"Carl Hiaasen & William Montalbano - A Death in China" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hiaasen Carl)

"I believe in the majesty of the work I saw," the old man said evasively.

"Majesty? Yes, my old friend." The emperor nodded. "Majesty indeed. A mountain whose insides have been carved into the shape of the cosmos by hundreds of thousands of workers who have labored a lifetime. I have made a generation of peasants dig through subterranean streams and seal them off with bronze to create a burial chamber where I shall rule for eternity. Palaces, pavilionsЧwith fine vessels, jewels, stones and rarities. With quicksilver I have created the waterways of the empire, the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, and even the great ocean itself, and made them flow mechanically. Perfect models. And above I have depicted the heavenly constellations, and below, the geography of the earth. All this you have seen?"

"Yes," the old scholar answered.

"And the vaults?"

"Yes."

"Majestic, would you say? Large vaults surrounding the mountain, filled with clay soldiers, thousands of them; infantry, archers, charioteers and generals. Each carrying a real weapon." The emperor's eyes flashed.

"Your celestial army," the scholar said.

"It will protect my perpetual reign." The emperor emptied his cup. "And having seen my tomb and my army, scholars, can you still deny my immortality?"

There was a long pause then. Every eye was riveted on the small group of scholars before the throne. After the pause, the eldest replied.

"Ideas, like Confucius, are immortal. Men die."

"Fools!" the emperor screamed.

The next day, four hundred and sixty wise men, gathered from all corners of the empire to assay the emperor's immortality, were made to watch as soldiers burned their books.

Then they were led to a deep pit not far from the emperor's celestial kingdom. From atop the steep sides of the pit jeering peasants shoveled clods of thick red earth. Most of the scholars kept their dignity. A few cursed and one or two of the younger ones cried. Before noon, they were all buried and dead. But then, three years later, so was the emperor, laid to rest under the perpetual vigilance of his fierce clay soldiers.

Chapter 1
Peking, August 1983
The high-ceilinged lobby seemed carved in time, socialist testimony to yesterday's barren promises. A wine-red carpet crawled like a stain toward the horizon. Improvident columns that were neither attractive nor altogether round highlighted bile green walls. The furniture was of blond wood and indeterminate proportion. Waist-high counters cluttered every inch of wall space, each chockablock with white-coated workers. Some were accountants, some receptionists, some managers. Most were watchers.

Tom Stratton threaded through a knot of noisy Americans. He skirted a gaggle of Japanese clustered around a guide waving a flag. He neatly sidestepped a functionary listlessly pursuing a fifty-pound steel vacuum cleaner. Reaching the stand where an empty-eyed girl protected trays of almost fresh fruit, Stratton bought two apples. She weighed them on a digital scale and made change of his one yuan note with an abacus.

"Ba lou," Stratton told the elevator operator in phrase-book Mandarin. He was eventually deposited on the eighth floor.

The room was a monstrous little brother to the lobby, but already, after a week, it seemed like home. Stratton kicked off his shoes and padded into the bathroom. The hot water tap snuffled and growled, barked and hissed. On past experience, the chances that the water would be hot when it finally appeared were exactly one in two.

Stratton ate the apples and fingered leaves of tea into a thin-walled mug. Tenderly, he added water from a thermos on the night table, then threw back the red velvet drapes to let in the last rays of sunshine and sprawled on the bed. It was one hell of a place, Peking. Stratton had not decided whether to love it or hate it. The city sprawled in all directions, a flat, dusty, one-story town punctuated by brick chimneys thrusting toward the smog like phallic exclamation marks. Graceless monuments of revolutionary architecture dwelt alongside exquisite, gold-roofed survivors of the city's imperial past. Stratton scissored off the bed to watch the evening rush hour flow past a hundred feet below. He had just calculated the bicycle flow at nearly five hundred per minute when the room door flew open.

"Comrade! The chairman wants to see you right away."

"Hello, Alice." Stratton stifled a grin behind the tea mug. She had become a China groupie, a parody in blue cotton. The pants Chinese women wear with shapeless abandon strained across Alice's ample rump. The jacket was buttoned to the neck and fashionably wrinkled. The flat-brimmed hat bulged in a frustrated attempt to contain a mass of bottle-blond hair. Clinging precariously to the cap was a sheet metal button, red on white. AAAH, it said.

"You could pass for a native," Stratton mocked. Alice Dempsey was not his favorite woman.

"Bought it all at the Friendship Store. Why didn't you come with us?"

"I felt queasy."

"Baloney!" she snorted. "Every chance you get you slip away from us. What have you got against art historians anyway? I'll bet you don't even wear your badge, do you?" She rolled her eyes up toward her own AAAH. American Association of Art Historians.