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

Casablanca re-run last night and wasnтАЩt Ingrid Bergman wonderful? Listening to Mo,
youтАЩd easily have thought Casablanca was showing on the box every night of the
week.

I donтАЩt know. Maybe, for him, it did.

The papers would almost always turn out to be names, and places, and
photographs: men and women who were married to other men and women who
suspected they were cheating on them, who were coming home later and later every
night, who stayed at the office overnight, who had appointments with their
hair-dresser at strange hours, who came back with a foreign scent on their clothes
and foreign shades of lipstick on their collars.

The usual.

IтАЩd be told where they lived and when they left, and I would follow them
around, a cheap automatic camera in one coat pocket, boxes of cigarettes in the
other.

It was a living.

I got used to standing in the cold, smoking cigarette after cigarette, a mound
of butts gathering by my side like a tombstone for Old Bull LeeтАЩs wife, who he one
day killed when they were both trippinтАЩ the light fantastic, shooting the apple on her
head like he was William Tell and of course missing the apple but not her. He was a
big one for guns, was Old Bull Lee. Everything that made a loud bang and could
cause lots of big, noisy damage delighted him.

So IтАЩd stand there, watching the Jills and the Johns come and go and do their
stuff, and IтАЩd photograph them in the compromising position and get the hell out of
there, and hand the camera over to Mo and get my money. тАЬMake sure you get them
in the compromising position, Para-dise,тАЭ Little Mo would say. I kept hoping he
would take up smoking, I pictured him every day with a small cheap cigar in his
mouth, chewed and chewed and never lit, but Mo was against smoking. WouldnтАЩt
even touch sweets. тАЬRot your teeth, they do,тАЭ heтАЩd say to me confidentially, paging
through the latest Kojak paperback and scratching his own bald head with his big
meaty fingers that were like five iron bars welded together. тАЬTrust me.тАЭ
 I did. I worked the old beat up hopeless divorce route at night, slept in my
little cell during the day, and smoked. It was a job.

ItтАЩs how I met Lola.

I was hanging out at the Purple Rose, a dingy strip joint in the back of
Shaftesbury Avenue, a black hole for hustlers and whores and the wrong kind of
tourist, where businessmen with no business chilled to the tune of canned music and
wet their pants over the angels of the night who rubbed thighs against crotches for a
minor fee.

Her name was Lola and she was a dancer, sliding up and down gleaming metal
poles in sweat-drenched, smoke-filled underground rooms in which the stale scent of