18mm Blues

by Gerald A. Browne

  The pearl farming in Ago Bay on the southern coast of central Japan was what Grady had read and knew most about. It was there that the Mikimoto firm and numerous prominent others were located. Grady understood that the water of Ago was becoming polluted and, as a result, first-quality pearls were becoming scarcer. Prices were up.

  “If there’s a better location than this for growing pearls I’ve not seen it,” Kumura said. “The tides are never a problem. The water is gently circulated by way of an inlet to the north and an outlet on the south. The bottom is clean and sandy, swept by the currents. Ago Bay, as you may know, has a problem with silt. When stirred up by a storm, silt can be a major problem. Pearl oysters are temperamental as hell, they seem to sulk and refuse to produce unless conditions are just so.”

  Grady pictured the bottom of this ideal bay. Inhabited by contented, pearl-laden oysters. He also thought about the favoritism of fate. Here was Kumura, a man in the line of a family that had year after year for nearly a century made a fortune in pearls. Hundreds of millions. If he never grew another pearl it wouldn’t matter. But it’s he, rather than someone needful, who happens upon this bay. And, of course, he had the wherewithal, the clout and finances, to make the most of it. What if instead of Kumura, he, Grady, had been the first pearl-appreciating person here? He could see himself scuba-diving the bay, skimming along the dappled bottom, delighted as, for his benefit, oyster after oyster opened to show its perfect treasure.

  “Oddly enough,” Kumura said, “there weren’t any oysters here to start with. Except for a few strays. We had to bring some in, plant them, so to speak, allow them to proliferate on their own.”

  “You brought them from Ago Bay?”

  “Heavens no. Ago Bay oysters are the species Pinctada martensii, what we call Agoyas. They’d be extremely unhappy in this warmer water. Besides Agoyas rarely produce pearls larger than nine millimeters and they run yellowish, must be bleached. We wanted to try for double that size and white on their own.”

  “So, what did you bring in?”

  “Pinctada maximas, silver lips.”

  “From where?”

  “That, my boy, is another story,” Kumura said, not evading, just arbitrarily concluding this installment.

  Two explosive pops.

  From somewhere down on the beach.

  Sounded like gunshots to Grady. He looked to Kumura, who wasn’t the least distracted from slathering jam and cream on another scone.

  When after a while Grady again looked in the direction of the beach he saw a man and a woman headed up the slope. The man carrying a shotgun. Cradled across his chest in the manner of a serious hunter. The woman had on a floppy-brimmed straw hat. They came all the way up and onto the terrace.

  Grady presumed Kumura must have been expecting them, as he was neither surprised nor elated, merely accepted their arrival. He did the introductions matter-of-factly.

  The woman was the Marquise Paulette de Sablier, the man, Daniel Lesage. Both were French.

  Paulette delivered ritualistic cheek kisses to Kumura, an extra for good measure. She sat and removed her hat condemningly, like it hadn’t served her well enough. She requested in a demanding tone a goblet of Evian sans glace, then changed that to a citron pressé.

  Lesage propped his shotgun against the nearest column and, without being offered and ignoring the servant, helped himself to sausage and eggs from the side table.

  Paulette complained about the heat with typical French umbrage. Blew out a breath that, Grady thought, in keeping with her complaint should have come out as steam. “I’m moist all over,” she frowned. “I really didn’t want to go shooting today, would much rather have splashed around in the pool, but Daniel insisted.”

  Grady glanced at Lesage’s shotgun. It was a Holland and Holland twelve-gauge over and under, elaborately engraved. At least a ten-thousand-dollar gun. “You were shooting traps?”

  “No, no, no,” Paulette replied, “but it is very much like trap shooting. I scale slices of bread into the air as high as I can. The gulls catch the bread. At that perfect moment Daniel shoots the gulls. Twice today he got four gulls with one shot. I like him to shoot. It improves his disposition.”

  “Monsieur Lesage is my partner,” Kumura explained.

  “Limited partner,” Lesage corrected dourly.

