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Êàê ñäåëàòü ðàçãîâîð ïîëåçíûì è ïðèÿòíûì Êàê ñäåëàòü îáúåìíóþ çâåçäó ñâîèìè ðóêàìè Êàê ñäåëàòü òî, ÷òî äåëàòü íå õî÷åòñÿ? Êàê ñäåëàòü ïîãðåìóøêó Êàê ñäåëàòü òàê ÷òîáû æåíùèíû ñàìè çíàêîìèëèñü ñ âàìè Êàê ñäåëàòü èäåþ êîììåð÷åñêîé Êàê ñäåëàòü õîðîøóþ ðàñòÿæêó íîã? Êàê ñäåëàòü íàø ðàçóì çäîðîâûì? Êàê ñäåëàòü, ÷òîáû ëþäè îáìàíûâàëè ìåíüøå Âîïðîñ 4. Êàê ñäåëàòü òàê, ÷òîáû âàñ óâàæàëè è öåíèëè? Êàê ñäåëàòü ëó÷øå ñåáå è äðóãèì ëþäÿì Êàê ñäåëàòü ñâèäàíèå èíòåðåñíûì?


Êàòåãîðèè:

ÀðõèòåêòóðàÀñòðîíîìèÿÁèîëîãèÿÃåîãðàôèÿÃåîëîãèÿÈíôîðìàòèêàÈñêóññòâîÈñòîðèÿÊóëèíàðèÿÊóëüòóðàÌàðêåòèíãÌàòåìàòèêàÌåäèöèíàÌåíåäæìåíòÎõðàíà òðóäàÏðàâîÏðîèçâîäñòâîÏñèõîëîãèÿÐåëèãèÿÑîöèîëîãèÿÑïîðòÒåõíèêàÔèçèêàÔèëîñîôèÿÕèìèÿÝêîëîãèÿÝêîíîìèêàÝëåêòðîíèêà






Nineteen





 

The police helicopter whizzed east over the Palisades. The cabin was filled with noise and activity. Esposito and David Hart were handcuffed in the tail of the craft amidst Bayliss and a dozen Special Ops. Paul Vane was wedged in the jump seat between Morty Greene and the pilot. A medic had dressed his wound. It was painful but not life threatening. Stein was an empty ghost, his face pressed against the plastic bubble, looking down over the terrain. Edna Greene sat alongside him and could read his thoughts. “Your baby will be all right,” she said. “I don’t believe any of these men would hurt a child.”

Stein nodded thanks. But not because he believed her.

Paul Vane nudged the pilot’s elbow and pointed down. “There it is.” The pilot brought them down over the loading platform. The deck foreman who had taken over for Morty Greene was a muscular Italian in a formfitting undershirt with a marine buzz cut and bright corneas that made him look continually startled. Bayliss held onto the bulwarks and picked his way through the matrix of limbs and weapons, positioning himself to be closest to the exit when the bird touched down.

They alighted on the Astroturf front lawn of the executive wing. Bayliss leaped out first. The paramedic helped Paul Vane down. Aided by an adrenaline high and unmindful of his wound, Vane led the unit around to the elevated side of the building where the executive office wing fronted the warehouse silos.

“You know the layout?” Stein asked.

“I’ve been here once or twice,” he said with a tight smile.

Inside, there were five corridors leading out from the central lobby. Bayliss deployed his men in groups to cover each artery of the wing. “The rest of you wait here,” he directed.

“Like hell am I waiting here,” said Stein.

“I’m not messing around with you, Howard. Stay out of the way!”

“This might be the time to mention that my name is Harry.”

The paramedic who had taken Vane down the hall to the bathroom to re‑dress his bullet wound now came running back in a state of agitation. “Somebody’s locked in the girl’s loo.”

“Angie!” Stein bolted down the wing that the medic had just come from. The sound of muffled pounding could be heard from inside.

“Angie? We’ll have you out in a second.”

