"Robert Rankin - Brentford 05 - The Brentford Chainstore Mas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

Mr Compton-Cummings shook his bulbous head. Tm sorry, Jim,' he said. 'But it looks as though your
forebears were notable only for their extreme halitosis. They put the poo in Pooley, as it were.'
Pooley groaned. 'And this vile smear upon my ancestors you propose to publish in your book, Brentford:
A Study of its People and History?'
'It would be folly to leave it out.'
Jim rose from his chair, leaned across the paper-crowded desk, knotted a fist and displayed it beneath the
snubby nose of Mr Compton-Cummings. 'It would be a far greater folly to leave it in,' he suggested.
Mr Compton-Cummings put a thin smile upon his fat face. He was a Kent Compton-Cummings and
could trace his own ancestry back to the Battle of Agincourt. 'I would strongly advise against a course of
violence, Mr Pooley,' he said softly. 'For it is my duty to warn you that I am an exponent of Dimac, the
deadliest form of martial art known to mankind. With a single finger I could disfigure and disable you.'
Jim's fist hovered in the air. A shaft of sunlight angling down through the Georgian casement of the
genealogist's elegant office made it momentarily a thing of fragile beauty. Almost porcelain, it seemed.
Hardly a weapon of terror.
Jim chewed upon his bottom lip. 'Sir, you wind me up,' said he.
'I never do,' the other replied. 'Schooled by no

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less a man than the now legendary Count Dante himself, inventor of the Poison Hand technique. Perhaps
you know of it.'
Jim did. 'I don't,' he said.
'To maim and mutilate with little more than a fingertip's pressure. It is banned now under the Geneva
Convention, I believe.'
Jim's fist unfurled.
'Good man.' The fat one winked. 'Reseat yourself. I'll call for tea and crumpets.'
Jim sat down. 'It's just not fair,' he said.
We cannot choose our parents, nor they theirs. Such is the way of the world.' Mr Compton-Cummings
strained to rise from his chair and made good upon the third attempt. To the sound of considerable
wheezing and the creak of floorboards, he manoeuvred his ponderous bulk to the door and coughed out a
request for tea to a secretary who sat beyond, painting her toenails with Tipp-Ex.
Pooley's unfurled hand strayed towards a heavy onyx ashbowl. A single blow to the back of the head and
a sworn testimony on his own part that the fat man had merely tripped and fallen were all that would be
required. But the obscene thought passed on at the moment of its birth. Jim was not a man of violence, and
certainly not a murderer. He was just plain old Jim Pooley, bachelor of the parish of Brentford, man of the
turf and lounger at the bar counter of the Flying Swan.
He had hoped so much that he might have been more. That perhaps somewhere, way back down the
ancestral trail, there might have been one noble
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Pooley, who had achieved great ends, performed mighty deeds, written the poetry of passion . . .
Or left an unclaimed legacy!
But no.
Jim had been shafted again.
Not, as was usually the case, by the quirks of cruel fate, or the calumny of strangers, but by one of his own
tribe, and a long-dead one to boot. It really wasn't fair.
Mr Compton-Cummings ladled himself back into his reinforced chair and smiled once more upon Jim, who
leaned forward.
'Listen,' he said. 'What if, for a small remuneration, you were to change the name in the manuscript?'
'Change the name?' The genealogist puffed out his cheeks.
Jim nodded enthusiastically. 'To, say . . .' He plucked, as if from the air, the name of his closest friend.
'John Omally,' he said.