"Tengu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM APPOMATTOX ONE, JULY 11, 1945

"We've located it, sir. No question about it. We've taken sixteen radio bearings and we have it right on the button."

"In that case (inaudible) immediately. I repeat, immediately. You will be picked up at 2125 hours on the 15th on the beach at (inaudible}"

BOOK ONE BURNED DOVES

CHAPTER ONE
When Sherry Cantor's alarm clock woke her at 7:27 on the morning of August 9 she had twenty-three minutes to live.
That was the most overwhelming fact of her morning. Yet it was the only fact she didn't know.
She knew that her twenty-second birthday was only three days away. She knew that in two weeks she was supposed to drive down to San Diego and spend a week with her brother Manny and his wife Ruth. She knew that she had a date to meet her good-looking new lawyer, Bert Dentz, in thirteen hours and thirty-three minutes for dinner at the Palm Restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard.
She knew that her savings account at Security Pacific contained $127,053.62, and she knew that last Wednesday's Variety had dubbed her "most promising young video star of 1983."
But knowing all that was not enough. Knowing all that could not possibly save her from what was going to happen in twenty-three minutes' time.
After the alarm had woken her up, she lay on her emerald-green satin sheets in her small white California-rococo bedroom, under the framed black-and-white print of yuccas at Santa Barbara. She thought about the dream she had just been dreaming. It had been vivid, almost realer than real, as only early-morning dreams can be. She had imagined herself jumping rope in the front yard of the old white house in Bloomington, Indiana. She had
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imagined the leaves falling from the trees like flakes of rust. She had imagined her mother coming to the door, and waving her to come in for cookies and milk. . . .
Sherry thought about her dream, and then let it warmly melt away. Bloomington, Indiana, was five years ago, and a lifetime away. She stretched on the twisted sheets.
She was a tall, striking girl with rich chestnut hair and a face that was uncompromisingly European. Her eyes were wide, and almost amber. She was wide-shouldered, big-breasted, and narrow-hipped. She slept naked, except for a small pair of blue satin panties, and her skin was soft and brown against the shiny sheets.
There was a faded photograph on the sideboard in Bloomington of Sherry's mother in a transit camp in Munchen Gladbach, Germany, in 1945. Except for the puff-sleeved dress and the headscarf, it could have been Sherry.
At 7:31, with only nineteen minutes left, Sherry sat up in bed and ran her hands through her tousled hair. On the bleached calico window blind, the first nodding patterns of sunlight shone through the fan palms in her garden, and made a shadow-play.
Somewhere outside, a radio was giving the morning traffic report. It was bad everywhere.
Sherry climbed out of bed, stood up, stretched, and stifled a yawn. Then she padded out of the bedroom and into her kitchenette. She opened the mock Oregon-oak cupboard and took down a can of Folger's coffee. As she reached for her percolator, a triangle of sunlight lit her hair, and then her shoulder, and then her right breast. The nipple was pale and soft.
While the coffee perked. Sherry poured herself an orange-juice and stood in the kitchenette drinking it. She felt hungry. Last night, she'd shared a bottle of tequila with Dan Mayhew, the curly-haired actor who played her unhappily married cousin in Our Family Jones, and hangovers always made her feel hungry.
She opened the fridge again. There were two Thomas's
muffins left. She wondered how guilty she would feel if she toasted one.
It was 7:37. She decided against the muffin. Dan May-hew hadn't even been worth getting a hangover over, and so he certainly wasn't worth putting on weight over. Last week she'd seen him sitting in the studio commissary with a boy whose pale lemon ballet shoes and surfer's knobs hadn't exactly reassured her about Dan's essential virility.
It was 7:39- There were eleven minutes of life left. Sherry left the kitchenette as the coffee began to perk, and walked into her small bathroom. There were T-shirts and panties hanging to dry on a line over the tub. She looked at herself in the mirror, pouted at herself, and pulled down her eyelids to make sure her eyes weren't too bloodshot. Lionel—Lionel Schultz, the director of Our Family Jones—always went crazy if anyone arrived on the floor with reddened eyes.
