Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“This beggar’ll take you home in his car!” shouted the little man who stood over him. “He’s got it parked around the corner.”

Turning his face toward the hot strip of sky which lowered over the city the little man began to laugh, with amusement at first, then loudly and triumphantly until his high laughter rang out in the quiet street with a weird, elfish sound, echoing up the sides of the tall buildings, growing shriller and shriller until people blocks away heard its eerie cadence on the air and stopped to listen.

Still laughing the little man divested himself of his coat and then of his vest and hurriedly freed his neck of tie and collar. Then he spat upon his hands and with a wild, shrill, exultant cry began to run down the dark street.

He was going to clean up New York, and his first objective was the disagreeable policeman on the corner!

They caught him at two o’clock, and the crowd which had joined in the chase were flabbergasted when they found that the ruffian was only a weeping little man in his shirt-sleeves. Someone at the station house was wise enough to give him an opiate instead of a padded cell, and in the morning he felt much better.