The Infant of Prague
- Автор: Granger Bill
- Серия: November Man #8
- Год: 1987
- Язык: французский
- Год: Warner
- ISBN: 0446347809
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Infant of Prague». Краткое содержание книги:
For in a humble Chicago parish church, the sacred statue of the Infant of Prague is found weeping real tears. A visiting Czech child star actress, transfigured by the wondrous event, declares, on live television, her intent to remain in American in the name of Christ and freedom.
Only an operative as cynical and seasoned as the November Man can sense the sinister link between two dramatic, yet apparently unrelated defections. A miracle has plunged him into a vast global adventure. And it will take a miracle to get him through it alive.
The defection of a highly visible Czech sparks an international crisis, and the November Man is caught in the middle.
Al Buck said it very flat and straight, the way an executive does when he is bottom-lining: “Three years network contract: one ten, one twenty-five, and one seventy-five. To make up the difference, one bill a week in expenses and car and we pick up your rent and—”
“Last week I was on the way out.”
“That was before. This is different.”
“The money isn’t there.”
“One twenty-five, one fifty, two,” Al Buck said then as though he were reciting numbers on the market wire without owning any stock. His voice was so dead, Kay thought.
“You’re scaring me, Al,” she said. “You think stories just disappear.”
“Stories are things we make up,” Hal Newt said. “The filler between the commercials. Anna Jelinak is a small story.”
“My story,” she said.
“We pull off,” Al said. “That’s the way it is.” There was no shadow to his voice. None of the words carried weight.
She stared at Al Buck. She thought about it. “I’ve got to think,” she said.
“There’s nothing to think about.”
In the corner of the office was the inevitable TV monitor tuned to the station. News at five, film at ten, world and national news at five-thirty P.M. Right now, however, it was the syndicated game show in which all the contestants tried to guess who their marital partners would really rather be sleeping with.
“I have to think,” said the reluctant little girl who had to take piano lessons at the age of ten at Miss Groomby’s house and who delayed the moment by walking very slowly down the street, hoping the time for piano lessons would pass. “I have to think.”
And thought and thought.
“No. It’s my story. If you don’t want it, someone else will want it,” she said.
“You won’t work for the network ever again,” Al Buck said.
“There are worse things.”
Hal Newt sighed and his face was white.
“You blew it, Kay. You’re yesterday,” he said.
Kay said, “We’ll see. You guys are strange. I mean, this is strange. You’re the ones blowing it.”
“Clear the building. Now,” Al Buck said. “We’ll send your things.”
“This is crazy, Al,” she said, feeling the craziness in the room. “I’ve got clothes in the dressing room and—”
“Dead,” Al Buck said. “Dead in this town now. Clear the building now.” He punched the intercom. “Send up Rollins from Security.”
She couldn’t believe it.
This time it was from a pay phone off the main room where the card game was going on. Ben hated cards. He felt like he was in jail, killing time. He punched in his card number and waited for the computer-voice to thank him for using AT&T and then counted the rings.
“Me,” he said.
“Our man did not handle it well. Perhaps I was too… oblique. She quit or was fired and that doesn’t resolve anything, she’ll have another job tomorrow. I don’t know why he blew it.”
“So what do we do now?” Ben asked, but he knew and he felt good about it because the waiting time was over and he could throw in his cards.
“Your way,” Julie said.
Hit her, Ben thought. He hung up the phone and went back into the card room and said he was tired and he had a cold and he was going back to the hotel. Actually, he felt better than he had in days.
9
For a long time, there was darkness.
He could move if he crawled. The pain was constant, just at the surface, and it spread hot fingers across his body. He groaned when he moved. Because of the darkness, he could not take a measure of the pain and where it came from; the darkness intensified the feeling of pain.
He lay in the darkness and tried to isolate the pain by thinking about it as something separate from himself and, that way, to make it less. It was like being a child, shut up in a sickroom, surrounded by goblins of fever who make the world shrink and expand constantly.
He felt his left hand with his right and could feel the taut, puffy skin. When he pressed his third and fourth fingers, the pain came sharp and hard and made him sick. He vomited on the floor of the place where they had put him.
His left leg was heavy and swollen as well. He touched it with his right hand and then he tried to flex it. He could feel the place where the muscle was torn. His left leg was so heavy that when he finally tried to move, he had to crawl across the damp floor and drag the leg behind him.
How long had he been here?
There were no windows and no doors, and the damp smell of the place crept into his nostrils, his clothes, his dreams. The dreams were the worst thing because when he would start awake, the darkness and the goblins remained. The ceiling was low enough to touch when he finally pushed himself up against a stone wall and reached. He thought he must be in a basement. He could hear the rats scuttling away from him. The rats sang to each other across the darkness in high-pitched, almost crooning voices. Sometimes, when he fell asleep and could not fight against the dreams, the rats ran across his body and he felt their sudden weight and the skidding, light steps.
He thought he could go mad if it lasted long enough and if that was what they wanted.
His clothes were damp, but if he took them off he would be even colder. He huddled against a wall and against the pressing dampness of the place they held him. He tried to move his hands and arms to make heat and flex the swollen muscles.
He urinated against a wall in the corner of the dark room and the urine burned from his body while the pain made black and red flashes across his vision.
There were only three sounds in the darkness: the singing of the rats, the drip of water someplace, and, once, his own voice that sounded small and flat.
“I’m alive.”
Light broke painfully into the darkness.
The shaft of light illuminated the room — it was a basement, after all — and the rats froze along the walls and watched the two figures descend the wooden stairs that dropped from the floor above.
Devereaux shrank into a far corner away from the light.
The two men spoke French. The first one said he hated the rats and the second one made a mumbled joke. They carried automatic pistols that picked up the glint of light. One of them had a flashlight and searched the room along the walls.
“Fucking rats,” the first one said.
“Hey, you,” said the second one. “You dead? Come on, we’re going upstairs.”
“Maybe he is dead,” said the first one, looking at the rats in the light. “Maybe the rats ate him.”
“You better hope they didn’t eat him,” the second one said. He was a heavy man and he stood still and let his gun muzzle wave across the semidarkness. “Hey, you, come on out. If you’re not dead yet, come on out.”
Devereaux said nothing. He tried to coil his body. The two of them were less than ten feet away. But the pain in his left leg let the tension out of his body and he couldn’t set himself.
“Where the hell is he?” said the first one.
Devereaux pushed off but his leg fell under him. He fell heavily on the floor.
“You’re there somewhere,” said the second one. “Come out here now.”
“Come and get me, copper,” Devereaux said.
They saw him at the same time and they trained the lights on him. The first one, who was afraid of the rats, saw he was alive and not eaten and slapped him on the side of the head with the pistol and Devereaux slumped into darkness again.
“Don’t kill him,” said the second one. Devereaux heard him through the fog of pain, like a voice in a fever.
“I don’t see why not,” said the first one.
“You saw what happened to the driver. The driver tried to kill him. You saw what happened to him.”