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

his cigarette, glances down at the saxophone in front of him.

Possibilities cascade.

A middle-aged man who looked like Albert Einstein used to come in during the
middle set and buy a drink. He would stare round helplessly for a moment, then
smile and light his pipe. He would sit down in a corner in his raincoats get
up
again to put a match carefully into an ashtray on the corner of the bar; sit
down again. He used to do all this with a kind of meticulous politeness, as if
he was in someone's front room; or as if, at home, his wife required of him an
unflagging formal acknowledgement of her efforts. He would stare at his pipe.
He
would start a conversation with a girl old enough to be his granddaughter,
getting out his wallet to show her -- and her friend, who wore torn black net
tights and industrial shoes something which looked in the undependable Long
Bar
light like a business card; which they would admire.

In fact he was not as old as he looked; he and his wife lived apart; and he
was
a detective.

His name was Aschemann.

Though he loved the city, Aschemann often complained to himself:

"Phony music, cheap neon, streets which reek of bad money. Hands which make a
big gun look small. All the burned-down rooms and lists of suspects. Crimes
you
might commit yourself, after a late night call. Those suburbs, you have to
solve
them like a labyrinth. And always some half empty hotel! Always someone luring
the innocent down the curve of the street, but before you can investigate,
before you can earn a blind dime, you have to find out what's behind that
door.

"The true detective," he used to warn his assistants (mainly local young men
and
women on one-month trials from the uniformed branch, neat and ambitious,
fluent
in three Pacific Rim languages), "starts in the center of the maze. Crimes
make
their way through to him. Never forget: you uncover your own heart at the
heart
of it."

HIS ORIGINAL VISITS to the Long Bar were made during the investigation of a
series of crimes against women. First on the scene of the original killing, he
had discovered two lines of a poem tattooed in the shaven armpit of the