"Dan Simmons - Carrion Comfort (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

had brushed forward to hide his encroaching baldness were knocked into disarray. Willi's face was
flushed with excitement, but there was also the telltale capillary redness about the nose and
cheeks that spoke of too much liquor, too.many drugs.
"Ladies, I think you've met my associates, Tom Luhar
and Jenson Reynolds?" The two men added to the crowd in my narrow hall. Mr. Luhar was thin and
blond, smiling with perfectly capped teeth. Mr. Reynolds was a gigantic Negro, hulking forward
with a sullen, bruised look on his coarse face. I was sure that neither Nina nor I had encountered
these specific cat's-paws of Willi's before. It did not matter.
"Why don't we go into the parlor?" I suggested. It was an awkward procession ending with the three
of us seated on the heavily upholstered chairs surrounding the Georgian tea table that had been my
grandmother's. "More tea, please, Mr. Thorne." Miss Kramer took that as her cue to leave, but
Willi's two pawns stood uncertainly by the door, shifting from foot to foot and glancing at the
crystal on display as if their mere proximity could break something. I would not have been
surprised if that had proved to be the case.
"Jense!" Willi snapped his fingers. The Negro hesitated and then brought forward an expensive
leather attache case. Willi set it on the tea table and clicked the catches open with his short,
broad fingers. "Why don't you two see Mrs. Fuller's man about getting something to drink?"
When they were gone Willi shook his head and smiled apologetically at Nina. "Sorry about that,
Love."
Nina put her hand on Willi's sleeve. She leaned forward with an air of expectancy. "Melanie
wouldn't let me begin the Game without you. Wasn't that awful of me to want to start without you,
Willi dear?"
Willi frowned. After fifty years he still bridled at being called Willi. In Los Angeles he was Big
Bill Borden. When he returned to his native Germany-which was not often because of the dangers
involved-he was once again Wilhelm von Borchert, lord of dark manor, forest, and hunt. But Nina
had called him Willi when they had first met, in 1931 in Vienna, and Willi he had remained.
"You begin, Willi dear," said Nina. "You go first."
I could remember the time when we would have spent the first few days of our reunion in
conversation and catching up with one another's lives. Now there was not even time for small talk.
Willi showed his teeth and removed news clippings, notebooks, and a stack of cassettes from his
briefcase. No sooner had he covered the small table with his material than Mr. Thorne arrived with
the tea and Nina's scrapbook from the sewing room. Willi brusquely cleared a small space.
At first glance one might see certain similarities between Willi Borchert and Mr. Thorne. One
would be mistaken. Both men tended to the florid, but Willi's complexion was the result of excess
and emotion; Mr. Thorne had known neither of these for many years. Willi's balding was a patchy,
self-consciously concealed thing-a weasel with mange; Mr. Thorne's bare head was smooth and
wrinkled. One could not imagine Mr. Thorne ever having had hair. Both men had gray eyes-what a
novelist would call cold gray eyes-but Mr. Thorne's eyes were cold with indifference, cold with a
clarity coming from an absolute absence of troublesome emotion or thought. Willi's eyes were the
cold of a blustery North Sea winter and were often clouded with shifting curtains of the emotions
that controlled himpride, hatred, love of pain, the pleasures of destruction.
Willi never referred to his use of the Ability as Feedings -I was evidently the only one who
thought in those terms-but Willi sometimes talked of The Hunt. Perhaps it was the dark forests of
his homeland that he thought of as he stalked his human quarry through the sterile streets of Los
Angeles. Did Willi dream of the forest, I wondered. Did he look back to green wool hunting


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