18mm Blues Page 14

  Which Grady accepted.

  It was a start, a good start, but more was needed, and Grady was confident that more was forthcoming.

  The next Tuesday he flew to Reno and got his divorce decree. Flew back that same day and, with papers in hand, was in attorney McGuin’s office early Wednesday morning. McGuin phoned Gayle’s attorney and by immediate messenger provided him with a copy of the decree. The messenger returned with Harold’s certified check in the amount of two hundred thousand. Grady’s rightful community property, half of the equity in the Mill Valley house.

  There was more than the satisfaction of money in the way Grady had caused Harold to cave in on that matter. It had to do with something Harold had pulled off seven years ago and boasted about to Grady.

  Harold was a compulsive collector of fine things or at least things that appeared to be authentically fine. Sculptings, paintings, antiquities, precious objets and the like. As with most collectors Harold got as much enjoyment from the act of acquiring as he did from owning. Either quite soon or eventually he tired of things, be they authentic or fake.

  Harold had a great many convincing fakes. First-century Grecian statues with members and noses broken off that were actually no more than twenty years old if that. Egyptian pieces that hadn’t seen a tomb. Antique Mayan figures well done in Yucatan by a family of eight to provide them with enough money for a flight to Disneyland. Stuff like that. Harold acquired these at fake prices but with invoices testifying to their authenticity and showing that he’d paid a proper high price. Thus he was able to insure the things for a lot more, often ten to twenty times more, than he’d put out for them.

  Seven years ago Harold arranged with a fence in Los Angeles named Harry Fox to have everything stolen. In Harry’s parlance it was a gimmie, a no-risk kind of burglary. According to Harold and Harry’s agreement, Harold was in Palm Springs the weekend the break-in occurred. The alarm system was purposefully on the blink, wouldn’t be fixed until Monday. The thieves simply backed up a van to the door and cleaned house. Ninety days later Harold collected the insurance. Six million dollars. And went on a fresh acquisitioning spree.

  Harold’s mistake was made one day out on the boat when he was bored and feeling ego starved and spouted on to Grady about how he’d pulled off the gimmie. In detail. So, recently when it came to this confrontation over the Mill Valley house, all Grady had to do was phone Harold and ask him if he’d heard from Harry Fox from Los Angeles lately.

  Anyway, that two hundred brought Grady’s capital up to a comfortable enough level for him to do some serious business. He was in high spirits, divorced from Gayle, wanted to celebrate. He wrangled reservations for dinner that night at Donatello, set his mind on the elegant Donatello atmosphere and his appetite on a lot of great Northern Italian food.

  Julia wasn’t for Donatello. She suggested Yoshida-Ya, a Japanese restaurant on Webster Street. Japanese food was about as contrary as possible to the orecchie-d’elefante and other such dishes Grady had looked forward to, however, he went along with it.

  When they were shoeless and settled cross-legged at a low table at the restaurant Julia ordered sake, but not just sake and for certain not a California one. She specified Harushika, a fine very dry type brewed in Nara, Japan, claimed she preferred it and promised so would Grady after a taste. When the sake was brought she did the pouring, gracefully handling the small, pinchnecked ceramic bottle. Poured into his cup first and waited until he’d drunk before pouring into her own.

  “It has a bit of a tail,” she commented after savoring a sip. The word shiripin came to mind for no apparent reason. She didn’t realize that in Japanese it meant having a tail, thought it was merely some nonsense syllables.

  Grady assumed by tail she meant aftertaste. Evidently Julia knew sake, he thought. There was so much he had to learn about her.

  When she asked his permission to order dinner, he was glad to be relieved of the responsibility. According to his experience with women and Japanese food he was quite sure she’d give the raw stuff a wide berth and stick to such things as tempura or shabu shabu.

  Julia, however, ordered a wide variety of sashimi, raw giant clam, raw yellowtail, raw tuna, both dark and light, raw sea urchin and double helpings of awabi, raw abalone. When her selections were brought she inspected them thoroughly before she allowed the waitress to place them on the table. She wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way the sea urchin was arranged, sent it back for tidier embellishments. Grady enjoyed that, and the way she’d taken over and tended to his needs. She inquired whether or not he approved of everything and mixed the soy sauce and wasabi, the fiery green horseradish, into a paste for him to slather on his raw stuff. He was fascinated by her dexterity with chopsticks, the way with no trouble at all she was able to pincer up just about anything with them, rice or whatever.

  Julia, meanwhile, was somewhat confounded by herself. For one thing, she hadn’t ever particularly cared for Japanese food. The mere idea of eating fish raw had been enough to bring her close to the point of gagging. And here she was now relishing every morsel and telling herself she didn’t know what she’d been missing. The awabi she found particularly delicious. As for chopsticks, she’d tried them a few times in Chinese places here and there and gotten fairly competent with them, but she’d never achieved this much efficiency. Maybe, she thought, that was because she’d tried too hard before and it had actually been easy all along. To prove her new, minor accomplishment she scooped up passion fruit sorbet with her sticks and, without a drip, carried the swift-melting lump to Grady’s mouth.

  Then came tea and talk. Julia steered the conversation onto what might be Grady’s next business move.

