"John Dalmas - The Puppet Master" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

excellent and the prices affordable. The waiters are a little strange, but they’re at least as courteous as their
customers.
Tuuli doesn’t worry about fat. That’s my problem. She’s the same age as me, thirty, but only five feet tall and
fine-boned. She probably doesn’t weigh more than 85 or 90 pounds, which is 40 percent of what I weigh. About
a third of what I weigh, sometimes. She’s the only Lapp immigrant I know; actually half-Lapp. Her father’s a
Finn, same as mine was. Born in the little mining town of Tuollivaara in Swedish Lapland, she grew up partly
there, and partly on a backwoods farm near Koivujoki, in Finnish Lapland. Came to America when she turned
eighteen. Her story is, she decided to emigrate when someone told her that in California women could be
shamans, and all the shamans were rich.
She’s been psychic, she says, since she was a little kid. From what I’ve seen, it’s easy to believe. Her great-
great-grandfather had been one of the last active Lapp shamans; the state church pretty much shut shamanism
down in Sweden a hundred and fifty years ago. The basic lore got passed down to Tuuli through her mother,
even though they were females. How I got to know her is, she sometimes consults for police agencies and private
investigation firms in greater Los Angeles. The police don’t like to acknowledge it—bad for their image—and
she doesn’t publicize it. She just deposits their credit transfers in her bank account.
But she built her reputation through the rich and famous. There’s a lot of rich people around L.A., and most of
her income is from them. It doesn’t hurt that Tuuli Waanila’s an interesting looking woman, either. Not just tiny.
She has elfin features, sandy hair, and slanty hazel eyes. It especially helps with entertainment people. Looks
mean a lot to them. Also she sounds good. She’s got a light accent that sounds pretty much Finnish. She’s well-
named, too. Her full name is Tuulikki, which in Finnish means graceful. Her dad named her that when she was
born, and it turned out to fit.
Anyway, at Mr. Ethel’s we got a booth in a corner, and while we waited, we drank coffee and talked. “What
do you think of astrology?” I asked.
Her eyes were direct, as usual. “Astrology? I’m not very informed about it. I don’t practice it. But I usually
look up my horoscope in the paper, in the morning.”
“Really?”
“Sure. It’s good to have a source of outside information. Psychics usually see better for others than for
ourselves.”
I didn’t leave it at that. I had to pump her a little. It goes with the profession. “But astrology!” I said. “I mean,
I can imagine people getting information through the omega matrix maybe, but from the positions of the
planets?”
She shrugged. “You read the papers.”
“Not the horoscopes, I don’t.”
“Did you read about the astronomer, Ashkenazi?”
“Do you believe him?”
“Nobody seemed anxious to try proving him wrong.” She paused, looking pointedly at me. “Why don’t you
tell me why you brought this up?”
So I did. “And now Ashkenazi’s my job. Thanks to Mr. Paska. Oops, Pasco.”
She tried to grin and wrinkle her nose at the same time. The nose won out. “Paska is a good name for him.”
“You know Pasco?”
“In my business, he has a reputation. He hates people like me. He’s California’s main agitator for laws to stop
us from practicing our profession.” Her eyes looked thoughtfully at me. “You’ve heard the saying, ‘In the land of
the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’ ”
“Yeah?”
“The person who said it was mistaken. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is apt to be considered a liar
and a fraud.” She paused again. This time her eyes seemed to focus somewhere above and beyond my right
shoulder. “You’re likelier to find something criminal about Pasco than about Ashkenazi.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes I’m serious.”
“What should I look for?”