Fresh Kills by Reggie Nadelson Read Free Book Online

speaker, which is how I ended up at a desk where I read faxes from Moscow and ate too many candy bars.
    The stuff that rolled off the fax machine was pretty worthless. The only interesting thing I’d come across was money filtered through a bank in Chechnya from Pakistan and onto London, and some money, also from Chechnya, laundered through second-hand car dealers near Detroit. Anti-terrorism guys took all of it over from me. Most of what I was left with were bad bank accounts and corrupt real estate deals.
    It was fine except that I missed the noise of the station house and the sound of the guys swearing, and the bang of the locker doors and the late-night stink of stale Chinese food. But I didn’t work nights or weekends; I didn’t feel like I was getting ulcers from looking at dead people, I worked nine to five; it was a life. I could take a few days off when I needed to. It was how I’d managed to get the time to pick up Billy in Florida.
    The waiter, who was paying plenty of attention to Sonny, brought me the Scotch I had ordered and I drank it down, and then looked at my watch.
    â€œWhen I was a kid, it was like big old guys ate here, you know?” Sonny said. “I remember we would hang around and watch the cars and the men in big alpaca coats and hats, like they were Rod Steiger in
On the Waterfront
, you know what I’m talking about, man?”
    I could tell Sonny was starting to wander, and I didn’t know even now if it was a tactic or if half his brain was permanently pickled from all the Scotch he’d drunk. Even now, he spent a lot of time drifting backwards into his childhood, his adolescence in Brooklyn which was inhabited by a huge cast of people, his parents who read Marx to him at bedtime, gangsters, union guys, politicos, prizefighters, ball players, Floyd Patterson, Jackie Robinson, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg;in the same past lived the musicians he loved like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and Sonny counted himself an original hipster which was why he said “man” in every sentence. I had stopped beating him up for it. I never knew how much of it was true, but for Sonny it was so real, it didn’t matter.
    At the next table, a foursome was talking loud French. I half listened. It was business talk.
    Sonny turned to look. “You understand them, man?”
    â€œYeah pretty much.”
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œYou know I can talk French, Sonny. What do you need from me?”
    â€œYour mother, she’s who made you learn, right? Isn’t that it? I fucking hate the language, also they talk so frigging loud, you know?” Sonny said. “Their food’s OK, they write great. You want to know why I hate the language? Not because of the shrub – you know President George Bush. You like that, shrub for Bush Jr?”
    â€œI heard it before.”
    â€œI hate their superiority and their anti-Semitism and most of all their language because I didn’t learn it right. I should have done languages, like you, and then I could have read the good stuff in the original. Balzac. Victor Hugo. Flaubert. Shit.”
    â€œSonny, I have to go.”
    â€œI had this French teacher at my high school and I was the smallest kid in the class, and he liked to pick on me. Mr Driscoll was his name and he’d say, ‘Sonny,
comment allez vous
?’ And I’d freeze. I knew the right answer, but I’d fucking freeze, man, and if I didn’t know the right answer, Driscoll would turn to the other boys in the class – it was an all boys’ school – and he’d say in this weird sinister drawl, ‘Give him the treatment boys. Give him the treatment.’ So all the boys would beat the shit out of me. I ever tell you about him? Or about the shower teacher, Mr Castro, the one who taught ushow to soap ourselves? Jesus. I could have read Zola, in the original, you know, if it wasn’t for that pig Driscoll. Man, I could