The Bobby Gold stories - Anthony Bourdain [39]
Nineteen grand, Bobby might have pointed out, was not going to be enough for both of them.
In April, Eddie Fish made the papers. A full-cover shot in the New York Post, Eddie interrupted at dinner, a mouthful of veal chop with the sauce from the chicken, laid out on the cold tile floor, shirt pulled up, head leaking black onto white, dead as dead could be. His eyes were half open and there was food on the shirt.
"I think I need more guns," thought Bobby, heading back to the dune shack. "I really do."
But when he got back Nikki was asleep, dozing really, midafternoon, one arm thrown over her eyes, mouth slightly open, blankets just below her breasts. Bobby quietly got undressed and slipped under the covers with her. She curled into a ball and worked her way dreamily under his arms, seeking warmth. He felt her slowly unravel, throwing a leg over his, then a hand around his back, the other one seeking something, finding it. Her head disappearing completely under the covers.
When he woke up it was dark and he couldn't hear the generator. The window by the bed flew off its hinges, blew apart, glass suddenly in his hair. It took a second to realize that people were shooting at them; window, door, through the walls, the reports of three, maybe four weapons muffled by the sand, whipped away in the wind.
It's always the little things you remember when terrible things happen.
Bobby would remember the splinter he got when he jumped out of bed, his bare feet scrambling for purchase on the floor. He remembered the way his fingers felt useless and rubbery as he tore open the drawer and grabbed for the H&K. He would always remember the sound Nikki made when he shoved her out of bed onto the floor — and that his cock stuck to his leg for a second as he ran for the door firing.
He'd remember that the first man he saw was wearing a shooter's vest and earmuffs and that when Nikki was hit she made an "Ouch!" noise like she'd just cut herself on a grapefruit knife.
BOBBY GONE
Bobby Gold in a raw-silk robe, maroon flecked with gold, in a faraway place, alone. Outside shuttered windows, palm fronds brushed stucco walls and geckos clacked and chattered in the hot, syrup-thick jungle air. A splash signaled a lone swimmer in the hotel pool, the fat German most likely. Neither the two red-faced Aussies, the taciturn Frenchman, nor the quiet Taiwanese — the hotel's only other guests — could make a sound quite so loud.
The room smelled of jasmine and bug repellent and the 555-brand cigarettes that Bobby had taken to smoking over the last few months. He was seeing the world, finally - after a lifetime under Eddie Fish's thumb, pinned down in New York, smothering in Eddie's careless, relentless embrace. "See the world," Bobby said out loud, chuckling bitterly. "Alone," he almost added.
He was free all right. Cut loose from everything. Eddie gone. NiteKlub gone. Family . . . long long gone. And Nikki? Not here. That was for sure. He missed everything about her. Her hair. Her sardonic smile. The not knowing what was going to come out of her mouth next. Her scent. Recalling it made his chest hurt.
He was the driver now. No longer a passenger in a tightly circling cab. And he had seen the world — the eastern part of it anyway: Bora Bora, Singapore, Japan, China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand,