Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 46

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WITH ROSA’S NAKED belly and thighs against him how warm she was! Warm and soft and holding tight as a magnet, her sex hair sticky with sweat and sperm, her skin slippery like olive oil and sweeter than honey. Old men are right, he realized, to love young women, they are the gift of God. Her body so lean and long and never-ending because his hands could not leave it, where there was only one place and that was inside her, only one feeling and that was she. Long after he could come no more he was still locked hard inside her, trying to slide deeper, her teeth in his shoulder, her claws up his back.

It's not this that's evil, he realized, but its absence. If you submit, it must be also to what you feel, that too is God's will.

When he woke the new snowfall had broken the cold and she slept warmly against him. Nearly five. In an hour he'd have to wake her. The Makarov she'd given him on one side, she on the other, he lay with neither cold nor pain, watching the snow drift down among the darkening rocks.

Crazy, what she and he had done. Forgetting the danger, everything. Wild as two newlyweds. Wilder.

Never had he been to this place of total forgetfulness before. This place of total concentration. Not even in prayer. He took a deep breath, realized he was still winded. Exhausted yet strangely rested. Could watch all night if need be, over her. This strange hateful child for whom so suddenly he was responsible. For whom he wanted no more pain.

Telling himself not to fall asleep lest he endanger her, he lay watching from the cave while the solitary snow sifted steadily down into the ghostly dusk. Although no men passed he kept seeing them, an endless line, snow caping their heads and shoulders, their backs bent under guns and swords, cloth-wrapped feet trudging the cold slippery snow. In'salah, the will of God. Back to the start of time. In'salah.

A shadow came up behind but vanished as he turned. Each way he looked, it hid behind him. Its blade drove into his spine and he shook himself awake.

Near night's faint glow on the snow. She moved, still naked against him, and he wanted her, in terror. The snow was still sifting down. What was that? A footstep? Just wind scurrying among the rocks. The line of her hair black as a veil above the pale brow. Oh God, he thought, how beautiful.

The shadow rose up behind him. “Nothing,” it spat, “is deadlier than love.”

IMAGINE finding Black Label here in Lebanon. But that's the thing about war, Neill decided. Either there's everything, supermarkets as full as Saigon's in '65. Or there's nothing at all, Hanoi in '69.

He'd been going to stay off liquor but that was the kind of intellectual decision he was always making to screw himself up. Nearly everybody drank, he just had to watch it. He'd have no trouble watching it here, at fifty bucks a bottle.

It poured cool and golden into the cracked white cup, swirling fine shadow, smelling like oak root, turf, musk, all together. His sinuses cracked as they opened, sucking it in. Nothing this good could be bad for you. Warms your tongue, slides cool fire down your throat, you can taste a thousand places...

The first Katyusha came over whistling like a dove. He snatched the Black Label but the rocket kept going, far away now, a monotonous thud, the air and scraps of window shaking. Out there maybe someone dying, their spirits floating up into the air.

How strange to sit at this desk in Nicolas and Samantha's guestroom with its empty windows, in the candle's wavering light, like a supplicant, a mendicant, a hermit, this cup of transitory gold in his hands, while out there others died. And when he died they'd be going about their business, unable to help him any more than he could them.

What if when he died there'd be time to look back? If he saw that he hadn't lived his life well? Hadn't done what he could? Instead of being a nobody reporter at the seamy ends of the earth, what if he'd done something?

In the mosque in Damascus he'd promised to change his life, improve his character in some way every day; had that too been illusion, both the reason and result?

This was the way to lose it. Sanity's just a convention: once you start asking questions like this there's no end to where you can fall. And what does it bring you, getting to the bottom of things?

He'd stop at three glasses. God, it tasted good. All those shut-down lines in your brain coming back to life. The signals going through again. What if he could make enough on this trip to take time off? Working for Freeman could net him twenty thousand a year, maybe thirty. Say thirty. Could live on that, up in the Lake District, a slate-roofed little place with an uneven rock-and-briar wall, looking out over sheepcotes and green valleys.

His underarm stung as he reached forward for the cup. Leave me alone. Shut down the thinking machine. Just for a while.

His watch said 4:56. In four minutes he'd promised himself he'd leave. Hamid wouldn't stick around. He wouldn't himself, Neill realized, if he were that scared. He needed an extra little hit, really, to face Hamid. Hamid a true turd on the face of God. Neill tossed back the fifth whisky and gave it a chaser, slammed the cup down cleanly on the table. Hamid source of all my sorrows. Nearly all anyway. He put the bottle under the pillow and went downstairs but Nicolas and Samantha weren't there. They were somewhere going through the foolishness of filming another peace talk for the television station that could not show it because the electricity was dead. He went outside into darkness. Another rocket came over softly hissing, drawing near but kept going, went over the hill.

Hamid opened his door before Neill knocked, led him into a low red room with beams. “She's a fool. She'll see you.”

“When?”

“After this, never come near me!”

“When, man?”

'Go back to your place and wait.”

“Today? Tomorrow?”

Hamid moved behind him, opened the door. “Do me a favor?”

“I owe you one?”

“Lay off the bottle. If you stink of liquor she won't even look at you.”

“HEY YOU! It'll soon be dark. Time to go.”

Rosa stretched, still asleep, looked up and saw him, drew closer. “I'm so tired...”

Mohammed had again a crushing sense of strength and helplessness. “Just a few more miles. Soon downhill.”

“The minefield.”

“You know the way across it. We have their tracks.”

“I've been worried those soldiers we saw were laying mines.”

He hesitated. “I hadn't thought of that.”

“Two of them had shovels.”

“I didn't see them.”

“Your mind was elsewhere.”

“It still is. You have completely befuddled me.”

“I thought I'd hate you. But you're still a boy.”

“Every conversation I start with you goes somewhere else.” The small of her back was so thin he could hold half in one hand, her fingers up his spine electric, her arm so soft and strong under his, round him. His penis tingled with delight. This had to be right, to be so good.