"Resnick, Mike - Lucifer Jones 03 - Exploits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

from Portugese East Africa, checked into the Luk Kwok Hotel (which
thoughtfully rented its rooms by the hour, the night, or the
week), spent the next hour in a local restaurant trying to down a
bowl of soup with a pair of chopsticks, and then, realizing that
my funds needed replenishing, I got involved in a friendly little
game of chance involving two cubes of ivory with spots painted on
them. It was when a third cube slipped out of my sleeve that I was
invited to inspect the premises of the local jail.
That had been five days ago, and I had spent the intervening
time alternately trying not to mind the smell of dead fish, which
is what all of Hong King smelled like back in 1926, and gaining
some comfort by reading my well-worn copy of the Good Book, which
I ain't never without.
The girl that brought my grub to me was a charming little
thing named Mei Sung. She was right impressed to be serving a man
of the cloth, which I was back in those days, and I converted the
bejabbers out of her three or four times a day, which made my
incarceration in durance vile a mite easier to take.
As time crawled by I got to know my fellow inmates. There was
a Turkish dentist who had gassed a British officer to death in
what he assured me was an accident and would certainly have been
construed as such by the courts if he hadn't appropriated the
officer's wallet and wristwatch before reporting the poor fellow's
untimely demise. There was a young Brazilian student who sweated
up a storm and kept screaming things about anarchy and tyrants and
such and keeping everyone awake. There were two Chinamen dressed
all in black, who kept glaring at me every time I finished
converting Mei Sung. There was a Frenchman who kept saying he was
glad he had killed the chef, and that anyone who ruined _sole
almondine_ that badly deserved to die.
And there was me, the Right Reverend Honorable Doctor Lucifer
Jones, out of Moline, Illinois by way of the Dark Continent, where
I'd done my best to illuminate the dark, dreary lives of the
godless black heathen despite certain minor disagreements with the
constabularies of fourteen countries which culminated in my being
asked to establish the Tabernacle of Saint Luke on some other
land mass. But I already wrote that story, and I ain't going to go
into it again, since anyone who's read it knows that I'm a
righteous and God-fearing man who was just misunderstood.
On the fifth day of the thirty that I was to serve, they gave
me a roommate, a well-dressed Australian with expensive-looking
rings on all his fingers. His name was Rupert Cornwall, and he
explained that he had come to Hong Kong because Australia was a
pretty empty country and he liked crowds.
"And what do you do for a living, Brother Rupert?" I asked
him, by way of being polite.
"I'm an entrepreneur," he said. "I put opportunists together
with opportunities, and take a little percentage for my trouble."
"I didn't know being an entrepreneur was a criminal offense
in Hong King," I said.