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

Mariko's expression when, at the end of her show, she had faced her audience.
Now that the act was over, Senjin felt the loss,
the acute depression, as pain. He assumed one must
necessarily feel incomplete when returning from a state
of grace.
His hands were again filled with the slender bits of steel that had lain like
intimate companions along his sweaty flesh. What he had done with Mariko's
clothes, Senjin now did to her skin, shredding it in precise strips,
artistically running the steel blades down and across what had.once been
pristine, and was now irrevocably soiled. Senjin chanted as he worked on Mariko,
his eyes closed to slits, only their whites showing. He might have been a priest
at a sacred rite.
When he was done, there was not a drop of blood on him. He withdrew a sheet of
paper from an inside pocket and, using another of his small, warm blades, dipped
its tip into a pool of blood. He hurriedly wrote on the sheet, this could be
your wife. He had to return the tip to the blood twice in order to complete the
message. His fingers trembled in the aftermath of his cataclysm as he blew on
the crimson words. He rolled the sheet, placed it in Mariko's open mouth.
Before he left, he washed his blades in the tiny sink, watching the blood
swirling in pink abstract patterns around the stained drain.
He cut down the length of cloth that had bound him to the standpipe. Then he
went to the sooty window and, opening it, boosted himself up to its rim. In a
moment, he was through.
Senjin rode a combination of buses and subways to the centre of Tokyo. In the
shadow of the Imperial Palace,


he was swept up in the throngs of people, illuminated by a neon sky, clustered
like great blossoms swaying from an unseen tree. He was as anonymous, as
homogenous within society as every Japanese wishes to be.
Senjin walked with a step dense with power yet effort­less in its fluidity. He
could have been a dancer, but he was not. He passed by the National Theatre in
Hayabusa-cho, pausing to study posters outside to see if there was a performance
that interested him. He went to the theatre as often as possible. He was
fascinated by emotion, and all the ways it could be falsely induced. He could
have been an actor, but he was not.
Passing around the south-western curve of the Imperial moat, Senjin came upon
the great avenue, the Uchibori-dori, at the spot which in the West would be
called a square, but for which there was no corresponding word in Japanese. Past
the Ministry of Transportation, Senjin went into the large building housing the
Metropolitan Police Force. It was, as usual at this time of the night, very
quiet.
Ten minutes later, he was hard at work at his desk. The sign on the front of his
cubicle read: captain senjin
OMUKAE, DIVISION-COMDR, METROPOLITAN HOMICIDE.
Under the knife, Nicholas Linnear swam in a sea of memory. The anaesthetic of
the operation, in removing him from reality, destroyed the barriers of time and
space so that, like a god, Nicholas was everywhere and everywhen all at the same
moment.
Memory of three years ago became a moment of today, a pearling drop of essence,