Green Ice (51 page)
Authors: Gerald A. Browne
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.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
EBOOKS BY GERALD A. BROWNE
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
