Fly Hunter: The Story of an Inquisitor - страница 36

The steering wheel of the car stopped obeying Bulov, so the director decided to leave the car at the restaurant and walk, luckily Kasym lived in the center, nearby. But after a block, Bulov saw the woman of his dreams and went after her. The woman was a professional, hoping for an acquaintance, she walked slowly, but Bulov thought she was speeding like an express train. Staggering from side to side, he stubbornly followed her, but caught up with her only in the old city district, when the woman, convinced that she was being approached, simply stopped. Bulov circled her for a long time, then tediously seduced the woman, from those women who make their piece of bread with butter on the panel, and was very proud of himself when he convinced her to take him home. He offered her twenty-five coins, so he liked her. If the woman demanded payment, the night of adventures would have cost Bulov only five coins, and twenty would have remained for a familiar venereologist. But the pleasure of being able to persuade another woman also cost something, let it be an extra twenty coins.

Slums, they are everywhere – slums. In a sober state, Bulov would not risk showing up here, but he was "knee-deep" in drunk. After a long wandering through crooked, tangled alleys, passages, through yards merging into each other, Bulov would not have found his way back even if he had been threatened with execution, the woman finally led him to her small, tiny apartment, where she honestly earned the unexpectedly inflated amount.

Bulov felt like going to the toilet. It turned out that all "amenities" were in the yard.

– You'll go out to the yard and fifty meters to the right, – the woman explained to him readily.

– What if I run out in just my underwear, I'll even put shoes on one bare foot, nothing?

– Who will you see here at such a late hour, your acquaintances, or what? The night is warm, run like that, just don't fall there. Maybe I should escort you? – she worried.

– Are you crazy? – Bulov was offended. – I'm as sober as a glass.

As soon as Bulov crossed the threshold of the house and found himself in the yard, the fresh night air played a nasty trick on him: instead of sobering him up, it further dazed him. Bulov went left, and having reached the neighboring yard, remembered that he needed to turn right, and turned right, wandered through the yards for a long time, finally, not finding the toilet and unable to endure any longer, he relieved himself in front of someone's window, not seeing a grandmother in the window, apparently suffering from insomnia, and now she was fearfully crossing herself at the sight of such shamelessness of a strangely dressed creature… And warm autumn nights become cold far beyond midnight, sometimes even frosts occur. Bulov, trembling, began to lose his fleeting body, wandered from yard to yard, from alley to alley, but only completely confused himself in the yards, forgot what the house where he was so warmly greeted looked like. To warm himself up, he started running, examining the houses, looking for "his," but the alleys unexpectedly began to end in dead ends, the houses threateningly loomed, the alleys became all too narrow, he could already touch the opposite sides with outstretched arms at the same time. Bulov began to feel that the houses were trying to catch and flatten him into a pancake. He suddenly imagined that he had stumbled upon an ancient labyrinth, a trap from which there was no escape. Losing control over himself, going mad, he began to wander and shout: