Free Ladies and Gentlemen by Adam Ross Page A

and
really
put some distance between us. And even after that, after we pull away and they swim back to shore and shake off, they sit down on the beach, calm as kings, and just watch us. Like maybe we’ll change our minds and come back to be their dinner.”
    Donato started to laugh, coughing productively. Thane rocked back in pleasure, amazed. “So what happened?”
    “So we called it in once we got back to the boat. The Coast Guard updated us a week later. Apparently the woman ran out of food, her radio was out, and the dogs turned on her and the servants. Ate everything. Most of the indigenous animals on the island too. Even the bones. And Ralston and I, after delivering, like, ten kilos of cocaine to Miami, we get a commendation from the Coast Guard for exemplary service.”
    The man seemed to have an endless supply of these stories. Thane didn’t care if they were invented or exaggerated. They had the ring of truth. Of real experience. What Thane had learned of Donato’s family history was just as colorful. He was Sicilian, his father Cosa Nostra in New York. Donato claimed to have run numbers for the Mob as a boy. “Nigger pool,” he called it. “You’re telling me you’ve never heard of the nigger pool?” He was constantly amazed at Thane’s ignorance; he’d often pause to look around the office at some imaginary audience or sidekick, someone to acknowledge how little the professor knew about the world. He told Thane about his two tours of duty in Vietnam, missions with Special Forces in Khe Sanh and Quang Ngai, about his stints in prison after the war: one year in Tennessee for aggravated assault, four years’ hard labor in Alabama for gun running. Surely the professor knew that the primary couriers of illegal firearms in this country were motorcycle gangs. No, he didn’t know this. Like the Dobermans streaking down the beach, images from Donato’s tales stayed with him long after the telling, and he found himself thinking about them on his dark drive home.
    There was a chirping in the office, and Donato produced an impossibly small cell phone from his hip pocket. Thane checked his watch. It was almost nine o’clock.
    “This is Mike,” Donato said. He looked at Thane while he listened to the caller and pointed to the receiver, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. “Right. Right.
All right
. Slow down already.”
    Donato sat forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees while he scratched his forehead. “Where are you?” He looked at his watch. “Give me a few minutes.” He flipped the phone closed and smiled at Thane warmly. “The weekend has started.”
    He stood up. Thane stood too.
    “You should get out a little, Professor. All week I’m here, you’re burning it at both ends.”
    Thane glanced at the copy of
Us Weekly
on his desk. “You have no idea.”
    Donato turned to leave.
    “Hey, Mike?”
    “Yo.”
    “We should do this again.”
    “We will.”
    “I mean we should organize this material.”
    Donato look puzzled. “What material?”
    “Your stories.”
    Donato pointed to himself. “You mean my life?”
    “We could make a book out of it.”
    Donato checked with his audience again, then smiled crookedly. “C’mon.”
    “I’m serious,” Thane said. “This stuff is fascinating. Give it the right treatment and who knows?”
    Donato processed this, squinting at Thane. “You’d really want to do that?”
    “Think about it,” Thane said.
    Donato offered his hand, and they shook.
    Later, driving home toward Troutville, Thane wondered how long the whole process might take—from interviews to transcription to manuscript, from editing to first printing. He and Donato would sit down weekly with a Dictaphone. He would organize the narrative as a series of tour de force chapters: “In New York.” “In Vietnam.” “In Great Inagua.” He would call it
Tales of an Anonymous Life
. The book’s effect would be like a man walking in place against a moving background,