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Canongate Books - Bourdain Anthony

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154 pages

English

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Description

Welcome to the retirement home of Henry and Frances, ex-New Yorkers and professional assassins: a luxury hotel suite in an idyllic, tequila-drenched Caribbean hideaway. It's supposed to be all cocktails and sex on the beach. But when a job icing a Mafioso godfather goes awry, trouble hits paradise . . . in the form of a cross-dressing capo, a debauched Irish hard man and a slew of incompetent but vicious US marshals.

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	31 août 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847676122
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0360€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

About the Author

Anthony Bourdain was a world-renowned chef, travelling the world for his Emmy Award-winning series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. He was the bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential. His fiction titles include Bobby Gold and Bone in the Throat . He died on 8 June 2018.

To Nancy
We don’t need clothes and we don’t need money … from "Totally Nude," Talking Heads
Contents
About the Author Title Page Dedication Epigraph Introduction Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty One Chapter Forty Two Chapter Forty Three Chapter Forty Four Chapter Forty Five Chapter Forty Six Acknowledgments By the same Author Copyright

Introduction
I wrote Gone Bamboo , unsurprisingly, in Saint Martin – on a balcony at the Oyster Pond Hotel. As a chef, and New Yorker, I am used to a somewhat more stressful, cranked up pace than exists in the Windward Islands and I wanted to write a book that would reflect the remarkable transformation one experiences after a few weeks without shoes – the sort of boozy romanticism that comes over one when sunburned and half-drunk after a day spent paddling around in body-temperature water and eating barbecue under a palm tree.
I wanted to write a sociopath beach book – something that jaded, hyperactive chefs, bent lawyers, paroled arsonists and protected witnesses might find entertaining and escapist. I wanted a hero and heroine as lazy, mercenary, lustful and free of redeeming qualities as I sometimes see myself. Whether I succeeded or not – I don’t know.
I can tell you that the people who get paid to read these things out in Hollywood were appalled by my loathsome couple. Studio coverage uniformly suggested – in the strongest terms – that my heroes should "learn from their experiences," and "grow as people." I felt they’d missed the point. Needless to say, you won’t be seeing a naked Mel Gibson, running in slo-mo down a Saint Martin beach anytime soon. And as much as I would have liked to see Sigourney Weaver or Linda Fiorentino with an all-over tan, I don’t think that’ll happen.
Readers of my first novel, Bone in the Throat , will recognize a few of the supporting players – and forgive me, I hope, if small inconsistencies of time-line occur in the less than seamless segue from book to book. I can only suggest you pop open a Red Stripe, grease up with SPF 15 and read on. Treat the little inconsistencies like sand-fleas or the guys hawking time shares and seashell jewelry – ignore them and they’ll go away. Put down the book, have another beer, take a dip… have sex… read another chapter. And please. Get sand between the pages.

