"O'Donnell, Peter - Modesty Blaise 12 - Dead man's handle" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Peter)
"Maybe. But thanks anyway. And take care."
"You too." He stood watching as the car turned on to the road, and lifted his arm to wave as she reached the bend.
Seated at one of the small tables in the bar of The Treadmill, Kazim looked across at Sibyl Pray. "They seem to be soft people," he said. "No force, no ki."
She smiled at him over her glass of tonic water. "The same could be said of Dr. Pilgrim, by appearance."
"You think they have hidden force?"
"It must be there. How else would they have such reputation? You have read the file."
"Perhaps their force has gone."
She shrugged. "Perhaps. It will make no difference."
He drank some beer and said, "After the first part of the scenario, after Garvэn has killed her, will there be the opportunity for me to take Garvin one-to-one?"
She said slowly, "I am hoping Dr. Pilgrim will choose me to do that."
His black eyes stared reproachfully. "But you had Mr. Papadakis. You could speak for me when it is Garvin's turn, Sibyl."
She reached out to put her hand over his. "Perhaps I will, Kazim. You are always most vigorous and exciting after you have made a good killing. I like that very much, my beautiful Turkish bull."
He turned his hand to grasp hers, and said in a low, urgent voice, "We have had sight of Blaise and Garvin, which is what we came for, so let us go back to the hotel now. Quickly."
She pretended to consider this, but her eyes glowed. "We have still to locate Molly Chen and to make careful plans to implement Dr. Pilgrim's scenario. The problems of transporting an unconscious person are quite complex."
He smiled. "We shall make better plans afterwards, Sibyl. After you have enjoyed your beautiful Turkish bull."
She drew in a long breath and dug her nails into his hand. "Yes, Kazim. Yes."
Behind the bar, Hazel watched them go to the door. Lucky people, she thought. The blonde woman was beautiful, the dark man was handsome, and you could see they were potty about each other by the way they held hands and kept looking at each other as they went out. It was ever so sweet to see a couple like that, thought Hazel. Ever so sweet, really.
Dr. Thaddeus Pilgrim sat at this desk. Mrs. Ram and Dr. Tyl were to attend upon him shortly, but it would have been inaccurate to say that he was waiting. The passage of time had to a great extent ceased to have meaning for him. On the desk was a plate with some cheese and dry biscuits, and a tray with a pot of tea. His eyes were open but he was not looking at anything, and it was unimportant to him that the tea was growing cold, for his senses had long been anaesthetised to the point of barely responding to most forms of stimulus.
If need be he could, at this moment, have conversed, discussed, argued, and in general have maintained the benign and bumbling faчade he presented to the world, while his inner being suffered not the least distraction from the dark ugliness in which it dwelt.
Thaddeus Pilgrim had once been a devout man of God, a zealous missionary dedicating himself and his family to the task of spreading the gospel. Then came the day in Uganda when the natives for whom he had worked so hard and so lovingly took pangas in their hands and cut his wife and children to pieces. Some weeks later, when he emerged from shock, another being occupied the shell of flesh that had once been Thaddeus Pilgrim. Now, the man behind the grief-ravaged eyes hated with murderous venom the God who had betrayed him and in whom he no longer believed. The illogic of such hatred did nothing to diminish it.
For several years Thaddeus Pilgrim disappeared from the world of those who had known him. To the extent that he was remembered at all it was believed that he had withdrawn into retreat abroad. During those years he sought to take revenge on the God who did not exist by turning to the Devil. In Europe, in Asia, in North America, and in the West Indies he devoted himself with intense passion to the obscenities of black magic, worshipping the Lord of Evil in a variety of forms and in hideous ways. But in the end there was no satisfaction, for he found himself devoid of belief in either his God or his Devil, and so he passed on into a kind of vacuum, his spirit detached from his senses, his soul extinguished within him.
For a long time now, all that remained of motive in the husk of Thaddeus Pilgrim was an urge to ape his non-existent God and Devil, each as cruel as the other, by manipulating human puppets, causing the little creatures to perform at his whim. His perception of malevolent potential was acute, and had assisted him in recruiting the inner core members of the Hostel of Righteousness. His control over such people stemmed from a power within him that was indefinable but was a natural by-product both of what he had become and the means by which he had become what he now was.
Sibyl Pray and Kazim, either of whom could have crushed him physically like a paper bag, feared him with that kind of fear in which there is a strong element of pleasure, the frisson of alarm that draws people to horror films and grand guignol. Similarly, Mrs. Ram regarded him with shivering masochistic delight. Dr. Tyl feared him deeply without being able to define the reason in psychological terms, which was additionally disconcerting to one of his profession. Thaddeus Pilgrim was aware of the fear he inspired. It did not give him pleasure, for he was beyond pleasure. To him it was simply a useful and vaguely interesting phenomenon.
