18mm Blues Read online

  Which was up for bidding.

  Grady had to hurry to fill out his bid.

  A hundred thousand dollars.

  He crossed out that amount. Shot the works. A hundred fifty thousand. Done! He dropped the slip into the receptacle. Waited, watched the officials open the receptacle and remove the bids. There were quite a few, fifty or so it appeared. Grady didn’t care how many there were. For him it was like after a horse race, waiting for the win number to be displayed when he’d just seen his horse finish lengths ahead. Sure thing. Put it up there, baby.

  His dealer number was 112.

  The number displayed was 92.

  A mistake?

  Fuck no.

  The dealer numbered 92 was standing nearby. Grady heard him blurt victoriously, “Got it!” He was a Bond Street-attired Englishman with diamonds, two caraters linking his shirt cuffs.

  Grady felt foolish, diminished. He went up to the room, changed into lightweight casual clothes, sneakers and no socks, and went out for a walk, down the grassy slope to an inlet of Lake Inye, where, with effort, he was able to appreciate some lemon-colored water lilies.

  He didn’t notice the young Burmese girl right off. Perhaps she’d been there and he’d been too preoccupied to notice her, or possibly she’d followed him down. She was seated on her haunches about thirty feet away at the edge of the inlet, distant enough for privacy, yet close enough to make out facial expressions. From the way she was dressed Grady took her to be a peasant girl, anyway someone poor. The plain short-sleeved green blouse she had on was faded, and she was wearing what in Burma is called a longyi, simply a couple of yards of cotton cloth (hers a blood red shade) wrapped and tucked at the waist to form an ankle-length skirt.

  The girl’s gaze was evidently fixed on the slicing courses of three windsurfers far out on the lake, although Grady once caught the turn of her head and got the feeling that even if it had been only a glance she’d taken all of him in.

  What mostly intrigued Grady was the cheroot she was smoking. Twice as fat as the fattest cigar he’d ever seen and about ten inches long. A roll of dried white corn husk bound by a red thread. It seemed to contain a mixture of ingredients, including tobacco. It looked as though the jumbo cheroot would be too much for her to handle, diminutive as she was, but she was its boss, brought it to the center of her lips, holding it from below in the European manner, dragged on it so strongly that her cheeks went concave and her face was like a bellows being worked as she took puff after puff without inhaling, creating a minor cumulus around her head.

  Grady watched deliberately, as though she were a permissible tourist attraction. The ash on the burning end of the cheroot became so great it dropped off. Grady decided to let that signify the end of the episode, went back up the slope to the hotel and the room.

  Julia hadn’t yet returned from sketching. There was still an hour of that day’s Emporium left and Grady thought about getting properly dressed again for another try. Instead, might as well make himself useful. He stood up on the bed and tried to eliminate the noise of the wobbly ceiling fan by taping Burmese fifty pyas coins to the upper surface of its blades. However, that surface was so coated with dust and lint he couldn’t get Band-Aids to stick to it. He wiped off the blades with a damp hotel towel, waited for them to dry, then after a half hour of trial and error managed to get the coins taped in place so their weight brought the blades into balance. The fan showed its gratitude for the attention by rotating with only a steady, much less intrusive hum.

  Julia arrived shortly thereafter, her hands coated with charcoal and chalk, a dark smudge in the center of her forehead above the bridge of her nose, Ash Wednesday looking.

  “How’d the sketching go?” Grady inquired.

  “Great,” she replied from the bathroom and over the run of the faucet as she washed up. “I’ve got enough for a whole show and then some. Such colors! Everything is so much more vivid, even the ordinary.”

  Grady was ambivalent about wanting her to ask how the day had gone for him. When she didn’t ask he was rather relieved. Probably she could sense his discouragement, he thought. A part of him wanted to complain, especially about not getting those twelve-millimeter pearls, but he wouldn’t allow it.

  She came from the bathroom saying brightly, “Well, now I’m fit for kissing,” and went directly to him for that purpose, offered her lips. When he took them, hers began taking.

