The tough part about writing fiction is the constraint under which one finds oneself —everyone assumes that one has the freedom to play God, but the truth is that only God can get away with the outrageous stuff.
A Buddhist ex-marine recovering alcoholic producing one of the world’s rarest and most expensive wines when not doing his day job as a philanthropic stockbroker… as a hero this is going to be a tough sell in any genre. Then there are all those other rules: We know that unlikely people can sometimes rise to the occasion, but for only the right people with the right skills to be in the right place at the right time?.. that stretches credibility. In the real world “coincidence” should be considered a law of nature, while in literature you use it at your peril. Literary allusions flatter our intellect, and plagiarism irritates our moral sensibilities, but both are plain eerie if they crop up in real life. A shocking disregard for all these literary rules is your guarantee that the following tale is true.

A story this timeless almost demands that I say “Mammon, Healing, Faith, Law, Art, Charity and Compassion were on a pilgrimage in the mountains” but as it happened only a few weeks ago I dare say that you’d prefer a more contemporary approach: Our oxymoronic hero was trekking in the Nepalese hill country with a Jewish pediatrician from Brooklyn, a Presbyterian minister and his attorney wife, an artist, a Sherpa guide and a couple of Tibetan women- just a group of middle aged friends taking a mildly strenuous exotic holiday.

The region around Everest is a land without roads so everything must be carried in baskets, about which one soon gets blasé, making it hard to say what was special about the particular basket we passed on the fourth day of the trek. Whatever the attraction it was sufficiently strong to pull our unlikely stockbroker some 20 feet off the trail to investigate. As soon as he reached it he realized that it was actually identical to every other Nepalese porter’s basket, but whether it was a trick of the light, or something more mysterious that brought him to this spot is immaterial- the scene was now set.