He tugged on the door but it was solid and locked and he couldn’t budge it. He yelled down the hall. “Does anyone have a key?”

Morty Greene had gotten his mother comfortably seated in the ergonomic chair in the main lobby and now ran up to where Stein was tugging on the door. He extracted a skeleton key that fit into the lock.

“I’m not going to ask how you have that,” said Stein.

“I appreciate that.”

The thick double door opened and Lila sprang out, a total wreck After a moment’s relief Stein looked past her. “Where is she?”

She could barely look at Stein, so wracked with guilt was she. “They wanted to take her picture.”

“You let her go off with strangers?”

“I know where she is,” said Vane.

Stein tried to hear relief in his voice but heard only restrained dread. Paul guided them through a door that looked like it led to an emergency staircase, but instead opened into a narrow corridor. It took a surprise dogleg to the left and seemed now to be angled upward. The perspective gave no evidence of elevation, but walking was more difficult. There was another security door at the end of the corridor. Stein’s blood froze at the sound of running water. Steady. Unabated. Neutral. The way it had run that night at Nicholette’s.

The doorway opened up onto a webwork of metal catwalks encircling an observation point fifty feet above an enormous open lake, two hundred feet around. One slender metal tightrope wire crossed above the center. Anyone traversing that bridge would feel like a Flying Wallenda. The bridge was vibrating.

A steady hum and splash emanated from the depths of the pit where epic‑sized mechanical arms were rotating heavy steel mixing rudders through the liquid below. Through sluices at symmetrical points on the circumference torrents of ingredients cascaded into the lake. The roiling liquid formed a layer of foamy soap scum several feet high that looked like weary cappuccino.

“Daddy.”

The sound of Angie’s voice penetrated through every other sound, as it always had, all of Stein’s life since she was born.

“There!” Lila pointed down into the lake where archipelagos of glycerin islands dotted the surface. The not very solid masses were diminishing in size, from large islands to very small ones, and then disappearing into the mixing blades. Angie was kneeling adrift on one of the tiny glycerin islands. Her legs and her arms were bound.

Vane melted into a pool of shame under Stein’s horrified look.

Stein could only choke out, “You weren’t going to tell me?”

“He promised she’d be safe.”

“Angie, I’m coming! Hold tight.” In a spastic frenzy Stein tore off his shirt and ripped at his shoes, trying to pull them off without untying them.

“Leave them on,” Vane instructed. “The glycerin‑alcohol tincture is more buoyant than water. You need the ballast. You have to pull her down to the bottom. Then swim through the drainage pipes.” Stein listened carefully. “You’re going to be under for at least sixty seconds. Tell her not to take too deep a breath. You won’t be able to get down deep enough with too much air in your lungs.”

“Hurry, Daddy.”

Stein maneuvered slowly out over the thin, vibrating, wire bridge. When he was positioned nearly above Angie he closed his eyes and plunged. Feet first. Stein had never learned to dive; he had never liked water. At the moment of impact he curled his knees to his chest, gulped a breath and cannonballed through the surface of the viscous liquid.

At the bottom, the tubes, like two giant nostrils, snorted out the impurities from the pool; the ferrocycrosulphate, the flecked mica flecks of phenol2Yisobutyltryptophane. He could do this, he told himself. He would propel himself up to the surface now.

The first twenty feet up was dessert pastry. Easy. Sweatless. He was a seahorse, bobbing to the surface. Squinting, he could see the outlines of the bottoms of solid mass. The hype about the shampoo was right in one regard, it didn’t sting his eyes. He could see translucent outlines. Then he hit the glycerin level. It was like swimming through a five hundred foot clam. He had no more breath and began to flounder. His body thrashed. His neck arched, desperately pushing his nose toward the surface. At last, with a thwop, he surfaced through the membrane into fresh air.

Soapy bubbly air filled his nostrils. He coughed and gagged and nearly puked.

“Daddy, here.”

