"Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George - The Cobweb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

in the Hotel Inter-Continental. Nevertheless, his slippers and robe were exactly where they would have
been at home. He had bathed and shaved the previous evening. He applied some Brylcreem to his
thinning hair and took a swipe with his electric razor at the glittery silver stubble that had dared to emerge
since midnight.

He devoted three quarters of an hour to reading several documents from his briefcase, most of them terse
cables originating from major cities in the Middle East.

He went back to the suite's bedchamber and applied his cologne and deodorant, specially mixed at
Whitsons on the High in Oxford. He opened the armoire. On the top shelf there were the ten folded and
starched French-cuffed white shirts that were always at the ready. On the next shelf were the ten pairs of
black silk stockings, the ten pairs of pressed and starched boxer shorts, the ten undershirts, and the ten
starched linen handkerchiefs. On the next shelf were the three pairs of matching black wing tips that he
alternated from day to day. He had five dark-charcoal pinstripe suits from Mallory's on Savile Row
hanging up, which he wore in sequence, one of them always out at the dry cleaner's. He had five silk
Hermès ties comfortably nesting in their rack.

He dressed in a determined and efficient manner, put on his tie, his fleur-de-lis cuff links (he was, after all,
in France), his Duckers Wing tips, handmade at the shop on the Turl in Oxford, looked at himself in the
full-length mirror on the inside of the door of the armoire, pulled his cashmere coat from its hanger.

Then he went down to the front desk, nodded to the doorman, and stepped out into the streets of his
favorite city. He stopped on the sidewalk and breathed the cool, fragrant air of early spring--the cherry
trees and early rhododendrons were peaking. He looked down the Rue Castiglione at the pink-tinted
clouds over the Tuileries. He turned left and strolled to the Rue St. Honoré; the breeze shifted as he came
to the corner, and he smelled roasting coffee and baking bread. He stopped at his favorite corner café,
stood next to a blue-uniformed sanitation man, drank a café noir, and ate a croissant.

He walked onward, stepping carefully through the random pattern of dog shit, noting that thanks to
Georges Haussmann, the gutters of Paris were always cleaner than the sidewalks. He walked with some
care and looked at the windows of the boutiques that catered to capitalism's winners and their significant
others: Gucci, Salavin Chocolatier, Guerlain, Bulgari, and Fayer.

He especially loved Paris early in the day, when it was still quiet, and while the city of Washington was
still asleep, and (except for the nocturnal gnomes at the Agency) incapable of pestering him. That would
begin around midafternoon, too late to spoil his luncheon meeting. For the next few hours Millikan was
more or less a free agent, and he was at the peak of his game: articulating the gross and crude impulses of
the United States of America into a foreign policy toward the rest of the world. He, not Baker over at
State, understood the United States of America and the world. He, James Gabor Millikan, was the one
who was here, out in the field, preparing for a luncheon meeting with his old friend, Tariq Aziz, the foreign
minister of Iraq. It had been scheduled as a dinner meeting, but Aziz had been mysteriously summoned
back to Baghdad and had requested a lunch instead.

He looked in briefly at the Eglise Polonaise, crossing himself as he stepped inside, admiring the ecstatic
baroque saints and wannabe saints on the walls. He moved on to the Rue Royale, paused for a moment
to admire the neoclassical elegance of the Madeleine on the right, then took a left toward the Place de la
Concorde. The hieroglyphs on the obelisk were uncommonly clear and crisp in the light of the rising sun,
as if they had just been carved last night.

To the right was the American Embassy, housed in an eighteenth-century prerevolutionary building of