18mm Blues Page 15

  Have you seen Grady Bowman’s goods?

  I’ve heard.

  You’ve got to see. Burmese beauties. The buyer at Shreve took only a quick look and wanted the lot.

  Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

  Oh, how it would hurt Harold’s ears.

  Clifton now asked, “Are you going to be looking to buy for someone or for yourself?”

  Grady gladly told him.

  “Well, I hope you won’t be disappointed. In fact, I hope the same for myself. The last Emporium I went to was hardly worth the trip. That was in ’82. Year by year before that it had gone downhill. The lots that were offered, anyway all but a few, were made up of second-rate goods with a first-quality head of about ten percent.”

  Grady had heard as much but he continued being attentive to hear Clifton’s version. Clifton paused to blow his nose into the fluff of an ordinary white handkerchief, examined with a mixture of curiosity and distaste what he’d discharged, enclosed it with a bunchy fold and inserted the handkerchief into his inside jacket pocket. “Damn dry air they pump around in these jets. Always raises hell with my sinuses. I’m no good for a week or two after a long flight.”

  Grady’s misery enjoyed the company.

  Clifton went on. “Every year the Burmese government gave one excuse or another for the decline in desirable goods offered for bidding at the Emporium. Blamed the heavier rains, the depletion of certain mines, trouble with rebels such as the Karens and the Mons, just about anything that sounded reasonable.”

  “One would think they’d be eager to sell their goods to the West.”

  “They are eager and they do sell, only not as straight and aboveboard as one would imagine. The Burmese government is military. It runs everything and takes its whack up and down the line. The lower ranks circumspectfully pocket their nibbles, the top of the brass, of course, help themselves to the flagrant big bites. Thus it stands that for a soldier, especially an officer, say a lieutenant or captain, to be assigned to one of the rich gemmining districts such as Mogok is thought of as a privilege, the next best thing to being given outright instant wealth.”

  Grady imagined while Clifton verbally drew it for him.

  “Doesn’t matter that those mining areas for the most part are chronic war zones occupied by rebels. And not just a few insurgents here and there but thousands of real angry, well-armed Karens, Mons, Hachins and the like. Plenty dangerous, but for the Burmese army officer well worth the risk. Between firefights he goes around to the numerous ruby and sapphire pits, which, as you may know … I’m sorry, stop me if you’re knowledgeable about these things…”

  “No, please, go on.”

  Clifton obliged. Told how the pits weren’t large, on the average measured about thirty feet in diameter and half that deep. So the army officer from his vantage up on the edge was able to see everything that went on. Told how the men worked in muddy water up to their crotches, water that had seeped or rained in. It was all quite primitive. They dredged the bottom with flat pans of tightly woven bamboo, brought up dirt and gravel from the mucky bottom. The army officer kept a sharp eye on what they brought up, what they emptied onto the sievelike screen situated at the edge of the pit. The silt and grit got hosed away leaving the gravel. No one, certainly not the mine operator, was allowed to touch that until the army officer had looked through it, spread it, rolled it over, picked the most promising rough rubies and sapphires from it. If he was new at this he was probably fooled by the dull material that adhered to the surface of some of the stones, often to some of the much finer ones, disguising them so they appeared to be no more than ordinary gravel. But he, like the fortunate army officers before him, soon learned what he shouldn’t overlook. He and his greed became sure-eyed, able to recognize the better stuff no matter how thick and ugly its skin.

  Grady imagined it. A diminutive Burmese army officer with a pocket or two of his fatigues bulging with what he, Grady, would happily settle for a mere few of. “What then?” Grady asked Clifton. “Where does that rough get sold?”

