"Destroyer 036 - Power Play.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

The third problem was those goddamn women marching downstairs in front of his building. Even through the double Thermo-pane windows he could hear them.
He got up from behind his desk and opened the sliding windows that looked down over Fifth Avenue. As he did, the chants of the women below grew louder.
From seventeen floors up, the women looked small, the way he liked women to look. Small and down around his feet. There were twenty of them carrying placards and signs and marching back and forth, chanting "Pruiss must go" and "Gross is gross."
Pruiss's face reddened. He grabbed a portable bullhorn he kept on a table next to the window, clicked it on, and leaned far out the window.
"Gross is gross," came the voices.
"Gross, hah?" Pruiss shouted. His electronically magnified voice swelled over the street and the women stopped chanting and looked up.
"I'll tell you gross," he yelled. "Three hundred and fifty million a year. That's gross."
One of the women also had a bullhorn. She was a former congresswoman who had been causing Pruiss trouble since he started the magazine. He had offered a ten thousand dollar-bounty in Gross for anyone who could write about an unnatural sex act he had performed with the woman. There were no answers. He raised the reward to twenty thousand. Still no takers. He broadened the category to include natural sex acts. He still got no replies. After running the advertisement in Gross for six month, he finally dropped it and did a cover story on the woman, calling her "America's last virgin. And why not?"
The woman aimed her bullhorn at him and shouted "You're sick, Pruiss. Sick. And so's your magazine."
"Never been healthier," Pruiss shouted back. "Three million readers a month."
"You belong in an asylum," the woman yelled.
"And you belong in a zoo," Pruiss shouted back. "You want a job?"
"Never," the woman called.
"I'll hire all of you. For photo spreads."
"Never."
"I'm booked up on girls for the next three years," Pruiss yelled. "But I got openings for two cows, a jackass and a lot of pigs. You all qualify."
"The law will get you, Pruiss," the woman bellowed back. The other women around her began chanting again. "Pruiss must go. Gross is gross."
"What do you have against making it with a bull?" Pruiss demanded. "You ever make it with a horse? Don't knock it if you ain't tried it."
Passersby had stopped to listen to the electronic debate, the participants separated by almost two hundred feet of open space.
"Hey, you. You with the flowered hat," Pruiss called. "Don't tell me you ain't made it with a bull."
The woman with the flowered hat resolutely turned her back on Pruiss.
"If you ain't made it with a bull, you ain't made it with nobody," Pruiss shouted. " 'Cause who else would stick it to a cow?"
"You're sick, Pruiss," the woman on the loudspeaker called.
"Go away, you dykes," Pruiss yelled. "The slut of the month feature is booked up until 1980. I'll call you then."
He closed the window, put down his bullhorn and with a sadistic smile went to the telephone.
"Send a photographer downstairs to shoot pictures of those dykes," he snarled. "If they want to know what for, tell 'em we're starting a new feature, 'Pig of the Month.'"
Pruiss was inspecting the page proofs for the next issue when a woman walked into his office. She was dark-eyed with long black hair that trailed straight and full down her back. She wore a thin white dress of some jersey material that clung to her full body as she moved. She had three file folders in her arms and she smiled at Pruiss as he looked up at her.
"What do you want first? The good news or the bad news?" she asked.
"The good news."
"There is no good news," she said.
"Still having trouble with that shark layout?" Pruiss asked.
The woman nodded, and some of her hair splashed forward onto her shoulder. "Still tough," she agreed. "Everybody's afraid they're going to get their boobies bitten off. We can always use Flamma to pose for it."
Pruiss shook his head. "Flamma's done too many gatefolds already. I don't want to make it look like we can't find girls willing to get screwed by a shark."
"I'll do it then," the woman said.
"Theodosia," Pruiss said. "You know how I feel about that. You did the first one with the bull. And that was enough. Those dingdongs that buy Gross will have to get off on somebody else. Not you, you're mine."
"Aren't you sweet?" Theodosia said. "I'll keep interviewing. We'll get somebody."
"I know," Pruiss said. "What about the movie?"
"We just got turned down by New Jersey."
"Why the hell'd they do that?" Pruiss asked.
"They said they didn't like the content."
"Did you tell them I was a Jersey boy myself?"
"I did even better than that," Theodosia said. "They set up this commission to bring movies to the state so I had lunch with somebody near that commission."
"And?"
"And I offered him five thousand dollars. And Flamma for three months."
"And he still turned you down?"
Theodosia nodded.
"Jerks," Pruiss said. "Don't they know I'm the wave of the future? A hundred years from now, people will look back and call this the Pruiss era."
"I told him that. He seemed more interested in the five thousand dollars," Theodosia said.
"But he turned us down anyway."
"Right."