"Destroyer - 027 - The Last Temple" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

Inside the room were two gory swastikas made from human limbs. One was shorter, hairier than the other, but both fit within the huge pond of blood. But Woodman didn't see that. All he saw was a huge scoop of red. A Book-of-the-Month-Club nonfiction selection or, at least, a Literary Guild novelization heralding his addition to The New York Times Best Seller List.

That was just the beginning. When Woodman looked in the bathroom and saw the two heads lying together in the bathtub, he really saw the movie, starring Clint Eastwood as him. He saw Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson and Book Beat on PBS and the NBC-TV special production.

Woodman stood, taking notes furiously. He had no idea that his paper and the paperback publishers would want nothing to do with just another grisly murder. They wanted conspiracy. They wanted something spectacular.

Woodman's item was buried on page thirty-two of the next day's edition, and he went back to chasing dancing congressmen and poisoned feminine sprays. It was Wednesday before his reporting came to the attention of Dr. Harold W. Smith of Rye, New York.

And to him the piece of news meant more than any Playboy serialization or Reader's Digest condensation. It meant that there might be no more Middle East soon.


CHAPTER TWO


His name was Remo, and the tiny flakes of rust built up under his fingernails like grains of salt. They were not so much dangerous as annoying, and he could hear the packed metal chips click against the steel structure as his fingers kept going higher and higher above his head as if cutting a path in space for his body to follow.

The body moved without thought and slowly, like a metronome that might not make another click. The breath came deep, holding all the oxygen for another count. The legs were relaxed, but always moving, not really fighting gravity by upward thrust, but ignoring gravity, moving in a time and space of their own.

The fingertips reached farther overhead, the packed rust touched the metal with a clicking sound, and the legs followed, and the arms stretched again.

Remo felt the chill of the height and took his body temperature down to meet it. Down below, Paris looked like a great gray tangle of blocks and black wires.

His arms stretched again over his head, and his fingertips felt the damp top of a horizontal metal bar, and even more slowly, he brought the rest of his body up to the level of the railing, because trying to hurry the last few steps would destroy his unity with the surface, like a skier who makes a great run down a slope and then tries to hurry into the ski lodge to brag about it, falls on the steps, and breaks an arm. Slow was the secret.

Then Remo's body was up and over the metal bar. He stood on a platform and looked down the sloping sides of the Eiffel Tower at Paris below him.

"No one told me this tower was rusty," he said. "But you people put cheese in your potatoes. How can you expect anybody who puts cheese in potatoes to keep a tower unrusted?"

Remo's companion assured the thin, thick-waisted American that that was true. Absolutely true. Definitely, naturally, certainement!

The Frenchman knew that Remo was thick-wristed, because that was about all he could see from where he hung, suspended over Paris.

When Remo did not respond, the man gave him a few more "definitelys," his carefully groomed Vandyke beard bobbing up and down.

"Do you know I haven't had a potato in over ten years?" Remo said. "But when I did have them, I didn't put cheese in them."

"Only Americans know how to eat," the Frenchman said. Remo's thin body moved into his view as the wind whirled about, and the Frenchman's dangling body twisted, and Remo's thick wrist lay across the vision of his right eye as Remo's hand was wrapped around his neck.

Remo nodded. "Steak," said Remo. "Remember steak?"

The Frenchman on the end of Remo's arm hurriedly reported that he himself could personally take Remo to at least a dozen, make that two dozen, places where he would buy Remo the nicest, fattest, juiciest steak he had ever had. Two steaks, a half-dozen steaks, a herd of steer. A ranch.

"I don't eat steak anymore either," Remo said.

"Whatever you like, I will get for you," the Frenchman said. "We can go now. Anywhere you like. We will take my jet. Just put me on the tower. You do not even have to bring me over the railing. Just put me near a rail. I will climb down myself. I saw how easily you climbed up."

The Frenchman swallowed heavily and tried to smile. He looked like a hairy grapefruit being slit open,

"Down is even easier than up," Remo said. "Try it."