"Michelle West - The Confidence Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

In the flat now was another mystery. Elzith made a circuit of the room in a few strides, peering at the
walls, checking the skinny mattress for fleas. She spent more time at the chest, opening its drawers and
looking inside them. Tod’s imagination tried a string of explanations for her strange actions, then gave up.
Abruptly Elzith straightened, fixing him with that gaze that weighed him like a balance. “Is it available
today?” she asked.
Tod floundered.

“You have no other inquiries?” Elzith restated.

Tod shook his head. “No. You could move in right now.”

“Good,” she answered, nodding as if she had known already. She drew a fold of notes from a pocket in
the breeches, confirmed the flat’s price, and paid Tod for a full season. He failed to find another single
word. “The key,” Elzith prompted him after waiting silently for a moment.

“Yes,” mumbled Tod, fussing it off his ring. “But your things—”

“My things,” the woman said. She ushered Tod out of the flat that was now hers and locked its door. “I
will have to get some.” Then she climbed the irregular steps up the slope and vanished behind the green
rise of the hill.

2
“A tart, is she?” Shaan Wheelwright pulled at his pipe and let out the smoke in broad rings of laughter.
“Strolled in here in her knickers, did she?”

Tod felt himself redden and tried to keep his concentration on his work. “Not in her knickers,” he
corrected, telling himself to keep his voice steady, keep his knife steady. “She was wearing breeches.”
The knife slid through the paper smoothly.

His neighbor laughed on another puff of smoke and started coughing. “Well there’s only one reason a
woman’s wearing breeches, chap, and that’s so we’ll look at them legs.” Shaan’s round face was pink
with merriment. “So did you see anything you like?”

Slash. Tod’s knife skidded off the fold in the paper and cut through a whole line of text. Tod gulped. The
book had ninety-six pages. Now he would have to cut apart the quarrels, unnest the stacks of folded
paper, get the ruined sheet printed again, and start over with his stitching. He tried to breathe evenly. He
would not lose his temper, he told himself. No riot scenes in his house.

Shaan was bigger than he was, anyway, and could probably squash him under a thumb like a bug. “You
saw her yourself, Shaan,” he forced himself to say coolly. “See anything you liked?”

“Aaah,” the man grumbled, “I only saw her as she was leaving, through my window, and her halfway
down the road to town.” Shaan shook his head, looking sad as a marionette. Then he winked, grinned,
and said, “But I’ll be seeing more of her soon, eh, mate?”

Tod turned his head aside to avoid the smoke flooding out of his neighbor’s face. He found Shaan
overbearing but couldn’t ask the man to go away. Tod was familiar with the feeling; he felt the same way
about his own brothers. He found himself eyeing Shaan suspiciously. Why is he sitting so close to my
desk? Did I see him open a drawer? His eyes half on Shaan, Tod brought the nested quartos close to his