"L'Amour, Louis - Last_of_the_Breed05" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

He frowned. "We thought we had more than we did, but we came up short. At least, I did."
"You mean you missed some supplies?"
"Oh, no! Not really." He gestured toward the shelves with their neat rows of cans, "I thought we had more than we did. I thought the cans were stacked three deep, but they were not."
Alekhin stared out the window. He looked sleepy. "Paul went to town that day? And what did you do?"
"Went to work, of course. I was drilling at the face of the tunnel. We have no power here, so it was hand work all the way."
Alekhin pushed his empty teacup toward Vanyushin. "Then nobody was at the cabin?"
Vanyushin shrugged. "No reason why there should be. Often we were both working, but there was nobody around to steal anything."
"But you did miss some canned goods."
"Oh, that was just a miscount! Paul probably put them on the shelves. We had a dozen cans of fish. It was fish from Baikal, my favorite." He shrugged. "Maybe he ate them himself."
"Some men will do that. I have known soldiers to hoard food." Alekhin sipped his tea. It was warm out there in the sunshine, another of those amazingly clear days for which the area near Yakutia was noted. "Lose anything else?"
"No, not really." Vanyushin frowned. "Come to think of it, yes. I lost my knife. My favorite knife. But that was Paul! Always using things and not putting them back where they belong."
Vanyushin made an excellent tea, Alekhin reflected. An excellent tea. His eyes scanned the tree-clad slopes, then returned to the cabin. He finished his tea and then stood up.
Vanyushin looked up at him. God, but the man was big! Not tall, just big. He was broad and thick and not with fat. Yet he moved as smoothly as a skilled ballet dancer. Vanyushin had known such men before, but not often. What they had was power.
Alekhin's eyes swept the cabin again. "Snug," he said, "but no place to spend the winter."
"No, I'll come down to Chita for that. I might even go to Irkutsk." Vanyushin stood up, too. "Sorry I couldn't help you. "
Alekhin's eyes swept over the old clothing hanging from nails in the log wall. Some of the pieces were quite dusty. If something was taken from there, how long before it would be noticed?
"You have helped," Alekhin said. "And thank you for the tea."
He went outside and looked up at the hills and smiled. Now he knew.
Alekhin did not often smile, but now he knew not only the American's direction but something of the kind of man he was. He had stolen food so cleverly that Vanyushin had not realized, and very likely some article of warm clothing. The knife had been his only false move, but that was necessity. A man can survive with a knife. A really good man needs nothing else. Of course, he might be wrong, but Alekhin was sure. His every instinct told him Makatozi had come this way.
A few hours later he was seated in Colonel Zamatev's office.
"East? The man's insane! It's too far! It will be too cold! Why not to China? That's the logical way, the easy way."
Alekhin stared at Zamatev from heavy-lidded eyes, eyes that seemed without expression, without emotion. "He is a man of the woods, a wilderness man. You would never catch him."
Zamatev felt a flash of anger. Alekhin presumed too much on their years of working together. How dare the Yakut say that to him? What had come over him?
"He is an Indian. To catch an Indian you must think like an Indian."
"Bah! He is a civilized man! An officer in his country's air force! He is a graduate of a university!"
"He is an Indian." The Yakut put his hand on his heart. "I feel it here. Whatever else he has become, he is still an Indian. "
"So? You understand him then? What will he do now?"
"He will try to escape. He will live like an Indian. If trouble comes he will die like an Indian, but first he will try one more thing."
"What thing?"
The Yakut looked at Colonel Zamatev, and not without satisfaction. "He will kill you," he said.