"Simon R. Green - Nightside 1 - Drinking Midnight Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Simon R)

looking slowly about him as though trying to remember why he'd come in.
There was no disputing Reed was dead. One look was all it took. He didn't breathe, his chest
didn't move and he had no body language at all. Everything about him shouted his unnatural
condition to all the world. In Mysterie, everyone would have known what he was the moment he
walked in. But this was the real world, where such things just didn't happen; so no one noticed


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anything.
Leo always drank with the arty crowd on a Saturday morning. So had Reed. They were currently
tucked away in their favourite corner, where the table was set right next to the big bay window
looking out onto Market Street. It was semi-private, a comfortable distance away from the damned
jukebox and its fixation with minor seventies hits, and the window meant that when the
conversation flagged, they could always look out at the world going by. People and traffic were
always going up and down, back and forth, as they had for centuries past. Though the traffic these
days moved a hell of a lot faster. Familiar faces were forever passing by the window, to be
greeted with a wave and a smile, and perhaps a pointed comment it was just as well they couldn't
hear. And there was always the primitive drama of Church Street, as motorists tried to squeeze
cars into parking spaces manifestly too small for them. There was a lot of lurching back and
forth, revving of engines and jockeying for position. Conflicts here started with road rage and
then escalated to open hysteria and bloodlust, happily viewed by those around. The arty set were
currently ignoring the dead man in favour of laying bets on whether the poor fool in the Rover Rio
Grande was going to be able to back his car into the space he'd chosen without first cutting a few
inches off both ends. He was on his twelfth attempt now, and a small crowd had gathered, sensing
trouble. The arty set were fascinated.
'He'll never get that in there.'
'Or if he does, he'll never get it out again.'
'Not without a crowbar.'
'Maybe we should just go down and offer to smear his bumpers with Vaseline.'
'It always comes back to sex with you, doesn't it?'
'Not nearly as often as I'd like.'
There was general laughter, and mouths and nose tips acquired layers of foam as everyone drank
their frothy coffee. Leo liked to hear them in full flow. He'd been there the day they invented
gut-barging, the English answer to sumo wrestling. He still couldn't believe it had actually
caught on.
Leo Morn was a tall, slender, almost Gothic figure, all pale and interesting, who looked as if he
should have been starring in a Tim Burton film. He wore black cords and a black T-shirt under a
black leather jacket, and was so thin a breath of fresh air might have blown him away. In his
early twenties, with a misleadingly amiable face under a permanent bad hair day, Leo played bass
guitar in a punk-folk band, whose name kept changing so that promoters would book them more than
once. He was currently resting between engagements. The band did a lot of resting. Leo mostly kept
himself busy giving guitar lessons to teenagers who had more ambition than ability.
He was also prone to gambling with money he didn't have, making promises he had no intention of
keeping, and having brief but torrid affairs with married women whose husbands understood them
only too well. As a result, he had also become very proficient at pulling off a disappearing act
at very short notice when it all inevitably came crashing down around his head. Leo had heard of
responsibility, but wanted nothing to do with it. He did try to be a nice guy, when he remembered,
but mostly he just didn't have the knack.