"George R. R. Martin - WC 4 - Aces Abroad" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

with her, and that thought hurt Sara most of all.
"You bastard," Sara whispered to Senator Hartmann, her voice choking. "You
goddamn bastard. You killed my sister and you couldn't even let her stay dead."


FROM THE JOURNAL OF XAVIER DESMOND
NOVEMBER 30/JOKERTOWN:
My name is Xavier Desmond, and I am a joker.
Jokers are always strangers, even on the street where they were born, and this
one is about to visit a number of strange lands. In the next five months I will
see veldts and mountains, Rio and Cairo, the Khvber Pass and the Straits of
Gibraltar, the Outback and the Champs-Elysees--all very far from home for a man
who has often been called the mayor of Jokertown. Jokertown, of course, has no


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mayor. It is a neighborhood, a ghetto neighborhood at that, and not a city.
Jokertown is more than a place though. It is a condition, a state of mind.
Perhaps in that sense my title is not undeserved.
I have been a joker since the beginning. Forty years ago, when Jetboy died in
the skies over Manhattan and loosed the wild card upon the world, I was
twenty-nine years of age, an investment banker with a lovely wife, a
two-year-old daughter, and a bright future ahead of me. A month later, when I
was finally released from the hospital, I was a monstrosity with a pink
elephantine trunk growing from the center of my face where my nose had been.
There are seven perfectly functional fingers at the end of my trunk, and over
the years I have become quite adept with this "third hand." Were I suddenly
restored to so-called normal humanity, I believe it would be as traumatic as if
one of my limbs were amputated. With my trunk I am ironically somewhat more than
human ... and infinitely less.
My lovely wife left me within two weeks of my release from the hospital, at
approximately the same time that Chase Manhattan informed me that my services
would no longer be required. I moved to Jokertown nine months later, following
my eviction from my Riverside Drive apartment for "health reasons." I last saw
my daughter in 1948. She was married in June of 1964, divorced in 1969,
remarried in June of 1972.
She has a fondness for June weddings, it seems. I was invited to neither of
them. The private detective I hired informs me that she and her husband now live
in Salem, Oregon, and that I have two grandchildren, a boy and a girl, one from
each marriage. I sincerely doubt that either knows that their grandfather is the
mayor of Jokertown.
I am the founder and president emeritus of the jokers' Anti-Defamation League,
or JADL, the oldest and largest organization dedicated to the preservation of
civil rights for the victims of the wild card virus. The JADL has had its
failures, but overall it has accomplished great good. I am also a moderately
successful businessman. I own one of New York's most storied and elegant
nightclubs, the Funhouse, where jokers and nats and aces have enjoyed all the
top joker cabaret acts for more than two decades. The Funhouse has been losing