"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

Sandru conceded the point with a little nod, lifting the brandy bottle as he
did so.
"So she's not as perfect as her face would suggest?" he asked at last. "Not
remotely. Thank God."
"This place, with all its obscenities, would please her?" "Yes, I think it
would. Why? Does that make you more open to the idea of selling it to me?"
"I don't know," Sandru replied, frowning. "This whole conversation hasn't
turned out the way I thought it would. I expected you to come down here and maybe
buy a table, or a tapestry. Instead you want to buy the walls!" He shook his head
again. "I was warned about you Americans," he added, his tone no longer amused.
"What were you warned about?"
"Oh, that you thought nothing was beyond your grasp. Or beyond your pocket."
"So the money isn't enough."
"The money, the money." He made an ugly sound in the back of his throat.
"What does the money matter? You want to pay a hundred thousand dollars for it? Pay
it. I'll never see a lei so why should I care what it costs you? You can steal it as
far as I am concerned."
"Let me understand you clearly. Are you agreeing to the sale?"
"Yes," Father Sandru said, his tone weary now, as though the whole subject
had suddenly lost all trace of pleasure for him. "I'm agreeing." "Good. I'm
delighted."
Zeffer returned through the maze of furniture to the door, where the priest
stood. He extended his hand. "It's been wonderful dealing with you, Father Sandru."
Sandru looked down on the proffered hand, and thenуafter a moment of
studyуtook it. His fingers were cold, his palm clammy. "Do you want to stay and look
at what you've bought?"
"No. I don't think so. I think we both need a little sun on our faces."
Sandru said nothing to this; he just turned and led the way out along the corridor
to the stairs. But the expression on his face, as he turned, was perfectly clear:
there was no more pleasure to be found above as there was down here in the cold; nor
prospect of any.
Page 16
Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
THREE
There were ten thousand things Zeffer had not witnessed, or even glimpsed,
in his brief visit to the vast, mysterious chambers in the Fortress's bowels; images
haunting the tiles which he would not discern until the heroic labor of removing the
masterwork from the walls and shipping it to California was complete.
He was a literate man; better educated than most of his peers in the
burgeoning city of Los Angeles, thanks to parents who had filled the house with
books, even though there was often precious little food on the table. He knew his
classics, and the mythologies from which the great books and plays of the ancients
had been derived. In time he would discover dozens of images inspired by those same
myths on the tiles. In one place women were depicted like the Maenads immortalized
by Euripides; maddened souls in service of the god of ecstasies, Dionysus. They
raced through the trees with bloody hands, leaving pieces of male flesh scattered in
the grass. In another place, single-breasted Amazons strode, drawing their mighty
bows back and letting fly storms of arrows.
There were other imagesуmany, many others-that were not rooted in any
recognizable mythology. In one spot, not far from the delta, huge fishes, which had