Green Ice
Page 40
And it occurred to Wiley that it just so happened that the Greeks and Turks were boiling at one another over Cyprus.
She abandoned that tack abruptly, because just then they were entering the Holland Tunnel. She closed her eyes again and hummed the tunnel time away with some random notes. When they were out on the New Jersey side she said, “Marry me.”
“Nope.”
“Please marry me?”
“Not yet.”
“When?”
“After I make my first million.”
“I love you.”
“I know.”
“How soon after?”
“Right after.”
“Is that before or after taxes, the million?”
“Take home,” he told her.
She thought there had to be ways she could make him that rich without his knowing she was involved. She’d talk to Corey, her chairman, about it. But hell, why did Wiley have to make it so complicated?
“I’m going to knuckle down,” he said.
Which reminded her. She reached into her purse, took out a small, drawstring chamois pouch, the kind she carried marbles in. There were two emeralds in it. Twenty carats each, brilliant cut. The matched pair Wiley had concealed between his toes. Instead of throwing them away, she’d concealed them. Since then she’d been waiting for the right moment. Anyway, that was what she’d told herself. Holding out on him again? Only sort of. The matched pair were worth a half million each, at least. That could be his million, if he skipped taxes. She was about to open the pouch when …
“I mean it, Lillian,” he continued. “I’ve been spinning too long on the wrong tracks, and the promised land was never just around the bend anyway. I realize that now.”
“Good for you,” she said just to say something.
He told her, “What I have to do is put my nose and ass to the grind like any regular, normally privileged American. When they play the song, salute. Know what I mean?”
She nodded, thought, He has been under a lot of strain.
“I’m ready to settle,” he said decidedly, “for a split-level out somewhere on the outskirts of somewhere. A refrigerator with a door that spits out ice, cubed or crushed, and plays music. A microwave oven that can bake a medium-size potato during a commercial break. An FHA loan. For once in my life I want to go into any bank, have someone give me a financial proctoscopy and qualify.”
He’s serious, she thought. “Instead of business, wouldn’t you rather just get into me?”
He didn’t say no, but that didn’t mean yes.
“Okay, then, what sort of business do you have in mind?” No matter what it was, he’d be a practically overnight, huge, at least two-million-dollar success. She’d call Corey first chance, from the next pay phone if she could.
“Who knows?” Wiley said. “Like today, it’s a little import-export deal. For starters.”
By then they were in Hoboken.
Wiley turned left and left again and pulled into the parking area outside United States customs shed number thirty-eight.
Lillian waited in the car.
Nearly a half hour later Wiley came out wheeling a hand dolly. Loaded with two burlap sacks, hundred pounders.
He put the sacks in the back seat, returned the dolly, got in and drove away. Deadpan.
The sacks were stenciled: COFFEE FROM COLOMBIA.
“Coffee?” Lillian asked.
“It’s like gold these days,” Wiley said.
He must have arranged for it sometime while they were in Colombia, she thought. At least he deserved a good mark for foresight.
He pulled up and parked on the next side street, a warehouse kind of street, everything closed at the moment. He cut the motor. Without a word, got out and got into the back seat.
She kneeled up on the front seat, noticed stenciled further down on the sacks in smaller letters: GROWER: FREDERICO LUCHO.
Thank the plaster Christ … the likeable old man now had a new coffee-hulling machine, would never again have to pay to use his neighbor’s. And Julietta Magdalena Rosario, who had told Wiley’s tomorrows, had more than she’d ever need to sustain her image. Only a bruja was so well provided for by mysterious sources.
The late-night expeditions with those two were still fresh in Wiley’s memory. The coca-chewing bruja with her absurd divining rod. What a laugh. Lucho traipsing along after her, tending the bottle of aguardiente. Wiley patronizingly following over and up the slopes. How ridiculous.
Wiley used a penknife to slit both sacks down the middle.
The coffee beans poured out onto the floor of the car.
They were hulled but otherwise not processed. Almost as they’d been picked from Lucho’s trees.
Green with a smattering of red.
And mixed in here and there were much greener greens.
Emeralds.
La materia verde, the green stuff.
Five pounds of it.
Twenty-two thousand seven hundred and twenty carats. A lot of it kelly.
Worth, roughly, in the respectable neighborhood of eleven million.
About the Author
Gerald A. Browne is the New York Times–bestselling author of ten novels including 11 Harrowhouse, 19 Purchase Street, and Stone 588. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages, and several have been made into films. He attended the University of Mexico, Columbia University, and the Sorbonne, and has worked as a fashion photographer, an advertising executive, and a screenwriter. He lives in Southern California.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Lyrics from “For Once in My Life”: Lyrics by Ronald Miller. Music by Orlando Murden. Copyright © 1965 Jobete Music Company, Inc.
Lyrics from “Feel Like a Man” by Toni Tennille and Daryl Dragon: © 1975 Moonlight & Magnolias Music Publishing Co.
Lyrics from “Just a Gigolo (Schöner Gigolo)” by Julius Brammer, Irving Caesar, Leonello Casucci: © 1929 by Wiener Boheme Verlag at Wein. © renewed, assigned to Chappell and Co., Inc. (Intersong Music, Publisher). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Copyright © 1978 by Pulse Productions, Inc.
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4532-2090-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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