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

'One.' Breathard lifted the forefinger, as if by this gesture he could test the tenor of the atmosphere. "One of my people on a staff that's how big?'
'Six, all told,' Wolf dutifully provided, though he knew damn well Breathard was the first to keep track of such things.
'One in six, Matheson, not a justifiable percentage of Afro-Americans. Not fucking justifiable at all.'
'I pick the best people, Chief, you know that.'
'I know that's the bullshit you put out, I know the commish buys it,' Breathard said. 'But I don't.' He nodded. 'I got two of my best people, Washington and White, just waiting to get in here, even out the odds.'
'I know them both,' Wolf said. 'One's failed his detective's exam twice; the other, I hear, was caught by his precinct captain shaking down store owners.'
'That's a lie. Honky shit - '
'Detective exam results are a matter of record,' Wolf said. 'And White's precinct commander is a friend of mine. I know who bullied him into burying the shake-down.' He leaned back in his chair. 'Besides, my manpower manifest is full.'
Breathard's yellow eyes darkened. 'Sure as shit, Matheson, something's gonna happen here, and when it does, I'm goin' to be the one who comes in, cleans up this mess.' He gave Wolf his best sneer. 'Who knows? Maybe this Ruiz fiasco's just what I've been looking for.'
He didn't wait for Wolf to reply, but turned on his heel and went out.
Wolf, watching Breathard's linebacker figure disappear into the theatre's haze, let his breath out in a hiss. He supposed the man, as corrupt as the mayor, the city council and all the rest of the macho politicos who ran the city, hated the fact that Wolf was directly responsible to Hayes Walker Johnson, the commish. Being out of the chain-of-command loop in this one instance didn't sit well with him.
His virulent racist leanings, needless to say, never made it up to the commish's or the mayor's level. With them, he was the very model of an impartial arbiter, the calm voice of reason. He was a cool customer. Like a moray eel, he would be passive, invisible for long stretches of time, until you just about forgot he existed. That's when he took his opportunity to pop up like a death's-head and tried to put the fear of God into you.
Wolf pushed himself away from the desk, stood. He found himself looking up into the larger-than-life face of Junior Ruiz up on the movie screen. Take that down,' he said sharply, because it was reminding him of how much there was left to do. Even after he had run Arquillo down, there was still the same shit to deal with, the ever multiplying amount of work. It never ended. On the contrary, it continued to grow like a cancer out of control and, for the first time, he found that idea intolerable.
The confluence of body and mind, the inner stillness necessary for both thought and action of consequence, began, for Wolf, with aikido. Being by nature kinetic he required a conduit for his energy, but he also needed a discipline so that he could discern the essential stillness within even the most violent burst of movement.
This discipline he found within aikido, a harmony of mind and body control that revealed to him the form of intrinsic energy, the circular forces within everyone that could be used against an opponent. The essence of martial arts for Wolf was not in being able to put his fist through a concrete wall, but in being a practitioner of Ken, the stillness of the mountain, to harness intrinsic energy, bringing to heel the agents of chaos.
His mind weary with questions without answers, his body not tired - remarkably, never tired no matter how hard he pushed it - he purged himself with aikido. He put himself through a rigorous set of movements of centralization, extension and evasion, the trine of the discipline's function of self-defence. Aikido actually refined such instinctive responses as heading directly into an attack to finding ways to evade the attack while using its energy to guide it away from you. He took on as many of his Werewolves as he could cajole onto the hardwood floor he had had installed in the balcony. Since most were either leaving their night shift or coming in for the day shift his opponents were limited to three: Bobby Connor, Squire Richards and Tony Three Times.
Tony Three Times - his real name was Pugnale, but since he had stuttered as a child, no one called him that - was strong but impulsive, given to taking chances even when he suspected he was being suckered into reacting. He had almost as much stamina as Wolf, but in the end Wolf took him down by feinting a blow to the left side of his head. When Tony reacted, grabbing at Wolf's shirt as he extended himself forward, Wolf used two tenkan, spinning first to his right, pulling Tony momentarily off-balance, then to his left. As he did so, he grabbed Tony's right wrist with his left hand and bowed low, pulling Tony up and over him, so that he flipped over, sprawled on the floor, immobilized by Wolf.
Squire Richards, a black man as big as any stevedore, was as lithe as a panther. His bulk was deceiving; he could outrun any of the Werewolves with the exception, perhaps, of Wolf. Squire liked contact so much that he could wear down an opponent who might otherwise be able to figure out a way to defeat him. Wolf worked with him for perhaps ten minutes before it appeared to Squire that Wolf was tiring. Squire took the opportunity presented him, grabbing Wolf's right wrist with both hands for an immobilization.
