"Folsom, Allan - The Day After Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Folsom Allan)

"He is ill...... "I'm sorry. But no, I do not know his name."

"Do you know where he works?"

"No. Except to say that he usually has some kind of fine dust or
perhaps powder on his jacket. I remember that because he was always
trying to brush it away. Like a nervous habit."

"Construction firms have been eliminated because construction workers do
not, in general, wear sport jackets to and from work. And certainly not
while they are working." It was just after seven that night when Jean
Packard sat down with Paul Osborn in a darkened corner of the hotel bar.
Packard had promised to contact him within two days. He was delivering
in less.

"Our man seems to work in an area that collects powdery residue where he
hangs his jacket during business hours. Scrutinizing the firms within a
one-mile radius from the three cafes, more than a normal walking
distance from a work day, we have been able to reasonably narrow his
profession cosmetics, dry chemicals, or baking materials." Jean Packard
spoke quietly. His information was brief and explicit. But Osborn was
hearing him as if in a dream. A week earlier he had been in Geneva,
nervously preoccupied with the paper he would deliver to the World
Congress of Surgery. Seven days later he was in a darkened bar in Paris
listening to a stranger confirm that his father's murderer was alive.
That he walked the streets of Paris.: Lived there, worked there,
breathed there. That the face he had seen was real. The skin he had
touched, the life he had felt under his fingers even as he tried to
strangle it, was real.

"By this time tomorrow, I will have for you a name and an address,"
Packard finished.

"Good," Osborn heard himself say. "Very good." Jean Packard stared at
him for a moment before he got up. It was no business of his what
Osborn would do with the information once he had it. But the look in
Osborn's eyes he'dd seen in other men. Distant turbulent and resolute.
There was no doubt in his mind whatsoever that the man he would soon
deliver to the American seated across from him would, very shortly
thereafter, be dead.

Back in his room, Osborn stripped and took his second shower of the day.
What he was trying to do was not think about tomorrow. Once he had the
man's name, knew who he was, where he lived, then he could think about
the rest. How to question him and then how to kill him. to think about
it now was too difficult and too painful. It brought back everything
dark and terrible in his life. Loss, anger, guilt, rage, isolation and
loneliness. Fear of love because of the dread that it would be taken
away.