"Destroyer - 025 - Sweet Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

Massello smiled and shook his head. "No. We will hit him only if he will not deal with us. Those are Don Pietro's instructions."

"Whatever he wants," Grassione said. "Whatever you want, Don Salvatore."

"Good," Massello said. He made arrangements to meet Grassione later, then hurriedly left the lower Broadway office. He felt in desperate need of a shower.

After Massello had left, Grassione turned on the television set, just in time to catch an independent station's sports report. But it was showing a film clip of some stupid guy winning some stupid race in Boston and because Grassione was not interested in sports on which he could not bet, he turned from the set and pressed a buzzer.

A moment later, Edward Leung entered his office. He paused inside the door of the darkened office, his almond eyes looking first at Grassione, then at the green-imaged television set.

"Tell me, wise one, what do you see?" Grassione asked.

"I see nothing," Leung said.

Grassione half-rose in his chair. "Hey, I don't pay you for 'I don't see nothing's.' "

"That is what I see."

"Get outta here, you Chink bastard."

Leung shrugged and opened the door behind him. He turned one more time to look at Grassione, then at the television screen which showed the winner of the Boston Marathon, racing past the finish line so fast he was only a blur on camera.

"All of life ends in death and dreams," Leung said.

"Get outta here. Go pack your rickshaw, coolie. We're going to St. Louis."


CHAPTER FOUR


Fourteen people fell in love with Remo as he returned to the hotel.

Several women on the outskirts of the marathon crowd where it thinned out two blocks from the finish line tried jogging alongside him, gasping as they tried to give him their telephone numbers. He got rid of them by telling them mincingly, "My woommate Bart would never approve."

One woman passenger in a car saw Remo and grabbed her boyfriend so hard he almost drove into the entrance of the Todd Private High School. A cashier and a candy girl in a theater, along with an usher whose sexual preferences were somewhat unclear, followed him with their eyes.

So did a black airlines reservation clerk who decided she would grow her hair back long and uncurl it from its Afro. She'd move from Dorchester and walk no more in South Boston. She'd gain a little weight and stop being such a tease. She'd meet him one night in the reading room of the library and from that night on be his slave, cook, cleaner, maid, fox, and mammy. Screw the movement. Screw women's lib. His. Now, then, and forever.

There were more, and Remo was aware of them, sensing the slight pressure of stares on him, but he couldn't be bothered now. After all, sex was just another technique-squeeze here for a purr, touch there for a gasp-and he had more important things on his mind than techniques. His techniques were perfect; everything he did was perfect. So why wasn't he happy? Didn't perfection include happiness ?

Remo slowed down as he passed an around-the-clock bookstore, and jogged inside.

The clerk at the front check-out counter looked at Remo and said: "The exercise books are in the back on the right. Jogging on the top shelf."

"Where's your dictionaries?" Remo asked.

The clerk had a beard that grew up his cheeks, almost to his eye sockets. Now the beard flickered as he winked to the clerk next to him, trying to gift-wrap a copy of The Prophet. "What are you looking up? Jockstrap?" the clerk said.

"Actually, no," Remo said. "I was thinking of surly, insolent, asshole, and fatality." He did not wink.