"Fritz Leiber - Best of Fritz Leiber" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

legged around the rim of his consciousness. JoeтАЩs own leg muscles twitched in sympathy and he felt
them grow supplely strong.

He coolly and searchingly looked the place over, his hand going out like it didnтАЩt belong to him to
separate a drink from a passing, gently bobbing tray. Finally his gaze settled on what he judged to be the
Number One Crap Table. All the Big Mushrooms seemed to be there, bald as the rest but standing tall as
toadstools. Then through a gap in them Joe saw on the other side of the table a figure still taller, but
dressed in a long dark coat with collar turned up and a dark slouch hat pulled low, so that only a triangle
of white face showed. A suspicion and a hope rose in Joe and he headed straight for the gap in the Big
Mushrooms.

As he got nearer, the white-legged and shiny-topped drifters eddying out of his way, his suspicion
received confirmation after confirmation and his hope budded and swelled. Back from one end of the
table was the fattest man heтАЩd ever seen, with a long cigar and a silver vest and a gold tie clasp at least
eight inches wide that just said in thick script, тАЬMr. Bones.тАЭ Back a little from the other end was the
nakedest change-girl yet and the only one heтАЩd seen whose tray, slung from her bare shoulders, and

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 best of fritz leiber

indenting her belly just below her breasts, was stacked with gold in gleaming little towers and with jet-
black chips. While the dice-girl, skinnier and taller and longer armed than his Wife even, didnтАЩt seem to
be wearing much but a pair of long white gloves. She was all right if you went for the type that isnтАЩt
much more than pale skin over bones with breasts like china doorknobs.

Beside each gambler was a high round table for his chips. The one by the gap was empty. Snapping his
fingers at the nearest silver change-girl, Joe traded ah1 his greasy dollars for an equal number of pale
chips and tweaked her left nipple for luck. She playfully snapped her teeth towards his fingers.

Not hurrying but not wasting any time, he advanced and carelessly dropped his modest stacks on the
empty table and took his place in the gap. He noted that the second Big Mushroom on his right had the
dice. His heart but no other part of him gave an extra jump. Then he steadily lifted his eyes and looked
straight across the table.

The coat was a shimmering elegant pillar of black satin with jet buttons, the upturned collar of fine dull
plush black as the darkest cellar, as was the slouch hat with down-turned brim and a band of only a thin
braid of black horse-hair. The arms of the coat were long, lesser satin pillars, ending in slim,
longfingered hands that moved swiftly when they did, but held each position of rest with a statueтАЩs poise.

Joe still couldnтАЩt see much of the face except for smooth lower forehead with never a bead or trickle of
sweatтАФthe eyebrows were like straight snippets of the hatтАЩs braidтАФand gaunt aristocratic cheeks and
narrow but somewhat flat nose. The complexion of the face wasnтАЩt as white as Joe had first judged.
There was a faint touch of brown in it, like ivory thatтАЩs just begun to age, or Venusian soapstone.
Another glance at the hands confirmed this.

Behind the man hi black was a knot of just about the flashiest and nastiest customers, male or female,
Joe had ever seen. He knew from one look that each bediamonded, pomaded bully had a belly gun
beneath the flap of his flowered vest and a blackjack in his hip pocket, and each snake-eyed sporting girl
a stiletto in her garter and a pearl-handled silver-plated derringer under the sequinned silk hi the hollow
between her jutting breasts.