"Himes, Chester - A Rage In Harlem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Himes Chester)

A RAGE IN HARLEM
by Chester Himes

Copyright 1957, 1985 by Chester Himes

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 1985.

First published in the U.S.A. as _For Love of Imabelle_.

FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, JUNE 1991


1

Hank counted the stack of money. It was a lot of money -- a hundred and fifty brand new ten-dollar bills. He looked at Jackson through cold yellow eyes.
"You give me fifteen C's -- right?"
He wanted it straight. It was strictly business.
He was a small, dapper man with mottled brown skin and thin straightened hair. He looked like business.
"That's right," Jackson said. "Fifteen hundred bucks."
It was strictly business with Jackson too.
Jackson was a short, black, fat man with purple-red gums and pearly white teeth made for laughing, but Jackson wasn't laughing. It was too serious for Jackson to be laughing. Jackson was only twenty-eight years old, but it was such serious business that he looked a good ten years older.
"You want me to make you fifteen G's -- right?" Hank kept after him.
"That's right," Jackson said. "Fifteen thousand bucks."
He tried to sound happy, but he was scared. Sweat was trickling from his short kinky hair. His round black face was glistening like an eight-ball.
"My cut'll be ten percent-- fifteen C's -- right?"
"That's right. I pays you fifteen hundred bucks for the deal."
"I take five percent for my end," Jodie said. "That's seven hundred and fifty. Okay?"
Jodie was a working stiff, a medium-sized, root-colored, roughskinned, muscular boy, dressed in a leather jacket and GI pants. His long, thick hair was straightened on the ends and burnt red, and nappy at the roots where it grew out black. It hadn't been cut since New Year's Eve and this was already the middle of February. One look atJodie was enough to tell that he was strictly a square.
"Okay," Jackson said. "You gets seven hundred and fifty for your end."
It was Jodie who had got Hank to make all this money for him.
"I gets the rest," Imabelle said.
The others laughed.
Imabeile was Jackson's woman. She was a cushioned-lipped, hot-bodied, banana-skin chick with the speckled-brown eyes of a teaser and the high-arched, ball-bearing hips of a natural-born _amante_. Jackson was as crazy about her as moose for doe.
They were standing around the kitchen table. The window looked out on 142nd Street. Snow was falling on the ice-locked piles of garbage stretching like levees along the gutters as far as the eye could see.
Jackson and Imabelle lived in a room down the hall. Their landlady was at work and the other roomers were absent. They had the place to themselves.
Hank was going to turn Jackson's hundred and fifty ten-dollar bills into a hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills.
Jackson watched Hank roll each bill carefully into a sheet of chemical paper, stick the roll into a cardboard tube shaped like a firecracker, and stack the tubes in the oven of the new gas stove.
Jackson's eyes were red with suspicion.
"You sure you're using the right paper?"
"I ought to know it. I made it," Hank said.
Hank was the only man in the world who possessed the chemically treated paper that was capable of raising the denomination of money. He had developed it himself.
Nevertheless Jackson watched Hank's every move. He even studied the back of Hank's head when Hank turned to put the money into the oven.
"Don't you be so worried, Daddy," Imabelle said, putting her smooth yellow arm about his black-coated shoulder. "You know it can't fail. You saw him do it before."
Jackson had seen him do it before, true enough. Hank had given him a demonstration two days before. He had turned a ten into a hundred right before Jackson's eyes. Jackson had taken the hundred to the bank. He had told the clerk he had won it shooting dice and had asked the clerk if it was good. The clerk had said it was as good as if it had been made in the mint. Hank had had the hundred changed and had given Jackson back his ten. Jackson knew that Hank could do it.
But this time it was for keeps.
That was all the money Jackson had in the world. All the money he'd saved in the five years he'd worked for Mr. H. Exodus Clay, the undertaker And that hadn't come easy. He drove the limousines for the funerals, brought in the dead in the pickup hearse, cleaned the chapel, washed the bodies and swept out the embalming room, hauled away the garbage cans of clotted blood, trimmed meat and rotten guts.
All the money he could get Mr. Clay to advance him on his salary. All the money he could borrow from his friends. He'd pawned his good clothes, his gold watch and his imitation diamond stickpin and the gold signet ring he'd found in a dead man's pocket. Jackson didn't want anything to happen.
"I ain't worried," Jackson said. "I'm just nervous, that's all. I don't want to get caught."
"How're we goin' to get caught, Daddy? Ain't nobody got no idea what we're doing here."
Hank closed the oven door and lit the gas.