''What do you think we're shooting here?" he invariably screamed. "A fucking Dracula picture?"
Lionel Schultz wasn't a gentle man. He wasn't much of a gentleman, either. But he had a perverse genius for soap opera, and for provoking believable performances out of inexperienced actors. It was Lionel Schultz who had shown Sherry how to develop the dumb, busty part of Lindsay Jones into a character of sweet and quirky sympathy. And he hadn't touched her once.
Sherry finished her orange juice and set her glass down on the basin, next to her cake of herbal soap. She stepped out of her panties, and sat on the toilet. She could hear the birds chittering in the garden, and the distant murmur of the freeways. She closed her eyes, and tried to think what she felt like wearing today.
It was 7:42. She flushed the toilet, washed her face, and walked back into the kitchenette naked. The coffee was popping and jumping. She picked up the folded-back script that lay on the counter, next to the Popeye cookie jar, and flicked through two or three pages.
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LINDSAY (sobbing): Is that really what you think of me? After all those days and nights together? After all those things you said?
MARK: Honey, you don't understand. I had to tell Carla we were finished. I didn't have any other choice.
Riboyne Skel O'/em, thought Sherry. If anyope had shown me this script before I signed up for Our Family Jones, I wouldn't have thought it was worth turning up at the studio. I would have stayed as a waitress at Butterfield's, fetching and carrying white wine and cottage cheese salads for pretentious British tax exiles in tinted glasses, and been glad of the work. Who would have guessed that some treacly saga about some even more treacly family would have gotten off the ground for a pilot and two episodes, let alone for two series?
Even more amazing, who would have thought that a Jewish girl from Bloomington, Indiana, would have been picked out of hundreds of would-be starlets for one of the most noticeable roles in the whole drama?
There wasn't any question that Our Family Jones had cost Sherry the love of her live-in boyfriend, Mack Holt. Mack was lean and moody, with curly blond hair and a broken nose, and he could swim and ride and fence and dance like Fred Astaire. They had met one evening on the plaza outside of the Security Pacific Bank at Century City, when she had just opened her savings account with $10 her mother had sent her. The shadows of the dying day had been very Bauhaus, and he had crossed the plaza at that trotting pace athletes use when they're just on the point of breaking into a run. She had been putting away her bankbook; dropped her purse; and he had picked it up for her in one fell swoop. After such a meeting, he should have known she would make it in soap opera.
Sherry and Mack had lived for seven months on the second floor of a brown crumbling hacienda off Franklin Avenue, in Hollywood. They had shared their three-room apartment with a lumpy divan, two fraying basketwork chairs, three peeling posters for the Grateful Dead, and a
dyspeptic gas stove. They had talked, played records, made love, smoked Mexican grass, argued, gone off to work, brushed their teeth, and finally arrived at the moment when Lionel had called to say Sherry was fabulous, and just had to come down to the studio right away, and Mack, far more talented, but still parking cars for a living, had refused to kiss her and wish her luck.
From then on, it had been nothing but sulks, arguments, and eventually, packed suitcases. Sherry had lived for a while with a plain but friendly girl she knew from Butterfield's, and then taken out a mortgage on this small secluded bungalow at the top of a steeply graded dead end called Orchid Place. She enjoyed the luxury of living alone, with her own small garden, her own wrought-iron fence, her own living room, her own perfect peace. She began to think about who she was, and what she wanted out of her life, and all of her friends said she was much nicer since she'd left Mack, and much more relaxed.
To ease one of the more pressing demands of being single, Sherry had bought, through the mail, a pink vibrator. Most of the time it stayed in her bedside cupboard, next to her Oil of Olay and her Piz Buin sun oil, but occasionally there were nights when fantasies crowded her mind, and the Los Angeles heat almost stifled her, and she used it just to keep herself sane.
It was harder than anyone knew, being the most promising young video star of 1983.