"Ron Goulart - Memoirs of the Witch Queen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

“He wasn’t. That’s what’s so odd, you know,” she said. “He only
bought the motorcycle early yesterday afternoon. He’d never owned one
before.”

“Sad,” observed Sanson, not meaning it. “So you’ve taken over his
task of calling me at odd hours to demand that I pay sums which I—”

“No, Paul, that isn’t the reason I called.” Her voice brightened. “It turns
out you were right about having made those arrears payments.”

“I was? I mean, I was, yes.”

“In fact, you have no back balance at all and you can start using your
card again immediately. Your new credit line is fifty thousand dollars.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” Amy repeated. “And since you’re on our
Especially Valued Customers list, Paul, you don’t have to make any
payments for eighteen months.”

Making a puzzled noise, he said, “Well, that’s ... nice,” and ended the
call.

He walked barefoot over to the living room window, gazed out into the
patch of woodlands that surrounded his cottage. A light rain was falling.
“How did I get from deadbeat to Especially Valued?”

He was eating bran flakes and scanning the front page of the New
Beckford News-Pilot when the phone rang again.

Sanson returned to the living room. “Hello?”

“Hey, dude. Did I wake you up?”

“No such luck, Rudy. What’s wrong now?”
 “Deadline,” said his youthful editor in far-off Manhattan. “Does that
word have any meaning for you?”

“Greensea Publishing hired me to polish Inza Warburton’s memoirs,
not write them,” he reminded Rudy Korkin. “I’ve faxed you folks my
revisions of every page she’s given me thus far.”

“When we hired you for such an outrageous fee, we assumed you’d
be able to speed her up and—”

“Fifteen thousand dollars is not an outrageous fee. It’s actually on the
modest side. The fellows who used to mow my lawn earn more than that
in—”