"Destroyer 028 - Ship of Death.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

The furniture was covered for storage as it had been for the last year. He went to the room where he was born and then to the room where he was raised and, finally, in the grand banquet hall with its majestic fireplaces that he could not now even afford to fill with wood, he strolled the gallery of family portraits.
And in the sense that comes to dying people, he understood. He understood that the baronetcy had not begun in grandeur but probably very much like that wretch Skouratis-with lying, robbing, stealing, deceiving. That was how fortunes began, and to preside over the ending of one was perhaps more moral than to preside over its beginning. Sir Ramsey would oversee the end of the Frawl fortune with grace. That was the least he could do.
The low purr of a Jaguar engine came into the quiet peace of the great banquet hall of Attington.
It was Skouratis. Sir Ramsey could tell by his desperate pudgy run. Skouratis jiggled several locks until he found an open door and, finally, sucking great inadequate lungfuls of air and wiping his forehead of greasy sweat, he stumbled into the great banquet hall of Attington that he now owned.
"Sir Ramsey, I'm so glad I got here in time."
"Really? Why?" asked Frawl coolly.
"When my people told me about your despondency and when I discovered you had come here with a pistol, I rushed here right away. I am so glad I got here in time, that you have not shot yourself already."
"You are going to try to stop me?"
"Oh, no. I just didn't want to miss your suicide. Go right ahead."
"What makes you think I won't shoot you? Just curiosity, mind you."
"To survive, one must know people. That is not you, Sir Ramsey."
"It has just occurred to me," said Sir Ramsey Frawl, "that you might have selected me to build my own disaster for other than business reasons."
"As a matter of fact, yes. But business is always first."
"Have I done something to offend you in any special way?"
"Yes. But it was not out of malice. It was something you said to the newspapers."
"What, if I may ask?"
"It was a small thing," Skouratis said.
"Obviously not that small to you, Mr. Skouratis."
"No. Not to me. You, as president of Frawl, had said that Aristotle Thebos was the foremost shipping man in the world."
"He once was. Before the great ship."
"And I am now, correct?"
"Yes. But my comment was so long ago. So very long ago."
"Nevertheless, you said it."
"And that was enough?"
"No. I told you it was business."
"I think there is something more, Mr. Skouratis."
"No, no. Just business. And, of course, Aristotle Thebos. What you had said."
"And that was enough to make you want to ruin me?"
"Certainly."
"And now you want to watch me finish the job?"
"Yes. Sort of a grand finale to all we have accomplished."
Sir Ramsey smiled. "It's too bad that you haven't read the newspapers this morning. You may have accomplished nothing at all. You may have become the biggest dinosaur since the Ice Age, Mr. Skouratis. The Jews call today Yom Kippur. It's their Day of Atonement. Your day of atonement is yet to come."
"What are you talking about?"
"A little war that started today in the Middle East."
"I know about that. I knew about it before the newspapers."
"Have you ever thought what you're going to do with the largest tanker in the world, when oil becomes too expensive? Your tanker, sir, was built to carry cheap oil. Cheap, plentiful oil."
Sir Ramsey turned his face from the grunt of the man in the ill-fitting suit to gaze upon a more graceful sight, the chair where his father had sat during so many formal dinners and the chair that he had used, and had been used so many times before when the British Empire was the empire of the world. And he pulled the trigger of the small gun, whose barrel he had stuck in his mouth, and it was so very easy. So much easier than life.
Skouratis watched the far side of Sir Ramsey's head pop out like a burst of tiny red spit. There were, of course, the proper witnesses coming into the room now, none of whom would remember Demosthenes Skouratis ever having been there. Actually, there had been no need for him to be there. He had known Sir Ramsey was a doomed man from the first time they shook hands on the deal to build the great ship.
Sir Ramsey had not been the first death connected to the great ship. There were eighteen others but, to Skouratis, that was just the average number of people killed or maimed in a large project. The real tragedy was the oil embargo. There wasn't enough oil to move because now there were too many ships ready to move too little. The price quadrupled and, like any other commodity, the more the price went up, the less it was used.
The great ship lay moored in its Norwegian berth and to just keep the engines running enough and the ship from rusting into an island of waste, it cost Demosthenes Skouratis seventy-two thousand dollars a week. It was like financing an empty city and he might have scrapped the great ship called only Number 242, except for the party that Aristotle Thebos had thrown for him in the shipyard when the ship was completed. Kings were there, socialites were there, the press was there, and every picture showed the great hulk with two hundred and forty thousand dollars' worth of tarpaulin, acres of it, covering the great pumps and fixtures.
"I am giving this party so that we may pay respect to the greatest ship ever built before my poor, poor friend, Demosthenes, must dismantle it," said Thebos.
"Ridiculous," was Skouratis' response to newspaper reporters. He answered with a little smile, as if the comment really were ridiculous.
And he was trapped. He knew Aristotle Thebos was correct. So did Aristotle. So did anyone else in the world who knew shipping. But it was only seventy-two thousand dollars a week, and it was worth seventy-two thousand dollars not to let Thebos have the last laugh on him. Only seventy-two thousand dollars a week. He could live with it for a while. The awhile became years-until lunch with an African diplomat one day in New York City, when Demosthenes Skouratis realized what he would do. He would be famous for it, great for it. Aristotle Thebos would die from envy. Die from it.
Skouratis had kissed the pimply black cheek of the African diplomat and danced around the table at the restaurant. The African diplomat had looked bewildered-until Demosthenes explained to him what he would do.
By the time the United States State Department found out about it, it was too late.
"Are they kidding? They're lunatics."
The officer who said that was talking about the United Nations. And everyone in the State Department agreed with him.

CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and he was supposed to enter the room after the lights were turned out. He had been told everything was arranged which, nowadays he knew, meant that he had probably been given only the right name of the city-Washington, D.C.-and the right name of the building-State Department-and possibly the right room-B Level, 1073.