"Parker, Robert B. - Promised Land" - читать интересную книгу автора (Parker Robert B)

"Wrong."

"David Rockefeller?"

"Never mind."

"Laurance Rockefeller?"

"Where would you like to go to lunch?"

"You shouldn't have shown me the money. I was ready to settle for Ugi's steak and onion subs. Now I'm thinking about Pier 4."

"Pier 4 it is. Think I'll have to change?"

"At least wipe the sweat off your chest."

"Come on, we'll go back to my place and suit up."

"When you get a client," Susan said, "you really galvanize into action, don't you?"

"Yes, ma'am. I move immediately for the nearest restaurant."

I clipped my gun on my right hip, put on my shirt and left the shirttail out to hide the gun and we left. It was a ten-minute walk to my apartment, most of it down the mall on Commonwealth Ave. When we got there, Susan took the first shower and I had a bottle of Amstel while I called for reservations. In fact I had three.

Pier 4 looms up on the waterfront like a kind of Colonial Stonehenge. Used brick, old beams and a Hudson River excursion boat docked alongside for cocktails. A monument to the expense account, a temple of business lunches. One of the costumed kids at the door parked my convertible with an embarrassed look. Most of the cars in the lot were newer and almost none that I could see had as much gray tape patching the upholstery.

"That young man seemed disdainful of your car," Susan said.

"One of the troubles with the culture," I said. "No respect for age."

There'd be a wait for our table. Would we care for a cocktail in the lounge? We would. We walked across the enclosed gangplank to the excursion boat and sat and looked at Boston Harbor. Susan had a Margarita, I had some Heinekens. Nobody has Amstel. Not even Pier 4.

"What does your client want you to do?"

"Find his wife."

"Does it sound difficult?"

"No. Sounds like she's simply run off. If she has she'll be easy to find. Most wives who run off don't run very far. The majority of them, in fact, want to be found and want to come home."

"That doesn't sound particularly liberated."

"It isn't particularly liberated but it's the way it is. For the first time the number of runaway wives exceeds the number of runaway husbands. They read two issues of Ms. Magazine, see Mario Thomas on a talk show and decide they can't go on. So they take off. Then they find out that they have no marketable skills. That ten or fifteen years of housewifing has prepared them for nothing else and they end up washing dishes or waiting table or pushing a mop and they want out. Also lots of them get lonesome."

"And they can't just go home," Susan said, "because they are embarrassed and they can't just go crawling back."

"Right. So they hang around and hope someone looks for them."

"And if someone does look for them it's a kind of communicative act. That is, the husband cared enough about them to try to find them. It's a gesture, in it's odd way, of affection."