"Paul Park - The Tourist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

And I thought, this is nothing. This feeling is nothing. Everybody
feels
this way.
The men in uniform collected our passports and then they marched us
toward
the terminal. They were not native to the time and place; they were
big,
fat men. I knew Dr Mog had hired mercenaries from all over--these ones
looked Lebanese or Israeli. They wore sunglasses and carried machine
pistols. They hustled us through the doors and into the VIP lounge, an
enormous air-conditioned room with plastic furniture and a single
plate-glass window that took up one whole wall. It appeared to lead
directly onto the street in front of the terminal. Certainly there was
a
crowd out there, perhaps a hundred and fifty people of all races and
nationalities, and they were staring in at us, their faces pressed
against
the glass.
One of the uniformed men moved to a corner of the window. A cord hung
from
the ceiling; he pulled down on it, and a dirty brown curtain inched
from
left to right across the glass wall. It made no difference to the
people
outside, and even when the curtain was closed I was still aware of
their
presence, their sad stares. If anything I was more aware. I sat down in
one of the moulded chairs with my back to the curtain, and watched some
customs officials explain two separate hoaxes, both fairly
straightforward.
There was a desk at the back of the room and they had spread our
passports
onto it. They were waiting for our luggage, and in the meantime they
checked our visas and especially our certificates of health. I was
prepared for this. The region is suffering from a high rate of AIDS
infection--almost 25% of the population in San Juan de la Cruz has
tested
HIV positive. The government seems unconcerned, but they have required
that all tourists be inoculated with the so-called AIDS vaccine, a
figment
 in the imagination of some medical conmen in Zaire, and unavailable in
the
US. Nevertheless it is now mandatory for travel in large parts of the
third world, as a way of extorting hard currency. I work in a hospital
research lab and I had the stamp; so, apparently, had someone else in
our
group, a thin man my own age, deeply tanned. His name was Paul.
Together
we watched the others gather around the desk, and watched them as they
came to understand their choice--to pay a fine of $150 per person, or