Rivers of Gold Read Free Page B

spoiled fucking brat who knows nothing about discretion. But he’s also a client, and business is business.
    â€”You’ll be the first to know, I assure him with my best Wry Insider grin. I should be getting it later tonight.
    â€”You always get it later at night, Luigi guffaws through his Negroni. (He’s a client, too, but for carnal, rather than chemical, services, and I’m not in on that end of the business, strange as it may seem.)
    â€”Pig, Joss sighs in disgust. (I wonder if Luigi’s had her, too. Joss would seriously freak if she knew where he’s been ensconcing his conch. I would have tried for her myself by now, but Renny’s Rule Number Two is, No Client Coitus.)
    â€”But you will let us know first, yes? Your benefactors? Timo drawls, tipping his martini toward me for emphasis.
    The prick is playing the boss for his friends, trying to lord my access to this party and others like it as being due to his patronage. He sees me as some shiny piece of rough trade in from the boroughs to hobnob with Manhattan’s hoi polloi, a chance find that adds a dash of edgy color to his safe, easy life. Whatever. I tell myself to relax. I don’t need the shit I will surely get if I lose steady customers, but I also don’t need to take any shit from a brat like this, client or not. Without me, they won’t find the speaks, and if they don’t find the speaks they can’t buy my Specials. I lean forward and say in a low voice:
    â€”I said , you’d be the first to know.
    It’s momentary, a fleeting thing, but the shift is palpable. Timo blinks, the bated breath of the congregation eases out, Joss gives me an appraising look that says, Not tonight, but soon .
    But not tonight. I make my good-byes with just enough haste. There’s more business waiting for me at Broome Street.
    I call Prince William that because (a) he’s British, and (b) he can make money out of thin air. How he came to work for our boss, Reza, I have no idea, but it’s a natural fit.
    I might not be in the position I’m in had we not met at the launch party for Moan cologne at the Flatiron Lounge, sponsored by Pyrethrum magazine. I was shooting for the mag; he was there because he’s got The Knack. (Any party, anywhere, anytime, he’ll know about it before it happens.) Over round after round of ginger-pear-basil-aspic martinis (those with The Knack never see a bar tab), I told him about how I was funding my digital media classes at Pratt with magazine work. He told me I should be at Parsons or the Art Institute (like I could have afforded that at the time). His accent was mesmerizing, his speech hypnotic. He told me about how he parlayed two double-default mortgages into one of the new three-thousand-square-foot loft conversions in the Mink Building in Harlem for no money down, that’s how fucking slick he is. Plenty of players can trade up these days with the glut of housing on the market, but Prince William fucking cleaned up, no mistake.
    I know a sales pitch when I hear it, but the Prince was a cut above the rest. He recruited me for Reza with the skill of a master angler, all in a night’s work. And when the money started flowing, I was hooked. That was then, and this is now, and the wheels on the bus go round and round. Life in the Big Apple in 2013 isn’t about pride or principles, it’s about survival . And you have to survive to thrive.
    Tonight the Prince is at the far end of the bar under the chalkboards, chatting up a pair of buzz-cut birds in tank tops, perhaps planning a threesome. Even if they’re actually lesbians, it wouldn’t matter to him, he’d simply see it as yet another challenge. Prince William could talk the devil himself out of his pitchfork, he can certainly talk a couple of dykes too young to be set in their ways yet into a surf-and-turf. The Brits have this sense of restraint about them, which explains how they get away with such