"Dead Center" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

DEAD CENTERDEAD CENTER

THEY GAVE him sweet ices, and kissed him all round, and the Important People who
had come to dinner all smiled in a special way as his mother took him from the
living room and led him down the hall to his own bedroom.
"Great kid you got there," they said to Jock, his father, and "Serious little
bugger, isn't he?" Jock didn't say anything, but Toby knew he would be grinning,
looking pleased and embarrassed. Then their voices changed, and that meant they
had begun to talk about the important events for which the important people had
come.
In his own room, Toby wriggled his toes between crisp sheets, and breathed in
the powder-and-perfume smell of his mother as she bent over him for a last
hurried goodnight kiss. There was no use asking for a story tonight. Toby lay
still and waited while she closed the door behind her and went off to the party,
click-tap, tip-clack, hurrying on her high silver heels. She had heard the
voices change back there too, and she didn't want to miss anything. Toby got up
and opened his door just a crack, and set himself down in back of it, and
listened.
In the big square living room, against the abstract patterns of gray and
vermilion and chartreuse, the men and women moved in easy patterns of familiar
acts. Coffee, brandy, cigarette, cigar. Find your partner, choose your seat.
Jock sprawled with perfect relaxed contentment on the low couch with the deep
red corduroy cover. Tim O'Heyer balanced nervously on the edge of the same
couch, wreathed in cigar-smoke, small and dark and alert. Gordon Kimberly
dwarfed the big easy chair with the bulking importance of him. Ben Stein, shaggy
and rumpled as ever, was running a hand through his hair till it too stood on
end. He was leaning against a window frame, one hand on the back of the straight
chair in which his wife Sue sat, erect and neat and proper and chic, dressed in
smart black that set off perfectly her precise blonde beauty. Mrs. Kimberly,
just enough overstuffed so that her pearls gave the appearance of actually
choking her, was the only stranger to the house. She was standing near the
doorway, politely admiring Toby's personal art gallery, as Allie Madero
valiantly strove to explain each minor masterpiece.
Ruth Kruger stood still a moment, surveying her room and her guests. Eight of
them, herself included, and all Very Important People. In the familiar comfort
of her own living room, the idea made her giggle. Allie and Mrs. Kimberly both
turned to her, questioning. She laughed and shrugged, helpless to explain, and
they all went across the room to join the others.

"Guts," O'Heyer said through the cloud of smoke. "How do you do it, Jock? Walk
out of a setup like this into . . . God knows what?"
"Luck," Jock corrected him. "A setup like this helps. I'm the world's pampered
darling and I know it."
"Faith is what he means," Ben put in. "He just gets by believing that last
year's luck is going to hold up. So it does."
"Depends on what you mean by luck. If you think of it as a vector sum composed
of predictive powers and personal ability and accurate information and . . ."
"Charm and nerve and . . ."
"Guts," Tim said again, interrupting the interrupter. "All right, all of them,"
Ben agreed. "Luck is as good a word as any to cover the combination."