  “Limited,” Kumura confirmed to all but aimed the word at Lesage, who begrudged with a toss of his head and a grumble around a chew of sausage.

  Lesage was a good-looking, tall man in his early fifties. Despite his large-boned physique he had a well-bred sort of face. His nose was narrow, pleasingly shaped but not totally lacking in interest; his brow ridges were just prominent enough and his cheekbones and chin were definite. Light brown hair, plenty of it. It had gone gray at the temples, distinguishing him, and for some reason at the moment he had a three-week beard, which was entirely gray.

  A kind description of Lesage’s bearing would have been confident or very self-assured, and, at times, when he made an effort, that was the extent of his uppishness. However, the attitude that those around him saw regularly was one of careless presumption. A life of privilege was to blame, it seemed, for having developed in him an outlook that could not be expressed without a degree of disdain. He was seldom pleased enough to admit he was pleased and when he couldn’t avoid such an admission he was embarrassed. Sentiment was a stranger to him. He refused to recognize it in others. Guile, however, was an old, usable secret friend.

  After the first few minutes of exposure (actually from the point when he’d heard about the gull hunting) Grady didn’t like the Frenchman and was grateful that he’d never have to. The way Grady looked at it, Lesage was a temporary, the most transient kind, would be forever gone from his life in not too many breaths. He watched Lesage use the nail of a little finger to extricate a grain of fresh ground pepper from between two of his too perfect, unbelievably white, front teeth. Noticed how Lesage’s hands contradicted, were not just huge, but coarse knuckled, ugly peasant hands.

  As for Paulette, anyone in her presence, man or woman, would have found it impossible to disregard her. She was that physically beautiful. Paulette had a remarkable effect on a beholder. The mere sight of her, particularly when she was at her best, would dilate the pupils and send such strong impulses along the optic nerve to the occipital lobe of the cortex that the image of her wasn’t just immediately clipped and filed away in one of memory’s cells. Rather, an afterimage remained, as though the receptors did not want to proceed to what was next being looked at.

  That happened when Grady assessed her. Not to be caught staring he nonchalantly looked away, looked at Julia. The afterimage of Paulette persisted and for a long moment what it seemed he experienced was a double exposure, Paulette and Julia.

  Paulette’s was a fierce beauty. Without moving a lash or pupil or lip, capable of siege or incursion. Her eyes were a good part of her influence. Brown eyes, not exceptionally large but eloquent, so deep a brown in many lights they appeared black. She made the most of them, of course (knew her weapons), deepened the set of them with perfect dark smudges below and above her lids (no hard lines), plucked her brows and otherwise helped them into the shape of astonishment, skepticism, hauteur, any number of statements, depending on how they were read and who was reading. On her noble, her marchioness’s head, was hair the color of wet coal, disheveled just so to suggest she’d come (not taken time to repair) from a vigorous entanglement.

  Grady searched for the error of Paulette. If anything, he decided, it was her ears. They were proportionally correct but a bit too intricate, more convoluted than ears usually were. Still, they weren’t unattractive, and he was made to think of them as maelstroms in which perhaps a million compliments had drowned.

  He also couldn’t help but speculate on how much passion she’d caused and received. The quality of it. A midthirty-year-old prime-time woman with such resources. How aggressive could she be? What would cause turnabout, set her off? Was there one ever
so slight but extraordinary thing that could touch off her current? Her secret switch, so to speak, or perhaps not so secret, perhaps if one were able to remain objective enough while with her the requirements could be detected. Who knew? This Frenchman Lesage? Grady preferred to doubt that.

  Lesage brought out a pack of Gauloises, took one from the pack with his lips and used a gold Dupont to light it. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked Julia within the exhale of his first puff.

  “It’s your funeral,” Julia smiled, as if she’d enjoy hurrying that eventuality.

  Lesage took it as a jest.

