"The Hymn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'Bastard,' she repeated. Then she coughed, and coughed again, and suddenly vomited up a bibful of blood and blackened lung and unburnt petrol. She fell sideways, trembling, and then she lay still. Bob would never forget the sound of her hairless skull, knocking against the concrete.
With an odd genuflexion, he laid down his fire-extinguisher. By the rivers of Babylon, I laid my fire-extinguisher down. In the distance, he could hear the yelping of a siren. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know what made him feel worse: the fact that he had tried to save her, and failed; or the fact that he had tried to save her at all. Nobody had ever looked at him with such hostility before, nobody. If looks could have killed, he would have been lying beside her, burned to death, just like she was -- and his soul, too, would have been blowing in the wind, like smoke.


TWO

'Did you ever cook grunion, Mr Denman?' asked Waldo.
Lloyd swallowed wine and looked up from his cluttered rolltop desk, 'Grunion? No, I never even thought about cooking them. Why?'
'Oh, nothing. It's just that grunion's in season right now. I was wondering whether I ought to take the kids grunion-catching. Trouble is, I don't know what you're supposed to do with grunion once you've caught them.'
'Did you ask Louis?'
'Louis said he didn't have a clue.'
Lloyd eased himself back in his captain's chair. 'Well ... you remember Charles Kuerbis? The realtor? He was always the first one down on the beach when the grunion started running. I asked him once how he cooked them. He said he didn't know: he gave them to his wife. Whatever it was she did to them, they were always excellent. So I asked his wife, and she said she fed them to the cat, and went out to the market and bought some decent fish.'
'Maybe I'll take them to Sea World instead,' Waldo suggested, in a defeated tone.
'Didn't you take them to Sea World last time?'
'Sure, and the time before that, and the time before that. I can't remember an access visit in three years when I haven't come back soaking wet. The kids always like to sit at the front. Did you ever smell a killer whale's breath, Mr Denman?'
'Sure, halibutosis,' joked Lloyd. He shuffled a heap of bills together and jammed them on to a spike. 'You're enough to put a guy off getting married, you know that?'
Waldo shook his head. 'Don't take no notice of me, Mr Denman. There's only one woman in the world as bad as my Tusha, and that's my Tusha. Celia's perfect for you, and you know it. Celia's bright, she's pretty, she's classy. She knows all about music. Not like Tusha. Tusha thinks that Pavarotti is some kind of cheese, you know, like ricotta. Besides, you never met her, she's hideous.'
'Why on earth did you marry her in the first place, if you think she's hideous?'
'Oh, no, don't get me wrong. On the outside, she looks great. Great eyes, great smile. Great gazongas. It's just on the inside she's hideous. A really hideous inside.'
Lloyd stood up, and carried his empty glass out of the office and through to the bar. He took a bottle of San Pasqual Chenin Blanc out of the icebox and poured himself a generous measure. He allowed himself only two glasses of wine during the afternoon: otherwise things would start getting a little unreal by the time the restaurant opened for the evening trade.
He checked his watch, the Corum Gold Coin watch that Celia had given him for his birthday last April. Waldo, the maitre d', always came early, because he really had no place else to go. They talked usually, or shared a bottle of wine, or played draughts. The rest of the staff would be arriving in ones and twos within a half-hour, ready for their opening at six-thirty.
Lloyd walked through the twenty-six table restaurant, checking each place-setting individually. Fresh orchids, gleaming Lauffer cutlery, shell-pink linen napkins folded like chrysanthemums. Quite a few restaurants let their waiting staff leave for the afternoon without resetting the tables, but Lloyd insisted that when the staff returned for the evening shift, the place should look as entrancing to them as it did to their customers.
It was still magical for Lloyd. After eleven years as an insurance assessor for San Diego Marine Trust, working out how much rich men's boats were worth, this restaurant was everything he had always wanted. Freedom, independence, profitable hard work, fun. Denman's Original Fish Depot, an informal but stylish seafood restaurant with Victorian-tiled walls, oak parquet floor and mahogany ceiling-fans, and a balcony outside overlooking La Jolla Cove.
San Diego magazine had already complimented Lloyd on his north-west salmon steaks broiled over alderwood, his glazed mahi-mahi, and his trademark dish, the Denman's Original Fish Depot Delight, which was lobster chunks, shrimp, clams, crab legs and mushrooms, served with poured-over chowder in a hot French-style brioche.
He walked across to the sliding glass doors that led out on to the balcony, and opened them. A warm briny wind was blowing off the sea, and gulls were sloping and crying around the steep sandy-coloured cliffs. He leaned against the wooden rail and breathed in the evening air. This was it. This was the dream. It was all so ridiculously idyllic that sometimes it made him grin to himself in shameless self-satisfaction.
