The Pariot GAme Read Online Free PDF Page A

anniversary he brings his wife home a loaf of bread that’s only one day old. The last time he had her out to dinner it was when the tenement got too hot and they took their tuna fish out and ate it in the yard under the clothesline. Yeah, Greenan is cheap all right. He owed Seats a lunch for over two years and he still didn’t pay him and now he’s back again, looking for another favor, as usual.’
    “I tell you what you do, Ticker,” Seats said, “and this is it. You meet me over the Colonnade in one hour and we will say hello to Stradivarius there and he will give me a nice table because he knows me and I have even given him a tip now and then, which I tell you even though I know it is sure to shock you, and we will sit down and have a bloody and then a piece of fish or something, and while we are having lunch you can try telling me again how come this fine upstanding citizen that you know does not deserve to be in MCI Walpole and I should do everything I can to get him out. And then I will think about what you say in a much better frame of mind, because I always get into a better mood when I have had my lunch and somebody else is paying for it. Especially you, Ticker. Especially you. Having lunch on you in my book ranks right up there with taking that supersonic jet plane that they got there to Paris and having lunch there at the top of the Eiffel fuckin’ Tower. One hour, Ticker. One fuckin’ hour.”
    Seats, grinning, put the phone down. He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned far back in the blue leather chair. He put his feet on the glass-topped desk. He regarded the high shine on the Johnston & Murphy tasseled loafers with satisfaction, and beamed at the color pictures of his daughters and grandchildren beyond them. The walls of his office were painted light blue and crowded with plaques from the Holy Name Society and the Knights of Columbus. There were several pictures of him with Richard Cardinal Cushing and one personally autographed picture of John F. Kennedy. There was a long table, also glass-topped, against the wall to his right. In the center there was a photograph of his late wife. At the end nearest the desk, there was a Bearcat Scanner radio, its lights flashing sequentially but the volume turned down to the limit. Seats had received the radio in appreciation for his fundraising efforts on behalf of the drum and bugle corps of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which he had completely outfitted and sent to march in the inaugural parade of Lyndon B. Johnson. He did not listen to the radio.
    “I can’t stand the fuckin’ noise,” he explained. “Who the hell wants to listen to a buncha fuckin’ cops yakking? It’s the lights I like. All us wops love colored lights flashin’ on and off like that. Fascinates us. You guys think we came over here to make money? You’re crazy. It was all the lights. The Statue of Liberty? The first thing you see, you come here onna boat, is the Statue Liberty. Got lights on it. Right behind that you got New York, huh?
Millions
of lights. Some colored lights, some regular white lights, some lights that come on and just stay on, some that blink and some that flash. You think were sending all that money back to Naples, we want all our gumbahs come over and get rich? Nah. ‘Colored lights, Giovanni, you should see the colored lights. They got more lights here’n they know what the hell to do with. Save the money and come and see them. You save up enough, you come here and you work,pretty soon the two of us can open a restaurant and have our own sign with colored lights on it.’ I never listen the fuckin’ radio. I just turn it on. Makes me feel like my family made good in America and I got my very own restaurant with a buncha spades ‘n’ spics out back throwing food on the floor and robbing all my booze and not turning in the money from the checks. I want to hear a lot of goddamned
talk
, all I got to do is come the office inna morning. I don’t have