Macdonald, Ross / Макдональд, Росс - Собрание сочинений (51 произведение) [1944-2015, fb2/epub, ENG]

The Dark Tunnel (= I Die Slowly) / Тёмный туннель 1944, fb2; 2013, epub, ISBN: 978-1-4532-9052-1, Open Road Integrated Media Trouble Follows Me (= Night Train) / Беда преследует меня 1946, epub Blue City / Коррумпированный город 1947, fb2; 2011, epub, eISBN: 978-0-307-74072-4, Vintage crime/Black Lizard The Three Roads / Три дороги 2011, epub, eISBN: 978-0-307-74074-8, Vintage crime/Black Lizard Meet Me at the Morgue (= Experience With Evil) / Испытание злом 1953, fb2; 2010, epub, eISBN: 978-0-307-74075-5, Vintage crime/Black Lizard The Ferguson Affair / Дело Фергюсона 1960, fb2; 2010, epub, eISBN: 978-0-307-74078-6, Vintage crime/Black Lizard

1

The cab turned off U.S. 101 in the direction of the sea. The road looped round the base of a brown hill into a canyon lined with scrub oak. "This is Cabrillo Canyon," the driver said. There weren't any houses in sight. "The people live in caves?" "Not on your life. The estates are down by the ocean." A minute later I started to smell the sea. We rounded another curve and entered its zone of coolness. A sign beside the road said: "Private Property: Permission to pass over revocable at any time." The scrub oak gave place to ordered palms and Monterey cypress hedges. I caught glimpses of lawns effervescent with sprinklers, deep white porches, roofs of red tile and green copper. A Rolls with a doll at the wheel went by us like a gust of wind, and I felt unreal. The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money. Even the sea looked precious through it, a solid wedge held in the canyon's mouth, bright blue and polished like a stone. Private property: color guaranteed fast; will not shrink egos. I had never seen the Pacific look so small. We turned up a drive between sentinel yews, cruised round in a private highway network for a while, and came out above the sea stretching deep and wide to Hawaii. The house stood part way down the shoulder of the bluff, with its back to the canyon. It was long and low. Its wings met at an obtuse angle pointed at the sea like a massive white arrowhead. Through screens of shrubbery I caught the white glare of tennis courts, the blue-green shimmer of a pool. The driver turned on the fan-shaped drive and stopped beside the garages. "This is where the cavemen live. You want the service entrance?" "I'm not proud." "You want me to wait?" "I guess so." A heavy woman in a blue linen smock came out on the service porch and watched me climb out of the cab. "Mr. Archer?" "Yes. Mrs. Sampson?" "Mrs. Kromberg. I'm the housekeeper." A smile passed over her lined face like sunlight on a plowed field. "You can let your taxi go. Felix can drive you back to town when you're ready." I paid off the driver and got my bag out of the back. I felt a little embarrassed with it in my hand. I didn't know whether the job would last an hour or a month. "I'll put your bag in the storeroom," the housekeeper said. "I don't think you'll be needing it." She led me through a chromium-and-porcelain kitchen, down a hall that was cool and vaulted like a cloister, into a cubicle that rose to the second floor when she pressed a button. "All the modern conveniences," I said to her back. "They had to put it in when Mrs. Sampson hurt her legs. It cost seven thousand five hundred dollars." If that was supposed to silence me, it did. She knocked on a door across the hall from the elevator. Nobody answered. After knocking again, she opened the door on a high white room too big and bare to be feminine. Above the massive bed there was a painting of a clock, a map, and a woman's hat arranged on a dressing-table. Time, space, and sex. It looked like a Kuniyoshi. . . .

Chapter 1

All the time you’ve been away from a town where you lived when you were a kid, you think about it and talk about it as if the air there were sweeter in the nostrils than other air. When you meet a man from that town you feel a kind of brotherhood with him, till the talk runs down and you can’t remember any more names. The city started sooner than I expected it to. In ten years it had crawled out along the highway, covering new farms with the concrete squares of suburban developments. On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession. “It won’t be long now,” the transport driver said. He yawned over the wheel, keeping his eyes on the road. “I don’t need any dago red to put me to sleep tonight.” “You live here?” “I got a room in a boardinghouse at this end. You could call it living, I guess.” “Don’t you like the town?” “It’s all right if you don’t know any better places.” He spat through his open window into the current of air that the truck’s movement made, and a fine spray blew across the back of my neck. “I call Chicago home. That’s where my wife is.” “That makes the difference.” “You married?” “No,” I said. “I’m traveling on my own.” “Looking for a job, eh?” “That’s right.” “You shouldn’t have any trouble here. Matter of fact, we need helpers down at the depot right now. Half the time I have to load my own truck. You strong enough?” “Yeah, I’m strong enough. But that’s not the kind of a job I was thinking about.” “Pretty good pay. Seventy cents an hour. You can’t do better than that around here.” “Maybe I can. I’ve got connections.” “You have?” He gave me a quick look. I wasn’t looking so good. I hadn’t shaved or washed that day, and my clothes had been slept in. He must have decided I was lying. He said with broad irony: “Oh well, in that case,” and stopped talking to me. . . .