Lab Notes: a novel Read Online Free

tribal shamans and spend time, lots of time, buddying up to them so we can analyze plants used for their native cures. Ethnobotany it’s called. It’s a ver-rr-ry slow process. And verr-rr-ry costly.”
    He slapped the bar. “So, there you have it—a sure formula for bankruptcy.”
    He stepped over to a cabinet, rooted around and came up with more olives. “There’s an upside to all this I guess. Diane Rose’s husband is a biochemist. He’s also her research partner—and a real prig, by the way. He’s in the final stages of developing a pharmaceutical from one of his wife’s jungle plants. If it’s approved by the FDA, it’s supposedly the best drug to control the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease to come along in forty-some years. I put out some feelers this week. There are parties interested in investing in the drug—even before the approval comes through. That could provide us with a quick return on our investment in the Roses.”
    Raymond mixed another martini. He took a long swig, then placed his glass on the bar and stared at it. “I was told to: ‘Just make it happen.’ There’s no limit to the incentives I can offer the Roses.”
    He turned to Maxine with glassy eyes and a thin smile. “So, I guess that does make them pretty special, doesn’t it?”

μ CHAPTER THREE μ
     
    Olimpia glanced around at the dozing passengers with envy. She usually slept well in flight, but the phone call had left her staring at the seat in front of her, reflecting ( for the millionth time ) on a moment of youthful exuberance and an innocent accommodation that led to a lifetime of servitude.

     
    Three days before her carefully charted life veered off course, twenty-three year old Olimpia Garza climbed the crumbling steps to the Church of the Madre de Remedios . Reaching the top, she turned and strained her eyes toward the solitary figure down at the harbor. Olimpia had not yet met the khaki-clad young man in the Panama hat who stood on the wharf. But she knew he was the Gabriel Carrera, Eduardo Carrera’s older brother.
    Eduardo Carrera, whose abilities were vastly undervalued (according to his own impassioned account), had approached Olimpia the evening before and introduced himself moments after she stepped off the riverboat. And despite their exceptionally short acquaintance, they had hatched a conspiracy of sorts.
    Olimpia watched Gabriel wave farewell to a workboat. As the vessel moved out into the bay with its cargo of logs, he hastened up to Turbo’s double-rutted main street where he was met by Eduardo. They spoke briefly, then the men headed toward their villa, playing Frisbee with Gabriel’s hat along the way.
    The Carrera villa, an imposing walled-in stucco structure, along with the neighboring church of the Madre de Remedios and its rectory, stood like white-clad sentinels guarding over the frontier town.
    Olimpia waited patiently on the church steps. Things were going as planned; the brothers were heading straight for her.
    Olimpia had learned from Eduardo that his brother was furious about being sent to Turbo to oversee the Carrera logging operation again this season. This summer, as industrialist-intraining, Gabriel was to have his own office suite in New York, Paris or Barranquilla and participate in his choice of the many Carrera family interests: shipping, coffee, cattle, petroleum, telecommunications, logging or wineries.
    He blamed his “exile to this sweltering gateway to hell” on his father’s displeasure with him, beginning with his bringing an American girl home from the States over the past Christmas holiday.
    Olimpia knew that Gabriel Carrera dreaded tomorrow when he and Eduardo and their crew would motor up river into the jungle; Gabriel detested the jungle. And he had told Eduardo that almost more than the jungle, he dreaded going back to graduate school at Harvard in the fall and confessing to what he actually did on his summer vacation.
    As the Carreras approached, Olimpia