Bobby Gold Stories (10 page)

Tommy Victory, in a smart tweed jacket, brown turtleneck and pleated slacks, approached his Lincoln town car in the cool autumn
Connecticut dusk. A dead leaf stuck to his loafter, and he stopped to peel it off distastefully with a fingertip before standing
by the rear passenger door of the idling car. He knocked on the smoked glass window for his chauffeur/bodyguard, and when
no response came, opened the door, irritated, and heaved himself inside, mouth already open to chew out his sleeping driver.

He wasn't sleeping. Tommy could see that right away. His head lay on the seat back at an unnatural angle, the neck broken.
The door on the far side suddenly opened and Bobby Gold, looking thinner and tanner than he'd remembered him, was sitting
next to him, grabbing him by the hair and pulling his head back. The .38 broke a tooth as it went in Tommy's mouth. Tommy's
last thought was of bridgework as he heard the words, "Hello, Tommy," matter-of-factly spoken as Bobby pulled the trigger,
pushed the barrel ever deeper down Tommy's throat.

Bobby emptied the gun, the car filling with cordite smell, the report deafening in the enclosed space. When Tommy sagged back
onto new leather, a single perfect smoke ring issued from his open mouth.

Bobby Gold, in a purple-and-blue sarong, feet bare, drank Tiger beer and watched children washing their hair in dark, brown,
muddy water at the riverbank. A water buffalo strained to pull a cart with a missing wheel in a rice paddy in the distance.
A Khmer in a khaki shirt and shorts, a red krama covering his head from the sun, collected sticks from the roadside. Bobby
brushed a persistent fly away from the corner of his mouth and lit another 555, sat there smoking, yearning for pizza.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Anthony Bourdain is the author of
Kitchen
Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary
Underbelly,
which spent fourteen weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list, and the Urban Historical
Typhoid Mary,
as well as
A Cook's Tour,
which was turned into a successful series by the same name for the Food Network. His mystery novels include
Bone in the Throat
and
Gone Bamboo.
He is the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. This old-style face is named after the Frenchman Robert
Granjon, a sixteenth-century letter cutter whose italic types have often been used with the romans of Claude Garamond. The
origins of this face, like those of Garamond, lie in the late-fifteenth-century types used by Aldus Manutius in Italy.