"Michael Moorcock - The Affair of the Bassin Les Hivers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

transformation was complete. He declared the area тАЬa meeting place of
deep realities and metaphysical resonances.тАЭ Though a few barge people
still brought their goods to Les Hivers, these were unloaded onto trucks or
supplied a march├й biologique to rival that of Boulevard Raspail and only
the very desperate still plied the dark, subterranean waterways for which no
adequate maps had ever existed. The barge folk continued to be as
clannish as always. Their secrets were passed down from one family
member to another.

When he had been a lowly detective sergeant, Commissaire Lapointe
had lived on the Avenue Parmentier and had come to know the alleys and
twitterns of the neighbourhood well. He had developed relationships with
many of the settled bargees and their kin and had done more than one
favour to a waterman accused unjustly of a crime. They had respected
Lapointe, even if they had not loved him.

A heavy-set man in a dark Raglan overcoat and an English cap,
Lapointe was at once saturnine and avuncular. Lighting a Cuban cheroot, he
descended from the footplate of his heavy police car, its motors humming
at rest. Turning up his collar against the morning chill, he looked with some
melancholy at the boutiques and restaurants now crowding the old wharfs.
тАЬParis changes too rapidly,тАЭ he announced to his long-suffering young
assistant, the aquiline LeBec, who had only recently joined the special
department. тАЬShe has all the grace and stateliness of an aristocratic whore,
yet these stones, as our friend de Certau has pointed out, are full of dark
stories, an unsavoury past.тАЭ

Lapointe had become fascinated by psychogeography, the brainchild
of Guy DeBord, who had developed the philosophy of тАШflaneurismтАЩ or the art
of d├йrive. DeBord and his followers had it that all great cities were the sum
of their past and that the past was never far away, no matter what clever
cosmetics were used to hide it. They had nothing but contempt for the
electric trams, trains and cars which bore the busy Parisians about the city.
Only by walking, by тАШdriftingтАЩ, could one appreciate and absorb the history
which one inhaled with every breath, mixing living flesh with the dust of
oneтАЩs ancestors. Commissaire Lapointe, of course, had a tendency to
support these ideas, as did many of the older members of the S├╗ret├й du
Temps Perdu and their colleagues abroad. This was especially true in
London, where LapointeтАЩs famous opposite number, тАШSir Seaton BeggтАЩ,
chief metatemporal investigator for the Home Office, headed the legendary
Whitehall Time Centre, whose very existence was denied by Parliament,
just as the Republic refused to admit any knowledge of the Quai dтАЩOrsayтАЩs
STP.

LeBec accepted these musings as he always did, keeping his own
counsel. He had too much respect to dismiss his chiefтАЩs words, but was
also too much of a modern to make such opinions his own.

Reluctantly, Lapointe began to move along the freshly-paved quay
until he had reached the entrance to a narrow canyon between two of the