  More coffee was poured. It was regular brewed coffee. Paulette requested espresso and it was hurriedly prepared, served in a Limoges demitasse with a sliver of lemon peel. She spooned in five heaps of sugar, counted them aloud in whispers, which was her habit or superstition. She stirred and stirred, the spoon caused scrape and ring on the fine china.

  The conversation had gotten to this house of Kumura’s, how exceptional it was and so compatibly contrary in this setting.

  “I have the same sort of mansion down the way,” Lesage said.

  That explained that first gate on the road, Grady thought. He wondered why Lesage had chosen to refer to his house as a mansion, even if that’s what it was.

  “Both this place and mine are by Addison Mizner,” Lesage said. “You know, Mizner, the architect who was so much in favor with the American wealthy back in the twenties.”

  Julia gave that information the slightest possible nod.

  Grady gave it a glance up to the terrace’s colorfully tiled ceiling. He spotted two places where tiles were missing.

  Lesage was pleased to relate that the original houses had been built by Mizner in Palm Beach and had since been demolished. The architectural plans had survived, however, and he’d managed to obtain them for five thousand a set from a financially forsaken descendant of the original owners. “I’m superb at coming up with such valuable things,” he said, and when neither Grady nor Julia were impressed enough to suit him, he was prompted to tell them, “in fact, if it hadn’t been for my resourcefulness there probably wouldn’t be more than a dozen pearl oysters in this whole fucking bay.”

  Kumura looked away intolerantly.

  Paulette’s sigh said this was an over-heard story.

  Lesage was too primed to stop. He related how back in 1975 when Kumura needed oysters for the bay he, Lesage, had assembled a task force of six deep-sea fishing boats, specially equipped them with holding tanks, hired tough crews and the best divers and made out down through the Strait of Malacca and across the Java Sea and the Indian Ocean (some sailor!) to the northwest shoulder of Australia, a stretch of coast called Eighty Mile Beach. Reconnoitered the pearl farms along there while staying well clear of them and pretending to fish. Nothing was left to chance. He and a few of the crew went ashore for what appeared to be a night of carousing in the town of Broome, and again another night in La Grange. Learned from loudmouths and braggers which pearl farms were getting the better yields. The very next night they made their move. Several divers were sent in ahead with knives to take out the watchmen posted on the rafts. Then the rest of the divers went to work using directional underwater lamps attached to their foreheads. The oysters were suspended under water in rectangular wire cages, on the average twelve to a cage. Silver lips, about the size of a dinner plate, the kind capable of producing South Sea pearls ranging in size from ten to twenty millimeters. At first the divers cut into the cages and removed the oysters, but that went too slow, so they began cutting the suspension lines and sending the cages up loaded. In six hours they just about cleaned out the best of the two best farms and before dawn, before anyone was the wiser, all boats were headed full speed back to Thailand. With fifty thousand Maxis in the holding tanks. The Aussie pearl farmers complained to their government, which complained to the proper Thai officials, who expressed regrets and counted their end.

  “As you may know,” Lesage said, “oysters normally don’t like being disturbed, but these took the trip as if it was a pleasure cruise. We didn’t lose more than a couple hundred. The others got strewn into this bay and have been showing their appreciation ever since. More coffee!” Lesage snapped at the servant and lighted another Gauloise as though it was a reward he deserved.

  Stolen pearl oysters, a few killings, a bit of corruption, Grady considered. Who would have thought it? Certainly not some decorous woman deciding her will, unable to make up her mind about which daughter deserved which strand.

  Paulette changed the subject radically, asked Julia, “Have you spent much time in France?”

  “Not lately.”

  “Perhaps you’ve been to Saverne.”

  “I don’t recall ever—”

  “It’s a short distance from Strasbourg partway to Nancy. I’m from there, Saverne.”

  “I spent a few days in Nancy years ago.”

  “So, chances are we came within seventy-five kilometers of an encounter.”

  “Possibly.”

