18mm Blues

by Gerald A. Browne

  He taxied back to the hotel. Julia was in the lobby with the baggage. They checked out and a half hour later were at Mingaladon Airport trying to get through customs.

  Their bags were thoroughly searched again, disheveled again. Including their carryons. The customs inspector took particular interest in Julia’s sketches, apparently approved of them, was fascinated with her charcoal, chalks and all that. Perhaps he had aspirations.

  The crucial thing was Grady’s currency form. He’d gathered from conversations with various dealers that the Burmese government, arbitrary as it was, was deadly serious about visitors accounting for every penny brought in, spent and taken out of its country. Hardline Burmese bookkeeping intended to discourage currency smuggling and other contraband activities (such as attempting to depart with precious stones that hadn’t been purchased from a government-connected source).

  Upon arrival three days before, Grady had declared a hundred and fifty thousand in his possession. Now, upon leaving, he had about a hundred and would have to account for the difference. If he revealed he’d bought the piece of rough from that cheroot-smoking woman rebel it would probably be confiscated.

  What to do? To start, he listed every currency exchange he’d made, exactly what he’d put out for the hotel, meals, gratuities and all. Then there was the ruby he’d bought from retired General Tun, fifty thousand for that.

  The customs official considered that item, asked to have a look at the stone. He unfolded the briefke containing it, examined the scintillating cushion-cut red.

  As far as Grady was concerned it wouldn’t matter whether or not the official had eye enough to know synthetic from genuine. Either way fifty thousand would be accounted for. Grady watched the man’s expression change to amused knowing and then to smug spite. Read the man’s sentiments: good! another fucked-over American.

  Within the hour Grady and Julia were airborne. Julia waited for the seat belt sign to be dinged off before going into her smaller carryon.

  For the eraser.

  Gray, malleable charcoal eraser that from her use during sketching had become an unsightly, variegated lump about the size of a large prune.

  She dug at it with her fingernails, peeled the eraser stuff away from the piece of rough.

  A conspiratorial grin.

  She dropped the stone into Grady’s hand. He bare-eyed it with the help of the afternoon sun that was striking that side of the plane. He hoped to God what he was looking at was what he hoped it was.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mahesak Road.

  In what is now referred to as the old farang (foreign) quarter of Bangkok. To all appearances, Mahesak is unremarkable, just another side street. On its three short, straight blocks there is no wat (Buddhist temple), no new high-rise or ancient landmark, not even the offerings of some girlie bars. What’s there is only a tight line of similar, older buildings of one or two stories that have changed little other than their faces over the past hundred years.

  How dependent they seem, these squat buildings pressed side against side, as though jostling for inches, squeezing and being squeezed, giving off the impression that they must be suffering what might be called architectural pain.

  Squeeze and pain. Suitable for the type of commerce conducted daily on Mahesak. For it is here that most of Bangkok’s gem dealers do their business. Dealers, mind you, not jewelers. Although there’s a bit of jeweler in nearly every dealer as there’s some dealer in most jewelers, the distinction is made. The jewelers of Bangkok are scattered throughout the city. They have public concerns, retail mentalities. The Mahesak dealers, on the other hand, are a concentrated community closer to the earth, that is, closer to the treacheries that go on along the violent borders Thailand shares with Burma and Cambodia.

  Any Mahesak dealer of consequence has his line of supply from those providing but perilous areas. A networking team, perhaps, to cover simultaneously various points. Or a partner with whom he takes turns being the carrier. Or his connection might be as tenuous as someone he’s hired by the trip who he hopes will prove trustworthy.

  The carrier goes out with money, buys and brings. Comes back when he’s accumulated a satisfactory number of stones. Rubies and/or sapphires, some faceted, some in the rough. Occasionally he returns with a single stone, one that is especially large and too promising to put off being bought.

