"Simon R. Green - Drinking Midnight Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Simon R)

solving impossible crimes and pursuing awful villains, while surrounded by dizzy dames and
femmes fatales, he knew that that was what he wanted to be. It helped that his long life gave
him plenty of time to learn from his mistakes, while his divine abilities kept him alive while
he learned.
Jimmy liked to know things, and had an insatiable hunger for the truth. Especially things
other people didn't want him to know. He had no time for subterfuge, always preferring to
meet things head-on. He had a fondness for the underdog, and a real weakness for damsels in
distress, and if he had a fault it was his constant determination to follow a case through to the
bitter end, revealing every last truth or secret, come what may. He never could bring himself
to accept that while his clients always said they wanted to know the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth, they didn't always mean it. Not when lies or evasions can be so much
more comforting.
Jimmy always got to the bottom of a case, but he wasn't always thanked for his trouble.
Sometimes cases ended messily. As in the case of Count Dracula's mandolin, where no one
got what they wanted, and everyone got hurt - even him. And sometimes Jimmy went into
cases knowing from the start that it was all going to end in tears. The Lord of Thorns still
hadn't forgiven Jimmy for proving his fiancee was a golem. But if he'd made enemies, he'd
made friends too. Even the Vatican owed him a favour.
(A few years back, Jimmy had been called in by the Pope to investigate a curious case
where all the statues in the Vatican had spontaneously started bleeding from vivid stigmata.
They'd had to close everything down, and run superhuman damage control to keep it out of
the media. All the top-rank exorcists did their best, with gallons of holy water and top-class
cross action, and got absolutely nowhere. So Jimmy got the call, on the grounds that while the
Vatican certainly wasn't prepared to accept that he was a god, he could at least be relied on to
bring a whole new perspective to the problem. Jimmy had expressed surprise that the Vatican
had even heard of him. The Holy Father had smiled and said, 'The Vatican has heard of
everybody, Mister Thunder.'
(Jimmy had sorted it out, mostly by asking questions and knowing when he was being lied
to. It turned out that the Pope had forgotten someone's birthday. As a reward, Jimmy was
allowed access to the Vatican's secret library for a whole afternoon and an evening, to browse
where he pleased. The really dangerous books were kept under lock and key and were
chained to the shelves, or in extreme cases immersed in holy water or kept in a vacuum inside
a sealed vault, but he still managed to turn up some interesting stuff. Not necessarily useful,
but interesting. The Gospel According to Judas Iscariot was a real eye-opener, though the
Fourth Prophecy of Fatima turned out to be just what everyone thought it was.
(The one story Jimmy was really interested in remained stubbornly elusive. There were no
records, and no one would talk to him about it. Which only convinced him all the more that
there had to be something to it. It was common knowledge that Vatican scientists had been
experimenting with computers and Artificial Intelligence for over fifty years, though they
kept their achievements to themselves. No one would admit that there had been any success
in creating an AI, but it was said that deep in the heart of the Vatican there was a room where
no one went, where the door was always locked. And that if you could find your way to that
abandoned room, and put your ear to that locked door, you would hear the sound of
something crying . . .
(There are many mysteries inside the Vatican, and only some of them have anything to do
with Christianity.)
Jimmy drank the last of the very hot sweet tea, flicked the cup a few times to empty it and
then screwed it back onto the Thermos. He'd only half filled the Thermos, anyway. Bad idea
to drink too much on a stake-out, especially when you didn't know how long you'd have to
hold your ground. He put the Thermos down on the roof beside him and leaned back against