Читать книгу Crocodile Tears онлайн

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“He told me I’ll be out next week, that —”

“So you ain’t gonna spend no time in here. I’m pleased for you, Sparrow. You got no idea how pleased.”

Hand on shoulder, pat on the back, more smiles. The occasional laugh.

The Hobo has stopped trembling.

This is what scares Diego the most inside prison, not the overcrowding or the promiscuity, not even the blows or the violence or the danger, but this arbitrary nature of affairs. The changing moods, the whims. The fact that nothing stays the same from one minute to the next. A schizophrenia of isolated events. A life at the mercy of men whose actions are driven by unbridled force.

“When you out, you gonna pay me back. By doin a job for me. You get that?”

“What does it involve?”

“You chickenshit. Who cares what it involves? You owe me your life.”

“Okay, Hobo, okay. No problem.”

“That’s how I like it.”

The Hobo pushes Diego without touching him, just with his gaze, and they walk until they reach a door that opens onto a courtyard, an arid freezing space, a concrete steppe where some dreamer or cynic has painted the white lines of a non-existent basketball court. To the right is a grey bench and just above it, protected by wire mesh, is a huge clock which always says half past five. Sitting or standing in a circle are a dozen or so men with rotten-toothed smiles, 28their faces scarred and pockmarked, all wearing extravagant cushioned sneakers. Their caps bear a well-known logo, and they wear them back to front in an act of aesthetic rebellion. They look like the results of a genetic mutation, a horde of soulless zombies about to sack the planet.