  Such brings, as they’re called, are never apparent. The arrival of the carrier is never even a minor event. It just blends in with the everyday comings and goings of Mahesak, an unhurried pace blamed on the steamy weather though more likely it is a habitual, intentional cover-up of the anxieties that go along with the surreptitious acquiring. (Millions’ worth brought sewn within a trouser cuff or tucked where a molar had been between cheek and gum.) Millions are all the more reason not to rush. The prudent attitude is serious nonchalance, as though every moment is no different from the one before or the one ahead, while underneath, in the underbelly of each transaction, dwells a venal quickness, the swift reflexes of the mind needed not only to profit but also to not get taken (the ultimate embarrassment).

  The gem dealers of Mahesak. Strangely, there are few Thais among them. Perhaps Thais just don’t have the personality for it, they with their tendency to smile first and if at all possible sidestep friction. Their absence is filled by a stew of nationalities. Self-eminent Germans, umbilicated to the cutting factories of Idar-Oberstein; shrewd, and friendly, coal-eyed Armenians; some excessively patient Arabs. Many caste-conscious East Indians, especially from New Delhi and Darjeeling, who never seem to have the desire to go home even when there is next to no profit to be made, who’d rather stay and make a penny than leave and not. The majority of dealers are Chinese. They’re the most successful, the more industrious ones with the wherewithal to exploit. They owe their financial edge to their day-by-day, deal-by-deal tight fists and their instinct to know precisely when circumstances are right to risk everything.

  This, then, on that Thursday morning in early June, was the sphere and milieu Grady and Julia entered when they rounded the corner of wide, bustling Silom Road and walked north up Mahesak. Grady’s stride was a little heavy in the heel. He still had remnant misgivings about staying over in Bangkok, and it was occurring to him that by now, if they’d been able to connect right away with a flight, they’d be only a couple of hours out of San Francisco. He told himself he wouldn’t have minded terribly being layed over for seven hours and catching Northwest’s nonstop night flight, which had the first available space. He’d been perfectly willing to make the most of that layover, to taxi into Bangkok proper, see some of it and have a good meal. Julia, however, believed that Bangkok was deserving of more than a few hours. At first that was just an opinion she impassively expressed. Next it came out as a pointed remark. Then a rather adamant preference.

  Grady was swayed by the way Julia had endured without complaint the room at the Lake Inye Hotel, put up with that awful furniture screwed to the wall or floor as though anyone in the world would ever want to steal it, and the wall-to-wall carpet so stained and contaminated-looking that to expose bare feet to it had seemed a health risk. As much as Grady wanted to get the next long leg of inevitable lag over with, get back home and give his all to his new business, he more or less persuaded himself that he owed Julia a portion of comfort. In fact his debt was greater than that; he owed her luxury.

  So, with carryons and baggage they proceeded by taxi to the Hotel Oriental where, when asked by the registration clerk how long they’d be staying, Grady, in a moment of romantic magnanimity, had replied, “At least several days.” Shortly thereafter they were unpacking and stowing and hanging their belongings in the drawers and closets of the five-hundred-dollar-a-day suite on the twelfth floor, overlooking the river. Julia going about arranging her cosmetics and other personals on the shelf over the counter in the elegant marble bathroom and humming and dah-dah-dahing to herself a song that was decidedly, stridently Oriental. Grady thought she was getting into the s
pirit of the place.

  Now, next day, here they were on Mahesak, putting off any sightseeing until they’d satisfied their questions about the piece of red rough bought in Rangoon. Whether it was a crystal or spinel or ruby or what. And if a ruby as claimed, how good a ruby? Fifty thousand good?

  Grady hoped to find out by finding Alfred Reese, a Bangkok dealer who’d called upon him years ago when he’d been buying for Shreve and Company. They’d had a long pleasant lunch and gotten along well and Grady had bought a lot of nice lavender sapphires. Sapphires and rubies were Reese’s métier. He truly knew them. Grady hadn’t seen Reese since that day, but there’d been some long-distance transactions, numerous phone calls, quite a bit of nonbusiness conversation. Reese, as Grady recalled him, was a tall man, six five or so, with a stoop. He wasn’t merely round-shouldered but had a stoop so extreme that a drip of water from the tip of his nose would have missed his toes by six inches. By now he would be in his late fifties. He’d been born and raised in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, gone to school in Stillwater and gotten into the gem business in Tulsa. Buying trips to Dallas, Chicago and New York preceded the trip to Bangkok that changed his direction. The only reason he returned to Tulsa was to settle some legal loose ends including a pending divorce and to turn everything that was surely his into cash.

