"Christopher Pike - The Immortal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pike Christopher)

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THE IMMORTAL

had to wait in line at the airport several times a day--it would have driven me nuts. He took us straight to
Olympic Airlines. At the terminal I had to help with Silk's luggage--we all had to. I handled her bag
roughly; it felt as if it was stuffed with back issues of Cosmopolitan, maybe an X-rated video or two.
We groped our way inside, out of the heat and into an oven, and still no one spat on us. Helen looked
disappointed when I pointed that fact out to her.

The flight to Mykonos was in forty minutes. I amused myself by sitting on the floor--all the seats were
taken--and reading my latest thriller. The hero was about to find out that the woman he was defending
had not only actually committed the murder but had cheated on the bar exam as well when the two of
them had taken it twenty years earlier. Spicy stuff. I glanced over at my father as he typed in a few words
on his laptop and gave him a wink. He smiled--he knew he wasn't going to write more than a useless
sentence or two in a crowded airport.

At last we were on the plane, a two-engine prop job that I hoped had been built in the U.S. Inside,
before takeoff, it was a thousand degrees, and it warmed my heart to see Silk on the verge of passing
out. But the air-conditioning came on once we were in the air. I sat in the back of the plane beside Helen.
She peered out the window.

"I have always dreamed of renting a sailboat and sailing from island to island," she said, almost with a
sigh. "Wouldn't that be heaven?"
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CHRISTOPHER PIKE

"It does sound wonderful," I said. "Maybe we can do it when we get older--and learn to sail."

"Sailing around these islands is not always that easy. There's a wind that comes up around Mykonos
called the meltimi. One second the water is flat and calm and the next it's churning. The meltemi will
probably kick in a time or two while we're here."

Half an hour later we were at Mykonos. We had to walk from the plane to the terminal. The airport was
small; there were no pushing crowds. The surrounding terrain was rocky, hilly--what tourists thought all
Greek islands were. Yet even though it was arid, it was beautiful. I liked it immediately. Athens had not
been as horrible as Helen had described, but there had been a certain heaviness to the place. Mykonos
was the opposite. There was a feeling of life in the air, of fun, of adventure. Indeed, I suddenly felt as if I
had reached an important crossroads in my life. I knew this would be a trip to remember for a long time.

There was a gentleman waiting for us--Mr. Ghris Politopulos. At first I assumed he was a hired hand at
the hotel where we were staying, but he was both the owner and the manager of the place. His face was
fascinating, thick-lipped with a warm smile and the palest, coldest blue eyes I had ever seen--one of
which was lazy, rolling this way and that as he scanned our luggage.

"Welcome to Mykonos," he said in heavily accented English. "You will love it here. But this"--he
gestured to our bags--"you don't need so many

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