  “I’m going to Burma,” he told her.

  “Why there?”

  “Each February right after the Chinese New Year the Burmese government holds an important sale of gems in Rangoon, sapphires, rubies, pearls. I should be able to pick up some nice goods at a favorable price.”

  “February you say?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know I’m a good reason for you to lose track of time, but not monthly hunks of it. This is June, not February.”

  “For some political reason they called off the last February sale,” Grady explained. “Now they’ve called it on for the week after next.”

  “Okay, I’ve got nothing against Burma. When do we leave?”

  He shot her a we question mark look.

  “I’ll pay my own way,” she said.

  “I’m just going to hop over and back.”

  “How long will hopping over and back cause you to be away?”

  “Five, ten days at most,” he replied, trying to nonchalant it.

  “Five, maybe ten? Well then, how about if I also pay your way? I won’t be a bother, promise, except in bed, of course. The rest of the time I’ll sketch and get some fresh ideas. From what I gather, Burma must be colorful.”

  Grady had intended to invite her along, had had doubts she’d want to go. Five to ten days away from her would be torture. He thought it might be a point won if he admitted that.

  He did. And it was.

  Within the minute she also scored by making him a gift of the alligator leather business card case she’d bought weeks ago. Earlier that evening when she was getting ready something or other had reminded her of the case and then made her realize why she’d bought it. For him. Even before she’d become aware of her interest, for him.

  Grady was delighted with the case, admired its patine and its 18k gold corners and couldn’t wait; right then and there put some of his new business cards in it.

  Thanked her with a kiss.

  And another, longer and more intensive, when they were in the car on the way to 760 and the office. He’d first headed for her place, was eager to get there, but she’d casually suggested they stop by the office for a moment. His passion hadn’t wanted to. She insisted. And when they got there he saw why.

  Now hung on the wall to the right of his desk was
the painting she’d been working on. Signed and dedicated to him in its bottom left corner. It was a complex painting, consisted of numerous underlays and overlays, was both subtle and vivid, distinct and obscure. The most dominant shape in its composition was a dark irregular triangle, a sort of high-topped shoe shape. Below that in one spot within a mass of vivid blue were numerous yellow, pink and green swirls.

  “Like it?” Julia wanted to know.

  “Very much,” he told her and, after another long moment of study, half-guessed, “it’s a seascape.”

  “Isn’t it though?” she grinned.

  “Someplace you’ve been I suppose.”

  “Not that I recall. Actually, I think it’s purely a product of my imagination.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was supposed to have been only an hour layover in Bangkok, a welcome hyphen during which they would recover their ground legs, stretch, walk their circulation back to normal and, without hurry, make their Thai Airline connection on to Rangoon. However, because there’d not been any of the usual countering headwinds at thirty-seven thousand feet all the way across the Pacific, they’d been put down in Bangkok an hour ahead of schedule. Then, as though deliberately to nullify such accommodation a computer monitor in the main terminal told them the takeoff of their connecting flight was delayed an hour.

  So, three hours. Hardly a hardship, but much of the good anticipation and endurance they’d had when they’d boarded in San Francisco had already been thinned down by the penalties of such a long-range air trip, and now to be unexpectedly detained, confined like prisoners by the airport and forced to serve three limbo hours, seemed unreasonable.

  Julia was handling this extra waiting better than Grady. Taking it rather in stride and feeling pleased with her patience. The patience demanded by public waiting of this sort had always been one of her shorter suits. B.G. (before Grady) she’d always been sigh prone and jittered when asked to tolerate such a waste of her time. Her reaction now was definitely an improvement, she thought, another, she thought, that had come along with her radically better outlook since Grady had entered her life. What could she attribute it to other than passionate contentment, a filling on the way to being fulfilled? A change among the numerous changes she was experiencing, to be able to sit there in a hard plastic seat at Bangkok airport gate number 14 without fidget, squirm or pace, limbs exact and still, breathing so tranquilly that even her inside hearing couldn’t hear it. What could explain this difference in her, allowing time to flow through her like a silken stream? The reason had to be him.

  He, on the other hand, was obviously uncomfortable, unable to conceal his impatience with the situation. Every so often mumbling little sibilant curses that he probably didn’t even realize were coming out. He was never at his best when subjected to such trips. Wished he could be, wished he could be like those many dealers he knew who could, with hardly a weary eye or spine, fly from New York to Tel Aviv to Geneva and back and without the need for repair time, be ready to be off again.

  Not he.

  He had the handicap of an extremely sensitive circadian clock, that cerebral device of everyone that to varying degrees reacts adversely to deviations from routine. Lag got to him so easily, causing his legs to resent the load they supported and the sealed-over sutures of his cranium to feel as though they were straining and just might come apart to allow his gray matter more room.

  Once, on a buying trip for Larkin, Grady had arrived in Ouro Prêto, Brazil, in such a condition. His reputedly good eyes were so impaired that he turned down a lot of sacrificially priced emerald half-caraters. Regretted having done so when the lag left him and his faculties sharpened and the competitor who’d bought the lot showed it to him and Grady realized how fine, really, those emeralds and their price were. That he’d lost out on a profitable deal hadn’t bothered him as much as why he’d lost out on it. Lag, fucking lag. He’d never told Larkin about his battle with it, nor anyone else. Kept the encumbrance to himself to keep it from ever being used in business against him. Besides, it wasn’t an easy thing to admit man to man.