Her little iceberg of glycerin had dissolved into a smaller islet and was drifting inexorably toward the lip of the upper level of the pool, from where it would plunge into the mixing section, where the steel blades whirred.

“I’ve got you, honey. We’re ok.”

Stein maneuvered himself to her and bit through the duct tape used to bind Angie’s arms. The shampoo made it come off a little easier. When he had pulled the tape off her hands and feet he held her face in his hands. Her eyes were wild like a deer trapped in a forest fire.

“Are we going to die?”

“Remember the time I pulled that cactus needle out of your eyelid and you had to sit perfectly still? And I told you it would hurt like hell for ten minutes and then it would be ok?”

“You pulled it and it bled and we had to go to the hospital.”

“This time it’ll be different,” he smiled.

He reached his arms out and eased her down into the lake. They held onto their dissolving life raft. “Get your clothes all heavy and goppy,” he said. “We’re going to take a deep breath and dive down to the very bottom. We’re going to see a couple of tubes and we’re going to swim right through them, until we get to the other side. We’ll have to hold our breath until we count up to sixty nice and slow in our minds and when we get there, we’ll be fine. Are you ready?”

“The same tube or different tubes?” Her voice was tremulous.

“What do you mean?”

“Do we both go in the same tube or different tubes?”

“You pick.”

“Same.”

“That’s just what we’ll do. Are you ready?”

She nodded, yes.

They breathed, they held hands, they jack‑knifed their bodies, and they dove down. Stein counted his fingers off in front of her face as they descended. One, two, three, four. They reached the bottom at ten. The water was less viscous but darker down here. He could sense only the dark shapes of the open pipes. He pointed at the openings in front of them, to the tube on the left. She swam toward it, her hair pasted to her neck like a mermaid. She lost heart for a moment. Stein pushed her by the heels and propelled her in. And he followed.

Stein thought of the seals he used to watch frolicking in the pool in Central Park Zoo, where Stein Senior had taken him on occasional weekends. One cub was Stein’s favorite. He was rambunctious, with whiskers only on one side of his mouth. Maybe the other side had been bitten off or never grew in, but it gave him an air of amused contemplation, as though he were thinking what prank he could pull next. He loved to waddle up along the hot rocks and get behind anyone who was snoozing in the sun, snuffle his snout down in good leverage, and shove his victim rolling fins‑over‑flippers into the cold water. Elder seals barked at him and tried to discipline him but he was incorrigible, and whenever they got too close, he’d dive into the water himself and become pure exuberant motion. That was how Stein tried to envision himself now, that every moving part of his body was an act of propulsion.

He kept mentally counting. At forty‑two his lungs began to implode. He could see, he thought, a lightening at the end of the tunnel. Forty‑four. Forty‑five. He reached forty‑eight knowing it was over for him. He saw himself at the zoo. Where Stein senior had died. At age forty‑eight. He visualized Angie standing there with him watching his father die. He knew that couldn’t be possible. She wasn’t born yet when his father died. He dreamed that he tried to yell to her to swim on without him. But the power in his brain shut down. The screen went black.

He never felt himself being grabbed by the hair and pulled through the last few feet of the pipe and lifted out onto the casement alongside the purification tank. He was unaware of the EMT giving him CPR or of the expulsion of liquid from his lungs. He was aware of Lila taking his hand and helping him up to sitting position, and when she saw that he was all right, she nodded to Angie, who was able look at Lila but not at her father until she knew.

Lila helped Stein to standing. His feet squished in his shoes. He could still barely breathe and the world was pixilating through the membrane of placental soap that still surrounded him. “I don’t mean to trivialize what you’ve been through,” Lila said, “but your hair looks absolutely lustrous.”

