"Steve White - The Prometheus Project" - читать интересную книгу автора (White Steve)

recognizable. The bar was a little place on one of the side streets off M Street, not far from the
footbridge across the canal. I was to meet George Stafford there.
As I approached the place, I became aware that something was not quite right. People were hurrying into
the bar in abnormal numbers for early afternoonтАФpeople who didn't look like regulars. I immediately
realized I shouldn't go in. Even if the meeting hadn't been blown, any out-of-the ordinary event at the
venue meant it would be, or at least should be. Either way, it was time for me to take a leisurely stroll
along the Potomac riverfront.
But a zillion generations of monkey ancestors told me to follow the crowd, out of sheer curiosity to see
what all the fuss was about.
Inside, the sense of wrongness grew. People were clustered at the barтАФbut they weren't drinking, to
speak of. And they were strangely quiet. They were all staring at the TV above the rows of bottles. The
voices from the TV had the unmistakable tone of news announcers trying to fill a silence.
I shouldered my way through the oddly passive crowd. I got to the bar just in time to see the latest of the
cruelly interminable reruns of the motorcade in Dallas, focusing on one open-topped car and on the
famous chestnut-haired head which suddenly slammed forward with the impact of a bullet.
You have to understand. We didn't know any of the stuff that came out about him later. Like the fact that
he was the kind of guy who, at the time his wife was undergoing a difficult and possibly life-threatening
childbirth, was off cruising the Med with a boatload of bimbos. The kind of guy who cheerfully signed
his name to a book Daddy had had ghost-written, and afterwards cheerfully accepted the Pulitzer prize
Daddy bought for the book. In fact, he hardly ever did anything in his life for any reason except to
please Daddy. And Daddy was, with the possible exception of Meyer Lansky, the most successful
organized criminal in American history . . . besides being a Nazi sympathizer, unlike most crooks, who
at least are refreshingly apolitical. A good match for Mommy, whose religious bigotry would have been
considered a bit much in the sixteenth century.

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 - Chapter 1

No, we didn't know any of that at the time. All we knew was that he was young and vivid and stood out
like a flame among the bald, boring old farts who in our experienceтАФI was twenty-seven thenтАФmade
up the political establishment. Call us naтАвve if you want. I can't stop you. I can't even disagree with you.
All I can say is that he meant something to us, as though something new had come into our world with
him. And now that something had been snuffed out.
That was why, for decades afterwards, in the teeth of all the evidence, people went on believing in
various conspiracy theories, the more far-fetched the better. We couldn't accept the factтАФand it is a
factтАФthat the assassination had been the stupid, pointless act of one lone, pathetic little loser. That truth
was unacceptable because it somehow diminished us. Surely the obliteration of what had meant so much
to usтАФdefined us, in a wayтАФhad to mean something, because we meant something. Didn't we?
In my case, it didn't help that I'd been in the Army's Special Forces before . . . never mind. He had
always been kind of a special patron of ours. He'd reviewed us once, and passed within a few feet of me.
Anyway, I don't remember much of the rest of that day, or the next few.
At some point, though, I ended up at Matt Kane's, not far from the Fourteenth Street sleaze strip, late at
night.
That place was another great thing about the old Washington. If you walked in through the storefront-
like entrance, it was just a medium-seedy Irish neighborhood tavern. You had to know the side door, off
to the right, that led through a slightly alarming-looking corridor to the "Bit of Ireland" bar in the back.
The business about the whole thing having been brought over from the Auld Sod brick by brick was
probably bullshit. But it was full of banners and Gaelic road signs and all the rest, and it hosted the best
Irish bands to cross the Atlantic.
Tonight, though, the usual liveliness was gone. And I was ignoring the justly famous beer list. I had