"Brian Lumley - E-Branch 2 - Invaders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

Western flavour, and lyrics too deep for Hinch to understand ... pleasing to listen to, even
soothing, in a way... if you hadn't heard it half a dozen times already this very night! Some old
black guy, singing his heart out about misery. But to Hinch's mind the only misery lay in having
to listen to it over and over again.
'So, you don't care for my music, Mr Hinch?' The voice was deep yet oiled; it seemed to rumble, or
purr, yet was in no way cat-like. On the other hand, Milan's movements were cat-like as he came
from the bar with a drink in his long-fingered hand, to gaze out on the night through an open
window.
But if it wasn't painted black, (Hinch thought), there'd \>e no need to open the fucking thing!
Not that there's anything to see out there. While out loud he said, 'Er, did I say something about
your music? I have a habit of talking to myself while I'm working. It doesn't mean anything.' Oh
yes it fucking does! It means that I'm pissed to death with you, and your bloody music, and with
bloody Kanadu, and all of this bloody black paint!
He looked down on Milan from a height of some twelve feet, from a wheeled scaffolding tower where
he had just put the finishing touches to the last pane of a high window. And that was it: the
entire interior surface, every square foot of hundreds of square feet of glass, varnished for
adhesion, painted black, and finally layered with polyurethane lacquer for durability. A double-
dyed bastard of a job!
'Perhaps I don't pay you enough?' said Milan, as Hinch put down his roller, wiped his hands, came
clambering down from on high.
'The money's fine,' the bad-tempered Hinch said. He stood

six feet tall, but still had to lift his head a fraction to look up at his employer. 'And I'd like
it now, for I'm all done.'
'Then if the payment is fine,' said Milan, 'it can only be that I was right and it's the music. Or
perhaps it's me? Do you find my presence unsettling?'
While he was speaking, Hinch had checked him out - again. For Aristotle Milan was the kind of man
you looked at twice. At a guess he'd be maybe forty, forty-five years old. Difficult to be more
specific than that, because his looks were sort of timeless. He was probably sixty but topped-up
with expensive monkey hormones or some such. Something was running through his veins, keeping him


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young, for sure. Spoiled, rich bastard!
But foreign? Even without the name to give him away, there could be no mistaking that: Italian
with a touch of Greek - but in any case a mongrel, in Hinch's eyes. Milan's hair was black as
night; worn long, it swept back from a high, broad forehead, and its shining ringlets curled on
his shoulders. And handsome: he had the kind of Mediterranean looks that seemed to appeal to a lot
of women. Hinch would guess that his bedroom crawled with all kinds of young, good-looking, dirty
women.
His ears were fleshy - what could be seen of them - but he wore his sideboards thick and lacquered
back to cover the upper extremities. Something odd about his nose, too: a flatfish look to it, as
if Nature had pushed it back a little too far, and his nostrils were too large and flaring. And
then those arcing eyebrows over deep-sunken, jet-black eyes ... those eyes that were Milan's most
startling feature. Jet-black, and yet Hinch couldn't be certain. Catch them at the right angle,
they'd sometimes gleam a golden, feral yellow. And despite the nose, still those eyes loaned Milan
the looks of a bird of prey.
But handsome? Maybe Hinch was all wrong about that. It was simply the attraction of Milan's odd -