Greenhouse Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

special service.
    Once or twice a year at the most, Eric. And you can refuse any contract you feel violates your moral or political principles with no hard feelings, we can always give it to someone who would find it more fulfilling. No more than one hit a year had ever been required of him, and when he turned down the occasional contract on moral or esthetic grounds, there were indeed no unpleasant repercussions.
    So it might fairly be said that because the esthetics of the manner in which he was constrained to fulfill this one left so much to be desired, preventing the dishonorable and odious M. Gauldier from further disturbing the commerce of this fair pleasure garden and the harmonious relationship between Bad Boys and Force Flic would be an act of righteous self-sacrifice.
    Noblesse oblige.
    He was, after all, a prince, was he not?

 

     

     

     

    MONIQUE CALHOUN TOOK THE ELEVATOR DOWN and strode through the lobby out onto Seawall Avenue, the boulevard atop the dikework that ran around Manhattan, the only real New York, the city she hated to love and loved to hate.
    This, of course, made her a true New Yorker.
    This in itself was part of the
attitude
.
    Her cramped studio apartment on the eleventh floor of a Seawall Avenue tower might hardly be a candidate for anyone but a New Yorker’s object of affection, but those favored by a crepuscular rendezvous therein, who didn’t have to live there, seldom failed to express their envy.
    For the westward view through the picture window at sunset was heart stoppingly glorious on a good day, the blazing ball of the sun bronzed by the haze over the New Jersey shore as it sank majestically behind the silhouetted filigreed fairyland landscape of the Palisades, painting the sky mauve and purple and orange, turning the Hudson River into a brilliant mirror of rippling light.
    The cold cruel light of morning at seawall level, however, presented a somewhat less romantic vista. The Palisades skyline wasstarkly revealed as a hodgepodge of factories, apartment blocks, windmills, tank farms, and solar arrays.
    Houseboats, barges, sampans, and fishing boat docks, with their connecting chaotic network of rotting gangways, formed an amoeboid floating favela outside the seawall, spreading five hundred meters and more out across the Hudson along as much of the length of Manhattan as the eye could see. And while from the eleventh floor she didn’t get much of the smell, even with the sun just beginning to steam the aroma off River City, she got a good dose of cookfire smoke and frying fish and better-you-don’t-ask from here.
    If the Paris of her girlhood was favored by fortune and the Lands of the Lost of Monique Calhoun’s guilty professional day-tripping were the victims of the roll of the climatological dice, New York was somehow both Blue and Green and yet neither.
    New York was energized by its perfect winters, the clear blue skies, the tangy air just a shade too warm to be called brisk. New York basked in its golden tropical springs and autumns, when it wasn’t being drenched with their monsoon rains.
    New York broasted in its horrendous summers, when you could fry an egg on the pavement and steam one in the supersaturated air if you could keep the mosquitoes and flies from devouring it first, when orbital mirrors had to burn away the inversion layer every other day to keep the air more or less breathable.
    The swamping of so much of the shorelines of Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island might have provided the breeding grounds for vast hordes of mosquitoes, flies, and swamp rats—and alligators and water moccasins and cockroaches the size of cats or so the legends went—but it had also created the habitat for the rich profusion of crabs, lobsters, shrimp, crayfish, catfish, carp, and shellfish which made seafood so cheap locally and had created the aquaculture and fishing industry in which, one way or another, most of the refugees from the Southeast Asian littorals and Pacific