"Resnick, Mike - Lucifer Jones 01 - Adventurers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

running water, except that he couldn't swim and narrow bridges
scared the hell out of him.
I don't know why he should have been so interested in me,
especially considering that I was a man of the cloth back then,
but he was. When he wasn't trying to nab me in the neck, which was
pretty difficult inasmuch as poor Herbie was barely five feet tall
with his boots on, he kept coming up with crazy schemes about how
I should go to the local hospital -- not Schweitzer's, but one
you've probably never heard of -- and borrow some blood, for which
he promised to pay me in pounds or dollars or rupees or whatever
else he'd gotten off one of his more recent meals.
You know, I think about Herbie and some of the others I met,
and I'd have to say that even without the animals -- and I never
did see all that many of them anyway, except for the time I was an
ivory poacher -- Africa was a pretty interesting place to be back
then. I had my flock and my tabernacle, and of course there was
Herbie, who came smack-dab between my little business excursions
into opium and brothels, and there were Long Schmidt and Short
Schmidt, a pair of brothers who became gods, and there was
Capturin' Clyde Calhoun and a batch of others.
Africa was full of colorful folk like that in the old days.
They called themselves adventurers and explorers and hunters and
missionaries, but what they mostly were were outcasts. They
gathered in the civilized cities, most of them: Johannesburg,
Nairobi, Mombasa, Pretoria, places like that. Every now and then
they'd go out into the bush -- only bad pulp writers ever called
it the jungle -- after everything from ivory to lost gold mines to
half-naked white priestesses. A lot of them found ivory, and a few
found gold, but the only man I ever knew who went into the bush
and found himself a white woman was an Irishman named Burley
Rourke.
I met him just a few days after I got off the boat, young and
hopeful and sporting my first beard. Due to a series of
unfortunate misunderstandings during an informal game of chance, I
had been invited to inspect the premises of the Johannesburg gaol,
which, while tastefully appointed, was nevertheless not the
temporary residence I would have picked had the choice been mine.
Rourke was lying on a cot in the adjacent cell. He was a
tall, cadaverous man, with bushy black eyebrows and an enormous
dimple on his chin. He had the longest, whitest, most delicate
fingers I had ever seen on a man, and since even his fingernails
were clean, I asked him if he, like myself, was being incarcerated
due to a certain flexibility toward the hard and fast rules of the
game. He allowed that this was indeed the case, and I asked him if
his trade was cards or dice.
"Neither," he said. "I'm a doctor, specializing in diseases
of the gullible."
That's when I knew we were going to hit it off just fine.
"How about yourself?" said Rourke. "You look like some kind
of preacher man, all done up in black like you are."