"WEST FROM SINGAPORE" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

but we're cooperating."
"Then," Mayo said thoughtfully, nodding his head toward the broad-beamed, battered
tramp freighter, "you might add her to your list of suspects."
"That's the Natuna out of Surabaya, isn't it? Didn't you used to be her skipper?"
"Yeah." Ponga Jim shifted his position to let the breeze blow under his coat. He
was wearing a gun, and the day was hot. "Then the company sold her to Pete Lucieno,
and I quit. I wouldn't work for that dope peddler on a bet. I'm no lily of the valley,
and frankly, I'm not making any boasts about being above picking up a slightly illegal
dollar-I've made some of your British pearl fisheries out of season before now, and
a few other things-but I draw the line at Pete's kind of stuff."
"No love lost, I guess?" Arnold squinted up at Jim, smiling. "Not a bit. He'd consider
it a privilege to cut my heart out. So would Dago Frank, that major-domo of his,
or Blue Coley. And I don't fancy them."
Major Arnold soon left, walking back up toward the club. Ponga Jim lighted a cigarette
and stared thoughtfully at the Natuna.
Then his eyes shifted to the other ship in port, a big white freighter, the Carlsberg.
Although there were three or four schooners, and a scattering of smaller craft, it
was the two freighters that held his attention.
"Now, Major William," he said whimsically, "you should never miss a bet. Being an
old seafaring man, it strikes me as being somewhat phony for that native scow to
be shoving herself around in circles. Especially when she goes behind the
Carlsberg
riding high and comes out with darn little freeboard. Then she wanders around, gets
behind the
Natuna, and comes out riding high in the water again.
"Now the only Carlsberg I ever knew sailed out of Bremen, not Copenhagen." Mayo's
eyes flickered to the sleek white Carlsberg.
"So, putting together a possibility of registry changed from Bremen to Copenhagen,
some mysterious goings-on connected with the
Natuna,
a scow whose owners would frame their
4
15
EAST OF GORONTALO
mothers for a dollar six-bits, a war, and William's rumors, what do you have?"
Ponga Jim Mayo straightened up and sauntered off down the dock. It was nearly sundown,
and the seven guilders that remained in his pocket suggested food. After thatJim
walked into Chino John's and stopped at the bar.
"Give me a beer," he said, glancing around. A man standing nearby turned to face
Mayo.
"Well, if it isn't my old friend Ponga Jim!" he sneered. "On the beach again, no?"
Jim looked at Dago Frank coolly and then past him at Lucieno. The fat little Portuguese
glistened with perspiration and illconcealed hatred.
"Yeah," Jim said. "Anytime to keep out of the company of rats."
"I disdain that remark," Lucieno said. "I disdain it."
"You'd better," Jim said cheerfully. "If you took it up, I'd pull your fat nose for
you!"
Dago Frank's eyes narrowed. He stepped closer. "Then maybe you pull mine, eh?" he
challenged.
Ponga Jim's right fist snapped up in a jarring right that knocked every bit of wind