"Bamboo and blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Church James)

5

We went down the stairs without speaking. When we got outside, he kept walking to the front gate. The guards looked at him and then at me. I shrugged and followed him to the street. Finally, he stopped and turned around. "If I shot you right here, do you think anyone would mind?"

"Nice to see you, too."

He lit a cigarette. "You still don't smoke, I assume. No problems of conscience. Just left me for dead and danced home. I wondered what I'd say if I ever saw you again."

"What did you decide?"

"I forget." He threw away the cigarette. "You didn't even look surprised when you saw me."

"It crossed my mind." I started to walk. "Let's keep moving."

He fell in alongside, but didn't say anything.

"Where have you been in the meantime? We'd have run into each other sooner if you'd been in-country."

"Here and there. It took a few years to recover. Pretty good job, the way they put me together again. Good doctors. Very dedicated." He held up his hand. "Too bad I'm left-handed."

"Must make it hard to count."

He stopped. "I think I'll use two bullets. The first one so that it hurts, really bad. And the second one, so it hurts even more." He paused. "I can still count to two."

"You should be able to make it to three, but you're not even armed, so maybe we can skip through the tough talk." He'd lit another cigarette; his good hand was shaking a little, not much. "What did your crowd want with the foreigner?"

"Doesn't concern you." The smoke from the cigarette drifted slowly out of his mouth, as if he weren't breathing. "I'll tell you this, though. There's going to be hell to pay that he got out of the country. You know where he's from?"

"He says he's Swiss." That was true, as far as it went.

"You believe him? He's not Swiss. His mother is a Hungarian, that's why he has a Hungarian name. What did you think Jeno was?"

Actually, I'd checked that with the name trace section. I put in the request on a Wednesday morning, the day after our foreigner arrived. When nothing was back by Friday, I called. Real simple, they said. It's Italian. "You sure about that? His papers say he's Swiss." Don't worry, they said. We know names; it's Italian.

"So, maybe his father is Swiss." I avoided looking at the man's hand and concentrated on his face. There was nothing in it I recognized.

"His father was Israeli."

"Was."

"Dead."

"Is that so? You seem to know quite a bit."

"You'd be surprised." He threw away the second cigarette. "Let me ask you a question. Nothing complicated. Why'd you let him go?"

"We had our orders to be nice, show him around, keep him comfortable. Ending up in one of your holes didn't match the description. Anyway, he hadn't done anything wrong."

"Not in your book."

"Not in my book." I stepped off the curb. "You hungry? I'll buy you lunch." There hadn't been food for lunch for a long time, but we still made the offer sometimes, out of habit.

"No, thanks." He turned around and started walking back toward the gate. "I'd rather choke."