"Van Lustbader, Eric - Linnear 03 - The White Ninja" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

her way towards him.


Senjin looked around him. The club was packed, mostly with businessmen out on
their companies' expense. The atmosphere was dense with the fumes of cigarettes,
Suntory Scotch and the sweat of anticipation. Senjin's tongue emerged from
between his lips, licked at the air as if tasting the mingled scents.
The minuscule stage before which Senjin sat was teardrop-shaped Plexiglas, one
of several on three differ­ent levels. The revolving disco lights spun off the
scarred surface of the Plexiglas, sending distorted rainbows spark­ing through
the club.
Eventually, the girls emerged. They wore oddly demure robes that covered them
from throat to ankle so that they had the aspect of oracles or sibyls from whose
mouths the fates of the men in the audience would soon be made manifest.
Apart from their faces, one could not see what they looked like at all. One had,
rather, to trust those gently smiling faces that looked like neither angel nor
vixen, but were suffused with such a maternal glow that it was impos­sible to
find them intimidating or frightening. Which was, of course, the point. Trust
me, those expressions said. And, automatically, one did. Even Senjin, who
trusted no one. But he was, after all, Japanese and, whether he chose to believe
it or not, he was in most ways part of the homogeneous crowd.
Senjin concentrated his attention on one of the girls, the one closest to him.
She was as startlingly young as she was beautiful. He had been unprepared for
her youth, but far from disconcerting him, her age somehow heightened his own
anticipation. He licked his lips just as if he were about to sit down to a
long-awaited feast.
The music had changed. It was clankier now, more obviously sexual in its beat
and in the insinuation of the brass arrangement. The girls simultaneously untied
their robes, let them slip to the Plexiglas stage. They wore


various forms of street clothes, most of them suggestive in one way or another.
Strobe lights flashed. In unison, the girls began to strip, not in any Western
bump-and-grind fashion, but in a series of still-life tableaux, freeze-frame
images held on the video of the mind. The poses, as the garments came off, were
increasingly wanton, until, at length, the girls were naked.
The music died with most of the light, and Senjin could hear a restive stirring
in the audience. The scent of sweat outmuscled all others now.
The girl in front of Senjin had flawless skin. Her mus­cles had the firmness,
the roundness of youth. Her small breasts stood out almost straight from her
body, and the narrow line of her pubic hair would have revealed more than it
concealed were it not deftly hidden in shadow.
Now the girl squatted down. In her hands were fistfuls of tiny flashlights
imprinted with the name of the club, The Silk Road. She offered one to Senjin,
who refused. But, immediately, there was a mad scramble over his back, as the
businessmen lunged to grab flashlights from her hand.
When the flashlights were gone, the girl bent her upper torso backwards until
her nipples pointed up at the mirrored ceiling where they were replicated over
and over. The bizarre image looked to Senjin like the statue he had once seen of
the teat-bellied she-wolf who had suckled Romulus and Remus.