  Paulette slashed Grady with a glance before aiming exclusively at Julia with: “Have you ever given thought to the spaces you’ve created throughout your life, how you’ve disturbed the air? For instance, now, there you sit, the air pressuring around you, the shape of you. Let us say you vacate that space, move to another chair or whatever. The instant you move the air rushes in to fill the space you’ve left, the air collides and causes reverberations that never cease. No matter how unmeasurable they might be or how more unmeasurabie they might become, those vibrations, so to speak, continue eternally. It is interesting, n’est-ce pas?”

  Julia thought this was something Paulette had said numerous times before, a seemingly offhand demonstration of a philosophical side to prove there was more than physical reason to desire her. The validity of the premise wasn’t as important as whether or not Paulette had thought it herself. Had she merely read it and remembered it for future use? Julia gave her the benefit of the doubt, although she’d known women (and men, too) who gathered up and carried along with them a supply of such cerebral displays. Didn’t she herself have a reliable few?

  “Being from Saverne makes me Alsatian,” Paulette said. “The usual comment is I don’t look Alsatian and I happen to agree, considering my coloring as well as my moral temperament. I believe I must be a throwback from the Dark Ages or some such time, from an Italian rapine perhaps. Or”—she laughed—“from nothing quite so spectacular, a trip my sexually suppressed mother made alone to Milan might be all there is to it. Don’t you adore lurid possibilities?”

  “Possibly,” Julia arched.

  “Daniel and I didn’t meet in Saverne,” Paulette volunteered. “We met on the Paris to Lyon run of the TGV going one hundred and sixty miles an hour.”

  “TGV?”

  “Train à grande vitesse. In first class, of course. I had noticed him, or rather we had noticed each other earlier in the restaurant of the gare. Just a catch of the eyes but it was enough so that when we encountered on the train we felt acquainted. We had splits of champagne, two each. He had on a smartly tailored gray suit and an eccentric necktie. I adore the TGV. It resembles a striped orange, gray and white snake, très chic.”

  As Paulette related this the volume of her voice diminished decibel by decibel, so gradually that Julia didn’t realize she was leaning closer and closer in order to hear. By the time the words très chic came from Paulette’s exquisite lips, her and Julia’s faces were only inches apart.

  Julia wasn’t daunted, didn’t draw back. “Why this?” she asked privately.

  “So I may smell you,” Paulette whispered. “You have a personal scent provocant.”

  Lesage was talking dinner. “There’ll be five of us.”

  “Six,” Kumura corrected. “That is, if you don’t mind. A dealer from Bangkok is having someone bring me a little something and I’ve promised to put the fellow up for the night.”

  “Six, then. And instead of don’t be late you can be as late as yo
u wish. I prefer dining late.”

  “This afternoon I’m showing Grady around the facility,” Kumura said. “Julia, you’re more than welcome to come along.”

  There was nothing Julia wanted less. “What are my other options?” she asked.

  Paulette rescued with, “Our place for a swim.”

  “Yes,” Lesage hissed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Grady and Kumura walked along the edge of the bay with sneakers tied together by the laces and slung over their shoulders. The tide was ebbing and the sand was fringed wet and packed, punctuated with fragments of scallops and cowries, and mites and parts of crab shells that had been pecked clean. Kumura had loaned Grady a top-open cap with a magenta-colored clear plastic visor, so whatever Grady saw was affected by that softening, pleasant shade.

  Their pace was slow, an observing pace. No need to hurry; they had all of the afternoon. For the first five or so minutes they remained silent, and it was during then that Grady had gotten to thinking about where he was geographically: there on the beach of this pearl-oyster-laden bay in Bang Wan, a village he’d never heard of in southern Thailand not far from either the border of Burma or that of Malaysia. He tried to visualize the immediate area, the houses, bay and all, as it would appear from above, from, say, a couple of thousand feet. Then what he got was a mental map of Thailand, which more or less expanded on its own to include all Southeast Asia and next, like a demonstration of the powers of distancing perspective, that flat map changed into the ball that was the entire world, the blue and white, clean-looking and flourishing-looking world as seen from the moon. God, wasn’t he ever infinitesimal and inconsequential!