GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

the Urania Theater in downtown Vienna on the way to the airport, the passenger began talking to himself.

Palmsting had lousy hearing because he spent too much time listening to loud vintage heavy-metal music on a cheap Walkman. When he first heard the man behind him mumbling, he thought he was being given instructions. The driver resented it when a fare did that. Because he prided himself on being honest. Never once in a fifteen-year career had he taken the long or wrong route anywhere just to make a little more money on a fare.

“Excuse me?” he asked, glancing in the rearview mirror. The passenger was looking out the window and saying something. Palmsting raised his eyebrows and looked back at the road. He assumed that if this guy really wanted to get his attention then he would repeat what he’d said.

Until two minutes ago Ettrich had forgotten about the set of keys Isabelle had given him to her apartment and car. Because they were the only thing of hers he carried with him, he took them out of his pocket and held them in his hand like a good luck charm while he looked out the window.

Almost immediately information came to him like signals on a radio so powerful that it receives too many stations at once. It sounds like gobbledygook until you fine-tune it. Ettrich realized that when he took the keys in hand, he was wondering where Isabelle was and what she was doing. He was finding out now, but there was so much Isabelle coming in that he could only decipher a fraction of it.

All of this was so new to him. It would take time to learn all that he was capable of doing now. He wanted things to stop or at least slow down so that he could get his bearings. But from all indications it appeared that it went at its own speed and too bad if you couldn’t keep up.

Something came to him that was so strange he had to say it out loud just to hear it. “Zi Cong Baby Palace.” Ettrich enunciated each word slowly and crisply. Then he said them again, this time as a question. “Zi Cong Baby Palace? What the hell is that?”

The taxi driver looked at him for a long time in the rearview mirror.

Images rushed through Ettrich’s mind in the course of a few seconds: a small hand patting a bare stomach. An Oriental woman in a white doctor’s lab coat. Some other Caucasian woman dressed in beige. A hand on a white table. A vivid shade of green. A photograph of Simon Haden. The woman in beige again, only now she was crying.

“I don’t get it. I don’t get it.” Ettrich raised a helpless hand to the car window, as if gesturing to someone on the other side of the glass to wait a minute.

Roman Palmsting looked in the rearview again and pursed his lips. He began figuring out what to do if this passenger was crazy and started acting weird or dangerous or worse. A traffic light ahead turned from green to yellow and he shifted his attention back to the street. He didn’t see Ettrich’s mouth drop open and then the man slump back against the seat, defeated. But Palmsting did hear the other squawk in dismay, “No! She didn’t go there; she can’t.”

Several minutes later Ettrich told the driver to pull off the autobahn behind a Range Rover that was parked at a strange angle on the shoulder of the road. Palmsting was happy to oblige and once paid, happy to drive away. The last picture he had of this strange passenger was of the man in a suit leaning on the open door of the Range Rover, talking to someone inside. But from what Palmsting could see, there was no one inside that car. This lunatic was just talking to himself again. Naturally the taxi driver could not see the very small man sitting on the dashboard of that car, listening intently to Vincent Ettrich.

John Flannery was writing in his journal when the doorbell rang. He stopped, capped the silver fountain pen, and read what he had just written: Up close, most women’s pussies look like a piece of chewed gum.

Flannery liked keeping a daily journal and had been doing it for years. He saw himself as a flaneur, a boulevardier, a keen observer and appreciator of life on earth and mankind in particular. He liked people, he really did. He had no hesitation killing any of them or making their lives miserable, but generally he got a big kick out of mankind and had no complaints about working with them.

Behind him he heard the Great Dane walk to the door and wait there as it always did when someone rang the bell. Flannery despised that dog more every day but there was nothing he could do about it. When he’d been assigned here, Luba had been sent to accompany him as a so-called partner. It meant that they still didn’t trust him fully although he had never done anything to merit their distrust. He was a good soldier—followed orders and never complained. But what was his reward? A dog the size of an aircraft carrier that watched Flannery’s every move and tattled on him at least once a month. Luckily Flora Vaughn detested dogs so she’d never seen this one when she came over.

John Flannery kept two apartments in Vienna: the small place near the Danube Canal where Leni visited him. And this one, in a different district three miles away, which was leased to Kyle Pegg. Pegg’s place was much nicer and he spent most of this time here. It was on the top floor of a nineteenth-century building with a wide view of the eastern part of the city. He had arranged his desk so that it faced that panoramic view. He often just sat there with a glass of whiskey looking out the window, a perfectly