Chasing the Dragon Read Online Free PDF

little time—after you stop breathing, after your heart stops beating—when you’re alone there inside the dark of your head. That’s the deadline,” Marinetti said. “Right then, before your soul leaves your body.”
    “I don’t believe it.”
    “You will, the time comes.”
    “How long I got before the soul leaves the body?”
    “Three seconds. Isn’t that right, Lord Mayor? Three—that’s the holy number?”
    Mayor Rossi did not answer this question. He was not comfortable with the wry tone, Salvatore knew, with the suggestion that there was something ludicrous at the heart of things. Rossi turned to him then.
    “Did your brother take the last rites?”
    Salvatore nodded, but he did not like the question. As if Rossi wanted to know what his brother—in his deluded state—had told the priest.
    The truth was his brother had no doubt overdosed, like the doctor said. Died from a heart failure, technically, head buried in his pillow. If it hadn’t been the heart, then it would have been the cancer. He was an old man, going to die anyway, so who would bother to kill him?
    It was ludicrous.
    Even so, Salvatore had been itching to talk to his nephew alone. Not about this necessarily, he told himself, but about the estate, the family business. There were lots of issues, even the possibility—though his son Gary would not like this—that Dante would want an active stake. They must schedule a time—but he did not want to do so now, with the mayor in the car.
    Finally they pulled into Cemetery Drive, and made their way down into the part of the graveyard known as Little Italy because of all the Italians buried in the dirt. Marinetti and Mollini got out of the limo, and looked rather grimly ahead. A Chinese from the funeral parlor stood by its open door, waiting for the pallbearers. Behind the cars lay the open grave and an endless line of stones.
    “I want to believe,” said Mollini. “But I don’t. For this, you tell me, I’m going to burn in hell?”
    “Nonbelievers, they get nothing, no heaven, no hell.”
    “Nothing?”
    “Nothing,” insisted Marinetti.
    “No walking through eternal fires, my body covered with sores?”
    “None of that for you.”
    “No pustules? No buckets of shit?”
    “I told you, you miss out on the whole business. You don’t believe, it’s an empty picture. God forgets all about you.”
    “I still don’t believe.”
    “You will change your mind, those last three seconds. I can already hearing you crying out.”
    “Nothing?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Mama Mia!” shouted Ernesto.
    He made a motion as if tearing at his hair, frightened by all that nothing stretching out in front of him. The two men laughed and patted one another on the shoulders. But in a little while the joke was over. They stood by the grave, all of them. Mollini and Marinetti submitted, too, heads bowed. Teary-eyed, sentimental, they watched their old buddy disappear into the abyss. Salvatore touched the envelope in his pocket, walked toward the grave.
Throw it in
, he told himself. He fingered the negatives. Then he hesitated. He didn’t know what the hell to do.
    Ben years ago at his mother’s funeral, Dante had stood in this same spot, more or less, and watched as his father cast in a red rose after his mother. It was a tradition, to throw something into the grave. That day, while he and his father stood by, neighbors and friends had come forward, tossing thimbles and wine glasses, figs and old photographs, holy cards, a plastic statue of the Virgin Everlasting. Today, by his father’s grave, Dante stood alone. His father’s friends came up and tossed in a little bit of this and that. A red poker chip and the ace of spades. A rosary. A Molinari salami and a Cuban cigar. A snort of grappa. Meanwhile, Uncle Salvatore lingered nearby, his hand in his pocket—hovering in such a way that Dante thought for a minute he might fall in after his brother.
    Dante had nothing with him. His gun. His wallet. He