"O'Donnell, Peter - Modesty Blaise Pieces Of Modesty" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Peter)

CONTENTS
1. A Better Day to Die
28. The Giggle-wrecker
62. I Had a Date with Lady Janet
94. A Perfect Night to Break Your Neck
127. Salamander Four
158. The Soo Girl Charity

A Better Day to Die

The Reverend Leonard Jimson twisted his long fingers together and tried not to let his hatred encompass the dark-haired young woman who sat beside him. 'The curse of this world,' he said with passion, 'is violence. And you are an apostle and advocate of violence.'
'Never an apostle and rarely an advocate, Mr Jimson. I always try very hard to avoid it.' Modesty Blaise spoke absently. She was growing weary of this intense young missionary who sat with her in the back seat of the small ancient bus as it jolted along the rough road which wound north to San Tremino.
'Please don't think my loathing and disgust are directed towards you personally. I assure you they are not,' Leonard Jimson said feverishly, his long bony face staring out through the fly-spattered window into the white glare of the sun. 'I am bound by my calling to love all mankind, and to hate only the evil of their ways. To hate the sin, not the sinner, you understand.'
'Yes,' said Modesty Blaise. It would be a good three hours before the bus threaded its way through the dry and lonely hills to emerge in San Tremino. Arguing with Jimson served only to stimulate his evangelical fervour. Better to hope that he might talk himself to a halt from lack of opposition, even though the hope was slender. He had been at it for over an hour now, almost from the moment of leaving Orsita, and there was still no sign of flagging.
The trouble was that in the earlier and less censorious stages of his discourse she had been unwilling to shut him up with a direct snub, for she was under an obligation to him. And now
it was too late. He was carried away on the foaming flood-tide of his obsession.
It was last night that she and Willie Garvin had arrived by car at Orsita and put up at the one hotel the little town possessed. Their fellow guests were the Reverend Leonard Jimson, in charge of ten well-scrubbed but shabby girls in their middle teens, and the elderly walnut-faced driver of the even more elderly school bus.
Within the first half-hour at the hotel Willie Garvin, whose inquiring nature was matched by his gift for satisfying it, reported that the young priest with the fanatical blue eyes was named Jimson, that he worked for the South American Missionary Society which ran a school for orphaned girls in Saqueta, and that he was taking this small group of school-leavers to San Tremino, where the Society had arranged for the girls to go into service with several of the wealthier families there.
The normal route, the good main road, lay twenty miles to the west, but there the rebels under El Mico were making trouble again, and Jimson had decided to take his flock by the little-used road through the hills. Most traffic was looping far round to the east, but that put a full day on the journey. The mountain road was a sensible compromise.
It was the road Modesty and Willie had planned to take, but that was before Willie had returned on foot from the garage at eight o'clock this morning with a slightly dazed look and said: 'I laid an egg, Princess. I told 'em to service the car last night.'
'That's bad?'
'Bad enough. They ran it up on the ramp an' didn't worry about putting the handbrake on or lifting the stops. So it rolled off the end.'
Modesty winced. The car was a Mercedes. 'Right off?'
'No. Just the front wheels. Then it crunched down.'
She sighed. 'How long to fix it?'
'They reckon six or seven hours.'
'It's too long, Willie love. I want to be in San Tremino by noon or not long after.'
Garcia was dying in San Tremino. The cable from his
daughter had been sent to Modesty in England, but she was in Buenos Aires with Willie Garvin at the time. Her houseboy, Weng, had re-transmitted the cable, and she had left with Willie scarcely an hour after its arrival.
Garcia, dying at sixty, held a very special place in Modesty's past. They had both been members of the Louche group, the smalltime gang in Tangier for which Modesty had spun a wheel in the casino when she was seventeen. When Louche died under the guns of a rival gang it was Modesty Blaise who took over the remnants of Louche's frightened men and held them together.
It had not been easy. Garcia alone had backed her, with words and fist and gun. With his help she had held them, fed courage into them, and remade the gang in a new mould. That had been the beginning of The Network, which in a few years became the most successful criminal organization outside America.
Now Garcia was dying in San Tremino, his home town, where he had retired a rich man when Modesty dissolved The Network. It would make him very happy to see her once again before he died, the cable had said.
The accident to the car in Orsita was maddening. She hated the thought of even a few hours delay. There was nothing to be had for hire. Most of the transport in the little town still consisted of donkey-drawn carts.
Til hitch a lift on that school bus, Willie,' she said. 'You follow on with the car when it's ready.'
'OK. You reckon 'is Reverence won't mind?'
Tm not likely to corrupt his flock between here and San Tremino. Besides, it gives him the chance to play a Good Samaritan.'
The Reverend Leonard Jimson had obliged. He had eyed her warily when she first approached him, and then with a strange startled glance when she introduced herself by name. She had been puzzled by his expression then, but was no longer puzzled. After ten minutes in the bus with him she knew the answer.
Of all the world's clerics she had fallen in with one who, astonishingly, knew her reputation in some detail. His first
3
words when they were settled on the bus made that plain. 'We have a mutual acquaintance, Miss Blaise. You know Michael Delgado, I believe?'
'I used to know him.' She did not tell Jimson that Mike Delgado was dead; that in a valley in Afghanistan he had held her at gunpoint and mocked her because she was about to die; and that she had drawn and shot him dead in the blink of an eye as his own bullet tore through her arm. 'I haven't seen him for a couple of years now,' she said.
'Nor I for three years.' Jimson was grimly pleased about that. 'I had the misfortune to spend nearly two weeks in hospital with him in Rio, when he was hurt in a car accident. We were in adjoining beds. He is an evil man, Miss Blaise. A man of violence. And apart from his own exploits, he took pleasure in telling me a great deal about you Ч especially when he saw how deeply I was distressed by his tales.'
'He probably exaggerated. You made an ideal captive audience for him, and I've no doubt he'd extend himself to shock a man of your calling, Mr Jimson.'
'Oh, he enjoyed it immensely.' Jimson ground his palms together, jaw muscles twitching. 'But even allowing for exaggeration, I still find myself horrified that any woman should do the things you have done.'
There it had begun. From that point Jimson had developed his theme. It soon became clear that he was more than a pacifist. He was consumed by an obsessive conviction that violence was the root of all evil. He reviled every act of violence, criminal or otherwise, from warfare and gangsterdom down through mugging and what he called the vicious gladiatorial displays of boxing, to the domestic violence of smacking a child.
He rejected motive as irrelevant. Any act of violence, he claimed, whatever the motive, gave birth to concentric ripples of cause and effect, expanding to create further violence.
Half listening, Modesty wished that Willie were there. Willie Garvin's verse-by-verse knowledge of the Psalms with their many ringing martial phrases, a knowledge acquired long ago during a spell in a Calcutta jail with only a psalter to read, would have enabled him to enjoy a ding-dong battle with the Reverend Leonard Jimson.
There was little hope of Jimson running dry, she realized at last. His denunciation had already taken a personal trend, and he had plenty of material to work with.
'You have killed,' he said in a low voice, staring with lost eyes down the aisle of the little bus. The girls in his charge were chattering together in Spanish, taking no notice of him. Perhaps they spoke little English, or perhaps the theme was tediously familiar to them. 'You have killed,' he repeated, and shook his head as if dazed. 'That is an act beyond my imagination, an act so monstrous that it affronts human reason.'