  “Across the Thai border,” Clifton replied and went on, telling how the Chinese dealers from Bangkok were the main buyers, how they usually situated themselves on the Thai side, not in a village but out along one of the remote, nearly indiscernible paths that crisscross in and out of Burmese territory. Paths known and used by locals but hardly anyone else. Most of the transactions were carried out at night, the darker the better. The buyer would prop a strong flashlight upright, aiming its beam through an opening in the jungle growth overhead. The large amount of cash he’d brought along would already be shallowly buried somewhere close by. He’d sit and wait, hoping a Burmese officer with ruby and sapphire rough to sell would notice the beam and come to him. He might wait all night in vain. If so, he’d move to another spot along the path. Sometimes it would take a week of such nights. It was dangerous business. There was always the chance that soldiers of one rebel faction or another might spot the beam and get to him. The rebels knew about this regular trade in contraband gems. They roamed the border areas at night searching for those vertical beams of light. When they spotted one they hurried to it, killed the buyer right off and located his money. The Bangkok buyers paid a fat price for the rough, but, of course, when the rough reached Bangkok and was cut into finished goods it was worth a great deal more.

  Clifton was a frustrated storyteller, Grady decided, but he allowed himself to go along with it, mentally placing himself some night along the Burmese-Thai border, waiting awhile and then doing swift business with a Burmese officer, trading the dollars he now had in his money belt for a chamois sack of precious stones, a veritable fortune in fine Burma rough. He could hear the contained stones clicking against one another, fine ruby against fine sapphire as he shoved the sack into the largest pocket of whatever he was wearing. But then came the realization of the peril involved in such an undertaking. It shot a shudder through him and he snapped back to Clifton’s face across the aisle. “Anyway,” Clifton was saying, “that’s why the last ten to fifteen Emporiums have been so paltry. Seems the government high-ups have conducted them merely for show, to keep their personally profitable traffic in contraband from being altogether obvious.”

  Grady thought about how he’d hate having made this long trip merely to look at mediocre goods. “What about this year?” he asked. “What are the expectations?”

  “Word is the government will offer up a considerable amount of fine grade. That would be in keeping with its recent change of heart in regard to doing more trade with the West. I tend to believe it. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

  A flight attendant came down the aisle, causing Grady and Clifton to have to draw back from their outward leaning and momentarily eclipsing their views of each other. It more or less concluded the subject.

  “Where in Rangoon will you be staying?” Clifton inquired.

  “The Inye Lake Hotel,” Grady replied.

  Clifton evidently disapproved.

  “Something wrong with the place?” Grady wanted to know.

  “It’s not the hotel I would have recommended,” Clifton told him, “but at least you won’t be staying at the Strand.”

  “Someone suggested the Strand, said it was colorful.”

  “It’s been trading on that description ever since the British left in ’48. Anyway, if you do nothing else, beware of the generals. They’ll be swarming around the Inye Lake.”

  Grady thought he meant high-level army types. Clifton set him straight: “Guys who present themselves as retired generals and look in every way as though they might be. They all use more or less the same approach and they’re really good at it, have it down pat. First that sort strikes up an amiable conversation into which he slips the fact that he was once in charge of one of the outlying mining districts such as Magok. After a little bullshit about that he’ll turn hush hush and confide that he still has a connection at the mines, someone who regularly supplies him with gems. He might be willing to part with a few
, he says. For a price. Which will be a high enough price to make it more convincing. What he’s selling, actually, are, of course, synthetic stones, cubic zirconium ruby-looking reds, sapphire-looking blues with silk and all the other right kind of flaws in them to make them credible.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Grady said politely, though not believing for an instant that anyone could fake out his eyes.

  Clifton took a loud heaving breath and let his eyelids close. “I’m going to doze,” he said and tugged with a finger at his shirt collar, as though imploring it not to choke him while he was unconscious.

  Grady sat back in his reclined business class seat and looked to Julia on his right. When he’d last given her his total attention she’d been engrossed in the Alice A. Bailey book having to do with souls. Had she overheard any of his conversation with Clifton? It seemed she hadn’t. She let the book drop to her lap so her then liberated hands could claim Grady’s upper arm. Her head used his shoulder. After a long moment of silence that was like an allotment to the auguring of the future Julia had said in a tone part encouraging and part the assuming of responsibility for her words: “Don’t worry, hon, you’re going to do even better than you hope. I just know it.”

