Green Ice Read Online Free

He missed out entirely on an indoor tennis complex in Westchester, American Indian jewelry, musk oil, mood rings, pet rocks, Art Deco furniture, imprinted T-shirts, and frozen yogurt.
    He had bad luck with a tropical fish venture when the heating system failed on a January night, froze the entire stock in blocks of ice that shattered the glass of all the aquariums.
    Korean ginseng. He was right on time with that, when its libidinal benefits were only in the rumor stage. He’d heard about it from a pretty Korean model who chomped on those phallic-shaped roots as though they were carrots—and demonstrated excellent results. She claimed she had a cheap and plentiful source of ginseng roots, tea, and extract—a man in Namchiang, Korea, which happened to be her hometown. Wiley put up the money. She flew. The only excuse he could find to forgive her was she must have been extremely homesick.
    Wiley had another business adventure with an Oriental. A man named Chun Ta Ha, who hoped his constant smile compensated for his inability to speak English. Ta Ha had jumped ship in Boston, made his way to New York City and was working in the Hop Tee Hand Laundry on West Seventy-second Street when Wiley met him. He was the son of a farmer in Canton and was astonished at the prices being paid here for Chinese vegetables. Wiley saw the possibilities. Ta Ha would grow, they both would reap.
    They rented an abandoned warehouse downtown, in the Bowery area. A large, dark, awfully damp place. Perfect. They bought forty-three field-kitchen kettles from an army surplus dealer in New Jersey. The kettles were four feet in diameter, had drain holes in their bottoms. They also bought five hundred pounds of mung beans, a portion of which they washed and soaked and put into the kettles. Ta Ha hosed the beans down three or four times a day, kept them damp.
    They were in business.
    Within five days they had their first harvest. Two tons of bean sprouts they could wholesale for twenty-five cents a pound.
    A thousand dollars, just like that.
    What was great about it was the beans did practically all the work. With more kettles and more beans, there could be a harvest every day. All they had to do was pack them. A thousand dollars a day, every day. A take of over a quarter million dollars a year.
    Ta Ha giggled, and Wiley’s voice echoed in that place as he joyfully shouted, “Sprout, you little moneymaking bastards!”
    On the seventh day of production Wiley received a frantic telephone call in Chinese from Ta Ha. Wiley didn’t know what was wrong until he saw it.
    Rats had eaten all the bean sprouts.
    Rats. There was no way to stop them. It seemed as though the word had been passed to every rodent in the city. Despite traps, poisons, and wire mesh covers, the rats kept on coming—to eat Wiley and Ta Ha out of a fortune.
    In such ways success eluded Wiley. However, each near-miss only made him all the more determined. His schemes weren’t really quixotic, he told himself; his time would come.
    Now there he was at the office, thirty-two New York City floors above the ordinary level of life. His hopes this day were higher than ever. He was close to pulling off a deal that would net him millions. A simple little gimmick: clear plastic disks about the size of a quarter that could be worn as medallions or charms or carried in the pocket. Sealed within each disk would be a pinch of dirt, certified to be a pinch of the old homeland. From Ireland or Italy, Poland, Greece, Puerto Rico, Israel, or wherever. Millions of people were latter-day Americans. Most families had been here only two or three generations. Practically the entire country retained pride in some foreign land.
    Wiley had gotten the idea one Sunday when trying to get crosstown in a cab while there was a parade on Fifth Avenue. The cab driver was bitching: “Every fucking Saturday and Sunday and every fucking holiday somebody’s jamming up traffic with a parade. If it ain’t the wops, it’s the