"George Alec Effinger - Marid 2 - A Fire In The Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

tough-guy moddy. Nobody messed with the Half-Hajj when he was chipping that one in.
Back home in the city, Saied thought it was beneath him to earn money. He liked to sit in the
cafes with me and Mahmoud and Jacques, all day and all evening. His little chicken, the
American boy everybody called Abdul-Hassan, went out with older men and brought home
the rent money. Saied liked to sneer a lot and wear his gal-lebeya cinched with a wide
black leather belt, which was decorated with shiny chrome-steel strips and studs. The
Half-Hajj was always careful of his appearance.
What he was doing in this vermin-infested roadside slum was what he called fun. I waited a
few minutes and followed him around the corner and into the coffeehouse. I shuffled in,
unkempt, filthy, and took a chair in a shad-owy corner. The proprietor glanced at me,
frowned, and turned back to Saied. Nobody ever paid any attention to me. Saied was
finishing the tail end of a joke I'd heard him tell a do/en times since we'd left the city. When
he came to the payoff, the shopkeeper and the four other men at the long counter burst into
laughter. They liked Saied. He could make people like him whenever he wanted. That tilent
was programmed into an add-on chip snapped into - badass moddy. With the right moddy
and the right iddy chips, it didn't matter where you'd been born or how you'd been raised.
You could fit in with any sort of people, you could speak any language, you could handle
mrself in any situation. The information was fed directly to your short-term memory. You
could literally become
another person, Ramses II or Buck Rogers in the 25th century, until you popped the moddy
and daddies out.
Saied was being rough and dangerous, but he was also being charming, if you can imagine
that combination. I watched the shop owner reach and grab the teapot. He poured some into
the Half-Hajj's glass, slopping some more on the wooden counter. Nobody moved to mop it
up. Saied raised the glass to drink, then slammed it down again. "Yaa salaam!" he roared.
He leaped up.
"What is it, O my friend?" asked Hisham, the propri-etor.
"My ring!" Saied shouted. He was wearing a large gold ring, and he'd been waving it under
the old man's nose for two solid hours. It had had a big, round diamond in its center.
"What's the matter with your ring?"
"Look for yourself! The stoneтАФmy diamondтАФit's gone!"
Hisham caught Saied's flapping arm and saw that, indeed, the diamond was now missing.
"Must have fallen out," the old man said, with the sort of folk wisdom you find only in these
petrified provincial villages.
"Yes, fallen out," said Saied, not calmed in the least. "But where?"
"Do you see it?"
Saied made a great show of searching the floor around his stool. "No, I'm sure it's not here,"
he said at last.
"Then it must be out in the alley. You must've lost it the last time you went out to piss."
Saied slammed the bar with his heavy fist. "And now it's getting dark, and I must catch the
bus."
"You still have time to search," said Hisham. He didn't sound very confident.
The Half-Hajj laughed without humor. "A stone like that, worth four thousand Tunisian dinars,
looks like a tiny pebble among a million others. In the twilight I'd never find it. What am I to
do?"
The old man chewed his lip and thought for a mo-ment. "You're determined to leave on the
bus, when it passes through?" he asked.
"I must, O my brother. I have urgent business."
"I'll help you if I can. Perhaps I can find the stone for
you. You must leave your name and address with me; then if I find the diamond, I'll send it to