He smiled upon Mrs. Ram and Dr. Tyl as they entered, waving them to chairs, then picking up his cup of cold tea and beginning to sip. "Well now, Mrs. Ram, this is the moment for us to review the progress of our various little scenarios, is it not? A moment to which, I must confess, I look forward each week with Ч ah Ч unfailing interest. Your reports are models of efficiency, dear lady, models of efficiency."
"Thank you, Dr. Pilgrim." Her dark eyes gazed at him worshipfully for a few moments, then she consulted the papers on her clipboard. "First item. No repercussions from death of Mr. Papadakis. His death officially assumed to be accidental. I feel Sibyl Pray is to be congratulated on her handling of this matter."
"Oh, yes indeed," said Dr. Pilgrim, nodding his head slowly and putting down his cup and saucer. "I shall commend her highly on her return from the United Kingdom, you may be sure of that." His ambulant gaze came to rest for a moment on the jackdaw by the window, then wandered up to a corner of the ceiling. "And should not such executive skill be rewarded, do you think? One must, I agree, acknowledge that it is far from easy to reward our dear young friend Sibyl, or indeed her colleague, Kazim, in an appropriate manner. They are charmingly free from greed for things material, and money is not of importance to them. In short, their needs are very simple: a sufficiency of Ч ah Ч victims to dispatch, and what to others may seem an inordinate amount of sexual congress one with another. Since these needs are widely available to them, it is, as I say, somewhat difficult to devise an appropriate reward for excellence of service."
The watery blue eyes drifted down from the ceiling to gaze almost in Dr. Tyl's direction. "Perhaps your psychiatric qualifications will enable you to suggest some particular form of pleasure suited to Sibyl's temperament, Dr. Tyl? I will leave the thought with you. Please continue, Mrs. Ram."
"Thank you, Dr. Pilgrim." She made a tick with her pencil. "Second item concerns progress in the proposed scenario for Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin. Latest radio reports from executives in the field are satisfactory. Action expected within three days from now. All transportation arrangements have been made."
Thaddeus Pilgrim had just put a piece of cheese and a small dry biscuit in his mouth. When he had finished munching he said, "And you will be ready to receive our visitor, Dr. Tyl?"
The Czech nodded briskly. "Yes. I have devised a programme and given Mrs. Ram a list of my requirements. She advises me that all the necessary materials will be assembled by the end of the week."
"Capital, capital," said Dr. Pilgrim approvingly. "We have never before, to the best of my recollection, brought any persons as Ч ah Ч as independent, I might almost say intractable, as Miss Blaise and Mr. Garvin into one of our scenarios. It should be a most interesting experiment."
He sipped some more cold tea and looked invitingly at Mrs. Ram. She folded back a sheet of paper on her clipboard and said, "We now come to the bread-and-butter scenarios. At this moment we have several hundred requests for prayers from individuals and organisations worldwide. All have been acknowledged in appropriate terms. Most can be discarded at once as unsuitable for our purpose. Of the remainder, careful inquiry and analysis reveal six potentially fruitful prospects. That is to say, six applicants whose needs can be satisfied by covert action on the part of our executives. That is further to say, by assassination, sabotage, arson, intimidation, and similar activities."
Dr. Tyl said, "Our two chief executives are engaged at present."
Mrs. Ram frowned. "I am of course aware of that, Dr. Tyl," she said reprovingly, "but once they have brought to Kalivari the person who is to be the subject of your programme, they will be free for the three weeks that you have declared you will require for said programme. Also we have half a dozen other executives in our A.T.P. section, all well trained, who are perfectly capable of carrying out requisite operations."
"I am always happy," said Thaddeus Pilgrim cautiously, "to have our Answer to Prayer Section fully employed. May I ask, Mrs. Ram, if some or indeed any of the applicants are likely to be generous in showing their appreciation when their prayers are answered?"
She studied her notes, then said, "I conclude that four would certainly be so, Dr. Pilgrim. The first is a quite wealthy religious sect which a certain South American country is about to banish. They ask our prayerful support that this threat may be lifted. Analysis reveals that removal of a particular minister in the government of said country will have desired effect. Then there is request from president of island republic in Caribbean, who does not want to get heave-ho from political rivals. He would show much gratitude I am certain. May I interpolate here that subtle change in sources of requests for our prayers indicate that certain persons and organisations may have become aware that satisfactory answers to Hostel of Righteousness prayers may be brought about by natural rather than supernatural powers. Subject for discussion, I think. However, not to digress, the third application comes from the Far East, and Ч"
"If," said Thaddeus Pilgrim with an apologetic wave of his hand, "if I may be forgiven for interrupting you, Mrs. Ram, I think we need not at this moment have a detailed account of future orders from clients. Our bread-and-butter work is of an ongoing nature, and it would seem, if I may say so without appearing injudiciously optimistic, that we invariably have sufficient orders on hand to keep our executives fully occupied. Therefore I am content to leave the choice of clients in your very capable hands, dear lady, and indeed the Ч ah Ч modus operandi also, though I am always of course available for discussion if you should feel the need of advice as to ways and means."
