"Patrick Tilley - Mission" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tilley Patrick)

looked again and saw that they were thorns.
Terrific. On top of which, we had a signed death certificate and no body to go with ~t. I handed
the problem right back to her. 'What do we do now, Doctor?'
Miriam decided that the best thing to do was play it straight down the line. The morgue attendant,
who was totally absorbed in the twin activities of reading a paperback and picking his nose, had
noticed nothing and looked unlikely to move fror~i his chair until pay day. She reasoned, with a
kind of Polish logic, that as rio one was likely to come looking for the body we might as well
pretend that it was still there. While I held my breath, Miriam calmly filled out a card for the
front of the freezer drawer that would hold our invisible corpse, then we put a combination of our
finger-prints on the sheet that had to go down-town. Since the NYPD was not going to come up with
a match Ibr the dabs, we figured that the freezer drawer would stay closed until the time came to


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ship the body to the city morgue. Arid when somebody opened it and found it empty, that would be
their problem.
Miriam transferred the blood from the floor on to glass slides then cleaned up t lie slab. We went
back upstairs into Emergency where she did a quick snow job on Lazzarotti then we hung up our
white coats and slipped out of the hospital.
Needless to say, we gave the Fasshindcr movie a miss. We went hack to Miriam's apartment on 57th
and First, brewed up some strong coi1i~e, holstered ourselves with an even stronrzer drink and
loolthat fliundered somewhere between the

initial intake of breath and the first three words. We were like a couple of characters from a
play by Harold Pinter. In the second act, we withdrew into silence. I think we both thought that
if we did not talk about the problem it would go away. A well-known tactic which, as you've
probably discovered, doesn't work. Deep down, of course, we were both trying to figure out some
kind of explanation that our dazed minds could accept. After all, we were normal people, leading
normal lives, with a firm belief in the normal scheme of things. We both knew that thin air
disappearances just did not happen. And yet - there it was.
In the third act, when the words came, it was in the form of small talk that touched upon our
lives but carefully side-stepped what had happened at the hospital. It was as if the event was a
concealed Claymore mine which, if triggered by one careless word, might explode and blow our lives
to pieces. So we kept our distance until finally we could no longer resist playing the verbal
equivalent of chicken. Jumping in with both feet but protecting ourselves by jokes
- the New Yorker's defence against calamity. At least, I did. And we might have managed to laugh
off the event if we'd been dealing with the inexplicable disappearance of an unknown Hispanic too
poor to buy himselfa pair of shoes. But all the black humour and scepticism I was able to muster
could not shake Miriam's deep inner conviction that she had bandaged the wrists.and feet of you-
know-Who. And that really had me worried. Because on top of being a very down-to-earth doctor,
this was a girl who had no time for religion. She came from a good solid family background, so
naturally, like any nice Jewish girl, she had had a grounding in the faith. But, like me, she had
left all that behind a long time ago. And again, like me, she was a very together person. She
needed a religious experience like a hole in the head. But if she was right about who had done
that Houdini act in the hospital morgue, there was only one possible explanation.
Somehow, at the instant of the purported Resurrection, the body of the man known as Jesus had been
transported forward through time and had materialised l~r at least seventy-five minutes in
Manhattan on Easter Saturday of the eighty-first year of the twentieth century.

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