  He’d hoped having Julia along on this twenty-four-hour flight would make a difference. It didn’t, not essentially. His lag was beyond her presence. In fact his trying to conceal it from her created an extra degree of strain that he had to cope with. Still, when he summed it all he knew if she hadn’t been along in other numerous ways he’d have been worse off. Worse off without her various smiles and their honesties. Worse off without the entertainment of the private mysteries conveyed by her eyes. And the collaborative caring she so often demonstrated. Made him feel she was decidedly with him. Did so, for instance, with spontaneous touches, the claiming of him with her hands, the sign language said by her mouth and its instruments tongue and teeth, by such aggressive things as having the attendant remove the armrest so she could snuggle and press. Every several hundred miles she massaged the back of his neck, if not subduing, at least with care competing with the tension that accumulated there. He was made to feel he was her man. At the same time he was made to realize how desirable it was to feel in her debt.

  She was, in his opinion, an excellent traveler. The antithesis of Gayle. She allowed him to stow her principal carryon bag in the overhead compartment, but then when she wanted something from it, got it down and back up again by herself. Asked the flight attendant for two pillows right off rather than one and then another. Didn’t complain about her ears being stuffed up or spill anything or remark a half dozen times that she should have worn a roomier pair of shoes. She actually read the books she’d brought along: a paperback version of a biography of Cecil Beaton and a copy of Alice A. Bailey’s The Soul and its Mechanism. Napped when Grady felt like napping, talked when he wanted to and evidently sensed when he was talked out. Didn’t hum or la de da along with whatever music she was listening to on her Walkman. Nor did she whip out an array of utensils and repair or redo her makeup every hour. Truly an ideal traveling companion, Grady thought, so much unlike Gayle, who would have let it be known with clenched teeth hisses and intruding demands that she was feeling neglected when he struck up a conversation with the man seated across the aisle.

  That man was obviously a businessman. In his late fifties and dressed the part in a vested gray suit of hard finished wool. Wearing black lace-up, cap-toed shoes, one of which was marred cruelly by a scuff. No doubt, he could have paled down his florid complexion considerably by forsaking image, loosening his tight knotted tie and unbuttoning his collar.

  The man introduced himself as Clifton, Lawrence Clifton from Chicago. As happenchance would have it he too was a gem dealer, by preference did business mainly in sapphires. That established, both he and Grady submitted a string of names to determine mutual acquaintances in the trade. There were several, including Larkin, Grady’s first and unforgettable employer. Clifton had for years done business off and on with Larkin, knew about him well enough to say, “Last I heard he’d had another stroke. In Florida.”

  “Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Damn shame. No one had better eyes. In his time Larkin could grade a mixed lot of sapphires in less time and more accurately than anyone I’ve ever known, and that includes those chinks in Bangkok who’ve always been magical at it. Phenomenal eyes.” It was the ultimate compliment one gem dealer could pay another. The ability to sight into a precious stone and know practically everything about it, not just its quality and value, but, as well, its place of origin—continent, country, area, often even the very mine that had yielded it.

  “Larkin loved pearls,” Grady said reminiscently.

  “Didn’t he though.”

  “Taught me plenty.”

  “How long were you with him?”

  Grady told him.

  “Now that I think of it I believe I remember him speaking of you, favorably. Tell me your name again.”

  Grady said it while his mind went back to the bar of the Algonquin with Larkin and that favorite topic, pearls. He returned to take notice of Clif
ton’s professionally manicured nails and passé dental work, caps that no longer convinced because they didn’t fit the gums. Grady wasn’t being critical as much as observant. “Where are you headed?” he asked.

  Clifton enjoyed replying. “Hong Kong first, then on to Colombo for a day before Rangoon. What about you?”

  “Rangoon.”

  “For the Emporium?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ever been before?”

  Grady disliked having to admit this would be his first Emporium. He’d heard so much about the event, mainly from older dealers such as this Clifton and from Larkin and others, that it seemed attendance was prerequisite to being thought of as thoroughly experienced. Grady had been particularly impressed by the accounts of profitable, fine goods that had been purchased at the Emporium of one year or another. He had, of course, dealt a fair number of Burmese stones over the years, knew them well enough. No sapphires were more valued, except perhaps those rarer lazy ones out of Kashmir. And Burmese rubies, the true pigeon bloods. One such ruby of four carats had sold at auction only a few years ago for five hundred thousand a carat. Burmese pearls and jade were also considered superior.

  Such riches.

  Grady was looking forward to having a chance at them on the Emporium level, just one step out of the ground and therefore far less expensive. He knew it probably wasn’t going to be absolutely easy. Fine goods weren’t going to just pop into his pocket. However, it wasn’t beyond possibility that he’d make some better than merely good deals, and he imagined himself returning to San Francisco and the Phelan Building, causing a stir of envy as word got around that he was starting up his business with a spectacular inventory.