"Robert Rankin - Waiting for Godalming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robert Rankin)

"Perhaps you've told us enough anyway," said the other voice.
"We know where to find the formula. On the Memorial clock."
"Oh yeah. Right." A laugh came from the tortured soul. "The
flowers. I got very angry over the flowers. Because of what
they'd done to me. Because they'd given me the power to see
something so awful that it would ultimately lead to my own
destruction. As it has. So I went back there, to punish the
flowers. To stamp them to oblivion. But then I thought no, it
wasn't their fault. They were quite mad, you see, the flowers.
That's what happens when you're deprived of sleep. When you
cannot dream. You go mad. The flowers couldn't dream and so
the flowers went mad.
"But I did go back. I made a kind of pilgrimage. I wanted to see
whether the floodlights had been repaired. And if they had, then I
would break them again. So I returned to the Memorial Park, and
do you know what I found when I got there?"
"What?"
"Nothing," said the tortured soul. "Nothing whatsoever. You see,
there was no floral clock in that park. There never had been."
"What are you saying? Speak to me."
Another silent moment, then another voice spoke.
"Save your breath on him," it said. "He's dead."


3
Now this is where I came into this tale, so listen up people and
listen up good.
With me you get what you pay for, when you pay for the best
private eye in the business. I don't come cheap, but I'm thorough
and I get the job done. I know my genre and I stick to it. When
I'm on the case, you can expect a lot of gratuitous sex and
violence, a corpse-strewn alley and a final rooftop showdown.
And along the way you'll get all the stuff that you get when you
pay for the best. You'll get a generous helping of trenchcoat
humour, a lot of old toot being talked in a bar, running gags
about the mispronunciation of my name and my trusty Smith and
Wesson, a dame that does me wrong and a deep dark whirling pit
of oblivion that I tumble down into, when she bops me on the
head at the very beginning of every new case.
That's the way that I do business, always has been, always will
be. Because, like I say, I stick to my genre. And because, like I
say, I'm the best.
If you're looking to get all fancy and post-modern, then don't
come a-knocking at my partition door. Because if what you want
is a lot of psychological fol-de-rol and a tormented detective with
a drink problem and a broken marriage, who's coming to terms
with a tragedy that happened in his youth and is reaching out to
his feminine side, then buddy you've come to the wrong address.
But if your taste is for a hard-nosed, lantern-jawed, snap-
brimmed-fedora'd, belt-knotted-trenchcoated, bourbon-swigging,