  The thing about Bangkok that got Reese was something that wasn’t there. The concept of original sin, the yoke of it. Reese hadn’t realized how restrained he’d been by it, libidinously suffocated, until the Thai women, those little beauties, unknotted him and caused him to take deep, totally responsive breaths. They and their ways stripped him of the Methodist Sunday school cupjock and converted him into a happier-to-be-bareass Okie cowboy Buddhist.

  So that was Reese, the dealer Grady and Julia were looking for on Mahesak. It had been years since Grady had spoken to Reese and there hadn’t been an answer that morning when Grady had tried phoning him. The address Grady had for him, 531 Mahesak, would be along there somewhere. The sidewalk was insufficient for two-way foot traffic. Grady and Julia had to go single file to make room for those walking in the opposite direction. None of the businesses appeared hospitable, they noticed. Not one open door. Most had steel gates across their entrances, and electronic locks. Some were numbered in Thai, some in Arabic, others had no numbers at all.

  Grady and Julia walked the entire length of Mahesak without coming upon 531. They doubled back and inquired. The third person they asked pointed it out. A narrow place looking bullied by its adjoining buildings. No windows. A steel-faced door. The entire front from street level to roofline was painted a high-gloss dark green enamel that emphasized here and there the buildup and flaked-away patches of numerous previous coats. Grady thought back to the times he and Reese had talked longdistance. He’d never pictured Reese talking from a place such as this.

  Julia found a buzzer button inset on the door frame, gave it a jab. Nothing. She gave it another, more insistent. After a long moment the door clicked open, allowing entrance to a short, narrow landing at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Nowhere to go but up. Gritty, metal-edged stairs. At the top was a similar landing and another equally formidable door with a peephole in it at eye level. Being peeped at made Julia uncomfortable. She repressed an impulse to make a face. Grady doubted, considering how long it had been, that the door would be opened by Reese.

  But it was.

  Glad to see Grady, glad to meet Julia. An unexpected pleasure, Reese said with more Oklahoma twang than Grady remembered him having. Reese led them to an area not partitioned off from the rest of the second floor but which he good-naturedly and somewhat apologetically called his office. There was a formidable late-model safe in the corner and a refrigerator of about the same size next to it.

  Reese didn’t look an hour older, Grady thought. Whatever he was getting out of life apparently agreed with him. It caused Grady to give his own ways and means a moment of comparative consideration and in the next moment reach the conclusion that a long term with Julia was going to make the same world of difference for him.

  Reese offered drinks, cold Polaris mineral water was settled upon for all. Grady and Reese spent the next ten minutes reacquainting, touching upon, almost as though reciting résumés, high points and some of the lows of their recent years. Julia just sat there and tried to appear interested, contributed nothing, held back making the wry quips that came to mind. Why didn’t they just get to the reason for being there? she thought. After all, it wasn’t as if Reese was a long-lost genuinely missed relative. She was relieved when finally Reese said he presumed Grady was there on a buying trip, and Grady told him he’d been to the Emporium, was on his way home.

  “How’d it go?” Reese asked.

  “Not all that great.” Grady understated and allowed some silence while he omitted telling Reese how he’d been outbid every time.

  “They’re such bullshit, the Burmese,” Reese said. “Mean little fuckers too.” He looked to Julia and begged pardon for his language.

  A blasé shrug from Julia.

  “Did you get to buy anything?” Reese asked Grady.

  “Just this.” Grady brought out the piece of rough.

