The Biology of Luck Read Online Free Page B

wants to do is get through this ordeal of a day, hour by hour, minute by minute. Tomorrow, he will have an agent and a live-in lover, a raison d’être, a justification for phoning Snipe and proffering his resignation. Or for not phoning Snipe, forletting Empire Tours float over the horizon of his life like so much driftwood. There will be no more questions about his long-term plans, no more jokes at Christmas parties about colleagues decapitated by traffic lights. Larry Bloom will never again stand in solitude on the platform of a red tour bus describing Captain Kidd’s role in the financing of Trinity Church and wondering whether the full-breasted temptation in the third row is old enough to ask out. So why doesn’t he ram his fist into Snipe’s mandible? Or even dare make a joke at his expense? Larry’s eyes have locked onto his supervisor’s chiseled chin, his angular jaw, the florid patches of flesh where a razor has chafed too close. He imagines they would make an easy target, if he truly wished to deck Snipe, but he wouldn’t even know the mechanics of the swing. Hitting just isn’t his medium.
    Snipe rubs his jaw, stamping approval on his shave. Then he cups his palm and punches it methodically with his fist. “You want some coffee, Bloom?”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œThat’s the one thing we seem to have enough of this morning. And it’s fresh. They sent up seventy-five gallons. Who is going to drink seventy-five gallons of coffee? If Juan Valdez at the caterer’s spent a little less time brewing coffee and a little more time baking bagels, we might fatten these Dutch fellows up some. They sure could use it…. Try this….”
    Snipe hands Larry a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee and a poppy-seed bagel.
    â€œDog piss,” says Snipe.
    Larry nearly breaks his teeth on the first bite. “A bit on the hard side.”
    â€œIt’s granite. It’s marble. It’s a goddamned marble statuette of a bagel, that’s what it is. We’ve been trying to unload the extras on the freak show, but it seems they also have standards. Even the cops won’t take them. By the way, Bloom, you have a car, don’t you?”
    Larry nods. Snipe knows he has a car. The bastard has borrowed it twice. Both times he claimed he had a funeral to go to in SouthJersey, which might have been the case, but Larry has a hunch that Snipe’s overnight trips are more likely to end in a birth than a burial. The second time, Snipe brought Larry the program from the service, a two-page foldout bearing the Twenty-third Psalm and a requiem to his godmother, but that only added to Larry’s suspicions. Who brings back a program from an interment as though it were a playbill or a National Park brochure? But Larry spent a full Saturday morning fine-toothing the backseat of his Plymouth, searching for so much as a Virginia Slims filter or a stray blond hair, an entirely futile endeavor, and the episode left him twice as convinced that if his boss is lying to him, he’ll never be able to prove it. For all he knows, Snipe is banging the director of a funeral parlor.
    â€œThat’s right,” says Snipe. “I remember now. A 1970-something white Plymouth. I wasn’t sure if you still owned it.”
    â€œI still own it.”
    â€œWell, here’s the thing, Bloom. I was kind of hoping I could borrow it.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œTonight, that is.”
    â€œLet me guess. A death in the family.”
    Larry stuns himself with his own audacity. After years of humoring his boss, he has suddenly hinted—not too subtly—that he thinks the man would kill off his own relatives, in a manner of speaking, if it suited his pecker. Then a worse idea strikes him: What if
this time
somebody has actually died?
    Snipe grins and crushes the bottom out of his empty Styrofoam cup. He does not appear insulted. “So you heard already. Word travels