"Gores, Joe - Kirinyaga" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gores Joe)

hold her.
"Youlookawful,"shesaid."Thinand''
"The annual bout of malaria. It's finished now."
She tugged at his arm, skin like satin and untouched by the
sun, auburn hair worn long and straight and parted in the mid-
dle like an Asian's. "Let me buy you a drink. I'm meeting Burke
at The Thorn Tree."
Let her buy, Kendrick thought. She'd have plenty of pence now,
living with the great Burke Hamlin. He felt a stab of jealousy.
They went out into bright Kenya sunshine, then under the col-
orful umbrellas shading The Thorn Tree's sidewalk tables. Ham-
lin was already there, surrounded by the usual sycophants, news-
paper and media people; three tables gad been pulled together to
accommodate them. Perkins, the young reporter on the East Afri-
can Standard, was asking a question. Kendrick knew Perkins
from the Kenya Mountain Club.
"How did you get that superb climbing footage? I've been on
scrambles up Kenya myself, and that camera angle"
"Two cameras, both set up on the edge of that glacier on Point
Lenana." Art Kaye, the hulking bespectacled chief cameraman,
had taken it as a technical question on the difficulties of location
shooting over three miles above sea level where cameras would
want to freeze up. "What you saw was put together out of both
magazines. Aeroflex 35mm's, one with a 120mm zoom for the
loose stuff, the other with a Questar for in tight."
A woman reporter put the focus back on Hamlin. Morna had sat
down next to the actor and had an unconsciously familiar hand on
his thigh with Kendrick's drink forgotten.
"Mr. Hamlin, when you slipped and were hanging by only one
handwas that deliberate? Or"
Burke Hamlin leaned back in his chair and sipped thoughtfully
at his drink, a faraway look in his pale blue eyes. A grin split his
craggy features. He had a rolling masculine voice that went well
with the six-three physique and fifty-inch chest.
"Let's just say it makes damned good theater."
Kendrick used that as an exit line, sliding backward out of the
crowd as Morna's lips formed the words: Call me. Behind him,
Hamlin's voice, beautifully projected, was explaining that Kenya
was a corruption of a much older Kikuyu word, Kirinyagawhich
meant, literally, mountain of whiteness. The house of god, home
of Ngai, the creator.
Kendrick had told him that himself a few days before.
Over their first drink Morna said, "A few days in Nairobi and I
remember why I left East Africa."
"Thanks for them few kind words, ma'am."
Kendrick had felt a suppressed masculine excitement ever since
picking her up at the hotel. They'd been good together, and he'd
found single-life sex unexpectedly conventional and bland, like
British cooking. Morna laughed and laid a warm hand on his.
"Present company excepted. You don't much care for Burke, do