Dead Lions полностью

“Not me, Jackson Lamb. I look around your green and pleasant land and I just love what you’ve done with the place. But you’re here because you’ve started to think what if, haven’t you? What if the cicadas are real after all? Who would they answer to? Not the national Soviet interest that put them here, because that no longer exists.” Raising his empty glass to the light, he tilted it so its faint red tidemark showed up like a scar. “Imagine that. Buried underground for years and years. Waiting for the word to start their song. But whose word?”

Lamb said, “Alexander Popov was a scarecrow. A hat and a coat and two old sticks, no more.”

“They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to make people stop believing in him,” Katinsky said. “But all joes believe in the devil, don’t they? Deep down, during their darkest nights, all joes believe in the devil.”

He laughed at this, which turned into another cough. Lamb watched him heave for a minute, then shook his head and dropped a fiver on the table. “Wish I could say you’d been a help, Nicky,” he said. “But on the whole, I think we should’ve thrown you back.”

When he looked back from the door, Katinsky was still heaving on the rack of his own body. But the five pound note had disappeared.

Earlier, from his car, Kenny Muldoon had watched Shirley Dander get behind the wheel of her own, slip a pair of shades on, and go roaring out of Moreton-in-Marsh station car park. She wants to be careful, he thought. The locals didn’t care for reckless drivers, and there’s no one more local than a local policeman. But that wasn’t his problem. He patted his breast pocket, where he’d tucked the money she’d handed him, then patted his stomach, into which he’d shovelled the breakfast she’d bought. Not a bad morning’s work. And it wasn’t over yet.

From his glove compartment he took a scrap of paper on which was scrawled a mobile number. Mumbling it aloud, he punched it into his phone.

A train was pulling out; one of the commuter wagons, stuffed to the gills.

The phone rang.

A woman stood on the bridge, holding a baby. She was making the child wave its hand at the departing train; holding it at the elbow, moving it left then right.

The phone rang.

A young couple in bright jackets and rucksacks examined a timetable by the platform gate. They appeared to be arguing. One gestured after the vanishing train, as if making a point.

The phone was answered.

Muldoon said, “It’s Muldoon. From the taxi. I was given this number.”

And he said, “Yes. It was a woman, though.”

And he said, “Yes, that’s what I told her.”

And he said, “So when do I get my money?”

Ending the call, he tossed the phone onto the passenger seat, then crumpled the scrap of paper and dropped it at his feet. And then he too left the car park.

After a while, the young couple in their bright jackets wandered onto the platform, to await the next train.

Roderick Ho was pissed off.

Roddy Ho felt betrayed.

Roderick Ho was wondering what it all added up to, if you couldn’t trust your fellow man, your fellow woman. If your fellow woman lied to you, misrepresented herself, was not who she claimed to be …

A lesser man might weep.

Because you put your whole damn self into a relationship, and what did you find? You found yourself reaching out to this hot blonde chick who was into hip-hop, action movies and snowboarding, who’d reached level five of Armageddon Posse and was taking evening classes in 20th century history, and then—and he’d only discovered this because she mentioned her make of car and that she had SkyPlus, two hard facts which allowed him to trace her corporeal identity as opposed to her online character—and then it turned out that if she was into snowboarding she’d better be doing it carefully, because not many insurance companies were going to cover a fifty-four-year-old woman on a snowboarding holiday, because fifty-four was the kind of age when your bones turned brittle and you had to worry about catching a chill in case it developed into something nasty. Christ. She didn’t need evening classes in twentieth century history. She just had to cast her mind back. Roddy Ho wasn’t sure his own mother was fifty-four yet. The bitch.

But anyway. Water under the bridge. The adjustments he’d made to his e-mail set-up ensured that any further communications from Ms. Geriatric Ward would be blocked. If she wondered what she’d done to upset Roderick Ho—or Roddy Hunt, rather; the DJ superstar with the Montgomery Clift profile she’d thought she was hooking up with—she needed to take a long hard look in the mirror, that was all. Truth in advertising was what she needed evening classes in. Ho wasn’t easily offended—he was an easygoing guy—so it was with both sorrow and disgust that he wiped out Ms. Coffin Dodger’s credit rating. He only hoped she’d learn her lesson, and stick to her own side of the generation gap in future.