"Barbara Hambly - James Asher 2 - Traveling With the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

of angling the lamp would reveal.
But hanging over the edge, like ivory against the dingy stone, was a man’s hand:
long-fingered, thin, ringed with gold. Darkness hid the rest, and though the
white hand itself looked as perfect as if painted by Rubens or Holbein, Lydia
knew that its owner had been dead for a long time.
It’s true, she thought, her heartbeat fast and heavy with fright. Silly, she
added, for she had known already that it was true… it was all true. She had met
this man and seen others like him from a distance.
But knowing, she had learned this afternoon, was different from seeing, and she
felt very naked, uncertain, and alone in the dark.
I’m doing this wrong.
Her breath made a little apricot smoke in the lamplight as she sat down on the
steps. Laying her weapon across her knees and pushing up her spectacles with one
forefinger, she settled herself to wait.
One
All Souls and black rain, and cold that passed like needles through flesh and
clothing to scrape the bones inside. Sunday night in Charing Cross Station,
voices racketing in the vaults of glass and ironwork overhead like ball bearings
in a steel drum. All James Asher wanted was to go home.
A day and a night spent burying his cousin—and dealing with the squabbling of
his cousin’s widow, mother, and two sons over the estate to which he’d been
named executor—had reminded him vividly why, once he’d gone up to Oxford
twenty-three years ago, he’d never had anything further to do with the aunt who
raised him from the age of thirteen. It had just turned full dark, and Asher
drew his greatcoat closer around him as he strode down the long brick walkway of
the platform, jostling shoulders with his erstwhile fellow passengers in a vast
frowst of wet wool and steam and reflecting upon the lethal adeptness of
familial guilt. Outside, the streets would be slick and deadly with ice.
Asher’s mind was on that—and on the hour and a half between the arrival of the
express from Tunbridge Wells at Charing Cross and the departure of the Oxford
local from Paddington when he saw the men whom he would later have given
anything he possessed not to have seen.

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They stood under the central clock in the echoing cavern of the station. Asher
happened to be looking in their direction as the taller of the two removed his
hat and shook the drops from it, gestured with a gloved hand toward the iron
frame into which boards bearing departure times had been slotted. Asher’s eye,
still accustomed to cataloging details after half a lifetime in secret service
to his country, had already been caught by the man’s greatcoat: the flaring
skirts, the collar and cuffs of karakul lamb, the soft camel color and the
braiding on the sleeves all shouting at him, Vienna. More specifically, one of
the Magyar nobility of that city rather than a German Viennese, who tended to
less flamboyance in their dress. A Parisian would have worn that smooth,
well-fitted line, but probably not that color and certainly without braiding;
the average Berliner’s coat generally bore a striking resemblance to a horse
blanket no matter how rich the man might be.
Vienna, Asher thought, with the tiniest pinch of nostalgia. Then he saw the