"Charles de Lint - Mulengro" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

The Gypsy turned slowly to regard him. “Yekka buliasa nashti beshes pe done grastende,” he said
softly. Forgetting himself, he spoke Romany. With one behind you cannot sit on two horses. He saw the
puzzlement rise in Tom’s eyes, but made no attempt to explain. Let Tom think he spoke Hungarian. But
the old saying rang all too true in his own mind. One was either Rom or Gajo. There was no in between.

“Listen, John,” Tom said. “If you want a place to stay… ?”

Janfri shook his head. His dark features were pained now. A fire smoldered in the depths of his eyes that
were such a dark brown they were almost black.

“There is no John Owczarek,” he said. He turned and, before Tom could stop him, disappeared into the
crowd.

For a long moment Tom stood in shock. The noise of the crowd seemed to grow louder. The roar of the
flames and the pushing, jostling bodies around him combined to throw off his sense of the here and now.
The night was abruptly surreal, filled with strangeness and menace. A chill traveled up his spine. He
stared into the crowd, trying to see what had become of his friend.

“John!” he cried. “John!”

But the night had swallowed up the man he knew as John Owczarek as completely as though he had
never existed.




2
The body lay at the back of the alley and, looking at it, Detective-Sergeant Patrick Briggs of the Ottawa
Police Force bit down hard on the well-chewed stem of his unlit briar. He thought he might be sick.
Under the bright glare of the police photographer’s lights, there was no avoiding the gruesome sight.
The body lay in a sprawl. The head, half severed from the neck, was on its side, facing Briggs, its glazed
eyes holding his gaze with a vacant stare. A gory trail of abruptly disjoined muscle, esophagus, trachea,
spinal cord, jugular veins and carotid arteries trailed from below the jaw. It looked, Briggs thought, as
though something had chewed right through the neck.



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The body itself had sustained wounds as well. The right hand and forearm had been opened to the bone
—defense wounds caused by the victim’s unsuccessful attempt to fend off his attacker. The flesh and
muscle hung in ribbons from the arm. The left shoulder was no prettier. The cloth of the man’s jacket
hung in tatters, matted with blood, and clung wetly to the corpse and the ground around it. Briggs looked
away, hoping his stomach would settle down.

He was a veteran of twenty-four years on the Force—the last fifteen of them in General Assignment. To
some extent he was inured to the inevitable results of violence that his work brought him into contact
with—more so than a civilian confronted with the same situation might be. But at the same time, that
familiarity, the sheer volume of man’s brutality against his fellow man that he was forced to be witness