"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Beautiful Damned" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

familiar," he said. "Perhaps you're related to the Carraways of St. Paul,
Minnesota."

"Yes," I said. The drink had left an unpleasant tang on my tongue. "I grew up
there."

"And Nick Carraway, the bondsman, would be your -- grandfather?
Great-grandfather?"

That he knew my grandfather startled me. Fitz looked younger than that, more
of
an age with me. Perhaps there were family ties I did not know about.
"Grandfather," I said.

"Odd," he murmured. "How odd, the way things grow beyond you."
He had kept his hand on my shoulder, making it impossible to see more than
half
of his face. "I wanted to thank you for inviting me," I said.

"It would be churlish not to," he said. "Perhaps, in the future, we'll
actually
be able to talk."

He let go of my shoulder. I could still feel the imprint of his hand as he
walked away. He had an air of invisibleness to him, a way of moving unnoticed
through a crowd. When he reached the edge of the dancers, he stopped and
looked
at me with a gaze piercing with its intensity.

"Next time, old sport," he said, the old-fashioned endearment tripping off his
tongue like a new and original phrase, "bring your cousin. I think she might
like the light."

At least, that was what I thought he said. Later, when I had time to reflect,
I
wondered if he hadn't said, "I think she might like the night."

CHAPTER IV

Men With little imagination often have a clarity of vision that startles the
mind. For all their inability to imagine beauty, they seem able to see the
ugliness that lies below any surface. They have a willingness to believe in
the
baser, cruder side of life.

On the following Wednesday afternoon, I found myself in a bar at the edge of
the
financial district, a place where men in suits rarely showed their faces,
where
the average clientele had muscles thick as cue balls and just as hard. Tom had