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

"Over there," the clerk said, pointing a trembling index finger at a low, flat counter.

Remo found the thickest dictionary and skimmed through it:

"Per-fek'-shen: 1) the quality or state of being perfect, as a) freedom from fault or defect."

He looked through all the definitions, but none of them mentioned happiness. He was disappointed.

On his way out, the clerk asked Remo: "Find what you wanted?"

"Yeah. Did you know I can be perfect without being happy?"

Before the clerk could answer, Remo was back on the street. He did not feel like going straight back to his hotel room, so he decided to carry his perfection caravan into the Roxbury ghetto of Boston.

The sight of a white man, running down the street after dark, in track shorts, caused much hilarity in Roxbury, but it stopped when nobody could catch him, not even Freddy (Panther) Davis, who last year had set the inner-city record for the fastest 440 ever run in stolen Keds.

The April night was chilling as Remo headed back toward his bright hotel. He looked up toward their room where he imagined Chiun sat at peace and decided he did not want to go up, not yet. So he jogged along Boylston Street until it intersected with Massachusetts Avenue, the sidewalks bathed by the eerie eyes of the passing cars on both the city streets and the Massachusetts Turnpike which passed under that point.

Remo stepped up to the guard rail over the turnpike and stared out at the impassive automobiles of the anything-but-impassive men and women who were born, became neurotic, argued, fought, questioned, reasoned, loved, screwed, killed, sought immortality, then died.

He thought about each one moving toward him and wondering where they were coming from and what they had done. He saw the cars on the other side disappear around a distant bend and wondered where their drivers were going and what they might do.

And then he had it. It was all clear, why he could be unhappy even though perfect.

Suddenly Remo knew where he was going and where all those cars were going.

Remo was going to a hotel.

Everybody else in the world was going home.

And Remo would never go home. Home was a wife, kids. But it would only be a matter of time before a wife would tap him on the back when he wasn't looking and she would wind up with many important internal organs atomized. And kids? By the time his were of school age, they probably would have wiped out half the block, which might be hard to explain to the P.T.A. "You see, friends and neighbors, the children's father is the world's most perfect killing machine and they're just chips off the old block, heh, heh."

But there was no reason he couldn't have a home. A house. A place other than a hotel room. He could do without kids anyway. Bringing them up nowadays was risky, 'cause if they didn't turn out to be junkies, they stood a good chance of turning out to be freakos like that obnoxious Margie from the School ofЕ

"Oh, balls," Remo said aloud.

As he tore off toward his hotel, an old lady clapped her hands over the ears of the twelve-year-old boy walking with her and shouted after him: "What the fuck's wrong with you? Can't you see I got a child with me, for Christ's sake?"

Remo hit the hotel steps three at a time, he took six at a time on the second and third floors and made the last seven flights in seven bounds.

He burst onto his floor, ruining his second door of the day, and jumped to the open entrance to his room.

Chiun sat in the middle of the floor, facing the door, his eyes closed, his mouth creased in a small smile. In the four corners of the room were four girls, their thumbs in their mouths, their rears pointed skyward.

Chiun opened his eyes as Remo entered and looked around.

"Oh, it is the perfect one," Chiun said, and then cackled. "Hen, heh, heh. All hail the perfect one."

"All right, knock it off," Remo said. "What'd you do to them?"