"Destroyer 044 - Balance of Power.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

He refused to open his eyes. If he should catch a glimmer of light, it would destroy his sleep and then the squawking would never go away and then he would be awake.
A man had a right to sleep if he paid for his own home. He covered an ear with a palm and curled his legs up toward his chin, hoping that assuming the
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fetal position would catapult him back to the womb, where there were no ducks.
It didn't. The doorbell continued ringing.
Bernard C. Daniels opened his eyes, brushed some of the dust from his white summer tuxedo and contemplated swallowing. The taste in his mouth told him it was a bad idea.
He pushed himself off the wooden floor that had once seen many coats of polish, but was now covered thickly from wall to wall with a gray film of dust. Only his resting place and last night's footprints broke the film. It was a barren room with a high white ceiling and old unused gas vents for lighting the house during a past era. It was his room, in the United States of America, where there were laws, in the town of Weehawken, New Jersey, where he was born and where no one crept up on you in the middle of the night with a machete. It was a place where you could close your eyes.
He was fifty years old and closing his eyes was a luxury.
His first night of luxury in many years shattered by a doorbell. He would have to get it disconnected.
Daniels stumbled to the window and tried to open it. Age had sealed it more securely than any latch.
He needed a drink. Where was the bottle?
He traced last night's steps from the door to his resting place to the window. No bottle.
Where was it? He couldn't have put it in the large closet at the other end of the room. There was no arcing sweep in the dust on the floor at the base of the closet doors. Where the hell was it?
Squawk. Squawk. Squawk. The bell sounded again. Daniels muttered a curse and broke a pane in the window with the empty bottle he had in his pocket.
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So that's where it was. He smiled. A cool April breeze off the Hudson River flowed through the broken window. Daniels filled his lungs with the cool, fresh air, then gagged and sputtered. He would have to tape over the window, he said to himself, coughing. Too much air, and a man could breathe himself to death. He'd been so much more comfortable breathing the homey dust of the floor.
A sharp voice came from beneath the window. "Daniels!" the voice yelled. "Daniels, is that you?"
"No," Daniels quavered back, his voice hurdling over a lake of rancid phlegm. At first he hadn't known whether to answer in Spanish or English. Fortunately, he realized, "no" was the same in both languages.
The bottle was wet in his perspiring hands. He glanced at the label. Jose Macho's Four Star Tequila. He could get a gallon for a buck in Mexico City. It had cost him nine dollars at a Weehawken bar.
Squawk. Squawk. Squawk.
"Damn it," Daniels hollered through the shattered pane. "Will you stop that goddamn ringing!" "
"I did," came the voice. It was familiar. Coldly, efficiently, disgustingly familiar.
''Wo estoy aqui," Daniels answered.
"What do you mean you're not home? What other idiot would smash a window instead of answering a doorbell?"
Succumbing to logic, Daniels dropped the bottle on the floor and left the room, the squawks still sounding in his ears. He descended the wooden stairs, slowly pausing to examine all three dusty barren floors.
He walked with grace, each step the product of years of gymnastics, built into a solid muscular body
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that 35 years of frequent abuse had not managed to debilitate. Daniels was a handsome man. He knew this because women told him so. His rugged face was topped by a shock of short, steel-gray wavy hair. His nose had been broken six times, and the last fracture restored the dignity that the first five had taken away.
A cruel face, women called it. Sometimes the perceptive ones added, "But it fits you, you bastard."
Barney would have smiled remembering that, if he hadn't been seeking desperately to burn out the barnyard-flavored coating of his tongue with a blast of alcohol. Any decent rotgut would do. But there was nothing.
Squawk. Squawk. He waved his arm in the oak-paneled foyer as though the man behind the stained glass window could see his movements and would stop ringing. No good. He fumbled with the three brass locks on the door, finally twisting the last into position.
Then, firmly grasping the tarnished doorknob as if it would fall to the floor if he let go, he pulled back hard and a gust of April swatted his face. "Ooh," Barney gasped.
A man in a stylish Ivy League blue worsted suit stood in the doorway. He wore an immaculate white shirt and a striped tie, knotted tightly, and carried a black attache case. He had the kind of well-bred, old-money face that was accepted everywhere and forgotten immediately. Barney would have forgotten it too, except that he'd seen its smug, vain, monotonously snotty expression too many times.
"Quit ringing the frigging doorbell," Daniels demanded, refusing to let the wind blow him to the floor and amazed, as ever, that its force failed to muss the man's careful Christopher Lee hairdo.
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"My hands are at my sides," the man said without humor.
Daniels stared into the wind. They were. '
Squawk. Squawk.
He needed a drink.
"You wouldn't happen to have a drink on you, would you, Max?"
"No," said Max Snodgrass emphatically. "May I come in?"
"No," said Barney Daniels just as emphatically and slammed the door in Max Snodgrass's face. Then, watching the dark shadow on the other side of the stained glass, he waited for the outrage.
"Open this door, Daniels. I have your first pension check. If you don't open up you won't get your check."
Barney shrugged and tilted his head back, looking at the solid beamed ceilings fifteen feet high. They didn't build them like that any more. It was a fine buy.
"Open up now or Fm leaving."
And the paneling, thick oak. Who paneled with oak nowadays?
"I'm leaving."
Barney waved goodbye. And the ceiling joints.
"I'm serious. I'm leaving."
Daniels opened the door again. "Don't leave," he said softly. "I need your help."