"Mike Resnick - Lucifer Jones - A Jaguar Never Changes Its Stripes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

with yourself? I ain’t seen you since we hunted that Yeti in the Himalayas.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it wasn’t no Yeti but just a eight-foot-tall basketball player on the
lam from the mob for not shaving points, so I told him everything I’d experienced since then, covering
such heroic adventures as the Clubfoot of Notre Dame, the Island of Annoyed Souls, my six hours as
President of San Palmero, and many other such exploits, which I’ve writ about before and won’t thrill
you with again (or at least not right this moment), and Clyde, for his part, told me about the mountain
gorillas and pandas and blue whales he brung back–them few what was still alive and feebly kicking–after
his veterinarians nursed ‘em back to health, which he assured me was the very safest way to bring ‘em
back alive. I told him of the fifteen or twenty times I’d fallen passionately and eternally in love, and he
told me about the eighty-three times he’d fallen passionately and briefly in lust–well, eighty-one if you
don’t count the gorilla and the orangutan–and when we’d caught each other up on the past few years we
went to work on dinner. I don’t know what it was, but it didn’t have no scales, and that was enough for
me. And then, as we shared his flask and lit a couple of cigars, just to keep the insects away, Clyde
decided to tell me why he was decimating the jaguar population of the Motto Grasso, which I didn’t even
know we was in until he mentioned it.

“It happened about two months ago,” he said. “I was back in the States, peaceably blowing away
spotted owls and turning the survivors over to some local zoos, when I got a request from down here for
three hundred jaguar skins. I made sure that the jaguars didn’t still have to be in ‘em, we hit upon a price,
and I put together a safari and came down here on the double, figgering them what I only winged could
be shipped back home to the Capturin’ Clyde Calhoun Circus.”

“Why does some guy want three hundred jaguar skins?” I said. “And what’s all this got to do with
politics?”

“My very questions,” replied Clyde. “Well, after my first question, which was what did the job pay?”

“And what’s the answer?”

“Well, it’s kind of complex,” said Clyde. “Maybe not for a sophisticated preacher like yourself, but for a
simple world-traveling sportsman like me. You ever hear of the Leopard Men?”

I shook my head. “Sounds like a bunch of men what picked up some disease that left ‘em covered with
spots.”

“Funny,” said Clyde. “That was my first thought, too. But the Leopard Men are a cult back in Africa, and
the way you can tell they’re Leopard Men is that each of ‘em wears a mask and cloak made of leopard
skins.”

“What do they do once they get decked out in their leopard skins?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Beats me. Probably engage in a bunch of fun and fascinatin’ acts against God and
Nature.”

“So you’re killing all these jaguars so some local tribe can indulge in some obscene sexual orgy?” I said,
and then added: “Can we join in?”

“T’ain’t that simple, Lucifer,” said Clyde. “Near as I can tell, this particular tribe of Injuns plans on
overthrowing the government and grabbing political power.”