  That had been during the flight.

  Now, here they were short of destination, having been deposited in Bangkok at Don Muang International Airport. They had an hour of the time waste yet to go. Grady couldn’t stay for more than ten consecutive minutes in the seat there in the proximity of gate 14. One of the seats in a row of rows, identical, hard, indestructible plastic molded to fit the cheeks of the universal ass. He’d get up and walk anywhere until reminded of his weariness, then come back to sit and feel afflicted. Whenever his look caught upon Julia’s he’d try for what he believed was a smile close enough to his true, relaxed one or he’d say something light. He was almost certain she was unaware of the strain in him, the terrible lag sensations. He reasoned that had she been aware she probably would have brought it up, tried to talk or even love him out of it, maybe. Best that she was as she was, okay, collected, taking care of herself, he thought.

  She got up, told him she was going to the ladies’ room. She was gone for longer than should have been required and Grady got to glancing uneasily every so often in the direction of the ladies’ room, down the long straight corridor of that arm of the terminal. Then he kept looking steadily for her, concerned for her until he caught sight of her returning. He appreciated the confident stride of her, the sensuality in its strength as her thighs lefted and righted beneath the ample cotton skirt she had on. And it occurred to him that during his concern for her he’d not felt lagged and that made him wonder if it might not be entirely or at least mostly psychological. He hoped so and he hoped not.

  He didn’t realize she was miffed until she was close, sat down hard in the next seat.

  “Why is it,” she said to the situation as much as to Grady, “that ordinary things cost like the devil in an airport? Do you know how much I had to pay for this?” She held up a pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum and didn’t give him time to guess. “Thirty bahts,” she said. “Can you imagine? Thirty bahts.”

  “How much is that?”

  “About a dollar and a quarter. When in your life have you ever paid a dollar and a quarter for a pack of gum, except maybe in an airport? They figure when they’ve got you they should take you. What an outrage!” She blew out a funnel of invisible chafe. Grady had never seen her so annoyed, and over such a minor thing. It made him wonder what other furies she was capable of. Would she, for instance, be this aggravated if he ever forgot to raise the toilet seat? He thought so. Decided after hardly a few moments of consideration it was in her favor that she was so volatilely stoked. It gave her tone. He wouldn’t want her predictably agreeable. As a matter of fact, he told himself, he was rather looking forward to their first vigorous difference and, of course, the intense loving that would follow. Not that he wanted theirs to be one of those fight and fuck relationships. He’d never let it get to that.

  While these were Grady’s thoughts he watched Julia rip open the pack of gum to reveal the silver foil-wrapped ends of the five sticks it contained. His lagged eyes, fixed on this inconsequential procedure, seemed to magnify each step of it. The coordination of her thumb and the nail of her second finger pulling out the top stick, tearing away its green paper wrapper (outer garments) to show its foil covering (flashy underthings), then inserting a thumbnail beneath the helpful serrated edge to peel off the foil and have the thing … nude.

  She folded the length of the gum twice, put it in her mouth.

  She hadn’t yet told him she loved him, Grady thought, at least, not verbally. She did a stick of the gum for him and he opened his mouth to receive it.

  Nor, for that matter, had he in words told her he loved her, he thought.

  Another stick for herself, another for him. That left the last.

  He refused it but believed she’d insist he have it, but she didn’t, just denuded it and added it to her chew and resumed where she’d left off on a page of Alice A. Bailey, a paragraph having to deal with the reasons certain souls might be reluctant, even refuse, to make the transition into the afterlife.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Close to three hours and precisely 374 air miles later Grady and Julia were being processed by a customs official at Mingaladon Airport in Rangoon. The official was an unattractive fellow with such a severe and irregular overbite that the tip of his left incisor was visible when his mouth was closed. That, along with the deep downward creases from each corner of his mouth and the obdurate glare of his dark eyes, caused the immediate impression that he was unfriendly.