  Neither had anticipated lovemaking, but now spontaneously they were bound for it. And during it this time, merely to gauge how much of herself she’d given up to Grady, she tried to put off her coming, to anesthetize with willpower. However, it was him within her and enclosing him and, as it had all the many previous times they’d loved, the maelstrom, so much more than just a stir of sensation, reached and caught her, sucked her into its current and she couldn’t help but swirl with its slick wet and contribute her own rotations around his thrusts. And after her first coming, when she’d recaptured her mind, she thought no amount of sense of power could equal the pleasure of such submission. She would wallow in it.

  Later, still in the afterward, with their brains, but what felt like their hearts, saturated with natural pacifying chemicals, they lay faceup on the bed, listening to the mosquitos and a ball game. Julia had repaired the canopy of netting that enclosed the bed by gathering the fabric and tieing a knot with it wherever there was a hole. Grady wondered how the mosquitos managed to get into the room. The windows were not the openable sort, but there the insects were, smelling blood and buzzing round trying to get to it. Like gem dealers, Grady thought.

  The ball game was coming from the radio built into the face of the nightstand. A tinny sounding radio that crackled and faded every now and then, as though reminding it should be appreciated. Grady appreciated it. The Pirates against the Padres, no score, bottom of the sixth half a world away. When he’d turned the radio on and searched back and forth on the dial for anything familiar or even understandable, he’d come across what was no more than a blip until he’d fine-tuned it like a safecracker. He doubted the Burmese cared for baseball, guessed what he was receiving was stray waves. Bouncing off some satellite?

  He turned onto his side toward a Taco Bell commercial. In the going daylight he again noticed the numerous cigarette burns on the edge of the nightstand, some had burned all the way through the blond veneer, caused charred grooves. What sort of person would do that? He imagined and fought off the thought that they were related to him by having once occupied this space, particularly this bed. He tried not to visualize the condition of the mattress beneath the sheet beneath him and Julia.

  Raps on the door.

  Most likely the chambermaid disregarding the PRIVACY PLEASE sign Grady had hung on the exterior knob.

  He got up, put on that day’s undershorts and opened the door slightly. No one was there. Stepped partway out into the corridor, looked both ways. No one. Puzzled, he returned to the bed and Julia. “Hungry?” he asked her.

  She said she was and got up and while slipping on a robe said she hoped they could find a more suitable restaurant than the one they’d tried to eat at the night before in downtown Rangoon near the Sule Pagado. Every dish they’d ordered except dessert had been laced with tiny, angry, tongue-searing red peppers. She said she’d inquired and there was a Japanese restaurant on Maha Bandoala Street. Couldn’t they go there for some abura-age?

  “What’s that?”

  “Fried bean curd. Lately, I’ve had such a craving for some abura-age?” Again raps on the door.

  This time Grady was quick to it, swung the door open.

  There stood the young Burmese girl Grady had observed at the shore of the lake. Only now that he saw her up close he realized she wasn’t all that young. In fact she was a mature woman. He’d been misled by her slight build and delicate features. It occurred to him that she might be an employee of the hotel, however there was a furtiveness about her, the dark pupils of her eyes were shifting peripherally. Grady asked what it was s
he wanted.

  She didn’t reply, slid past him to be in the room, and, when Grady didn’t immediately close the door, she bowed a beg pardon and shouldered it closed.

  She was too small and fragile-looking to be intimidating. Grady again asked her what she wanted.

  The woman replied this time but not with words. Rather by extending her fisted hand to Grady and uncurling her fingers to reveal something wrapped in a soiled patch of ordinary white cloth. An insistent thrust of her hand conveyed to Grady that he should take whatever it was.

  He complied, undid the cloth. It contained an oblong piece of gem rough. A six-sided crystal about an inch and a quarter long, a third that in diameter at its widest point, with water-worn rounded edges. It didn’t look like much, almost entirely crusted as it was with a coarse, variegated black and rust-colored material.

