The Bobby Gold stories - Anthony Bourdain [34]
Eddie just lay there, staring out into space from under heavy lids. Bobby could hear him breathe, a thick, rasping sound. A few seconds later, he was asleep.
Bobby took a yellow cab over to 9th Avenue, the Bellevue Bar at 39th, and found a seat at the end. He should probably call Tommy, arrange a sit-down, work out an arrangement in keeping with the new, inevitable restructuring. He should have killed Eddie. Rented a car, taken him out for a drive. Problem over. Anybody still loyal would understand. And Eddie's enemies would appreciate the gesture. But he just didn't have it in him.
There'd be people trying to kill him soon, Bobby understood. If he said nothing. Met with no one. Did nothing. If he just sat here every day, drank himself into insensibility day after day, let them do what they had to do — let the gears turn, the world outside go on without him - sooner or later, someone would come through that door and kill him too.
Nobody at the bar talked to him. When Bobby nodded, the bartender came over and gave him another drink. Soon he was drunk, tapping his fingers to the jukebox. "Love Comes in Spurts," Richard Hell and the Voidoids. He was deciding whether he wanted to try and live, about what would have to be involved. He'd need a gun. And a car. And money. He had the airweight and the H&K in the floor safe of his apartment, with a stack of emergency money totalling about 50K. He could get a car no problem. Just a phone call and a taxi to Queens. His Aryan "brothers" would help — for a while — where the Italians would be unsympathetic. He wouldn't kill Eddie. He wouldn't set him up. But he'd leave him to the wolves this time.
His cell phone rang and he heard objects noisily knocking together on the other end. A second later, "Pusherman" off the Curtis Mayfield album was playing over the receiver. Eddie, in a sentimental mood, playing him tunes over the phone. The soundtrack to better times.
BOBBY'S NOT HERE
Bobby Gold nowhere in sight; 5:30 A.M. in the NiteKlub office with Lenny, in ludicrous-looking ski goggles, working the power saw, Nikki wetting the blade down with water from a kitchen squeeze bottle. Halfway through the second metal pin on the revolving money drop in the safe and Lenny is bathed in sweat, his goggles beginning to steam up.
"Jesus! This thing is taking forever!" says Lenny, turning off the drill for a second and listening for the sound of the floor waxer. "You sure that guy's still got his Walkman on?"
"He's always got his Walkman on," says Nikki, wiping Lenny's brow with a paper towel, hands like Lenny's - in surgical gloves from the kitchen. "C'mon. You're almost through there. Keep at it."
Lenny turns on the drill and proceeds, bits of metal bouncing off his goggles, stinging his face, lodging in his teeth.
"Ouch!" he complains. "That hurt!"
"Pussy," says Nikki.
Finally the sound of the saw changes pitch, the shelf falls free of the last pin. Lenny yanks it out and hurls it into a corner. "I've gotta piss like a racehorse."
"Use the trash," suggests Nikki, pointing at a plastic wastebasket.
While Lenny empties his bladder, Nikki reaches her arm (longer than his) down into the safe and starts pulling out banded stacks of cash. There are a lot more of them than they'd expected.
"Uh . . . Lenny," she says. "You see this?"
Lenny, zipping up his fly, turns and looks. The pile of cash on the floor is large - and getting larger. "Holy . . . shit!"
"No kidding! . . . Holy . . . shit is right!" says Nikki, suddenly damp, a few strands of hair glued to her forehead. "There wasn't supposed to be