The Return: A Novel by Michael Gruber

Author:Michael Gruber [Gruber, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805091298
Amazon: 0805091297
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2013-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

13

Marder walked out on his terrace and watched his daughter helping Skelly and a crew of colonia men bolt the shaft of the cell-phone mast to one of the squat towers that guarded the four corners of Casa Feliz. The towers were actual rooms, unfinished but weather-tight, devised, he imagined, for the storage of terrace furniture. One of them was electrified and piped for a wet bar that had never been installed, and Skelly planned to use it for the base station of the cell. One of his “guys” was in contact with someone from Telmex, who, for the usual consideration, would mate the cell to his company’s system. This was not an unusual arrangement, Marder had learned, provided so that the wealthy in isolated haciendas need not give up the benefits of modern technology. Cheap cell phones had been distributed generally around the colonia—nice for the people and vital to what Skelly hoped to develop into an efficient little militia and threat-detection network.

With deep pleasure, Marder observed the fierce concentration with which his girl fired bolts into the concrete to hold the brackets for the antenna mast while also joking with Skelly and the crew as they worked. She seemed happy and unaffected by the encounter yesterday with the younger Cuello. Marder felt now that, curiously, he had come out on the other side of worry, because worry was useless and degrading. This was the upside of no importa madre—a man did not spend energy on obsessing about what could not be helped. His daughter’s breaking a bottle over the Piglet’s head would not make Cuello hate Marder more than he already did, and in a way it furthered Marder’s cause. He wanted Cuello enraged, in fact.

Marder himself had spent the day setting up a Web marketing system. He had edited a book about it some years back and found it a fairly painless exercise. Young Epifania had been tasked to go around to the small factories and take digital photos of their work, and the thing was coming along nicely. He’d hired an outfit in New York to set up fulfillment software and handle billing and tax matters and a firm in Santa Clara to market the goods to high-end crafts shops in big American and European cities. Thus commerce progressed in the wired global marketplace. He had no great hopes of making a fortune for these people, but he wished at least to secure a better living than they had been used to, as well as a place for them to live.

Life flowed on smoothly for the next week or so, and the house was indeed as happy as its name. The cell phones went on. A prefab steel building was delivered by flatbed truck and assembled on a concrete slab to serve as an office and warehouse. The animals (except poultry) were herded away from the humans and corralled at the northern end of the island. The septic field went in, and plastic pipes were laid to distribute water.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.