"Paul-Loup Sulitzer - The Green King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sulitzer Paul Loup)

He stood up to leave, in a caIrn and courteous manner. She realized then that he was probably alone in Paris, and in France, maybe even completely without friends or family. Not daring to offer him money, she tried to think, almost desperately, of how she could help him, and impulsively she invited him to have lunch with her the following day. She saw him hesitate, but he finally said yes, he would come "gladly." He remained a few moments longer on the threshold, looking at her fixedly and gravely with his surprising gray eyes. She suddenly felt a strange timidity come over her, which she pushed away with a feeble joke.
"And I promise not to try to seduce you."
"It's too late," he said with a sparkle in his eyes. "As my father would have said, once again, you have already made my fortress crumble."
He brushed the old woman's hand with his lips and left.
The following morning she received a note, along with a rose. In small, tight handwriting, with elegant but strongly defined downstrokes, he asked her to forgive him for not being able to accept her invitation; he had to leave Paris that very day.
"I met," she wrote to David one week later, "the most disconcerting boy, the strangest and yet also the most extraordinarily intelligent boy I've met in sixty-five years. If there is anything that you can do, with or without my help, for Reb Michael Klimrod, do it, David. I had the feeling he was in a rather miserable situation at the moment, although he said nothing of it to me
The news of Reb Klimrod's reappearance, and especially the fact that he had turned up at his French grandmother's house, stupefied David Settiniaz, who had been certain that he'd never hear of the man again. By return mail, he told his grandmother that he, too, had been strongly affected by the fellow and he asked her, "should he appear again," to try to find out where he could be reached, because he, too, would like to see his "Austrian friend" again.

4

Dov Lazarus sat back with a peaceful sigh in one of the wicker armchairs of the Cafщ de Paris, on Place de France in Tangiers. "Martini?" Reb shook his head. Lazarus ordered a rosщ martini for himself, a drink he had recently switched to, and a mint tea for his companion. He began to speak about gold, in Yiddish. Gold was beginning to abound in Tangiers, he said; it came from all over Europe, even from Switzerland-after all, the Russians were in Vienna and who was to say that they would always be stopped by Swiss neutrality? Besides, the gold markets in Paris and London were closed, and inflation .
"Do you know what inflation is, kid?"
"Yes," said Reb indifferently.
He had turned eighteen aboard the .Djennщ, between Marseilles and Tangiers. When they had arrived, Lazarus had booked two rooms at the Hotel Minzah. Reb had then walked along the Boulevard Pasteur alone while his companion was at a meeting. He had stood on the observation deck from which one can see the magnificence of the Straits of Gibraltar and Malabata Point, and had wandered into the Gran Socco.
"Are you listening to me, kid?"
"Yes."
"You don't look like you are. Reb, there is money to be made. In the Legislative Assembly of the International Zone, there are three Jews. I've met one of them. They are shortly going to decide to extend to gold the benefits of an undeclared deposit; that is to say, anyone, resident or not, will be able to deposit any amount of gold without paying taxes. In France alone there are thousands of guys dreaming about gold, because of the inflation. Do you know what the difference is between an ingot of gold in Zurich and the same ingot in Lyon,
for example? Two hundred thousand francs. We could, using Tangiers as a base, deliver gold in small planes, using the old fields of the French Resistance . .
"I don't know how to fly a plane."
A waiter who was at least seventy-five years old and, it turned out, spoke eight or ten languages brought them their drinks and the package of cigarettes Lazarus had also ordered. Lazarus kept his shiny little eyes glued to Reb's face.
"You in a bad mood, kid?"
The silence continued. The gray eyes turned to meet his gaze. Lazarus smiled.
"You don't have a dime, you have no family, no place to go. Without me, you'd probably starve. I've taught you everything. I even brought your first woman to your bed. Right?"
"Right."
"Did you kill anyone with Anielewitch?"
Before meeting Dov, Reb had strolled through the markets, coming back through Rue du Statut to the entrance to the Mendoubia, which overflowed with hibiscus and where there were dragon trees thought to be eight hundred years old. He had seen the man and had recognized him instantly, despite his civilian clothing, despite his mustache and his longer hair. With his jacket over his arm, mopping his neck with a handkerchief, the man was talking pleasantly to some British sailors who were arguing with a moneychanger. It wasn't Erich Steyr, or Hochreiner. Reb, who had a "rather good memory," had seen him only once, four years earlier. It had been at Belzec, on July 17, 1942. This man had walked through the rows of Jews who had just been brought from Lvov, and, in almost perfect Yiddish, had asked them all to write a letter to their families, to reassure them and tell them that they were not being mistreated, and that their deportation had not, in fact, been so terrible
"You didn't answer me," said Dov.
"No."
"You didn't kill anyone?"
Reb smiled, shaking his head.
"I didn't answer you."
Lazarus picked up the pack of Philip Morris the waiter had brought with the mint tea and the martini.
"I was talking to some people in the market. In Italian, they call this Ufumu, the smoke. They say you can make a lot of money with this also."

