Читать книгу The Big Man - William McIlvanney - Страница 11

THREE

Fast Frankie White was a person of great but misdirected enthusiasms, the sort of man who, if he had been of a more literary inclination, might have devoted two years of his life to learning Spanish in order to read Dante in the original. As a young man, he had been inexplicably to America and, though the trip was so short that people meeting him in the street on his return would ask him when he was going, the experience was something he always carried around with him, a fragment of fool’s gold he believed would lead him to the real thing. For the hurried vision of America he had glimpsed, the sense of how quickly and surprisingly money could be made, had left him with a kind of Klondyke mentality. Like a mad prospector who has lost his map, he stumbled around his life, looking for gold where there was none, following hunches that were hardly more than superstitions.