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

man’s face.
Dear God.
He stopped at the head of the steps down from the platform, and the blood seemed
to halt in his veins. But even before his mind could form the words Ignace
Karolyi in England, he saw the face of the other man.
Dear God! No.
It was all he could think.
Not that.
Later he thought he would not have seen the smaller man at all had his eye not
been arrested, first by Karolyi’s greatcoat, then by the Hungarian’s face. That
was one of the most frightening things about what he now saw. In the few seconds
that the two men spoke—and it was not more than a few seconds, though they
exchanged newspapers, an old trick Asher had used hundreds of times himself
during his years with Intelligence—Asher’s mind registered details that he
should have seen before: the fiddleback cut of the small man’s shabby black
greatcoat, and the way the creaseless buff-colored trousers tapered to straps
under the insteps. Under a shallow-crowned beaver hat his hair was
short-cropped, and he did not gesture at all as they spoke: no movement, no
change of stance, not even the shift of the gloved fingers wrapped about one
another on the head of his stick.
That would have told him, if nothing else did.
Three women in enormous hats, feathers drooping with wet, intervened, and when
Asher looked again, Karolyi was striding briskly in the direction of the Paris
boat train.
There was no sign of the other man.
Karolyi’s going to Paris.
They’re both going to Paris.
How Asher knew, he couldn’t have said. Only his instinct, honed in years with
the Department, had not waned in the eight peaceful years of Oxford lecturing

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that had passed since he quit. Heart pounding hard enough to almost sicken him,
he made his way without appearance of hurry to the ticket windows, the small bag
of a weekend’s worth of clean linen and shaving tackle swinging almost unnoticed
in his hand. By the station clock it was half past five. The departures board
announced the Dover boat train at quarter of six. The fare to Paris was one
pound, fourteen and eight, second class—Asher had just over five pounds in his
pocket and paid unhesitatingly. Third class would have saved him twelve
shillings—the cost of several nights’ lodging in Paris, if one knew where to
look—but his respectable brown ulster and stiff crowned hat would have stood out
among the rough clothed workmen and shabby women in the third-class carriages.
He told himself, as he bought the ticket, that the urgency of not calling
attention to himself was the only reason to stay out of third class tonight. But
he knew it was a lie.
He walked along the platform among women in cheap poplin skirts loading tired
children onto the cars, screaming at one another in the clipped, sloppy French
of Paris or the trilled r’s of the Midi; among men huddled, coatless, in jackets
and scarves against the cold, and tried not to listen to his heart telling him