"Innes, Hammond - The Killer Mine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Innes Hammond)

'No -- and Ah dinna care,' was the reply.

'Two years,' I answered. 'Two years up in the lignite mines near Florence. Nearly a half a million lire. I had to pay through the nose for sterling.'

'More fool you,' Mulligan snapped back. 'Ye could've made it in a single trip wi' one of the gangs operating the Black Market in the Naples area.'

'Well, I made it the honest way,' I answered him. I looked up at him out of the corner of my eyes. He was watching me intently, the pistol grasped by the barrel. He must have seen me watching him, for his hand tightened on the weapon. I shifted my arm so that my hand was almost touching his boot. I glanced at the waves seeping against the steep sandy shore. The stern of the boat lifted. We were almost in the break now. The suck of the backwash was quite loud. I shifted my weight so that I could use my arms. One heave and he'd be in the water and then we'd see who'd have the money. I felt my fingers touch the wet rubber of his sea boots. I braced my back against the gunnel. And at that moment the stern lifted again and Mulligan said, 'Reecht, boys -- run her in.' He looked down at me and said, ''Mais avec toi, man petit, je ne cours pas des chances' The butt of the pistol rose and fell. My head seemed to crack like a broken eggshell and everything went black.

When I came to I thought I was in my bunk with a hangover. It was so comfortable and my head throbbed with pain. I felt, chilly and moved my hands to pull the bedclothes up. But there were no bedclothes. A slight breeze was ruffling through my hair and my feet were wet. My head throbbed and the waves flopped and seethed to the hammer of the pain. I rolled over on my back and opened my eyes.

Above me the stars were dimming with the pale light of morning. I moved my hands under me and encountered sand. The sound of a wave scattered pain through my head and water swilled up to my buttocks. I sat up with a groan and gazed about me through pain-dimmed eyes. I was sitting on a beach of yellow sand, my feet stretched over the tide mark. A wave rose up out of the half light, broke white and flooded up the beach, wetting me to the waist.

I scrambled back out of reach of the advancing tide. I fingered my scalp gently. Through matted hair my fingers encountered an ugly bump just above the left ear and another right at the back of the skull. When I looked at my hand there was half-congealed blood mixed with sand. For a moment I sat there with my head in my hands, trying to collect my thoughts. This must be England -- the Cornish coast, right by Land's End. And -- that was it -- I had just five pounds. Five pounds and no background. It wasn't much of an introduction to my native land. In a sudden frenzy of fear I thrust my fingers into the zip-fastened pocket of my money belt. I brought out the wad of paper that had replaced my hundred and fifty one pound notes. Toilet paper. With trembling hands I shredded it through, searching for the five pounds that swine Mulligan had said he'd left me. Piece by piece I separated those sheets of toilet paper and let them drift away in the wind. Then I ran through the pockets of my jacket. Nothing. But in the right hand pocket of my trousers I found it. It was a mean little wisp of folded notes, wet and stained. But, oh God, how glad I was of it. In my fear that I had been left nothing, those five sodden notes seemed suddenly gigantic wealth.

I put them in the pocket of my belt and struggled to my feet. I felt feint and slightly sick. The cliffs reeled and toppled. I stumbled to the edge of the sea and doused my head with water till my scalp wound tingled with the salt. Then I turned and began to struggle along the sands towards the inward curve of the bay.

The dawn came reluctantly, cold and grey, showing me the sweep of the bay. The farther tip of it was thrust out into the sea and ended in a tumble of jagged rocks. The village of Sennen Cove huddled beneath the headland. The wind had freshened from the sou-west and the sea was already flecked with little white-caps. Before I was halfway across the bay, the sun had risen above the hills inland - an angry red disc that barely penetrated the mist of low cloud that had trailed with the dawn across the sky. A few minutes later the sun disappeared. An autumnal chill was in the air. I stopped and looked back. The black granite cliffs which I had left were capped with a veil of cloud. Even as I watched the mist thickened and swept down, blotting out the northern limit of the bay entirely. Within a few minutes the mist had closed down and I was walking through a thin grey void, my world reduced to sand and the surf of breaking waves. The chill of the moist blanket of the mist seeped through my damp jersey and ate into my very bones. So this was England! I thought of the sunshine and the blue skies of Italy. Forgotten in that moment was all the dirt and flies and squalor, the vindictive sneers of the Italians, the loneliness. I wished I had not come.



CHAPTER TWO


At the Ding Dong Mine


I have set down in detail the manner of my return to my native Cornwall because, like 'the prelude to an opera, it was all of a part with the strange events that followed. As an outcast myself, it was inevitable that I should be thrown into company with men who themselves lived outside the law. At the time, I admit, I felt that I was the subject of a series of most fetal coincidences. But now that I look back on the whole affair, I feel that it was less a series of coincidences than a natural sequence, one thing leading inevitably to another. From the moment that I decided 10 take Dave Tanner's advice and reurn to England on the Arisaig I was set upon a course that led me with terrible directness to Cripples' Ease.

