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

Shit, who cared?

To my surprise, I realized that I did.
****
I looked for the old man the next time I passed by Hollywood Road, but for once he wasn't there. The
steps of the butcher's shop were empty except for black plastic bags of whatever bits of animal even the
Chinese considered inedible. Several wet-looking lumps and stringy things had spilled out of the bags, but
for all I could tell, they might have been the burial remains of an alien from Fomalhaut.

That was a thought. Had the old man been abducted by aliens, and hunted mammoths that had
themselves been abducted anything up to 150,000 years earlier?

I decided it wasn't a very good thought.

Wang saw me staring at the butcher's shop steps. "He's dead, Mike. Feng told me." Feng was one of the
butcher's employees. "Apparently the old guy was some kind of distant relative of Feng's. When he didn't
show this morning, Feng called his home, got through to one of the paramedics from the ambulance
instead."

I gave this some thought. "Does Feng know his address as well as his phone number?" I thought some
more. "Dammit, Wang--can he tell me the old man's name?"
****
He could. It was Tsong: good solid Chinese name. Except that he was Tsong Kapa, and that was rare
outside the Xizang autonomous region. Formerly known as Tibet.

Tsong's apartment was on the thirty-ninth floor of a dilapidated high-rise on a reclaimed section of harbor
near Tai Kok Tsui. I had a valid search warrant in my pocket, obtained through the Agency's contacts at
Police HQ, and after lengthy scrutiny and a wristband call to senior management it entitled me to an entry
card from what was laughingly called the concierge desk.

I slid the card into the lock and pushed the door open. There was a faintly musty smell, no doubt because
the windows were closed but the air-conditioning was switched off. The apartment was hot, humid, and
small. Westerners would have called it cramped, but in Hong Kong terms it was, if not palatial, ample for
a single person. Often an entire family, plus Filipino maid, would have occupied a smaller space.

I pulled on rubber gloves and searched the whole apartment. It didn't take long.

There were the usual consumer electronics--small, Japanese, stylish. A flatscreen, an mp5 player, an
old-style wristband-to-landline socket in the wall, a battered deskcomp with wireless Net connection. I
couldn't crack the password--I'd have to leave that for the IT fraud squad, who would be very interested
indeed to find out whether there was anything incriminating on it.

There were no books, no photographs. An acrylic painting of a bull elephant silhouetted against a
Kenyan sunset hung on one wall, slightly lopsided. In the tiny closet were some drab shirts, a few pairs of
worn trousers, and a couple of threadbare jackets.

The furniture was cheap and ordinary, most likely bought second-hand. Tsong Kapa had led a simple
life. Except--