Читать книгу Damage Control - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 12

They were all waiting for something, but nobody would say what it was, even though all four knew—Rose Siciliano Craik, assistant naval attaché, Bahrain; Harry O’Neill, big-bucks American convert to Islam; Mike Dukas, head of Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Bahrain; Leslie Kultzke, live-in interloper on Dukas’s life after following him all the way from Washington. What they were waiting for was Alan Craik, but he wouldn’t be home for more than three days.

When they had planned this gathering, he was supposed to be home, and then he had been made fleet-exercise umpire, and there went the notion that they would all be together for Rose’s birthday. Alan was the glue that held them, and, without him, there was this strange sense of waiting for somebody who wouldn’t show up.

The three old friends sat with their knees almost touching, laughing and mopping at spilled drops of coffee and licking fingers that had become coated with powdered sugar from Rose’s biscotti. Leslie sat a little apart, like a good child allowed to sit with the grown-ups. She smiled when they laughed, otherwise sat with a pretty good imitation of interest on her round face. She was twenty-two. They were nearing forty, in Dukas’s case more like forty-five.

Then the conversation ran down, and Harry said, “Shall we play a round of whatever-happened-to-old-so-and-so now?”

“We’re going to play let’s-help-Michael-lose-weight.” Leslie smiled at him as she said it, pulling the plate of biscotti away from Dukas’s hand. Quite opposite expressions flitted across their faces, his chastened, then irritated, hers mature and maternal. The change made Harry raise his eyebrows at Rose, who drew her own dark, thick brows together and gave him what her husband called “the look that kills.” Then she turned away and said in that voice that announces clearly that the speaker is trying to change the subject, “What do you think Alan’s doing right now? Mike—Harry—? What does the umpire do at the start of an exercise?”

Harry, who had been a junior intel officer ten years before, smiled and shrugged. “Stand around and try not to look bored, I suppose.”