Budding Prospects Read Free

commodities both licit and illicit, bought and sold buildings and property and God knew what else—and all with the unshakable confidence and killing instinct of an apprentice Gould or Carnegie.
    And his timing was exquisite, I had to admit that. He’d come to me at just the right moment, a year and a half after my divorce, a time when I was depressed and restless, a time when I was beginning to feel like a prisoner in solitary. Half a million dollars. It was as if the head of NASA had just asked me if I’d like to be the first man to walk on Mars. There were risks involved, sure, but that was what made the project so enticing—the frisson, the audacity, the monumental pissing in the face of society. Vogelsang wasn’t going to grow a hundred plants or a hundred and fifty, he wasn’t going to be content with fifteen or twenty thousand—no, he was going to grow marijuana like Reynolds grew tobacco. My blood was racing. When I looked up into the three faces intent on my own, I was already halfway there.
    “I don’t know a thing about growing marijuana,” I said finally. Vogelsang was ready for this. “You don’t have to,” he said, lifting himself from the chair arm, “—that’s Boyd’s department.”
    “But two thousand plants … can one person handle that sort of thing?”
    “No way,” Dowst said, rustling his rain slicker.
    “We figure you’ll need two full-time people to help out. Who they are and how you pay them is up to you. You could hire them on a straight salary, or split your five hundred into shares. But whatever, they’ve got to be willing to give up the next nine months of their lives, and above all they’ve got to be”—here he paused to come up with the right word—“discreet.”
    Rain hit the roof like pennies from heaven, the icy voice on the radio was chanting
Money, give me money,/Money, give me money.
© We were all standing, for some reason. Dowst and Vogelsang were grinning, the girl’s face had softened with what I took to be a sort of truculent amicability.
    “How about your friend up in Tahoe,” Vogelsang said, as if he’d had a sudden inspiration (I realized at that instant he’d beenplaying me all along, like a street-corner salesman, a carnival barker making his pitch). “What’s his name …” (he knew it as well as I) “Cherniske?”
    “Phil,” I said, half to myself. “Yeah, Phil,” as if I’d stumbled across the solution to a baffling puzzle.
    Vogelsang took hold of my hand and pumped it in a congratulatory way, Dowst showing all his long gleaming teeth now, the girl fighting to keep the corners of her mouth from curling into a smile. I felt as if I’d just come back from sailing around the world or whipping the defending Wimbledon champ. I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no, but already Vogelsang was lifting his half-empty Moosehead bottle and calling for a toast.
    He had an arm round my shoulder, zombies disintegrated on the TV screen as heroes lobbed grenades at them, the cold voice chanted
money
in my ear, the smell of musk, of conception, of semen and the dark essence of the earth fired my nostrils, and then he flung up his hand, bottle clenched tight, like an evangelist called to witness: “To the summer camp!”

Chapter 2
    There was nothing in my early upbringing to indicate a life of crime. I wasn’t beaten, orphaned or abandoned, I didn’t hang out on street corners with a cigarette in my mouth and a stiletto in my pocket, I wasn’t mentally disfigured from years in a reformatory or morally and physically sapped as a result of shooting smack on pigeon-shit-encrusted stoops in the ghetto. No: I was a child of the middle class, nurtured on Tiger’s Milk and TV dinners and Aureomycin until I towered over my parents like some big-footed freak of another species, like a cuckoo raised by sparrows. I knew algebra, appreciated Verdi, ate veal marsala, sushi and escargots, and selected a good bottle of wine. My record, if not spotless, was tainted