Anthony Bourdain 2000
1
J immy "Pazz" Calabrese wanted room service.
"Just a san’wich or somethin’ for chrissakes," he said.
"I would prefer you didn’t," said the other man at the table. "Then I’d have to change motels. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I’m not crazy about being seen together."
"Awright… awright…," said Jimmy, his stomach growling, "I’ll get somethin’ later. Shit."
The other man at the table was tall, around six foot four, thin, and deeply tanned. He looked in his mid-to late forties, with long, dark brown hair, sun-bleached in spots and going to gray, tied back in a ponytail. He was dressed in faded blue jeans with holes in the knees and a loose-fitting long-sleeve T-shirt. He was wearing no socks or shoes, and even his feet were tan. In the dimly lit motel room, the darkness of his skin made his eyes and teeth and the gold hoop earring in his left ear flash unnaturally bright.
There were three other men in the room at the Teterboro Motor Lodge. Richie "Tic" Gianelli, a small, ferretlike man with a jailhouse pallor, stood by the door, appearing nervous in a flannel-lined Burberry trench coat. The coat didn’t look right on him, somehow; he looked like he’d borrowed it from an older brother. Paul "Paulie Brown" Caifano, a large man with no neck and a crew cut, sat silently on the edge of the bed in a camel hair coat, playing with the remote control for the bolted-down television, clicking from channel to channel.
"There’s a reason this is comin’ from me personally," said Jimmy Pazz, solemnly. "Nobody gimme permission for this piece a’ work. I’m tellin’ you that up front, right from the get go. It’s two guys gotta go a double. And they gotta be done this weekend ’cause you ain’t gonna get another crack at ’em."
Jimmy Pazz weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 320 pounds before lunch. He had a low, simian brow, beady, wet eyes set too close together, and a big, sloping honker of a nose. He had a dark, heavily bearded complexion, despite a recent shave and the heavy application of face powder, and he was wearing, as was often his habit among friends and business associates, a dress; on this occasion it was a blue and green tartan jumper the size of a pup tent, white kneesocks, and saddle shoes. Because he had come to discuss a matter of some gravity, he had chosen to dispense with his customary wig; it lay neglected on the dresser like a strangled chinchilla.
"What is it?" asked Jimmy, narrowing his eyes so that they almost disappeared into his face. "What?"
"I was thinking that’s a good color for you," said the man with the earring. "Goes well with your eyes."
Jimmy scrutinized the other man’s face for a sign of mockery. After a long, tense moment during which nothing was said by anyone in the room, he turned, satisfied, to Richie and smiled, his amethyst drop earrings wiggling.
"See?" said Richie from his place by the door. "You din’t believe me. I told you green was good. Din’t I say that?"
"I don’t get a chance much to wear what I want around the office, the club. They takin’ pitchers there. The fuckin’ FBI. They’d love to get a pitcher a’ me in a dress. Prolly send it to my mother. That’s how they are, you know… they’re "
"Vindictive," interjected Richie. "They’re vindictive and repressed."
On the bed, Paulie Brown rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He’d heard this before.
"You got it," said Jimmy. "Vindicative. That’s what they are. They should fuckin’ talk too… Hoover did this, you know. Friend a’ mine saw him one time at Rockefeller Center, ice skatin’ in a fuckin’ tutu like nobody’s business…"
The other man at the table cleared his throat.
Jimmy leaned forward in his chair, suddenly all business, his brawny, fur-covered arms coming together on the table. "Lissen, Henry," he said, "as far as anybody outside a’ this room goes, this meetin’ never happened "
"Jimmy. You should get a job with the government, talking like that," said the man called Henry.
Jimmy smiled indulgently. "I get connected with this, I’m gonna have myself some serious fuckin’ problems."
Henry looked around at the other men. "Hey. If you end up reading about this in the papers, it’s sure as hell not coming from me," he said testily. "From what I’ve seen, it’s you guys been opening up your books for the feds. Seems like every other member of your little fraternity’s been picking up two paychecks these days. I mean, Jimmy, your admission standards are really going to hell. The old days, as I recall, membership in the FBI used to stand in the way of qualifying."
"I ain’t inferrin’ nothin’ about you," said Jimmy.
"Implyin’," corrected Richie. "You ain’t implyin’ nothin’. You imply, he infers."
"Whatever," snapped Jimmy.
"So. You going to tell me what it is, Jimmy?" asked Henry.
"The thing of it is," said Jimmy, "to do this right, I gotta be there when it happens."
"Where is this taking place?" asked Henry.
"Show him that thing," said Jimmy.
Richie came over to the table with a color brochure and laid it out in front of Henry. It depicted the grounds and facilities of the Devil’s Run Ski Resort in the Adirondacks. There was a map of the ski trails and surrounding slopes and some photos of the lodges, restaurants, and rooms.
"See there?" said Jimmy, placing a stubby finger at a point on the map. "This is where everybody’s gonna be at. All the bosses gonna be there Jerry Dogs, Philly, Sonny, me and Richie… everybody and some other guys they gonna bring "
"A convention," observed Henry, shaking his head.
Jimmy reached into his jumper pocket and unfolded two newspaper photos. One showed an old man in bathrobe, knee socks and bedroom slippers standing in front of a Manhattan social club. The other showed a younger man, broad shouldered, in an expensive double-breasted jacket, shaking his fist at the camera from a loading dock somewhere.
"Charlie Wagons and Danny Testa," said Henry after the briefest of looks. He gave Jimmy back the pictures. "I know what they look like."
Jimmy raised half of the eyebrow that ran uninterrupted across the upper part of his face. "You know these guys?" he asked, troubled. "You done some work for these pricks?"
Henry said nothing. His expression didn’t change. After a few seconds of awkward silence, Richie piped in, "Professional ethics, right? He ain’t gonna tell you. It’s like a doctor or a priest; you get the confidentiality. It’s sacred."
Henry allowed himself a smile.
"This won’t be a problem, right?" asked Jimmy, looking unsure. "I mean… that won’t stand in the way