It was Dov Lazarus who financed the first operation, which took place in the second half of October. Then they did ten more, with the same destination: Spain. The system was easy, provided you could get a boat: the mild cigarettes that came from the United States were officially in transit in Tangiers, where their cost was thirty francs per pack, and in order to take them out, legally, you had only to indicate a port of destination where tobacco imports were legal, usually Malta. They would agree with Spanish buyers from Valencia to a meeting place at sea, outside territorial waters, since otherwise the Spanish ran the risk of meeting up with Franco's customs men. There were almost no risks, and the profit was quite satisfactory: one could resell for between fifty and sixty francs the pack bought in Tangiers for thirty. And since they sometimes carried fifty cases a trip, that is, twenty-five thousand packs, the profit from just one expedition could reach five or six hundred thousand francs-or, with the dollar then at one hundred and twenty francs, between four and five thousand dollars. It was not surprising, therefore, that there were fights over the business, which had not yet fallen into the hands of vagrants; former officers of the Royal Navy, a future French minister, British and Italian aristocrats, and even a crew made up entirely of lesbians, who sailed under a pink flag, were elbowing each other among an assortment of other smugglers.
After the first six trips, Reb was in a position to reimburse Lazarus for his initial investment.
"You don't have to do that," said Dov. "I didn't ask you to."
"I prefer it this way," answered Reb simply.
A man was present during this exchange, a Frenchman named Henri Haardt, who dreamed of adventure and had come from Nice to Tangiers only for that purpose. Haardt and Klimrod had met accidentally, standing in front of the shelves in the Librairie des Colonnes bookstore. The man from Nice, who was a history scholar, was the first to strike up a conversation-about the book this tall fellow was looking through. It was Spengler's Decline of the West, which Reb had almost suc
ceeded in reading entirely. During the prolonged conversation on the terrace of the nearby cafщ, the revelation that this young Spengler reader was only eighteen amazed Haardt, who was thirty, but the fact that he was dealing in cigarettes greatly intrigued him. He himself had a few new ideas on the subject, and could even imagine a "boulevard of cigarettes" going from Tangiers to the French and Italian coasts, where one could sell a pack of Philip Morris or Chesterfields for up to one hundred francs. .
"And if, instead of fifty cases per trip, we carried five hundred or one thousand, even more-it's a simple question of boats-the profits would soon be fabulous. One million dollars a year would not be too far-fetched."
Haardt was surprised at his own continued obstinacy in wanting to convince a kid to team up with him. A kid who was hesitating, visibly. Certainly not for lack of nerve or ambition. There was something else.
"Is it your Irish friend? Because of him?"
"Not really."
"If you want," Haardt finally said, "we could all three get together. Although .
He did not like Dov Lazarus (whom he knew only as O'Shea, a pseudonym he used the whole time he was in Tangiers) and actually was frightened of him. On two or three occasions, he had heard him in heated conversation, in English, with some rather suspicious-looking Italian-Americans, mentioning names like Hymie Weiss, Meyer Lansky, Lepke Buchalter, Lucky Luciano, the way former soldiers speak of their commanders. Haardt had a frantic desire for adventure, but within reasonable limits. A Lazarus-O'Shea seemed off-limits to him, just as the ill-matched duo he formed with young Hubrecht did. Ill-matched and dangerous.
All in all, Haardt was behaving like an older brother. And wondering why.
He couldn't do anything about the Langen incident. He was only a witness to it, and not even a direct one.

"They are Dutch," said Lazarus. "One is named Langen and the other one De Groot, or something like that. One of them has a license as a master mariner, and we need a real captain,