"Van Lustbader, Eric - Black Blade(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

Moun giggled. 'Well, you know what artists are like, everything's a mystery - in fact, the more mystery the better because they think the bio stuff about them only gets in the way. You see, they want their art to speak for them. What they want most is for the viewer to come to their art without any preconceived notions about what it is they should be seeing.'
'I thought what artists wanted most was to sell their art. Aren't most of them starving in some garret somewhere?'
Moun giggled again. 'Some, maybe, but not Chika. I don't think she has to worry about whether or not her art sells.'
'Why not?'
Moun blew another bubble; it took a long time to pop. 'You ask an awful lot of questions for a lawyer.'
'The estate pays me to ask a lot of questions. No one's heard of Chika before.'
'As always with art,' Moun said, 'you have to find the right people to ask.'
'About the artist Chika. Would you say she and Larry were good friends?'
'They liked each other, you could tell that just by looking at them. I think they had a history.'
'Either of them mention something that would give you that impression?'
'I overheard them talking about Tokyo a lot, like they'd been to places together.'
'Like what places?'
Moun shrugged, another cascade of scents. 'They spoke of something called Forbidden Dreams. Sounds like a club to me. Maybe a kinky sex place, knowing Larry.'
'I think I'd like to talk to Chika,' he said slowly, reminded again of Moravia's disturbingly erotic photos. 'She live in Manhattan?'
'Sure.' Moun nodded. 'In fact, she's got the second-floor apartment in a building three blocks from here but -' she glanced at a desk calendar '- I can tell you she's out of town and won't be back till tomorrow.'
'We never should have tried it so soon,' Yuji Shian said.
'I doubt we had a choice.'
'But to kill a human being . . . '
'It was an accident. An honest mistake.'
Yuji looked at his mother, Minako. It was just coming on dawn, and an oyster-grey light filled the sky over Tokyo. To their left, Tsukiji's forest of bare-bulb lights illumined lines of glistening fish. As they stood there, men in high rubber boots passed by, holding hoses, methodically spraying the fish to keep them fresh. The sharp smells of fish and brine came in waves, heady as foaming beer. Behind them, in the last vestiges of the shadows of night, hulked the unmarked warehouse where the Oracle was stored.
'I am a scientist, Mother,' Yuji said now. 'I should have known better. Procedure dictated that I wait for - '
'For what? Clinical trials? You know that in this case, standard procedure would be useless,' Minako said. 'Testing on lower forms of life would tell us nothing.'
Yuji turned his head away, towards the river. Steam rose from it, and now and again the mournful hoot of a passing boat hung in the air like frost.
He nodded. She was right, of course. They had had no choice. As a scientist, he knew this. The technology demanded testing. But as a human being, he was appalled at the outcome.
'Yuji-san,' Minako said gently, 'let me bring you some tea.'
At one of the many stands selling sushi and soba, Minako turned back to look at her son. He stood there on the fringes of the great fish market's hubbub, shoulders hunched against the early morning chill, alone in a crowd. Her heart ached for him. All her children were precious to her, but Yuji was her only son. That, alone, would have made him special to her, but his genius in the biosciences made him even more so. Minako ordered tea, and thought of her son, and how she had fought to keep him innocent of the dark side of the world. Now, that would have to change. That was his karma - and hers.
Yuji waited patiently for his mother to return, his mind racked with guilt. He could not have known, of course, what the Oracle would do to Moravia. But wasn't that the point? He thought of the risk they had all taken, and was again swamped with grief. He looked out on a sea of flat, colourless eyes. Here and there, the soft thud of a tail beating against the wet concrete was enough to confirm the fish were still alive.
Tea,' Minako said, handing him a steaming cup. All around him he could feel the city awakening, moving by increments towards the inchoate roar of rush hour. They had deliberately set up the Oracle labs at this ancillary warehouse far from Shian Kogaku's Shinjuku headquarters, so that late-night sessions would go unnoticed in this area where fishermen laboured through the night and dawn.
