"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

She wanted the case, and she was going to get it.

Ruy Jacques—how many hours awaited her with this amazing scoundrel, this virtuoso of liberal—nay,
loose—arts, who held locked within his remarkable mind the missing pieces of their joint jigsaw puzzle of
The Rose?

That jeering, mocking face—what would it look like without makeup? Very ugly, she hoped. Beside his,
her own face wasn't too bad.

Only—he was married, and she was en route at this moment to discuss preliminary matters with his wife,
who, even if she no longer loved him, at least had prior rights to him. There were considerations of
professional ethics even in thinking about him. Not that she could ever fall in love with him or any other
patient. Particularly with one who had treated her so cavalierly. Willie the Cork, indeed!

As she waited in the cold silence of the great ante-chamber adjoining the office of Martha Jacques, Anna
sensed that she was being watched. She was quite certain that by now she'd been photographed,
x-rayed for hidden weapons, and her fingerprints taken from her professional card. In colossal central
police files a thousand miles away, a bored clerk would be leafing through her dossier for the benefit of
Colonel Grade's visigraph in the office beyond.

In a moment—

"Dr. van Tuyl to see Mrs. Jacques. Please enter door B-3," said the tinny voice of the intercom.

She followed a guard to the door, which he opened for her.

This room was smaller. At the far end a woman, a very lovely woman, whom she took to be Martha
Jacques, sat peering in deep abstraction at something on the desk before her. Beside the desk, and
slightly to the rear, a moustached man in plain clothes stood, reconnoitering Anna with hawk-like eyes.
The description fitted what Anna had heard of Colonel Grade, Chief of the National Security Bureau.

Grade stepped forward and introduced himself curtly, then presented Anna to Mrs. Jacques.

And then the psychiatrist found her eyes fastened to a sheet of paper on Mrs. Jacques' desk. And as she
stared, she felt a sharp dagger of ice sinking into her spine, and she grew slowly aware of a background
of brooding whispers in her mind, heart-constricting in their suggestions of mental disintegration.

For the thing drawn on the paper, in red ink, was—although warped, incomplete, and
misshapen—unmistakably a rose.

"Mrs. Jacques!" cried Grade.

Martha Jacques must have divined simultaneously Anna's great interest in the paper. With an apologetic
murmur she turned it face down. "Security regulations, you know. I'm really supposed to keep it locked
up in the presence of visitors." Even a murmur could not hide the harsh metallic quality of her voice.

So that was why the famous Sciomnia formula was sometimes called the "Jacques Rosette": when traced
in an ever-expanding wavering red spiral in polar coordinates, it was...a Red Rose.

The explanation brought at once a feeling of relief and a sinister deepening of the sense of doom that had