It may sound fantastic. But then is anything more fantastic than life itself? I have so often been angered by people who damn books from the comfortable security of their armchairs for being too fantastic. I have read everything I have ever been able to lay my hands on, from the Just So Stories to War and Peace -- that's the way I got myself educated -- and I have yet to read any book that was more fantastic than the stories I've heard in the mining camps of the Rockies or down under in the Coolgardie gold district of Western Australia. And yet, I will say this, that if I had been told as I strode over the mist-shrouded road to Penzance, that I was walking straight into a terrible mine disaster - not only that, but into a pitiful story of madness and greed that involved my own family history - then I just should not have believed it.

For one thing I was far too absorbed in my own wretchedness. I had dreamed so often of this homecoming. All Cornishmen do. Their dream is of a lucky strike and then back to Cornwall to swagger their wealth in the mining towns with big talk of the things they've done and the places they've been. And here was I, back in Cornwall, an outcast -- alone and penniless. I doubt whether there was any one more depressed, more completely dispirited by his own sense of loneliness -- yes, and his sense of fear -- than I was. And all round me was the deep, soundlessness of the mist in place of the blazing blue of the Italian skies.

There was no traffic on the road. Everything was dead and cold and wet. Old tales of the tinners - old superstitions that I'd heard by the camp fires - came to my mind. I'd thought them stupid tales at the time. Piskies, the Giants, the Knockers, the Black Dogs, the Dead Hand and a host of other half-remembered beliefs - they all seemed real enough up there in the mist on the road to Penzance. There were times when I could have sworn somebody was following me. But it was just my imagination. That and the fact that I'd have been scared of my own shadow if the sun had suddenly broken through the mist.

The trouble was that I hadn't understood what it would be like coming back to an organised society. I hadn't realised quite how much of an outcast I should feel. Four years in Italy is apt to give you the idea that the organisation of the masses is such an impossible task that any individual can discreetly lose himself in the crowd.

But in Sennen Cove, after breakfasting at the inn under the curious gaze of the waiter, I had gone into the little general stores to get a map of the district. The shop was warm and friendly, full of seaside things with a stand of postcards crudely illustrating old seaside jokes. It reminded me of little places near Perth. A girl was talking to a man with a little brushed-up, sandy moustache - obviously an officer on leave. 'You wouldn't think it possible, more than three years after the end of the war,' she was saying, 'Nearly fifteen thousand, it says. Listen to this -" You 'II find them on the race tracks, in the Black Market, running restaurants, selling bad liquor, organising prostitution, gambling and vice, dealing in second hand cars, phoney antiques, stolen clothing -- they're mixed up in every rotten racket in the country." Parasites - that's what this paper calls them. And that's what they are.' She threw the paper down on the counter. It lay open at the page she had been looking at. The headline ran -- FIFTEEN THOUSAND DESERTERS. 'I know what I'd do with them if I were the Government,' the girl added. 'Round them up and send them to the coal mines for three years. That'd teach them.'

I had bought my map and hurried out of the shop, scared that the girl would notice me. Unseen eyes seemed watching me from the blind windows of the cottages as I hastened up the damp street and footsteps seemed to follow me as I climbed the hill to the main road. A little knot of people waiting for the bus at the school watched me curiously as I hurried by. I felt like a leper, so raw were my nerves and so much did I hate myself.

I reached Penzance shortly after noon, having been given a lift over the last three miles of the road by a lorry loaded with china clay. It was market day in Penzance. I strolled down to the waterfront. There were men dressed much the same as myself in seamen's jerseys and a jacket. Nobody took any notice of me. I felt suddenly at ease for the first time since I had landed in England.

Drifters and single-funnelled coasters lay alongside the piers and the rattle of cranes and donkey engines kept the gulls wheeling over the oily harbour scum. The mist had lifted and thinned to a golden veil. The streets were already beginning to dry. Across the Albert Pier, St. Michael's Mount gleamed like a fairy castle in a shaft of sunlight.

I lit a cigarette and, leaning against the iron railing by the car park, fished in my wallet for Dave Tanner's address. As I unfolded the crumpled sheet of notepaper the sun came through and the rain-washed faces of the houses smiled down at me from the low hill on which the town is built. I felt warm and relaxed as I read through Tanner's letter :

2 Harbour Terrace Penzance, Cornwall 29th May. Dear Jim, I hear things are not what they were in Italy now that the Army's moved north and the peace treaty has been signed. If you're getting tired of the Ities and would like a change of air, I can fix you up with a job in England - no questions asked! The bearer of this note - name of Shorty - can fix passage for you in the Arisaig which will be taking on cargo in Livorno.

Is Maria the same dark-eyed little bitch I knew or has she retired to raise a brood of American bambini? If she is still at the Pappagallo, give her my love, will you? England is all controls and restrictions, but those who know their way about do all right, same as we do in Italy. But I miss the sun and the signorinas.