All the Lives He Led-A Novel Read Free Page A

at that moment in those remote and mysterious places called the Stans that nobody seemed to want to talk about, where the somadone and all kinds of other strange things came from.
    Actually somadone is what put the Afghan and Colombian drug lords out of business—as good at making you feel good as the hard stuff but with no harmful physical effects at all. Unless you stopped taking it, in which case you got all the withdrawal symptoms of any cold-turkey quitting. Of course everybody knew that, which is why the only people who got hooked voluntarily were addicts to one of the older, harder drugs who were having their health totally destroyed thereby. This was a problem for our local drug dealers, which they dealt with in various ways—by giving away free somadone-laced lemonade, or by handing out somadone-enriched jelly beans at kindergartens. That’s when I learned never to take anything edible from a stranger—or, for that matter, from most of the people who weren’t strangers to me at all. The person I learned it from was my poor old aunt Carrie, but I’ll tell you more about her later.
    Anyway, the cops didn’t bother with the likes of lookouts like me. The dealers did bother, though. The one or two times a cop did succeed in getting past me I got a pretty good working over from my employer of the moment to remind me to be more vigilant. That was bad enough but what was hard work then was trying to keep my mother from looking at me too closely for a few days, until the bruises lightened up. (My father wouldn’t have noticed anything as trivial as a few dozen black-and-blues. Maybe if I’d turned up with an ear missing.) Oh, and I never pimped anybody, either. I might have tried, before I got good at other skills, but I was only fourteen years old then and the girls just laughed at me. Besides all the good-looking girls had gone off to be nanas or au pairs—or hookers—in Kuwait and Madagascar, and it was only the homely ones that had stuck around New York.
    So those were the things we did. Since they couldn’t put all of us in jail, we kept right on doing them.
    Actually the cops were a lot more worried about terrorism than our kiddy crime. They had all the reason in the world to feel that way, of course. I mean, you just had to look down Fifth Avenue at the stump of the old Empire State Building to see what kind of thing they were worrying about. That had been the Unborn Babies Are Worth More Than Living Sinners attack, back in ’47 or so.
    I don’t want to give the impression that it was all one-sided. The news said otherwise. They’d rounded up and convicted everybody involved in chopping the top off the old Empire State, and in our civics class at NYA&M the teacher bragged that the government had finally got positive proof that the master terrorist of the age, somebody named Brian Bossert, had died of his wounds after his attack on the city of Toronto, Canada.
    It was the first time I’d heard the name Brian Bossert, and, oh, how I wish it had been the last.
    I didn’t really care what terrorists did, you know. Why then did I spend time watching terrorist actions on the news channels? Simple. They were doing something interesting, which the other news wasn’t. It was of no interest to me that the king of England had to face a parliamentary committee of inquiry because it had been alleged that he was considering turning Catholic, or that the vice president of the United States of America, or what was left of it, was having an affair with the president’s wife. None of that had anything to do with me.
    I did wonder sometimes why the US loonies didn’t employ their own gangs of terrorists, doing things like maybe going around and setting off bombs to punish the rest of the world for not—I don’t know—maybe for not somehow preventing Yellowstone? It wasn’t that Americans didn’t have the skills for terror. I mean, look at all the home-brew nutties who showed their annoyance by blowing up a