'Does this mean that we will have to begin all over again?' his mother asked.
Yuji considered this for some time. It had been a question that had plagued him ever since she had told him of Lawrence Moravia's death.
'I don't think so,' he said at last. 'It isn't as if we were on the wrong path. But we are missing a vital piece of the puzzle. The problem is akin to a generator with one On switch that blasts so much power it lights up the city, then blows the generator.' He turned to her. 'No, we won't have to start anew. What we have to do is modify the On switch.'
Minako nodded. 'I feel at fault, Yuji-san. It was I who pushed you into creating the Oracle. It was I who brought Moravia to you, who urged you to use him as a guinea pig.'
'But, Mother, he consented. He knew the risks.'
Minako smiled sadly. 'Then do not blame yourself, Yuji-san. Moravia's karma was his own doing.'
'You're right, Mother,' Yuji said. 'But, still, I feel compelled to go to Senso-ji.'
Minako nodded. 'It is only right. We will go together.'.
They went down to the Sumida river, caught a water taxi to the Asakusa district, where the Senso-ji temple stood. It was dedicated to Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, and was the holy place where Minako had taken her children on festival days.
They went down the long lane, lined with a profusion of stalls selling anything and everything, from rice paper parasols and traditional wooden combs to wind-up robots and sake. They paused at the mammoth incense burner in front of the entrance and, cupping their hands, drew the aromatic smoke to them, covering themselves with it, thus ensuring continued good health.
They climbed the steps, went into the temple itself. Echoes filled the otherwise still air. They were surrounded by phalanxes of huge columns, and lanterns, which hung like pine cones in this stylized forest. High above their heads, like the distant swirl of clouds, the ceiling was decorated with complex dramas out of Japanese legend - or history, depending on your point of view.
They said a Buddhist prayer for the dead, lighting sticks of incense, chanting as the thick smoke curled like adders' tongues in the still, cold air of the temple.
This ritual, so familiar it was comforting, calmed Yuji, but, glancing over at his mother as they left Senso-ji, he saw that she was still troubled.
Outside, the sun was up, struggling through the thick industrial haze that blanketed the metropolis. Asakusa seemed a dream, a painting from the brush of a pointillist like Seurat.
Minako shivered. 'I feel a change in the air,' she said in a whisper.
Yuji, by now used to his mother's presentiments, said, 'It will be a change for the better.'
'No,' Minako said. 'We are on a precipice, and below us, in the darkness, is an abyss.' Her clasped hands twisted this way and that. 'And, Yuji-san, something is moving in the abyss. Something even I cannot guess at.'
Rain, hard as a fighter's fists, drummed against the roof of his car. Wolf, parked within sight of Urban Decay, was watching steam come cannoning through a hole in the tarmac of Avenue C while a slickered Con Ed crew tried to find some way to stop it.
He had dialled the main number of the Department of Defense in DC and had already been bounced more times than a basketball from department to department in a search for the seemingly elusive McGeorge Shipley, Moravia's out-of-town buddy. No one, it seemed, wanted to take responsibility for Shipley's existence, which meant that either he had run afoul of the Federal government's vaunted bureaucratic inefficiency or Moun had given him the Warhol, the wrong information.
With a grunt, he checked out of the Defense's electronic tangle, phoned an acquaintance at the NYC headquarters of the FBI. No one at NYPD was ever what you might call friendly with a Fed but, from time to time, favours were grudgingly done on either side, resulting in a kind of sand castle relationship that might hold up as long as too much pressure wasn't brought to bear.
Wolf hung on the line, while Fred the Fed waited for his computer to come back on line. 'Fuckin' Con Ed,' Fred said. Staring out of his windshield at the great gout of steam rushing from the bowels of lower Manhattan, Wolf could sympathize, if only fleetingly, with this minion of bureaucracy.
'Okay,' Fred said at last, 'I'm into the Defense personnel program. What'd you say this guy's name was?'