"Ian McDonald - Some Strange Desire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

The pleasure is mutual. When he has a couple of gin slings down him he can be a
delightfully effervescent conversationalist.
"Darling heart, you're looking especially radiant tonight!" He kisses me, on the
cheek, not the mouth-to-mouth soul kiss of tesh meeting. He calls for cocktails.
"Your mother is well, dismal suburbia notwithstanding?"
I reply that business is booming, and tell him about the pimp.
"I heard about that on News at Ten. That was you? A gangland killing, they said,
made to look like an overdose." He takes a Turkish from his silver cigarette
case, taps it once, twice, three times. "That was bit of a bloody risk, wasn't
it, dear heart?"
"He'd broken in. Credit him with some intelligence, he could have worked out
something was going on."
"Still, Orion darling, you could have left him to us. It's our job to look after
you, and yours to provide us with what we want. You people have a vicious streak
a mile wide. One of your less endearing traits. Smoke?" I take the proffered
cheroot.
"So, this new client."
Vinyl Lionel examines his chrome-polished nails. "Well, there's not a lot to say
about him. Nice enough boy. You wouldn't think to look at him, but then you
never do, do you? Fat Willy recruited him, you know, the usual way." He moistens
a finger in his Singapore sling, draws a yin-yang symbol on the marble table
top.
"How much does he know?"
"The bare minimum. He'll talk the leg off you, dear heart. One of those
confessional types. Well, fiddle-dee-dee, if that isn't him now..." Vinyl Lionel
waves flamboyantly, trying to attract the attention of the lost boy by the door,
fidgeting and conspicuous in a chain-store gent's-ready-made suit. "Oh God, I
told him don't dress up, Strangefella's isn't that kind of place, and what does
he do? Well, don't blame me if the gorillas bounce him."
"Nerves, Lionel," I say. "You were as bad the first time."
"Bitch," says Vinyl Lionel. He resents any overt reminder of his fall from youth
and beauty while we remain changeless, ageless, ever-young. He beckons the young
man between the tables and the smokes and the back-beat and the bass. "I'll bet
you fifty he drives a Ford."
One bet I won't be taking, Lionel. A Ford Sierra, metallic gray, F-registration,
the odd rust spot. Something to do with metallic finishes, I always think.
Garfield crucified upside-down on the back window. Open the glove compartment
and cassettes fall out. Home bootlegs, all of them, apart from the mandatory
copy of Graceland. Nothing more recent than three years ago.
He is nervous. I can smell it over his Heathrow Duty-Free after-shave. Nerves,
and something I cannot quite place, but seems familiar. I do not much like being
driven by someone who is so nervous. Gaily lit buses swing past headed down
across the river South London way; girls in smogmasks, denim cut-offs over
cycling shorts and ski-goggles weave past on clunking ATBs like the outriders of
some totalitarian, body-fascist invasion. I light up a cheroot Vinyl Lionel gave
me as a keepsake as we surge and stop, surge and stop along Shaftesbury Avenue.
Lionel, the outrageous old ul-goi, was right. This one seems to want to talk but
is afraid of me. I weave pheromones, draw him into a chemical web of confidence.
On New Oxford Street, he opens.
"I cannot believe this is happening," he says. "It's incredible; that something