"Ian Stewart - Environmental Friendship Fossle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Ian)

ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDSHIP FOSSLE by IAN STEWART
"The oldest crime in the book" may not mean quite what it sounds like....


Illustration by Broeck Steadman
****
It happened so fast that I nearly missed it.

I'd seen the kid hanging about near Wang's stall, with a studied nonchalance on his face and a hardness in
his eyes, but a lot of the street urchins do that and it's not illegal to look at tourist trash without buying
any. And I can usually tell the thieves from the hopefuls--some kind of sixth sense, born of long practice.

This time, my extra sense let me down.

The kid was good, I have to admit. Wang Chin-Li was distracted by a potential customer, a willowy
blonde just flown in from Amsterdam, still red around the eyes despite recent applications of eye-shadow
and mascara. She was deciding whether to buy an expensive jade rabbit, and Wang, who has a bit of a
thing for tall Western women and even more of a thing for their money, wasn't quite as alert as he would
usually have been.

I only caught the actual act of theft out of the corner of my eye, because at the time I was trying not to
trip over the old man.

I didn't know his name. You could usually find him, sitting in a small, none too clean alcove by the
entrance to the butcher's shop across the road, dismembered ducks hanging from metal hooks, thick
slabs of animals I couldn't identify, watching the world go by. He'd sat there almost every day for the last
three and a half years, to my knowledge, and he looked old enough that for all I knew he might have sat
there for the last fifty.

He didn't beg, he didn't talk, he didn't look unhappy. He just sat. Overhead, the Shelley Street escalator
bumped and ground its raucous way towards the middle levels and beyond, all the way up to Conduit
Street where the middle classes hung out. It was late morning, so the direction was up. In the morning
rush hour it was down. Sometimes, and they were getting more frequent as the machinery slowly fell to
bits, it didn't go either way. Then the locals started walking and the tourists started fretting. But today a
steady stream of people glided up the slope, like Jesus walking on diagonal water.

The old man never acknowledged the escalator, the travelers, or me. He had sparse gray hair protruding
in tufts from the edges of a flat denim cap that had seen better days. Rheumy eyes matched the faded
blue of the cap. When he stood, you could see that his left ankle was frozen and his knees were none too
sound either, but he didn't stand often, or for long. I noticed what the kid was doing when those eyes,
suddenly imbued with life, flicked sideways. I tried to grab the little bastard's sleeve as he ran past,
heading for one of the alleys down to Hollywood Road, but he avoided my clumsy lunge and darted
away between the vendors' stalls, agile as a monkey. There was a shout from the woman who sold bags
of unidentifiable sea creatures, dried and dyed, as a pile of what looked like pink teabags tipped over
and spilled across the uneven stone steps.

Then he was gone.

"Sorry," I said to Wang. "I'm getting slow in my old age. It's the reflexes that suffer."