Wolf waited until the last split instant before pivoting to his left. This dragged Squire with him, his momentum carrying him forward, lifting Wolf's arm up over his head. Wolf planted his left foot, transferring his balance as he turned his lower body to the right, sliding beneath Squire and, dropping to one knee, reaching up and back for Squire's hands locked on his wrist and pulling hard forward. Squire's feet left the floor as he tumbled over Wolf's ducked head onto the floor in front of Wolf.
Bobby was another matter entirely. Not as strong as Wolf, he was a serious thinker, who conceived the most remarkable combination of moves to defeat opponents even more advanced than he was. Wolf got him down by using the ikkyo, the first and simplest of immobilization techniques, using a first-level circular irimi on Bobby's left arm to twist it up over his head, bringing him to his knees.
Wolf spent the next hour instructing the three of them on how he was able to use their own weaknesses to defeat them. By the time he showered he found that he was famished. He was about to take Bobby out to breakfast when a call came in from the commish, who wanted to set up an immediate briefing.
'I'm not at the office,' Hayes Walker Johnson said in Wolf's ear. 'Come to my brownstone, but not the front way. In fact, I want you to use the entrance I use when I'm ducking reporters. No one knows about it, except a few of the brass so keep it to yourself.'
Wolf and Bobby took one of the unmarked Werewolf cars, a medallioned yellow cab, its top spray-painted with infra-red dye that could be tracked by a helicopter. That innovation was Wolf's idea, and he could think of at least two times they would have lost their quarry had it not been for this link, invisible to the human eye, between types of police vehicles.
As Bobby drove, Wolf speculated on the meet. Usually, the cases the commish wanted Wolf to work on were faxed over from his office; a face-to-face briefing was rare. The same thing must have been on Bobby's mind, because he said, 'Must be some important murder victim involved -probably something political that the commish can make headlines with.'
The commish's brownstone was in the east eighties, a perk he had insisted on when James Olivas, the mayor, wooed him to NYC from Houston. Wolf directed Bobby to swing around onto the street one block south of the building, and he pulled over, parked without putting out the POLICE BUSINESS sign - commish's orders. This meet was strictly hush, which was no doubt why the commish was going to get to the office late this morning.
Wolf led Bobby into the basement entrance of a sedate, well-groomed greystone. As Johnson had predicted, the black iron gate was closed but unlocked, and they went through it. The door just beyond in the minuscule cement courtyard was the same, and they took a long walk down a perfectly straight, dimly lit corridor smelling pleasantly of aromatic pipe smoke and some heavy cloth, perhaps velvet.
At the end of the windowless corridor was an old-fashioned wooden door with a glass panel, frosted and etched, that allowed what appeared to be outdoor light inside.
Wolf opened the door, found himself in the rear garden of the house. A pair of bald English plane trees arced overhead, guarding privet and boxwood. White-painted boxes for annuals rimmed the perimeter, their earth turned over, waiting for the sun.
At the far end of the garden, a twelve-foot fence of some basket-like material had been erected. There was a door in this fence, but had Johnson not described its location to Wolf he would not have known it was there. He pushed the door open, Bobby following close behind, and they found themselves in the back yard of Hayes Walker Johnson, the commish. Mature honey locusts, their long branches reaching upward, were underplanted with sheared ilex and holly, still glossy green. Beyond, an ancient wisteria, as gnarled as a brawler's fist, wound itself up the brownstone's four-storey facade.
The commish was waiting for them at his back door, beckoning them across the brown grass and fieldstone pathway. A bandy-legged man with skin the colour of milk chocolate, his cheeks were dusted with black birthmarks. He had small, inquisitive eyes offset by a telegenic smile that could put Anglos, if not Latinos, at ease. This was, no doubt, more due to the colour of his skin than it was to his manner. In his dark suit, white shirt and regimental striped tie, he looked quite formidable.
He ushered them into a kitchen area, sunlit and homey, with that lived-in and loved air that could not be replicated by money or an interior designer.
'Good of you to come,' the commish said, just as if he had issued an invitation that had been in jeopardy of being refused. 'Heard about your man going down, Wolf. Sorry about that.' Then added, 'It's always hard, isn't it?' without expecting an answer. 'But at least Arquillo's taken care of.' He waved them to a dark wood refectory table that dominated this section of the wood-panelled kitchen. It was covered with food, hot and cold, the commish mindful of the hour, considerate of his heroes just coming off shift.
As they sat, Wolf thought, apparently, word had not got out about the strange fire that had consumed Arquillo's face. He had told Bobby not to include that strange bit of info in his written report, and to say nothing of it to anyone, which was just fine by Bobby. He was too busy right now to wonder why he had ordered Bobby to do those things.
