Sins of the Flesh by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online

vomit-green!”
    The screeches had dwindled to sobs of distress, the dominant voice seeming to feed off them until it lost all its weariness. Suddenly it shouted, “Lights up!” and the entire space in which Abe was marooned sprang into glaring relief.
    Abe stared at what he presumed was an entire stage in nude disarray, a full forty feet high; its upper half was a grid of rods, rails, booms, rows of lights on thin steel beams, gangways, and walls solid with boxes, machinery, rods. The wings, he was fascinated to discover, communicated as one space with the back of the stage. His mechanical eye discerned hydraulic rams—expensive! No amateur playhouse, this, but the real thing, and constructed with a disregard for cost that put it ahead even of some major Broadway playhouses. Though it wasn’t a theater; audience room was limited to perhaps fifty stall seats.
    The owner of the voice was approaching him, the willowy man at his side, no doubt to fill him in. Abe gazed in awe.
    Easily six and a half feet tall, he was clad in a black-and-white Japanese kimono of water birds in a lily pond, and wore backless slippers on his feet; gaping open as his legs scissored stiffly, the kimono revealed close-fitting black trousers beneath. His physique was too straight up and down to be called splendid, yet he wasn’t at all obese. What my Nanna would have called “solid” thought Abe: a basketballer, not a footballer. Feet the size of dinghies. Tightly curly corn-gold hair, close-cropped, gave Abe a pang of envy; Betty had finally managed to push him into growing his fair, thinning hair long enough to cover his ears and neck, and he hated this modern look. Now here was an internationally famous guy sporting short-back-and-sides! This guy had no wife, so much seemed sure. His facial features were regular and were set in an expression suggesting a kind nature, though looks were treacherous; Abe reserved judgement. The eyes were fine and large, an innocent sky-blue.
    How, wondered Abe, am I to reconcile his aura of kindness with his waspish tongue? Except, of course, that the rules of conduct in the theater world were rather different from others, he suspected. The artistic temperament and all that.
    Mr. Willowy was now moving toward the weeping form of Peter the lighting blighter, clucking and shushing as he went.
    On his feet, Abe stuck out his right hand. “Lieutenant Abe Goldberg, Holloman PD,” he said.
    One huge hand engulfed his in a warm shake, then the Voice sat down opposite Abe by pulling a fused section of seats around. Something flashed as he moved; Abe blinked, dazzled. He wore a two-carat first water diamond in his right ear lobe, but no other jewelry, not even a class ring.
    “Rha Tanais,” he said.
    “Forgive a detective’s curiosity, sir, but is Rha Tanais your original name?”
    “What an original way to put it! No, Lieutenant, it’s my professional name. I was christened Herbert Ramsbottom.”
    “Christened?”
    “Russian rites. Ramsbottom was probably Raskolnikov before Ellis Island, who knows? I ask you, Herbert Ramsbottom? High school was a succession of nicknames, but the one everybody liked best was Herbie Sheep’s Ass. Luckily I wasn’t one of those poor, despised outsiders picked sometimes to literal death.” The blue eyes gleamed impishly. “I had wit, height, good humor—and Rufus. Even the worst of the brute brigade had enough brain to understand I could make him a laughing-stock. I racked my own brain for a new monicker, but none sounded like me until, as I browsed in the library one day, I chanced upon an atlas of the ancient world. And there it was!”
    “What was?” Abe asked after a minute’s silence, appreciating the fact that (a rare treat in a detective’s working life) he was in the presence of a true raconteur with considerable erudition.
    “Family tradition has it that we originated in Cossack country around the Volga and the Don, so I looked at the lands of the ancient