"R. A. MacAvoy - L3 - The Belly of the Wolf" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

three folded blouses and pounded the pile flat-“‘The Belly of the Wolf’” is not entirely silly. If he hasn’t
understood your practice very well, you haven’t spent much time teaching him.”
 I protested that I hadn’t wanted to teach him at all. It had not seemed appropriate. “But he refused to
understand that. He broadcasts his own lessons like grass seed, come stone or soil. And he did not
hesitate to set himself up as a teacher before anyone complimented him on his wisdom.”
Navvie finally gave me the giggle I wanted. “Oh, poor man, if he had to wait for compliments, he’d
be tripping on his beard before he could start to lec-ture. He waited so long to be taken seriously.
Es-pecially by you.”
The wine was bright and rough, probably produce of Canton itself. “I fear that the Norwess
Provincial Assembly will be taking him more seriously than he’d like, from now on .
“.. . If the crown party leans on them,” I con-cluded, and for a moment the wine was like blood in my
throat.
“I know,” said Navvie.
The last veil of numbness ripped away, and I was no longer able to pretend this death—this
assassi-nation—this murder had nothing to do with me, or with the people I touch. “We shall probably
have to do something about all this,” I said. I looked at Nav-vie through the ruddy lens of the wineglass,
and I saw what she was doing.
“I know,” she said again. “That’s why I’ve been packing.”
It was the middle of the night when I woke, out of a dream not about Rudof but concerning Arlin,
who was explaining to me why she would not return with me on the wharfside horsecar. It had something
to do with the weight the poor beasts could pull, I remember, and I was telling her she had grown so thin
with the cough the horses wouldn’t feel her. She held out an omnibus card stub, saying, “One trip is all
you get for your ticket,” and she walked out, an-kle-deep, into the sandy water. Her intransigence made
me angry, but when I woke I was not angry but wet-eyed, and there was someone moving about on the
downstairs floorboards.
I had given up carrying my dowhee on the over-civilized streets of Canton, but had not lost the habit
of putting it under my bed at night.
At the top of the staircase was a shape, but I knew that shape; Navvie was not the source of this
mid-night disturbance. From birth she moved without noise: an astonishment to her mother, her father,
and their teacher as well. She also had the good ears of youth.
In Navvie’s right hand was a pistol—not the ex-perimental weapon but a serviceable thing we kept
loaded in the closet of her room. In her left hand was one of her mother’s beautiful, nasty throwing
knives. “There are two,” she murmured in my ear. “They are looking for the staircase.”
Incompetent. Or perhaps the intruders had not been given time by their employers to prepare for
this—what? This kidnapping, murder? I made a quiet suggestion into Navvie’s ear as the first of the two
found the stairs. We withdrew, she to the lav-atory doorway, and I to the shadows at the end of the hall.
The men carried razors, which caught the slim light coming through the hall window. My dowhee’s
gray blade did not. As the second of the assassins (for so I had to call them), came tiptoeing past the
head of the stairs, I struck him hard with the pom-mel of the dowhee and the sound rang in the air like a
spoon against a wooden bowl. He grunted and died thereby, for his companion spun around in re-flex
with his razor out and slit half the man’s face and half his throat. .I think he died unconscious.
There was a good opportunity to take the other one down while he stared at the work he had done,
but I did not want to la him if I could avoid it. My dowhee had almost three times the reach of his blade,
and I knew my house.
He was soaked and spattered with blood, and it ran in his eyes. Blinking, he made a screaming
charge for me and I struck at the razor with my heavy blade and deflected it. Then the assassin’s
screaming was drowned out by a, huge report and his bloodstained face was orange-lit and I heard the
small but distinct splat of his shoulder joint explod-ing. He screamed again.
“You made it hard to get in a shot, Papa,” said Navvie. Methodically, she checked the barrel for
wadding, tested its temperature, and stuck the pistol into the sash of her nightrobe. I went out to find a