Читать книгу The Last Frontier - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 9

The inevitable cigarette holder clipped between his teeth, the inevitable Russian cigarette well alight, the Count leaned a heavy elbow on the buzzer and kept on leaning until a shirt-sleeved little man, unshaven and still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, came scurrying out from the little cubicle behind the hotel’s reception desk. The Count eyed him with disfavour.

‘Night-porters should sleep in the daytime,’ he said coldly. ‘The manager, little man, and at once.’

‘The manager? At this hour of the night?’ The night-porter stared with ill-concealed insolence at the clock above his head, transferred his stare to the Count, now innocuously dressed in a grey suit and grey raglan raincoat, and made no effort at all to conceal the truculence in his voice. ‘The manager is asleep. Come back in the morning.’

There came a sudden sound of ripping linen, a gasp of pain, and the Count, his right hand gripping the bunched folds of the porter’s shirt, had him halfway across the desk: the blood-shot, sleep-filmed eyes, widened first with surprise and then with fear, were only inches away from the wallet that had magically appeared in the Count’s free hand. A moment of stillness, a contemptuous shove and the porter was scrabbling frantically at the pigeon-holed mail racks behind him in an attempt to keep his balance.