Страница 55 из 65
How goes it with the Khan? The Khan still lives and thrives, judging by the newspaper Shadrach buys — the first he has bothered to look at in all the weeks of his journey — which is strewn with photographs of Mangu’s funeral, held last week with Pharaonic pomp and majesty. There is Genghis Mao himself, in full mourning regalia, riding in the vast procession. There he is again, benevolently blessing the millions crammed into Sukhe Bator Square. (Millions? Well, so it says. Thousands, more likely.) And again, and again, the Khan doing this, the Khan doing that, the Khan orchestrating all the remaining energies of this bedraggled planet in a global outpouring of grief. Ulan Bator, Shadrach discovers, is to be renamed Altan Mangu, “Golden Mangu.” This seems comically excessive to Shadrach, but he supposes he will get used to the new name in time; the old one, which means “Red Hero,” has been obsolete anyway since the fall of the People’s Republic in 1995, and Genghis Mao has been thinking for years of changing it to something more appropriate. Well, Altan Mangu will do well enough, Shadrach decides. A noise in place of a noise. Pages and pages of coverage of the funereal rites! Not even a President of the United States would have received such a spread. And the funeral was last week; have they been ru
So much fuss, in an American newspaper, about a funeral in Mongolia. Shadrach finds himself thinking about the final president of the United States — someone named Williams, he thinks, or maybe Richards, at any rate a first name turned into a last name — and what sort of funeral he had. Seven mourners and a muddy grave on a rainy day, most likely. (Roberts? Edwards? The name has slipped through his memory, beyond recapture.) There still were presidents of the United States when Shadrach was a boy, even a living ex-president or two. He tries to remember who the president was when he was born. A man named Ford, wasn’t it? Yes, Ford. Most people liked Ford, Shadrach remembers. Before him there was one named Nixon, whom people did not like, and one named Ke
San Francisco is a fine city for walking. The scale of the place is modest and human, so that one can move from one neighborhood to another, from the mansions of Pacific Heights to the su
There are more policemen here than he has ever seen in any one place, more even than in Ulan Bator itself. It is as though every ninth San Franciscan has enrolled in the Citizens’ Peace Brigade. Maybe it is only a delusion of his troubled mind, or maybe the unusual vitality of this city requires a correspondingly unusual quota of policing: at any rate, there are gray-and-blue uniforms everywhere, everywhere, usually in pairs but not infrequently in clumps of three, four, five. Most of them have the mechanical insectoid look that seems to be characteristic of their kind, that makes Shadrach suspect that Citpols are not born and trained but rather are stamped out in some ghastly factory deep in the Caucasus. And they all are watching him. Watching, watching, watching — it can’t be mere paranoia. Can it? Those dull gray watchful eyes, hard, stupid, purposeful, studying him from all angles as he strides through the city? Why are they looking at him so intently? What do they want to know? They are going to arrest me soon, Shadrach tells himself. He is certain that he has been under surveillance since his departure. He is positive that Avogadro is receiving information on his movements and is filing daily reports with Genghis Mao; and — is it his own growing tension that makes it seem that way, or is the tension in Genghis Mao? — the intensity of the surveillance appears to have been increasing, from Nairobi to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to Istanbul, from Istanbul to Rome, first a casual Citpol or two glancing offhandedly at him, then more overt scrutiny, then teams of them following him about, hovering, staring, conferring, charting his movements, until, perhaps in San Francisco, perhaps not until he reaches Peking, they get the orders from the capital and make their move, dozens of them on the housetops, in doorways, on street-corners: All right, Mordecai, come quietly and you won’t get hurt—
And then, when he is at Broadway and Grant, about to turn downhill into teeming Chinatown and speculating darkly about the three Cirpols clustered outside an Oriental grocery store across the street, someone shouts at him from the far side of Broadway, “Mordecai? Hey, Shadrach Mordecai!”
At the sound of his name Shadrach freezes, impaled in mid-fantasy, knowing that the game is up, that the moment he has feared is at hand.
But the man approaching him, moving in awkward dragging lurches through the traffic, is no Citpol. He is a burly, balding man with a seamed weary face and a thick unkempt gray-streaked beard, who is clad in threadbare green overalls, a heavy plaid shirt, a faded red cloak. When he reaches Shadrach’s side he puts his hand on Shadrach’s forearm in a way that seems to be asking for support as much as for attention, and thrusts his face close to Shadrach’s, assuming intimacy so brazenly that Shadrach does not resist the encroachment. The man’s eyes are watery and swollen: one of the organ-rot sympiomata. But he is still capable of smiling. “Doctor,” he says. His voice is warm, furry, insinuating, “Hey, Doctor, how’s it going?”