He had it all, or the best part of it, anyway. His own restaurant in a posh and profitable location; a talented and startling pretty girlfriend who loved him like crazy and wanted to marry him; a white 5-Series BMW with the personalized licence FISHEE, and a $568,000 house close to the University of California at San Diego with a hot tub and an olive tree and what his realtors had called 'a tantalizing peek' of the North Shore. A full peek would have cost him $30,000 more, and so far an actual view was financially out of the question.
But think of it: his father had been a mail-carrier, and his mother had taken in sewing, and here he was.
Lloyd didn't really look the part of a restaurateur. He was very lean and tall, with a mop of grey-streaked hair and a prominent bony nose which had led his mother to describe him as 'proud-looking' and his father to call him 'the yooman can-opener'. But now that his fortieth birthday was approaching, and he was lightly suntanned and psychologically well balanced and everything was well with the world, he had an air about him that was both distinguished and light-hearted. Celia always said that if Basil Rathbone had been both Californian and funny, then he would have been Lloyd Denman instead.
He turned around and watched Waldo setting up his reservations book on the oak lectern beside the front doors. Waldo had smoothed-back hair, a clipped Oliver Hardy moustache, and a wide dark green cummerbund that made him look like a ribbon-wrapped Easter egg. He spoke to the customers with an amazingly over-the-top French accent, 'Zees way, sair, see voo play -- pardonnay mwuh, madarm,' but in fact his name was Waldo Slonimsky and he was Lithuanian; the only survivor of his entire family. Sometimes Lloyd could look at his face and clearly see the plump lonely seven-year-old boy who had been brought over to America just before the war. Waldo had married, had kids, divorced, dated a few women the same shape as him. But Lloyd thought: when you've lost for ever the people you love the most, how can you ever stop being lonely?
'Waldo,' he called. 'Come on out here.'
Waldo stepped out on to the balcony, tugging his cummerbund straight. 'You want something, Mr Denman?'
Lloyd nodded. 'Yes, I do. I want you to drop everything for just a couple of minutes and come out here and take a look at the cove.'
Waldo kept his eyes on Lloyd; obviously tense, obviously thinking anxiously about everything he had to do. Check the menus, update the wine-lists, call for two replacement waitresses because Angie and Kay had both phoned in sick. Sick, my ass, excuse my Lithuanian, surfing more like.
Lloyd tried to encourage him, 'Relax, look around. What do you think of the cove this evening?'
Waldo glanced at it quickly. 'This evening, it's a nice cove.'
'Is that all? Just nice?'
Waldo contrived to look around some more. 'This evening, it's a heck of a nice cove.'
Llody laughed and clamped his arm around Waldo's shoulders. 'You know what your trouble is, Waldo?'
'What?' asked Waldo, uneasily. 'What's my trouble?'
'You never stop to think how lucky you are.'
Waldo plainly didn't understand what Lloyd was trying to say to him. He shrugged, twisted the napkin that he always used for polishing fingerprints from knives and forks. 'I do what I can, Mr Denman. You know that.'
'Sure, Waldo, I know that. But just close your eyes and take a breath of this good Pacific air and let your muscles loose. You may have had your troubles with Tusha, but you've got yourself two beautiful children, and your own apartment and a car that actually runs, and a whole lot of people who like you.'
'Well, that's nice, Mr Denman. Thank you very much.'
'Waldo ...' Lloyd began, squeezing Waldo's arm. But he knew that it was no use pushing Waldo any further. He would simply embarrass him.
Waldo went to the rail and looked out over the sea. Now that the sun was setting, La Jolla and all its jostling restaurants and souvenir shops and colour-washed apartment buildings were thickly coated in a glutinous shellac of amber light. The gulls continued to wheel and scream, and Waldo lifted his double chin and watched them.
'My family used to live in Palanga, you know, on the Baltic,' he said. 'It seems very far from here now, very long ago. My grandfather used to take me for walks along the shore. It's funny, don't you think, Mr Denman? I can see him as clear now as I did then. He always used to wear a long grey wool coat, and an old-fashioned black felt hat.'
'That's not so funny,' smiled Lloyd. 'I can almost see him myself.'
Waldo slowly shook his head. 'Grandfather used to say to me that when we die, our souls become seagulls. They fly, they swoop. That is why seagulls always sound so sad. They are always looking for the people they left behind.'
Lloyd said, 'That's a cute little story.'
Waldo wiped his eyes with his fingers. 'I used to believe it. I think I still believe it. Maybe in the Baltic my grandfather still flies and swoops along the shoreline, looking for that boy that he once used to take for walks.'