"M. John Harrison - The Neon Heart Murders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

JOHN M. HARRISON

THE NEON HEART MURDERS

ALL DOWN THE WEST COAST of the island at night glitter the lights of a city
five
miles long, its towers like black and gold cigarette packs standing on end. In
the malls fluorescent light skids off the surfaces of hard and soft designer
goods: matte plastics, foams of lace and oyster satin, the precise curves of
cars and shoes and shoulder pads. This city is well known for the scent of
Anais
Anais in its streets; stacked video screens in the cocktail lounges; and, down
by the ocean front -- where men push past you smelling of sweat and seafood,
and
you can hear the soundtrack of your own life playing from the dashboard of a
white car -- neon of green, red or frosty blue. Music pulses from the
amusement
arcades, clears its throat in the night clubs. In the jazz bars they serve
only
"Black Heart" rum, and you can hear the intricate bass lines twenty miles out
to
sea.

The best of the bars is the Long Bar at the Cafe Surf, with its decor of
strained contrasts. Marble pillars and designer blinds with thin aerodynamic
slats. Cane tables and salt-blistered chrome bar taps. Forgotten movie stars
crowd the walls in brushed aluminium frames. Exotic beers glitter from the
shelves of the cooler. While under the red neon sign "Live Music Nightly," the
Cafe Surf two-piece -- piano and tenor saxophone ambles its way through the
evening's middle set.

The pianist, a young man with a mobile mouth, plays the house Kawai with one
hand while with the other he coaxes from a piano-top synthesizer the sound of
a
deceptively relaxed bass. Just now he is Relaxin' in Camarillo. He picked this
tune up from a Spanish bootleg CD so cheap its cover showed not Charlie Parker
but Johnny Hodges. The rhythms flick and rip across one another, tangle and
separate.

The saxophonist is an older man. White face, black rollneck, white hands.
Years
of music have tightened the muscles round his mouth into two deep grooves.
Every
so often he stops to watch the pianist take a solo. At these times his
expression is one of puzzled admiration, as if he heard someone this good once
before but -- because he has played so much music since -- now forgets who or
where. (It was in a bar much like this one, somewhere less relaxed, on some
bigger mass of land perhaps. Perhaps it wasn't in a bar at all.) This is the
sole acknowledgement the old can give the young. Anything more would be too
bitter; but so would anything less. He nods his head in time, pulls sharply on