Читать книгу Koko - Peter Straub - Страница 42

‘Just let me keep the books,’ Michael Poole said to the erect little woman, all black shining hair and deep dimples, beside him. Her name tag read PUN YIN. She tilted his carry-on bag toward him, and Poole took the copies of A Beast in View and The Divided Man from the open pouch on the side. The stewardess smiled and began making her way forward through the pediatricians.

The doctors had started to unwind as soon as the plane hit cruising level. On earth, visible to their patients and other laymen, Michael’s colleagues liked to appear knowing, circumspect, and only as juvenile as conventional American ethics permitted; aloft, they acted like fraternity boys. Pediatricians in playclothes, in terrycloth jogging suits and college sweaters, pediatricians in red blazers and plaid trousers roamed the aisles of the big airplane, glad-handing and bawling out bad jokes. Pun Yin got no more than halfway toward the front of the plane with Michael’s bag when a squat, flabby doctor with a leer like a Halloween pumpkin positioned himself before her and did an awkward bump and grind.

‘Hey!’ Beevers said. ‘We’re on our way!’

‘Give me an S,’ Conor said, and lifted his glass.

‘You remember to get the pictures? Or did your brain collapse again?’

‘They’re in my bag,’ Poole said. He had made fifty copies of the author’s photo on the back of Orchid Blood, Underhill’s last book.

All three men were watching the unknown doctor twitch around Pun Yin while a group of medical men yipped encouragement. The pretty stewardess patted the man on the shoulder and squeezed past him, interposing Michael’s bag between the doctor and herself.

‘We’re going to face the elephant,’ Beevers said. ‘Remember?’

‘Could I forget?’ Poole asked. During the Civil War, when their regiment had been founded, ‘facing the elephant’ had been slang for going into battle.

In a loud, blurry voice Conor asked, ‘What traits are embodied in the elephant?’

‘In time of peace or in time of war?’ Beevers asked.

‘Both. Let’s hear the whole shootin’ match.’

Beevers glanced at Poole. ‘The elephant embodies nobility, grace, gravity, patience, perseverance, power, and reserve in times of peace. The elephant embodies power and wrath in times of war.’

A few of the pediatricians nearest stared at him in affable confusion, trying to share the joke.

Beevers and Poole began to laugh.

‘Damn straight,’ Conor said. ‘That’s it, there it is.’

Pun Yin glimmered for a moment far away at the head of the cabin, then switched a curtain before her and was gone.