Snowstorms in a Hot Climate by Sarah Dunant Read Free Book Online Page B

you’d be paying maybe one hundred dollars for a gram whichcontained nowhere near that amount of cocaine. Lenny told me once that he moved the equivalent of about ninety thousand grams, pure. Even with a four to five hundred percent markup, by the time it reached the punter he was making one hell of a lot of money. I didn’t ask how much, and he never volunteered the information.
    Enough, anyway, not even to think about working for a long time to come. Spring was exploding when we got back. We used to spend the weeks in New York and the weekends at Westchester. God, I loved Manhattan. It was like a giant toy box, and I played all day long. Movies and galleries, shops and shows. And the days danced by without my noticing.
    With the summer swelter we took off, spent six weeks in California by the ocean, in this amazing house that a friend of Lenny’s had built. We were living on the pleasure principle. It wasn’t even to do with coke. When he arrived back from his “office,” he had brought a stash home—“There it is, Elly. Shavings of profit.” But he didn’t touch it, at least not when I was around, and hearing the island conversation in my head, I too withdrew my patronage. Once I’d made the decision, it wasn’t that hard. There was a week or so when I found myself yearning, when I seemed a little edgy and irritable. But it passed. And the world was too full to miss it.
    Maybe it was California where things first started to go wrong. I don’t remember clearly anymore. But I do know that when I got back and the autumn began to roll in, I made an attempt to organize my life. I was lucky. There was work to be done in the shop. Yes, the shop. It—or rather they—really did exist. Three of them: Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. Like all careful coke men, Lenny had developed certain legit fronts. Panache was one of them. Of course, he had very little to do with it. He did the buying, in a haphazard kind of way, and left the selling to others. Boy, was it a mess. A funky little placeback from Washington Square, crammed with Colombian jewelery, sweaters, and leather goods; about as much sense of design as a Liverpool junk shop. It was perfect for me. I redesigned, redecorated, and reopened it. It was something to do, something that I was good at. A kind of independence. Also a way of getting a green card.
Design Consultant
. Lenny’s lawyers started the wheels grinding. If I was going to stay in New York, it was either that or marriage. And neither of us wanted marriage. Even then. Maybe we could already see the rocks in the distance.
    Certainly by the autumn it was clear that something was poisoning the water. He had changed. There had been so much life to him, vitality as well as charm. Not just with me but with the rest of the world. Gradually that began to evaporate. When I look back on it, I suspect it had begun almost as soon as we got home, as if once the coke had been shifted, once the job was done, his whole metabolism started to change. He became stiller, more contained, and finally withdrawn. Of course there had always been that element in him, the sudden switch-off. But this was different. This was calculated distance, a kind of emotional paralysis almost. It wasn’t that he was lazy. My God, far from it. He would spend whole days in his study or out at the library reading. And not just anything. Very particular books. Check out the bookshelves and you’ll see. I tell you, Marla, you’d have a lot in common. He would have these academic obsessions. History, politics, even literature. There would be weeks when all he’d read or talk about would be the medieval church in Europe, the campaigns of Napoleon, or the work of Carlos Fuentes. And all with such discipline. He’d get all the right books—he even has an account with Blackwell’s in Oxford—he’d take notes and then hold seminars in his head, or with me over the dinner table. And he was good. But there was such iron in his method, like