"Night Warriors - 01 - Night Warriors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'No doubt that she's dead,' said Henry, in his clear lecture-room voice. He brushed back his white windblown hair with his hand.

'I thought it was a dog, at first,' said Gil. 'You know, an Afghan or something.'

Henry stood up. 'I guess we'd better call the police. There's nothing that we can do.'

Susan kept her arms folded close across her tee-shirt, and shivered.

Henry said, 'Would you and this young man like to go call the police? I'll stay here and make sure that nobody disturbs it.' He hesitated, and looked down at the body, and then corrected himself by saying, 'Her.'

Susan nodded, and the two of them jogged away across the beach. Henry remained where he was, his hands clasped behind his back, tall and stooped in the silvery mist of the early morning. Almost unseen, the grey Pacific disobediently roared as the moon tugged it inch by inch away from the shore, and seagulls shrieked like anxious women as they swooped for fish. It was April, but it was chilly, and the sea-mist would probably envelop the coastline for most of the day.

Henry hadn't yet been to bed. He had been sitting in the study of his beach-house all night, under the light from his brass-shaded lamp, working on his new article for Philosophy Today: 'The concept of life after death', by Professor Henry Watkins. He had been writing in thumb-cramping longhand, and rewarding himself after the completion of every page with a large vodka and tomato juice; and so at six o'clock he had taken a walk along the beach not only to clear his mind often centuries of philosophical morbidness, but the cumulative effects of twelve large Bloody Marys.

And here she was, lying dead on the sand, a naked young woman. Stark and direct proof that everything he had been writing all night was pretentious nonsense; hot-air balloons and horsefeathers. He felt almost as if he had been fated to find her; as if stern gods had directed his footsteps this way, to show him in the most jarring way possible just how ridiculous his theories were. Nobody can ridicule the living quite as effectively as the dead.

She was lying face down, her bare skin covered in fine grey grit. Her long blonde hair was ribboned with seaweed, and fanned out on the beach like a mermaid's. One dead hand seemed to be clutching at the sand as if she had been trying to stop herself from being dragged out to sea again, as if to be drowned twice was more than she could endure. Her body was so white that in the pearly-grey mist it was almost luminous.

Henry walked around her. Alone, he felt suddenly so sad for her that he found that his throat was tightening up, and that the sea-wind was bringing tears to his eyes. Perhaps he was drunk, but she could have been any one of his philosophy students, she was so young. Although her face was hidden, she couldn't have been more than nineteen or twenty years old. She had a long, well-shaped back, and wide-flared hips. One of her legs was drawn up, so that he could glimpse blonde bedraggled pubic hair. There was a fine silver chain around her left ankle, but that was all the jewellery she wore. The white blue-veined curve of one half-exposed breast showed that she had the kind of figure that most men would turn around to look at twice.

The sea foamed briefly around her outstretched foot, and then retreated, as if it had sourly decided that it had done enough.

Henry thrust his fists into the pockets of his fawn-coloured windbreaker and deliberately turned away, towards the cliffs. He had never had children of his own. His four-year marriage to a lady oceanographer from the Scripps Institute had been barren in every conceivable sense. He had learned to drink during that marriage; he had also learned to be alone. Now he taught philosophy to successive waves of cheerful young men and women, and occasionally played chess with his next-door neighbour; and that was sufficient to make him feel fulfilled.

At least, it was sufficient to stop him from taking two bottles of sleeping-pills and going to bed with a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

His students at UC San Diego called him Bing, because of his faint resemblance to Bing Crosby. He had grown his hair to try and make himself look more like Timothy Leary than Bing Crosby, but the nickname had stuck.

After five minutes or so, Gil and Susan came back down the concrete ramp which led up to the oceanside parking-lot, and half jogged, half walked across the sloping beach.

'The police are on their way,' Gil said, breathlessly.

'Thank you,' Henry acknowledged.

Susan said, 'I never saw anybody dead before.'

'She was young, too,' Henry remarked. 'Nineteen, twenty.'

They waited, uncomfortable and fidgety. There was no sound of a police siren yet. The sea kept on snarling, and the seagulls fluttered silently against the wind.

Gil said flatly, 'I was just jogging, you know? I really thought it was a dog at first.'

Susan couldn't take her eyes away from the body, from the fanned-out hair and the clutching hand, and the shoulders sparkling with grit.

Gil was one of those young Southern Californian men who defy immediate classification. He could have been a student or an automobile mechanic or a barman or anything at all. He was very thin, very tanned, with a narrow serious face and a prominent freckly nose. His hair was thick and dark, and mussed up into a fright-wig by the wind. He wore a navy-blue sweatshirt with Crucial stencilled on it in white, and sawn-off denim shorts.

Susan had all the hallmarks of the spoiled but rebellious daughter of a middle-class family. Her fair hair was cut short and spiky, and she wore a white Italian-style tee-shirt with red and green lightning flashes on it, and white satin running-shorts that were tighter than tight. She was plump faced but pretty. Henry could see that in two or three years some very striking features would emerge from that teenage round-ness. Her eyes were already large and blue and dreamy lidded, like the eyes of one of those girls in a romance comic.

'I guess the police will want us to make statements,' said Henry.