"Lavie Tidhar - Midnight Folk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tidhar Lavie)

So I was sitting in my tiny apartment counting the bricks and watching soaps
on the box and thinking of a drink. It was cold. When I first arrived in London I
stayed with a girl I knew, an American flower transplanted without much success in
this ancient metropolis, held hands and shivered like a madman and dreamed of the
road, and the trip to Italy with my one true love that IтАЩve never taken and now never
will, and of the secret byways of the world.

тАЬSal,тАЭ my friend said to me one night. We were sitting on her small brown
sofa without our clothes and with the ancient heater working overtime by our side,
eating curry from little silver packets. I dipped a large chunk of Naan bread into my
chicken Madras and bit it and felt warmth flood me for the fraction of a second like
a remote gun shot.

тАЬYes, darling?тАЭ I was affecting a British accent in those days, the kind bad
actors use in Hollywood movies, all upper-class and superior, as if oneтАЩs nose is full
of snot through which the words ooze out with difficulty.

тАЬItтАЩs time you got yourself your own place,тАЭ she said, her sweet voice
vaporizing in the heat of the room. тАЬAnd a job, too.тАЭ She put her hand on mine,
tenderness in her eyes like the bite of a snake. I was suddenly angry. I wanted to
shout at the moon, berate the unfairness of this life I found myself in, cry for the
road and for friends left behind. I got ready to stand up and leave, as I was, to step
blissfully into the cold calm arms of night, naked and unbowed and unafraid.

But she was right, and I didnтАЩt.

I told you I was getting better, didnтАЩt I.

Instead, I finished my curry in silence, and in the small hours of the night
made love to that strange undemanding creature for the last time. The next day I
packed my bag and left and in a moment of sheer exhaustion walking around Mungo
Park, which never fails to evoke in me thoughts of Old Bull Lee in Tangiers, found
this place and paid for it there and then and moved in.

And found employment the next day as a private investigator.

It wasnтАЩt a bad job, really. I worked for a guy called Little Mo Cohen, a big
barrel of a man, a Jew of the old East End, a former gangster with a love of black
and white movies, a mountain of muscle with the heart of a child.

I did divorces, mainly.
 тАЬPara-dise!тАЭ Little Mo would shout from his office, a small cramped space in
the basement of a building on Harley Street that did not officially exist and which the
doctors and nurses who worked there treated with a kind of silent horror, that such
an undignified thing as a private dick could so clatter such a fastidious establishment
in such a dignified setting. But Little Mo didnтАЩt give a damn.

тАЬPara-dise!тАЭ heтАЩd call me, and when I walked in heтАЩd thrust a hand full of
papers in my face and tell me to get on with it, and oh-by-the way did I watch the