Dr. Tyl recalled some of the ways and means Thaddeus Pilgrim had contrived over the past few years. There was no doubt, he decided, that the man was a genius. An evil genius if the adjective had any meaning, which Dr. Tyl doubted. He was not interested in conceptions of good and evil. His sole interest was the degree to which it was possible to control and direct another human mind, and it was his unethical and unacceptable experiments in this area which had caused him to be outlawed from his profession and had eventually brought him to Dr. Thaddeus Pilgrim, who supported and encouraged such experiments.
The activities of the Hostel of Righteousness provided rich opportunities for Dr. Tyl's work. Experts in hypnosis, for example, always asserted that a person under hypnosis could never be made to commit an act which on moral or ethical grounds he would never commit while in a normal mode of consciousness. This was probably true. You could not put a gun in the hand of a man under hypnosis and simply order him to kill another. But you could induce a belief or hallucination by hypnosis, or by narco-hypnosis in the case of a difficult subject, which would certainly cause a man or woman to kill.
You could, for example, induce a visual hallucination to make a woman see a particular man as a hideous nightmare monster, and you could make her believe that the monster was about to kill her child. That would by-pass any moral barrier, and if given the means she would kill without hesitation. It was all a question of finding the right psychological key, and Dr. Tyl had achieved this twice with great success. Two applicants to the Hostel of Righteousness had received positive answers to their petitions for prayer, not by the intervention of the Answer to Prayer Section, but by the hand of innocent victims of Dr. Tyl's mind-bending.
In the study, Mrs. Ram adjusted a fresh sheet on her clipboard and said, "I now refer to The Hallelujah Scenario. All elements of this operation are proceeding satisfactorily through cut-outs. You have a copy of the itinerary, Dr. Pilgrim, and all factors are proceeding in accordance with time schedules set out therein."
She looked up with an air of deferential admonition. "It is my duty to warn that finances must not be neglected," she said. "Our bread-and-butter missions are very much bread-and-butter. Sometimes our prayerful interventions receive no financial appreciation. If all overheads are taken into account, it may be that we run the Answer to Prayer Section at slight loss."
Thaddeus Pilgrim gazed with a puzzled air at the remains of cheese and biscuit on his plate as if wondering how they came to be there. "But surely, Mrs. Ram," he said, "our operation in the Far East Ч ah Чlet me see, some two years ago now, The Hosanna Scenario we called it, if I am not mistaken . . . surely this brought us funds in the order of several millions of dollars at, if you will forgive a dubious metaphor, one fell swoop. I would have thought our financial position was still quite satisfactory."
"A substantial percentage of said revenue had to be expended on laundering same and prolific use of cut-outs, Doctor," said Mrs. Ram. "Nevertheless, I do not say we are short of funds at this moment. I say only that expenditure exceeds income and this must not continue indefinitely."
Thaddeus Pilgrim spread his hands slowly and smiled with paternal affection in the Hindu woman's direction, his gaze wandering around and beyond her. "Mrs. Ram, Mrs. Ram," he said gently, "surely you cannot think it is our purpose in life to become rich and to live off the fat of the land? That is too easy, and is not at all in accord with our philosophy, with yours and mine and that of our dear friends and colleagues. All we desire is to live a satisfactory life, each according to his individual preference. Or her individual preference Ч I would not have you think me chauvinistic. For myself, I find satisfaction in our little scenarios, and I think I am correct in suggesting that you, dear lady, find satisfaction in your work of administration for our group."
His eyes roamed for a second or two until they found Dr. Tyl, and he continued, "Satisfaction for our good Dr. Tyl comes from his freedom to experiment with patients in ways disallowed by orthodox medical practice. Our friends of the Answer To Prayer teams ask nothing more than to exercise their lethal skills, and, in the case of Sibyl and Kazim, to enjoy untrammelled use of each other in a sexual context. The remainder of our community, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, if I may so describe them, are of no importance and quite expendable. Indeed, they will all have to be expended once we have completed The Hallelujah Scenario. Then we shall recruit afresh, as we did after the Hosanna Scenario."
He leaned forward, peered hopefully into his cup, and drank the last of his tea. "And let us not forget," he said, "that our financial return on The Hallelujah Scenario will be in the order not of a few million dollars but of at least one hundred and twenty million dollars." He set his cup down in the saucer and leaned back in his chair. Chin on chest, white hair fluffed up like a halo about his head, he looked up from beneath white eyebrows and said with a diffident smile, "No, Mrs. Ram, no, I really do not think you have any cause to fear for the state of our finances."
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