  Reese took it and took a look at it. Shifted his eyes aside, then brought them back to the crystal. Grady believed he saw Reese’s interest intensify. No doubt Reese knew ruby rough, had seen a lot of it. “What do you think?” Grady asked offhand.

  “Looks okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Can’t say more than that for sure until we get some crud off it. That all right with you?”

  “Sure.”

  It was precisely what Grady had hoped for, had come for, and he liked that he hadn’t had to ask the favor. He followed Reese across the room to a workbench. Reese flipped a switch that started the spin of a grinding wheel. He gave the piece of rough some deciding inspection before applying one of its surfaces to the wheel. Did it cautiously with practiced fingers and just enough gentle pressure.

  The stone sounded mortal, tortured, screeching the way it did as the diamond-coated wheel abraded its worthless skin. Reese gave the same attention to its five other surfaces and its ends. Then treated it to another kinder wheel to polish it some.

  He spat on it. Held it up to the daylight fluorescent light. Louped it from various angles for a couple of minutes. Next pincered it with a pair of locking tweezers and mounted the tweezers in place on the nearby microscope so the now cleaner crystal was held below the lens. He clicked on the microscope’s attached light and sighted into its binocular eyepieces. Adjusted the tweezers, adjusted the focus and looked and looked. Without comment or even some little sound like a grunt that Grady might interpret. Finally, still silent and expressionless, he backed off and gestured that Grady should take a look.

  The magnification was forty times.

  The realm that Grady viewed was rich deep red, entirely, except for…

  “See the silk?” Reese asked.

  As though Grady could possibly miss it. An arrangement of rutile needles. They intersected one another at an angle of about sixty degrees, were interwoven densely, glittering. Silk. To Grady’s eyes it was like seeing a vast number of headlights transformed into four-armed stars by a red rainy San Francisco night.

  “Notice how fine woven the silk is?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s what’s telling us it’s Burma goods. Not Ceylon. If it was Ceylon goods the needles would be a lot more slender, with a coarser weave. If it was Thai or African goods there’d be no silk at all. It’s Burma, all right.”

  Grady knew most of what Reese had just said. It was elementary geminological textbook stuff, but he let Reese say it. The important thing he’d just learned was what Reese had taken for granted. It was ruby. How good a ruby was yet to be determined, but surely, considering the carat weight, it was worth more than the fifty he’d paid for it. “Want to sell this piece?” Reese asked.

  Grady didn’t reply immediately. He was enjoying looking a
t profit. Finally, he gave his eyes a rest. “You want to buy it?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “If maybe, what would you offer?”

  “A fast deal, a right-now deal, I might go two hundred thousand.”

  Grady didn’t say two hundred was an insult, didn’t want to bother with that old obvious routine. Instead, he refused with just a shake of his head.

  Reese removed the ruby crystal from the microscope. Bare-eyed it again. “I myself don’t have the kind of money you probably want, but I know someone here who does.”

  “How much would that be?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t have a figure in mind.”

  “Think about four hundred thousand.”

  Grady enjoyed thinking about it. A chance to pick up a fast three-fifty, if Reese was serious, and he seemed to be. A certain sort of gem dealer reasoning told Grady that if the ruby crystal was worth four hundred here it would be worth perhaps half again as much on the market back in the States. And even more when it was cut. “I’m going to have it cut,” he decided aloud.

  Reese accepted that Grady’s mind was made up, wouldn’t press further. Cutting the piece was what he’d do if the piece of ruby was his. “Who’ll you have cut it?”

  “Merzbacker, probably,” Grady replied, wishing that could be. “Or at least someone of that level.” Merzbacker had the reputation of being the best cutter of colored goods in New York City and one of the best in the world. He was said to be temperamental and extremely slow but seldom got less than the most out of a stone.

  “You want to put yourself through all that?” Reese said.

  “Be worth it.”

  “Merzbacker’ll take six months to let you know whether or not he wants to do the stone, and just as long as that to get to it. Fucking prima donna. In my opinion there are plenty of cutters as good as Merzbacker.”