 

TWENTY

 

Stein was not an ardent observer of Nature but it always amazed him when the same kind of tree burst into blossom simultaneously all over the city. In late winter it was the heady mock orange blossoms. In spring the purple jacaranda flowers carpeted the streets. And all through the year, a bunch of other stuff whose names he didn’t know. He wondered how they all got the signal. What was the trigger? He was reminded of this phenomenon now as he drove across the city and saw one after another after another of newly exposed billboards for Espe New Millennium Shampoo.

Each was ingeniously comprised of a three‑dimensional reproduction of the bottle, which in itself was a generation of Nicholette Bradley’s sumptuous body. As though she had been regenerated. Become a milkweed, seeds of her new life spread by the wind after death and desiccation. Being surrounded by all these pictures of Nicholette made it harder for Stein to let go of her. He didn’t want forgiveness. There was too damn much forgiveness in the world. Emotional pedestrian crossings. If we learn anything at all in this life it is through enduring the consequences of our worst mistakes. The moment Stein had stopped believing that one man could make a difference, Nicholette had died. He resolved never to forget what Shmooie the Buddhist always said, that we had to keep doing the best we could all the time, even if no one was watching.

What also pissed him off was that he had been yoinked once again‑swallowing the whole story about Alex being the new Espe model when obviously she was not‑and never catching even a whiff of the lie. At least he had been right (after how many wrong guesses?) about David Hart and Michael Esposito being the killers, so that was something. He had just come back from the homecoming of Goodpasture’s orchids, which had taken place at the edge of the Los Padres National Forest (which in Los Angeles resembles a forest as much as the Gobi Desert resembles a ski resort). The weed had been flown commercially from Amsterdam to Ottawa, Fed Ex’d to St. Croix, yachted to Santa Barbara, taken by HAZ‑MAT truck down to L.A. and now, concealed amongst ten freshly cut California Spruces that were loaded onto the open flatbed of a lumber truck which would carry them up north, carefully swaddled in burlap so as not to disturb the cones of gorgeous green sin‑semilla that hung from the branches like festive ornaments.

Stein watched the proceedings but had little to say to Goodpasture or Schwimmer, nor they to him. There was muted joy in the triumph. More and more, the fight was exhausting just to get back to even. Stein found it depressing that they were still considered outlaws for aiding people at the end of their lives. Maybe next year when Al Gore was elected president and we put all the Clinton blowjob stuff behind us, the country would get back on track and Stein would feel a part of something again.

Paul Vane was being discharged today from Cedars Sinai, the gunshot wound, as he had accurately self‑diagnosed, a mere glancing blow to the heart. He was sitting primly on his hospital bed as Stein entered the room. It was filled with flower arrangements, beautiful, unusual, thoughtfully constructed poems of flowers. In his bright yellow shirt and brown silk pants, Vane looked very much the pistil of the flower. His weight barely made an impression on the hospital mattress. He looked his age. He looked beyond his age. He looked fossilized. He pretended not to have been looking at the newspaper strewn across his bed carrying the sordid tale of his two former lovers.

Stein put his arm around Vane’s shoulder. “You just bet the wrong horses.”

“Story of my life.”

“You only bet the wrong horses. They are the wrong horse.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel any different.”

A pudgy bespectacled man shaped like a bowl of mashed potatoes came into the room. He was wearing white, which even Stein could see was an unfortunate fashion choice. He had brought Vane a candy bar and Stein was glad to see the staff was caring and personable. “They didn’t have Twix so I got you Almond Joy. I hope that’s close enough.”

“My two heroes,” Vane announced. He introduced Stein to the man Stein first thought was an orderly but who was not an orderly at all, but the photographer Ray Ramos.

“You did the shots of Alex for the Espe box,” Stein said, recognizing the name as soon as Vane spoke it

Ramos smiled, while he went about the efficient scouting of all the hidden crevasses in Paul’s room where items might accidentally be left behind.

“What was that all about?” Stein persisted.

“That story is best left in the vaults of industrial secrecy,” Ramos said as he puttered.

“I think he’s earned it,” Vane purred.

