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

everything. And then there was the other problem, and -even to this
moment Osborn hadn't quite known how to broach it. And then Jean
Packard said the next and Osborn's difficulty was erased.

"I would ask you why you want this person located, but I sense you would
prefer not to tell me."

"It's personal," Osborn said quietly. Jean Packard nodded, accepting
it.

For the next forty minutes Osborn went over the details of what little
he knew of the man he was after. The brasserie on the rue St.-Antoine.
The time of day he had seen him there. Which table he had been sitting
at. What he had been drinking. The fact that he had been smoking. The
route the man had taken afterward, when he thought noone was following
him. The Metro on boulevard St.Germain he had suddenly dashed into when
he realized he was.

Closing his eyes, picturing him, Osborn carefully went over Henri
Kanarack's physical description, as he had seen him here, just hours
ago, in Paris, and as he remembered him from that moment, years before,
in Boston. Through it all Jean Packard said little, a question here, to
repeat a detail there. Nor did he take notes, he simply listened. The
session ended with Osborn giving Packard a drawing of Henri Kanarack
he'dd made from memory on hotel stationery. The deep-set eyes, the
square jaw, the jagged scar under the left eye that worked its way
sharply down across the cheekbone toward the upper lip, the ears that
stuck out almost at right angles. The sketch was crude, as if drawn by
a ten-year-old boy.

Jean Packard folded it in half and put it in his jacket pocket. "In two
days you will hear from me," he said. Then, finishing his water, he
stood and walked out.

For a long moment Paul Osborn stared after him. He didn't know how to
feel or what to think. By a single circumstance of serendipity, the
random choosing of a place to have a cup of coffee in a city he knew
noting o everything had changed and a day he was certain would never
come, had. Suddenly there was hope. Not just for retribution but for
redemption from the long and terrible bondage to which this murderer had
sentenced him. For nearly three decades, from adolescence to adulthood,
his life had been a lonely torment of horror and nightmares. The
incident unwillingly played over and over in his mind. Propelled
mercilessly by the gnawing guilt that somehow his father's death had
been his fault, that some- how it could have been prevented had he been
a better son, been more vigilant, seen the knife in time to shout a
warning, even stepped in front of it himself. But that was only part of
it. The rest was darker and even more debilitating. From boyhood to
manhood, through any number of counselors, therapists and into the
apparently safe hiding place of professional accomplishment, he had