"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 023 - The Mystic Mullah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

dangled well below his knees and the wrists were matted with hair that looked like rusted steel wool.

Had the corridor been a little less brilliantly lighted the hairy gentleman might have been mistaken for an
amiable gorilla.

The hairy man squinted little eyes at the dapper one and said, “Pipe down, you shyster, or I'll tie a knot in
your neck!”

Then they both saw the tall skeleton of a man down the corridor. They could not help but note his
excitement.

“What's happened, Johnny?” demanded the apish fellow.

They could not see the body of Hadim, which lay around the bend in the corridor.
“JOHNNY,” the bony man—he was actually William Harper Littlejohn, world-renowned expert on
archaeology and geology—gestured over his shoulder with the monocle magnifier.

“Come here, Monk,” he said, then included the dapper man. “You too, Ham.”

“Monk,” the homely gorilla of a man, and “Ham,” the immaculate fashion plate, advanced hurriedly. A
moment before, they had seemed on the point of blows; now their quarrel was suddenly suspended. It
was always thus. No one who knew these two could recall one having addressed a civil word to the
other.

Monk, whose low forehead did not look as if it afforded room for more than a spoonful of brains, was
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, generally conceded to be one of the most accomplished of
industrial chemists; while Ham, the fashion plate, was Major General Theodore Marley Brooks, a lawyer
who possessed probably the sharpest legal mind ever trained by Harvard.

Monk and Ham, rounding the hallway angle and sighting Hadim's body with its grotesquely twisted head,
jerked to a stop and became slack-jawed.

“Blazes!” Monk sniffed, sampling the air like an animal. “I smell burned gunpowder. Who shot the guy?”

“No one,” said Johnny. “I fired a few shots subsequently.”

Monk ambled over to the body, hands swinging below his knees, and stared intently.

“What's wrong with his neck?” he asked.

“Broken,” Johnny replied.

Monk asked, “Who broke it?”

“No one,” answered the gaunt geologist “As far as I can tell.”

“Yeah,” Monk growled. “Then who'd you shoot at?”

“A peculiar, nebulous green corporeity with the optical aspects of a serpentine specimen suspended
aërospherically,” said Johnny, his expression not changing. “It bore similarity to a phantasmagoria.”