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.
“No. I can’t let you get involved.”
“I can get involved. I know Brussels. You need a guide. An old friend.”
“No. You can’t be involved in this.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Information,” she said. “About a man.”
“Your boyfriend,” he said.
She didn’t say anything.
“Did he run out on you?”
“Maybe something like that,” she said.
“That’s a lie,” Lee said. “Nobody would walk out on you. I know that much.”
“I have to find someone.”
“In a dangerous place. In a dangerous trade,” he said. “I was always a good guesser. I still work the crossword puzzle in ink. Your boyfriend isn’t a journalist, is he? What have you gotten involved in, Rita?”
She had thought about that all the way from Lausanne. She had let David Mason get her a room here, she had accepted the fact that he was watching her, that if she got close to it, he would be right behind her. What was she getting into?
“Your boyfriend,” Lee was saying. “The one you’re looking for. He’s in something you can’t talk about.”
She said nothing.
“What is he? A dealer? Arms or drugs? Is that what you got involved in?”
She stared at him with pretty green eyes and her face was very hard. It was so different from the way she had looked a long time before when they were both starting out on the newspaper in Wisconsin.
He put down the drink and kept looking at her. “I don’t care, Rita. I really fell for you. You get over that but you don’t either. I’d do anything for you.”
“I know,” she said. She had known it, too. That was why she looked him up. She never intended to see him again. That’s not something she would have admitted ten years ago.
“Anything,” he said.
But she was getting up now. He waited for her to leave the bar. He waved a fat index finger at Pierre behind the bar and Pierre knew the signal because he knew the fat American and he came down with the bottle of Scotch and a fresh glass.
Kay Davis didn’t even feel fired. It had really happened just a few hours ago but she didn’t feel it as a thing yet. She took a long hot shower and made herself an indulgent cup of hot cocoa. She thought she should call her mother in Davenport, but then she thought she couldn’t tell her that she had just been fired. She felt like a little girl in her terrycloth robe with the cup of hot cocoa on the coffee table. The city was spread out in stark night colors below her window wall on the twenty-ninth floor of the condominium. The view was south toward the Loop, the spires all creating an orange sky. Her view. Her town. Until 4:12 P.M. that day.
She sat on the Euro-style white couch and propped her bare feet up on the glass-and-chrome coffee table and took the cocoa a teaspoon at a time, the way she had done as a child when she was sick. The cocoa warmed her memory of being a little girl. She rarely thought now about being little and helpless. Maybe she was beginning to feel fired.
Why did they want to kill the story of Anna Jelinak? Why did they think they could?
She had called Stephanie Fields but got her answering machine. She had left her name. She had called the news director at Channel 7 and he was definitely interested, he definitely wanted to set up a meeting with the station manager.
So why be upset? she thought. You’ll work tomorrow or the next day. This is still your town.
Hal Newt had looked at her with such sad eyes.
She put down the cup and got up. She felt a panicky sense of isolation. She went to the window and looked down at Chestnut Street below. It was narrow and there were cars clogging both sides of the street. Chicago was the next to last step up to the Big Apple and she had slipped on a banana peel.
Why did it happen to her?
And she thought of Anna Jelinak. Did Anna wonder why the statue cried? Why it moved her that minute, that very afternoon in a TV studio in a foreign city?
Kay started. She turned around because she suddenly thought she saw something reflected in the window.
It was a large man.
She felt dizzy and afraid. It was impossible for anyone to be inside her apartment. There was a doorman, there were security television cameras, there was a steel door with a peephole, and this was impossible. This building was as safe as they could make it.
The large man just stood there in the foyer and looked at her. He had a wide forehead and his eyes were set so far apart that it was hard to keep both of them in mind in a single glance. She looked from eye to eye. His face had the pebbled texture of a basketball. He stood and stared at her and said nothing.
She could not speak. When she found her voice, he was already talking.
“You’re dumb, you know that?”
“How did you get in here?”
“You could be a leg up now but you were dumb. Dumb. How can you figure dumb people.”
“You get out of here.”
“You get a nice chance and you blow it. I could say you’ll regret it the rest of your life, but what the hell is that? Ten minutes?”
He didn’t move.
She picked up the letter opener. Gift from her Aunt Doris. Part of a set including desk pad, telephone book…
The large man walked into the room.
“Get out of here.”
There was disgust on his face. “Dumb.”
Oh my God, she said to herself. I don’t want to die.
He took the letter opener out of her hand. He slapped her across the face and the blow sent her back into the window. The window wall shook from the force of her body hitting it.
“There was a broad once was supposed to jump through the window in an apartment in the John Hancock Building, but I don’t think you can. I mean, you’d have to really hit the glass the right way, with a lot of force, to even crack it. These high-rises are built like brick shithouses.”
She staggered around the desk to put it between her and the man.
The telephone rang.
Kay pushed at the desk to shove it against him. Her robe opened.
He stared right through her, the way Al Buck had stared right through her when he told her to clear the building. Her nostrils flared with the rush of adrenaline.
He was talking out loud but he was talking to himself. He was really huge, outweighing her by about one hundred fifty pounds. His fingers were large and some of them had been broken once. He wore a blue suit and an open-collar white shirt. His black hair glistened with oil.
“So how do you figure a broad throws a snit and walks out on a good job, good bucks, moving up the ladder of success? A good-looking broad, good tits, good can, and she walks out and goes to her fancy high-rise one-bedroom apartment on Chestnut Street and kills herself? I mean, what happened? She flip out or what? Yeah. She must of flipped out.”
She ran across the room and he caught her by the wrist at the door of the bathroom and pushed her in. His hand was hot around her pale wrist.
“Pills,” he said. “Broads do it with pills. Look at Marilyn Monroe. That was a waste. How do you figure people who got it made?”
He opened the medicine cabinet.
“Everyone’s got pills,” he said.
He took the bottle of sleeping pills from the glass shelf and closed the cabinet. She hit him in the face.
He looked at her. “You want me to slap you around some first?” He seemed surprised and hurt. “You make it easy, you make it hard.”
“Please for the love of—”
“Look, honey. I get no kicks out of this. Well, maybe in a way. But if it wasn’t me, it’s someone else. See? If it isn’t today, it’s tomorrow, and why put it off. It’s like going to the dentist to get a tooth yanked. You put it off and put it off, but you still got to do it in the long run.”