"Dan Simmons - Children of the Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

Their message was the same: we had the run of the nation and any recommendations we could make to our
various constituencies for help would be eternally appreciated. The officials treated me with the most deference
because they knew my name and because of how much money I represented, but even that polite attention was
tinged with a distracted air. They were like men sleepwalking amidst chaos.
Returning to the Intercontinental that evening, we watched as a crowd of people-most, it looked, office workers
leaving the stone hives of the downtown for the day-beat and pummeled three men and a woman. Radu Fortuna
smiled and pointed to the broad plaza in front of the hotel where the crowd was growing larger. "There . . . in
University Square last week . . . when peoples come to demonstrate with singing, you know? Army tanks roll
over persons, shoot more. Those probably be Securitate informers."
Before the van stopped in front of the hotel, we caught a glimpse of uniformed soldiers leading away the
probable informers, encouraging them with the butts of their automatic weapons while the crowd continued to
spit and strike them.
"Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs," muttered our Professor Emeritus, while Father O'Rourke
glared at him and Radu Fortuna chuckled appreciatively.
"You'd think Ceausescu would have been better prepared for a siege," Dr. Aimslea said after dinner that
evening. We had stayed in the dining room because it seemed warmer than our own rooms. Waiters and a few
military men moved aimlessly through the large space. The reporters had finished their dinner quickly, with a
maximum of noise, and left soon after to wherever reporters go to drink and be cynical.
Radu Fortuna had joined us for coffee, and now he showed his patented, gap-toothed grin. "You want to see
how prepared, Ceausescu, he was?"
Aimslea, Father O'Rourke, and I agreed that we would like to see. Carl Berry decided to go to his room to get a
call through to the States, and Dr. Paxley followed him, grumbling about getting to bed early. Fortuna led the
three of us out into the cold and down shadowed streets to the soot-blackened shell of the presidential palace. A
militiaman stepped out of the shadows, raised an AK-47, and barked a challenge, but Fortuna spoke quietly and
we were allowed to pass.
There were no lights in the palace except for occasional fires in barrels where militiamen and regular soldiers
slept or huddled to keep warm. Furniture was tossed everywhere, drapes had been ripped from twenty-foot-tall
windows, papers littered the floor, and the formal tiles were smeared with dark streaks. Fortuna led us down a
narrow hall, through a series of what appeared to be private residential rooms, and stopped at what seemed to be
an unmarked closet. Inside the four-foot-square closet there was nothing but three lanterns on a shelf. Fortuna
lighted the lanterns, handed one to Aimslea and one to me, and then touched the molding above the back wall.
A sliding panel opened to a stone staircase.
"Mr. Trent," began Fortuna, frowning at my walking stick and shaking, old-man arms. The lantern light tossed
unsteady shadows on the walls. He held out his hand for the lantern. "There are many stairs. Perhaps . . ."
"I can make it," I said through tensed jaws. I kept the lantern.
Radu Fortuna shrugged and led us down.
The next half hour was dreamlike, almost hallucinatory. The stairway led down to echoing chambers from
which a maze of stone tunnels and other stairways branched. Fortuna led us deep into this maze, our lights
reflecting off the curved ceilings and slick stones.
"My God," muttered Dr. Aimslea after ten minutes of this, "these go for miles."
"Yes, yes," smiled Radu Fortuna. "Many miles."
There were storerooms with automatic weapons on shelves, gas masks hanging from hooks; there were
command centers with radios and television monitors sitting there in the dark, some destroyed as if madmen
with axes had vented their wrath on them, some still covered with clear plash and waiting only for their
operators to turn them on; there were barracks with bunks and stoves and kerosene heating units which we eyed
with envy. Some of the barracks looked untouched, others obviously had been the site of panicked evacuation
or equally panicked firefights. There was blood on the walls and floors of one of these chambers, the streaks
more black than red in the light of our hissing lanterns.
There were still bodies in the farther reaches of the tunnels, some lying in pools of water dripping from
overhead hatches, others tumbled behind hastily erected barricades at the junction of the underground avenues.