He had to do a fair bit of hand-holding
with the realtor to get her set up and running on e-gold, but he loved
to do that sort of thing, loved to sit at the elbow of a novitiate and
guide her through the clicks and taps and forms. He loved to break off
for impromptu lectures on the underlying principles of the transaction,
and so he treated the poor realtor lady to a dozen addresses on the
nature of international currency markets, the value of precious metal as
a kind of financial lingua franca to which any currency could be
converted, the poetry of vault shelves in a hundred banks around the
world piled with the heaviest of metals, glinting dully in the
fluorescent tube lighting, tended by gnomish bankers who spoke a hundred
languages but communicated with one another by means of this universal
tongue of weights and measures and purity.
The clerks who'd tended Alan's many stores -- the used clothing store in
the Beaches, the used book-store in the Annex, the collectible tin-toy
store in Yorkville, the antique shop on Queen Street -- had both
benefited from and had their patience tried by Alan's discursive
nature. Alan had pretended never to notice the surreptitious rolling of
eyes and twirling fingers aimed templewise among his employees when he
got himself warmed up to a good oration, but in truth very little ever
escaped his attention.
Pages:
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39