"Chris Roberson - Gold Mountain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Chris)

"Mister McAllister?" Lien said, speaking in English for the old man's benefit. "McAllister James? I am
Johnston Lien, if you recall. We spoke last week at the market, and you agreed to speak with me for a
brief while?"

The old man narrowed his watery eyes, and nodded slowly. Opening the door wide, he stepped out of
the way, and motioned Lien inside. When she was through the door, he shut and locked it behind her,
and then returned to a threadbare sofa in the far corner of the room. Lien crossed the dusty floorboards
to a dining table and chair, the only other furniture in the room.

"May I be seated?"

The old man nodded, and Lien arranged herself on the chair, spreading her notes on the table in front of
her.

"Thank you for agreeing to meet with me," Lien said, bowing slightly from the waist. The old man just
watched her, his expression wary.

McAllister James, in his early eighties, matched the name of "ghost." He seemed spectral, intangible. The
few hairs that remained on his liver-spotted scalp were wispy and white, his ears and nostrils grown
enormous with the advancing years. He had only a few yellowed teeth left, stained by years of whisky
and tobacco —the white man's vices. The skin of his face, neck 7 and arms was covered with the scars of
the flowering-out disease, smallpox.

"You're going to pay, yes?" the old man said brusquely, the first words he'd spoken since she arrived.
"To hear me talk?"

Lien nodded.

"Yes, there is a small honorarium, a few copper coins as fee for your trouble."

"Show me," he said.

With a sigh, Lien reached into her satchel, and withdrew a half dozen coppers, stamped with ideograms
indicating good fortune, with a square hole bore through the middle. She arranged them in a neat tower at
the corner of the table.

"There," Lien said. "Is that sufficient?"

The old man sat up slightly, peering over the edge of the table at the coins. He caught his lower lip
between his gums, thinking it over for a moment.

"Alright," he grunted. "I'll talk."

"Very well, Mister McAllister. When we spoke at the market, last week, you mentioned that you were
one of the first Vinlanders to come to China, and that you worked on Gold Mountain straight through to
its completion. Is that correct?"

The old man leaned back, and arranged his skeletal hands in his lap.

"Well, I don't know that we were the first, but we must have been pretty damned near."