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e his studio. He was working on a portrait, a seated matron--silver hair, a lot of greens, sage, purple lilac colors. Her hands were partially sketched, folded in her lap. A diagonal grid of pencil lines mapped the unpainted portions of the canvas into large diamonds. "'Ach, the jewelry. Always the jewelry. I hate it.' Franz said, looking at indications of bracelets and rings. 'Ach.' I asked him what the pencil lines were for. "'Structure. Composition. Always I start with them."' Joe stretched and finished his coconut banana dessert. Mo looked thoughtful. "What became of the babe?" "I saw her across the street, a few weeks later. I don't think she noticed me. Every so often I look at the mountain and remember that studio, especially at night. You can see a couple of lights way up there. You know what I keep seeing?" He answered his own question. "Those diagonal pencil lines." "Mmm . . . " Mo pushed her plate away. "Thank you, Joe. It was a nice lunch." As they left the restaurant she put a hand on his arm. "When the going gets tough, the tough get going, right?" She was looking at him as though he were a sixth grader. "Right," he said, and they went in different directions on Kapahulu Avenue. Joe took the long way home, around the zoo and through Waikiki. He didn't know what to make of Mo. She was a good listener. She didn't seem to be involved with anyone. It was a shame to let that body of hers go to waste. Joe had started the day at 4 a.m. to catch the market opening on the East Coast; by the time he got back he was tired and already anticipating the next day's trading. Precious metals were hot. He was making money. He had made the acquaintance in cyberspace of Claude Ogier, a knowledgeable gold bug from Quebec who issued a constant stream of communications about the latest mining developments. Claude was preparing to launch a newsletter, working into it. Joe was up $3000 in six weeks by following his advice. Southwest Precious Metals was attracting a lot of interest. They claimed an area of desert basin that was filled to a depth of 400 meters with material eroded from an adjacent range--a mountainous area that had been mined for gold in the last century. The deposit, known as 'desert dirt,' contained gold, silver, and platinum in small concentrations. Small, that is, by the ounce. By the square kilometer, Southwest was sitting on the find of the decade. The problem lay in the extraction. There
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