Читать онлайн «Bird in a Cage»
Автор Фредерик Дар
Whose dark or troubled mind will you step into next? Detective or assassin, victim or accomplice? How can you tell reality from delusion when you’re spinning in the whirl of a thriller, or trapped in the grip of an unsolvable mystery? When you can’t trust your senses, or anyone you meet; that’s when you know you’re in the hands of the undisputed masters of crime fiction.
Writers of the greatest thrillers and mysteries on earth, who inspired those that followed. Their books are found on shelves all across their home countries – from Asia to Europe, and everywhere in between. Timeless tales that have been devoured, adored and handed down through the decades. Iconic books that have inspired films, and demand to be read and read again. And now we’ve introduced Pushkin Vertigo Originals – the greatest contemporary crime writing from across the globe, by some of today’s best authors.
So step inside a dizzying world of criminal masterminds with Pushkin Vertigo. The only trouble you might have is leaving them behind.
F. D.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
1 The Encounter
2 The First Visit
3 The Outing
4 The Second Visit
5 A Piece of Advice
6 The Diversion
7 The Third Visit
8 The Fourth Visit
9 The Switch
10 The Cloth Bird
11 Lost Property
12 You Never Can Tell
About the Publisher
Copyright
1 The Encounter
How old does a man have to be not to feel like an orphan when he loses his mother?
When I returned after being away for six years to the small flat where Mother died, it felt like the slipknot on a rope round my chest was being tightened without pity.
I sat down in the old armchair next to the window where she always did the darning and looked around at the silence, the smell and all the old things that had lain waiting for me. The silence and the smells had greater reality for me than the damp-streaked wallpaper.
My mother died four years ago and I learned of her death only when I got the funeral notice. I’d thought about her a lot since then but I hadn’t wept for her enormously. Now, as I crossed the threshold of our flat, I suddenly grasped that she had died.
It hit me head-on.Outside, it was Christmas.
What brought it home to me was coming back to Paris and to the crowded boulevards of its poorer districts lined with brightly lit shop window displays, and with illuminated trees at street corners.
Christmas!
I was a fool to come home on a day like that.
There was a smell that I didn’t recognize in her bedroom—the smell of her dying. The bed had been entirely stripped and the mattress rolled up in an old sheet. The people who took care of her had forgotten to take away the glass for the holy water and the sprig of blessed palm.
These sorry items were on the marble dresser next to a black wooden crucifix. There was no water left in the glass and the leaves on the sprig had gone yellow. When I picked it up, they fell on the bedroom carpet like golden flakes.
There was a photograph of me on the wall in the ornate old frame that had been used to display my father’s medals. The photo was about ten years old but it wasn’t very flattering. I looked like a sickly and repressed young man, with hollow cheeks, a sidelong glance and the kind of vague pouting expression that could only belong to someone very bad or very miserable.
