"Himes, Chester - The Big Gold Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Himes Chester)

Laboriously, they spelled out their signatures below.
"Okay, now you can take this junk and load it," the Jew said, tucking the receipt carefully into a stuffed wallet and extracting a thin sheaf of banknotes.
Stolidly the helpers shuffled into the sitting room and began slamming the furniture about. The colored lady had retired from her grandstand seat in the front window when they appeared on the street with the first load, but other windows up and down the street on both sides were occupied with the customary Sunday afternoon sightseers. No significance was attached to the moving. In a number of windows only the grayish bottoms of big bare black feet resting on the sills were visible from below; and they remained stationary. A patrol car idled past, but the cops didn't give the movers a second look. Moving on Sunday was a perfectly legitimate undertaking; many people figured that was the best time to do it.
The helpers loaded the bureau and the dressing table in the van alongside the sitting room suite, then, after knocking the bed apart, brought it down in sections. One of them brought down the mattress, and the other brought down the springs. They packed the springs but left the mattress on the tailgate to be used as a buffer for the stuff from the kitchen. Before going back up, they went forward to the driver's compartment and drank heartily from a bottle of California muscatel wine.
A young man standing in the doorway of the adjoining tenement sucked on a marijuana cigarette and watched them with an expression of infantile concentration. He had a big, flat body, whose wide square shoulders gave the impression of abnormal strength. He had a small head with a round babyish face and smooth brown hairless skin. His big eyes with their drugwidened pupils looked completely senseless. Despite the heat he wore a heavy tweed jacket with thick shoulder pads, a widebrimmed beaver hat pulled low over his forehead and skintight mustard-colored corduroy pants tucked into black and white cowboy boots. On first sight he looked like a harmeless moron.
As soon as the Jew's two helpers went back upstairs, he squashed the marijuana butt, stuck it into the band of his hat and sauntered toward the truck. Without looking about to see whether or not he was being watched, he shouldered the mattress as though it were stuffed with down and began walking casually in the direction of Lenox Avenue.
A young brown-skinned woman, looking out of a window as he passed her tenement lodging, laughed melodiously.
"Hey, baby, come look at this spook with his house on his back," she called over her shoulder.
A muscular black mars, naked to the waist, appeared at her side. "He's probably found a new gal and he's moving in with her," he said.
The young man turned the corner at Lenox Avenue and disappeared.
When the helpers came down with the kitchen table and chairs, they noticed the mattress was missing. They looked up and down the street. The young woman saw them and shouted, "Ain't no need of looking, 'cause sleepy done got it."
"Sleepy who?" one of them asked.
"How do I know who?" she replied. "You think I knows any niggers who steals mattresses?"
The muscular man reappeared at her side, and the helpers had business back upstairs.
The Jew was sniffing about in the kitchen when they came up. Figuring he might find something good to eat, they didn't disturb him with news of the stolen mattress but hurried to get finished.
The Jew lifted the lid from a big iron pot on the stove and found it half filled with a concoction of boiled rice and squares of orange-colored meat that smelled like fish. He dished up some with his finger and tasted it. "Mmmm, it's good," he said. 'What is it?"
Rufus stuck his nose in the pot and tasted a bit of the brightcolored meat. "It's alligator tails and rice," he said. "It's a great dish in South Carolina." Then he added, "That's where my wife came from."
"Rest her soul," the Jew said, took a plate from the cupboard and began serving himself.
When the two helpers finished they found their boss eating from a plate on the stove and Rufus from a plate on top of the icebox.
"Tails and rice," they chorused in unison and joined the feast, putting their plates on the sink.
One stopped long enough to look for some whiskey but only found a bottle of black rum behind a stack of used paper sacks on the top shelf.
"You don't mind if us drink a little of this," he asked Rufus.
"Help yourself," Rufus said.
He and the Jew drank beer.
By the time they had cleaned the pot, чverybody felt loveydovey. It wasn't until the three of them had gone downstairs and were about to enter the van that the driver remembered to tell the Jew about the stolen mattress.
The Jew looked thoughtful. He wasn't worried about the mattress, but with everybody having the same idea, he resolved to look into the stuffings of the living room suite as soon as possible.
Rufus was thinking along the same lines. Upstairs he had taken off the locked door of the clothes closet by knocking out the pins of the hinges, and was searching inside. But he didn't find anything but clothes, two empty pasteboard suitcases, a stack of shoe boxes filled with slips containing the hit numbers for the past five years and a variety of nameless junk.
He looked as though he had been taken.
After a moment he shrugged and walked out of the flat like a man trying to play the part of a good loser. He locked the door with the key that Sugar had given him, went down the stairs and hesitated for a moment in the entrance. He didn't see anyone who seemed concerned with him, so he went down the street and around the corner and got into his car parked in the shade on Lenox Avenue.


4

On the south side, Harlem is bounded by 110th Street. It extends west to the foot of Morningside Heights, on which Columbia University stands. Manhattan Avenue, a block to the east of Morningside Drive, is one of the corner streets that screen the Harlem slums from view. The slum tenements give way suddenly to trees and well-kept apartment buildings, where the big cars of the Harlem underworld are parked bumper to bumper. Only crime and vice can pay the high rents charged in such borderline areas. That's where Rufus lived.
Sugar climbed the stairs of a modern brick building at the corner of 113th Street and knocked at the door of a secondfloor apartment.
Rufus answered. He had shed his green silk jacket, but was still wearing the pants along with the pink sport shirt.
"I want to talk to you," Sugar panted menacingly.
"I got a woman inside," Rufus said. "Let's go in the park."
They went down to the street and crossed to the small triangular park formed by the converging of Morningside Drive and Manhattan Avenue at 112th Street. Across the Drive was the rocky incline of Morningside Park, filled with Sunday picnickers. They sat on a green wooden bench.
"Look here, nigger, I told you just to take the television set," Sugar said accusingly.
"You told me she had some money hid there somewhere," Rufus contended. "I searched the place and I didn't find nothing."
"Hell, do you think I didn't search it before I came for you?"
"I heard she dropped dead," Rufus said. "I had to get something for my trouble."
"You didn't have no right to take the furniture -- that was mine," Sugar stated.
"If she had anything, she didn't hide it in that furniture," Rufus said. "You can take it from me, man; I have searched too many of these places to miss."
"She had something hidden there, all right," Sugar contended. "I'll bet my life on it."
Rufus looked skeptical. "You know she didn't have much sense. An ignorant woman like her always hides everything in the mattress. And there wasn't nothing in that mattress."
"She had sense enough to fool both of us so far," Sugar reminded him.
"Then she must have hid it somewhere else," Rufus said.
"Where else could she have hid it?" Sugar persisted.