Standing at the head of the table like a patriarch at Thanksgiving, Johnson, apparently anxious to show his avuncular side, loaded up their plates with smoked salmon, curried chicken, lobster salad. From a drawer hidden at his end of the table he took a bread knife, sliced a loaf of fresh-baked seeded rye. 'Help yourself to juice and coffee. Or I can make you decaf espresso,' he said. Wolf noticed he made himself a double espresso, but no food at all. He allowed them perhaps ten minutes to make appreciative noises over his breakfast before he got down to business.
'I, for one, am damn glad this Arquillo thing is wrapped up,' he said, 'because what I've got now for you is top priority.' He handed over a buff folder. 'Someone iced Lawrence Moravia last night. In his own office no less. Pranced right through Moravia's vaunted security, did the deed and split without a trace. The autopsy's being done even as we speak.' He nodded at the folder. 'Tell me what you think.'
Hayes Walker Johnson slowly drank his way through three cups of his double espresso while Wolf and Bobby read the file. This is what they learned:
Lawrence Moravia, a multi-millionaire before he turned twenty-five, was an anomaly in New York City. A self-made man from Brooklyn, Moravia, whose immigrant parents never spoke fluent English, had built himself a burgeoning real estate empire to rival those of the Helmsleys and the Kalikows.
But Lawrence Moravia was the exception to the rule: instead of making deals with the city to infringe on its already diminishing air space, he took his tax breaks and created desperately needed middle income housing. In part, he could do this with a good deal of cost-effectiveness because of his ties to the Japanese. He had spent a number of years in Tokyo learning alternative construction and management techniques and, up until his murder, had continued to shuttle back and forth between New York and Tokyo with some frequency, to keep himself current and to fulfil the complex but enigmatic obligations of friendship so important to the Japanese.
Increasingly polarized into a city of the elite rich and the abject poor, New York in the decade of the eighties and the early nineties was dying from an exodus of the middle-class, who were fed up with the escalating costs of rents, essential services and taxes, frightened by dark and forbidding neighbourhoods overrun by teenage drug pushers and the homeless.
Moravia sought to change all that on a scale that could make some real difference until, last night, he was murdered in his office on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue skyscraper he owned. He had been shot twice in the back of the head with what appeared to be a 9mm gun (ballistics being run) in classic execution style, and the only fact immediately apparent was that it had been a thoroughly professional hit. No murder weapon had as yet been found; no fingerprints except those of the deceased and those of his assistant and secretary. Moravia's security people, who had discovered the body, had been careful not to touch anything. On first glance, the only thing close to being odd was that Moravia had been found with his cheeks rouged. But this was New York and, after a while, almost nothing seemed odd.
Bobby was still scanning the last page of the report when Wolf said, There must be more to it than just this. Otherwise you could've faxed me this file.'
Hayes Walker Johnson put down his cup. 'On the surface this guy was golden - and I do mean golden. He probably meant more to the revitalization of this city than anybody else I can think of. But something wasn't kosher with him. I got a call from the CME himself-early this morning. On prelim, he says Moravia didn't die from the bullets in his brain - maybe. He's got to do some sophisticated toxicological tests.' The commish sighed. 'In any event, this isn't the clean hit it appears to be. And I want you to find out what is going on before the shit hits the fan - and, believe me, unless you can close this down immediately, it's going to in a big way. Because - and let's take the simplest answer - if Moravia was a user, his close ties with high-ranking members of the city government are going to rock the area's economy to its foundations. Given Moravia's rep and influence as a deal-maker, I can guarantee you that his shit is going to become our shit, and it will cast a long, ugly shadow. The pull-out of new business we've been trying to coax back into the city will take on the impetus of a stampede. We can't allow that. Our economic survival is in the hands of these people.'
Wolf sat back while Bobby returned the last page to the folder and closed it. The commish took it out of Bobby's hand. Wolf, watching how carefully Hayes Walker Johnson guarded the file, imagined he knew why he hadn't received it by fax.
'In other words, you want this covered up,' Wolf said.
'I want it cleaned up.' The commish held up his hands. 'Do it any way you want, Wolf. Just make sure you get to the bottom of it ASAP. I don't want the media to get wind of any dirty laundry.' His watch beeped and he glanced at it. 'I got a meeting in five. Any other questions?' as he got up.
'I want a paint crew,' Wolf said. 'I'm sick of seeing the blood on my office walls.'
'You got it,' Hayes Walker Johnson said. 'Just call my office and -'
'No,' Wolf said, pinning him with his eyes. 'Tomorrow morning. First thing. I'm not handing any more requisitions to your office. Handle this yourself.'
'I'll do that,' the commish said. His telegenic smile almost wiped away the chronic apprehension in his eyes. 'Just get this job done quickly, neatly and on an eyes-only basis so we can all breathe a little easier, okay?'
Back on the street - having left via the circuitous way they had entered - Bobby, climbing in behind the wheel of the cab, said, 'What do you think the real story is?' He fired up the engine to get some heat into the interior.