Онлайн-библиотека книг
‘Russian slang. It means great, cool, wonderful.’ He closed the book, and leaned slightly towards me so that he could slide it into his jeans pocket. I caught a strong whiff of aftershave, riding over a harsher but fainter chemical smell that I couldn’t have pinned a name on even if I’d wanted to. ‘What did you have in mind by way of remuneration?’
‘Let’s leave that open for now,’ I parried. ‘There’s something else I need, and it’s big.’
‘Yeah?’ Nicky’s offhand tone suggested that there weren’t many jobs in the whole wide world that counted as big for him.
‘I was wondering if you could pick something up for me,’ I said. ‘The kind of something that doesn’t change hands too often.’
‘Go on.’
‘Memorabilia.’
‘Relating to . . . ?’
‘A dead gangster. A killer, from way back.’
Nicky’s head swivelled round fast and he stared at me for a few moments in dead, perplexed silence. It seemed like something of an extreme reaction: okay, maybe this sounded pretty sleazy, but I knew him well enough to be sure he didn’t have any moral objections.
‘I thought we had a “no bullshit” rule in place, Castor,’ he said, his tone unreadable.
‘You think this is bullshit, Nicky?’
‘Isn’t it? You give me Gittings’s book, you pump me about what I was doing for him, and now . . .’ He hesitated and shrugged, as though I ought to be able to join the dots for myself.
‘It’s not about John. It’s a different case.
He didn’t answer, but he was still giving me the fish-eye, so I rolled straight on. ‘It may not be something you can help me with in any case. There was a gangster back in the 1960s named Myriam Seaforth Kale. I don’t know if you ever heard of her. She killed a dozen people, all of them men, then the FBI shot up a hotel to get hold of her and sent her to the chair.’
‘An American gangster,’ Nicky said, with careful emphasis.
‘Yeah.
