Small World Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the far side of which he had parked the Villerosi.
    He stood puzzled for a few seconds. It wasn’t there. A vague panic formed like a knot in his stomach. Guardedly, trying to appear casual, he glanced over the parking lot. It was the same blue van. He remembered very clearly the lettering on the side: Jim Owen!Caretaker. No, he was sufe he’d left it here. There was a fleeting half-second of relief; his memory wasn’t slipping. And then it came to him that if he hadn’t forgotten exactly where he’d parked it, there was only one explanation.
    Captain Morrisey, the color drained from his face, stood staring at the place where it should be—where a long, low bullet-shaped pink projectile, a winner of the Targa Miglia and the Targa Firenze, the car driven by the holder of a world speed record for seven months, should be—and saw only the fading white lines on the black hottop, oil stains, dirt, a wad of dirty, deformed bubble gum, a crumpled cigarette pack.
    Cold sweat began to bead his forehead, stain the armpits of his shirt. The Guinness in his stomach roiled and surged. For twenty-five years, he had flown planes, seventeen years in wide-bodied jets. This was how it felt when one of the goddamn wheels wouldn’t come down, or when a tire blew on the runway and scared the shit out of everybody. This was how it felt when you hit a monster air pocket and had passengers screaming and pissing themselves as tons of metal plunged to the next floor. He told himself it wasn’t as bad as losing the battle for the runway, going into a hundred and fifty mile an hour skid and not coming out of it. Or not finding that next solid floor of good air. Those things had never happened to him, but he thought about them sometimes, in the hotel rooms that were like a chain of paper dolls, and sometimes when he was in the middle of the physicals the company liked to spring on him at what seemed like weekly intervals. No, it wasn’t that bad.
    But someone had stolen his Villerosi. His beautiful classic racing car. Maureen would kill him. Just kill him. He reeled against the van.
    ‘It could be worse,’ he muttered, unaware he was speaking out loud.
    Something inside him snapped like a rubber band. O my suffering jesus he thought, and puked warm Guinness down the length of his yellow trousers, over the glossy shine of his Bally boots.
    ‘Lucy!’ Pop shouted. ‘Lucy!’
    Then he was in the doorway. The sun behind him turned him into a big black scarecrow, brandishing a chunk of wood at her. Lucy pushed up her protective goggles into her hair and turned off her drill.
    The workshop was suddenly quiet, the loudest sound her father’s panting breath. The air that Lucy breathed in was hot and dusty, perfumed with wood and oil. Despite the overhead lights and the open skylight above her workbench, it was darker here than outside, where the spring sun fiercely washed out everything. Stepping inside, beyond the backlight of the sun, her father became himself again. He was grinning, excited, thrusting the stick he carried at her. It flopped open in his hands and became a magazine. Her hands were suddenly sweaty. She wiped them on her overalls.
    ‘Finally come,’ he said, a weight of satisfaction in his voice.
    She looked from the magazine in his hands to his face. His unnaturally white teeth gleamed at her. Reluctantly, she accepted the magazine. Her father waited expectantly as she studied the cover.
    It was the north side of the White House, a view as familiar to most Americans as their own mother’s face. It had been photographed very cleverly, from the same plane as the model of the grounds in which it stood. The crudity of the artificial shrubbery and lawns, the plastic limo in the drive, shouted illusion. Yet it looked the real thing, almost as if someone had pasted a photograph of the real White House onto a false background. But where the sky should be, a band of red-backed black letters declared VIP. And about where the Washington