The story was revealed, and as Penelope Kim so aptly observed, truth kicks fiction’s ass. The plan had never been to replace Nicholette as the New Millennium girl. The plan had been to leak a plan of disinformation that she was going to be replaced and generate the tremendous buzz around who the new girl would be. Of all people, it had been Mattingly who came up with the brilliant idea to make it a fake replacement and to stay with Nicholette. Whether that demonstrated tremendous imagination or tremendous lack of imagination can be debated. The results were that with the arrest of Michael Esposito, Mattingly was once again the only unindicted survivor and would now be sole owner of the franchise.

The last pieces of information came out, and it was as if a chiropractor had made one last crack, and the pain and chafing that had plagued Stein’s neck at last abated. At the time of the photo shoot for the New Millennium package, Ray Ramos was among the very few people who knew the secret plan. He knew that the shots he did of Alex would never be used, so to save money and not waste good stock, he had used film that had been degraded going through an airport X‑ray scan.

“Imagine Ray’s surprise,” Vane elaborated, as he told the story with great relish, looking younger with each level of embellishment, “imagine his surprise when the next morning his gorgeous, eager, young assistant David Hart presented him with twenty rolls of perfectly shot, perfectly exposed images of Alex.”

“Which he knew could not have been perfectly exposed,” congratulated Ramos. “So you had to know something was up.”

“Something is always up,” Vane purred. The question is up whose?”

“Don’t you love him?” Ramos smiled

It was nearly time to pick Angie up at Lila’s. They were going to meet Hillary for lunch and attempt to mediate the standoff. Hillary would have full custody if she got her way. Stein would have full custody if Angie had her way. Both prospects terrified him. Lila had left a note for him on her front door saying that she was out back and that Angie was upstairs waiting for him. Stein punched in the code to her alarm system. She had given him the combination to her wall safe and her internet passwords.

She trusted Stein with everything she had. Inside the dark oak and stucco Spanish entranceway Stein called out Angie’s name. God forbid she should ever answer him without his having to climb a flight of stairs. He climbed the spiral staircase to the second floor. Angie had a funny look on her face when she opened the door.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing. Lila washed your clothes from Amsterdam. Look what else we found.” Sitting on top of the neatly folded pile of laundry was Yosemite Sam’s silver bud holder.

“It’s not mine,” he explained with lame sincerity.

“Good one, Dad. Very original.”

He told her to meet him out at the car.

“If you want to marry her it’s cool,” she said.

Stein nearly wept. She never said anything to him that indicated she thought about his life in any way. Maybe what Lila said about her in Palm Springs was true.

He combed his hair back and tucked in his t‑shirt and came out of the house into the yard behind Lila. She was lying on the chaise alongside the pool, with her back to him. She was wearing a big straw hat tied under her chin with a ribbon, sunglasses, a pair of white shorts and a halter‑top, sunning herself while reading a magazine and partially absorbing her Italian lesson on her earphones.

A wave of nostalgia for Lila swept over him. He thought about what life would be like with a woman who loved him unconditionally. No financial worries. A stable home for Angie. A strong role model. Lila did not hear Stein approach. He had perfect position two steps behind her. She was defenseless. He could do anything to her he wanted.

If only love was like unleaded gas, and didn’t matter whether you pulled into ARCO or Mobile. You filled up your tank, it ignited your spark plugs, torqued your engine and it got you where you had to go until you were empty again. But with love, all that matters is the pump. And because Stein did not love Lila the way we all yearn to be loved, deserve to be loved, believe that some day we will be loved, he did not swoop her off the lounge and hurl her into the pool, sending her magazine and tape machine flying out of her hands in all directions, her arms flailing at her straw hat, a scream of exultation caught in her throat, her eyes wild with glee.

 

Date: 2015-12-13; view: 425; Íàðóøåíèå àâòîðñêèõ ïðàâ; Ïîìîùü â íàïèñàíèè ðàáîòû --> ÑÞÄÀ...



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