"Donald E Westlake - Bank Shot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westlake Donald E)

true role in life would be to operate a USO canteen, but here she was in this

white-collar ghetto in the middle of Long Island.

"No, no," Dortmunder said with an honest smile. Most of the housewives he

met in the course of business left him cold, but every once in a while he ran

across one like this who hadn't been lobotomized by life in the suburbs, and the

contact always made him cheerful. She's sprightly, he thought, and smiled some

more at the rare chance to use a word like that, even in interior monologue.

Then he turned the smile on the customer and said, "You write to them in Butte,

Montana. You tell them you want to know about, uh . . ."

"Anguilla," she suggested.

"Sure," Dortmunder said, as though he knew just what she meant. "Anything

you want. And they send you the whole story."

"My," she said and looked again at all the promo papers spread around her

neat living room.

"And don't forget the five annual roundups," Dortmunder told her, "to keep

your encyclopedia right up to date for the next five years."

"My," she said.

"And you can reserve the whole thing," Dortmunder said, "for a simple ten-

dollar deposit." There had been a time when he had been using the phrase

"measly ten-dollar deposit," but gradually he'd noticed that the prospects who

eventually turned the deal down almost always gave a visible wince at the word

"measly," so he'd switched to "simple" and the results had been a lot better.

Keep it simple, he decided, and you can't go wrong.

"Well, that's certainly something," the woman said. "Do you mind waiting

while I get my purse?"