  However, in return for a look through Grady’s and Julia’s passports the official activated such a smile that it seemed he might have found something amusing on the pages. There in magenta and green ink were the seven-day visa stamps and, inserted for examination in the back of Grady’s passport, were the applied for and issued Union of Burma credentials that identified him as a qualified gem dealer approved to attend the Emporium. Also there, the required currency form Grady had filled out in duplicate just prior to landing. It not only required that he declare how much money he was bringing in but that during his stay he also keep a written account of every exchange and expenditure he made. The whole thing would have to balance out precisely upon departure. Grady considered declaring only a hundred of the hundred and fifty thousand he had on him. There had been instances in his pursuit of gems in various other foreign places when being able to come up with some unexpected cash had worked wonders. Thus, his hand had wanted to write a hundred thousand on the currency form. His better judgment, however, owned up to the whole hundred and fifty.

  Passport, credentials, forms, all were in order. The official, as though expressing personal joy, raised his stamping device high and slammed it down on a vacant passport page. Noting date and time of entry. Then came the first words he’d spoken: “Hkunni,” he said, “seven, seven days, no more.” He held up seven fingers and wiggled them for emphasis. Grady, in boning up on the dos and don’ts of Burma, had read how strict the government was about visitors adhering to the length of their visas. Seven days meant not an hour more. Overstayers would be punished. Punished?

  Grady and Julia proceeded to the next area, where their baggage would be inspected. The inspector they got was no less good-natured, although Julia thought it intentionally perverse the way he made a shambles of the contents of each bag as he searched. She prided herself in being an excellent, extremely organized packer, and now there were her silkies and flimsies and, as well, her everyday, practical cotton underthings topping the peak of a haphazard pile. Grady noticed how the inspector kept coming back to those and riffling through them.

  “What nerve,” Julia remarked.

  Grady hoped she wouldn’t cause a scene, thought she was bound to as without waiting for the inspector’s consent she flipped down the lid of that particular bag and zipped it up. Then all fo
ur bags were closed and zipped and the inspector wielded a chalky, yellow crayon to slash his validating mark across the face of each. They proceeded then through an outward opening door to where, most prominent, was the teller’s window of an official money exchange. Grady converted a hundred dollars into a sheaf of kyats. Gave half to Julia for her possible needs.

  Neither Grady nor Julia felt as though they’d finally arrived in Burma until they were out of the terminal, in the awful humidity and being ulteriorly welcomed by what must have been twenty hustling taxi drivers.

  The taxi they chose was a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, red and cream with its original paint miraculously surviving. It had a whiplike radio antenna, no hubcaps and one of its tires was a vintage-type whitewall, no doubt weary of being time and time again recapped. The driver and owner of this vehicle was a typical slightly built Burman with a contradicting moon face and a stringy mass of jet black hair. He smiled and kept smiling as rather victoriously he loaded the bags into the trunk. One of his upper front teeth, Grady noticed, was completely gold capped and inset with a heart-shaped piece of lavender jade.

  The driver got behind the wheel, started up, but wouldn’t pull out until the fare was negotiated. He began with a straight face at fifty kyats (approximately seven dollars), which was tantamount to thievery. Grady, on principle, didn’t let him get away with it, nor with a reduction to thirty kyats. Grady knew from his pretrip reading what was fair, and twenty-five kyats was settled upon. The driver pulled the taxi out abruptly and soon had it beyond the airport complex and headed at its old-age full speed south in the direction of Rangoon City.

  It was late afternoon. There had been the usual brief but drenching daily rain and the air was still steamy from it, more redolent than fresh with the pervasive scent of some sort of spice. All the windows of the car were down (no handles to roll them up), and, despite the humidity, it felt pleasant to Grady and Julia to have the fifty-mile-per-hour turbulence striking their faces and whipping their hair. Meanwhile, the driver was offsetting his tedium by making the playful most of the depressions in the highway where rainwater was pooled. He splashed every possible puddle, swerved sharply several times to splash some he would have otherwise missed.