  Grady took the piece of rough to one of the bedside lamps, looked at it under the light. Visible here and there through its coating was a pink to reddish tinge. He held it up to the lamp bulb and a redder red was discernable. Impetus enough for him to examine it with his loupe.

  When he had it magnified for his right eye he turned it over and over until he found a less-crusted spot on its end, and a tiny natural window. He sighted into it, saw the fluorescence, the cherry red glow of its interior atmosphere. Was caught up in it for a long moment, then came back to objectivity. He assumed the woman wanted to sell the piece. He tilted his head sharply, silently asking how much.

  “Four hundred fifty thousand,” the woman told him and added, “kyats. But I do not want kyats. I want dollars.”

  Grady figured it into dollars. Seventy-five thousand. He shook his head no.

  “Too much?” the woman asked.

  A more definite nod from Grady. Because he had just advised himself to be sensible. Good eyes or not he wasn’t experienced when it came to judging colored rough. For all he knew and with what little he was able to see, this could be merely semiprecious, an extraordinary spinel crystal or a fine garnet. And even if it was a ruby, even a Burma, it could be a bad one, zoned and included. And what about this woman? Mightn’t she be the female of the species retired general?

  “Three hundred thousand kyats,” the woman reasoned.

  A part of Grady shoved his prudence aside, told him that was more like it, fifty thousand dollars. Still he hesitated.

  The woman sagged.

  Julia gave her a therapeutic drink of water.

  There was a fifth of Dewar’s on the dresser. The woman looked longingly at it.

  Julia poured three fingers of the whiskey into a hotel glass.

  The woman downed that in three consecutive gulps and without a grimace, as though it were no more than tepid tea. Then, evidently primed, she explained that she was a Mon from the village of Kyunchaung near the Three Pagodas Pass. Did they know the Three Pagodas Pass? They didn’t? (That was incredible.) Then did they know the Khwae Noi? No? Otherwise known as the River Kwai (the same as the bridge)? Ah, good! The headwaters of that river are only a walk from Kyunchaung.

  The woman was satisfied with having established that much common ground. She went on.

  Her husband’s brother had been a member of the Mon Way to Freedom guerrilla group, which was part of the National Democratic Front but only like a little finger of it. And, because he was her husband’s brother, government troops came and hung her husband to death and said it was a suicide, which she knew was a lie because it is a Buddhist belief that anyone doing suicide would be punished by having to suffer five hundred and five more lifetimes and deaths by suicide. They wanted to hang her too but she did not let them find her. She got away with only the piece of ruby, which she had found at the foot of a small mountain near Thaybre a year ago and kept hidden for when trouble came. Only one other person had laid eyes on it. Her good cousin, who had off and on been a ruby miner. He told her its value or she wouldn’t have known. She needed the money, much money to buy herself a new identity there in Rangoon, all the proper papers so that she might be allowed on an airplane to Singapore. She had two relatives in Singapore, rice dealers, the woman said.

  “The pour soul,” Julia sympathized.

  The woman smiled and lifted her blouse to reveal a pistol shoved in the waistband of her longyi.

  Done for effect, Grady thought dubiously. He took another lengthier look at the piece of rough, heard through his concentration Julia telling him, “Buy it, darling.” He told himself not to listen to her. His right eye was watering up from its focus being so fixed and intense. Fifty thousand wasn’t all the money in the world, he thought. If only he’d gotten those twelve-millimeter pearls today this would be no decision. No money left, no decision. He hated the idea of going home empty-handed or merely with a couple of average lots of sapphire melee. He went into the bathroom, where his money belt was hung on the inside of the door. He had sixty thousand in cash, all brand-new hundreds, and two Wells Fargo cashier’s checks of forty-five thousand each. He counted out five hundred of the hundreds and returned to the bedroom. Julia was fortifying the woman with another stiff hooker of scotch.

  The dealer in Grady told him forty thousand would do it, probably even thirty-five, but then the circumstances found a chink in his harder side. He slipped the sheaf of hundreds into the woman’s calloused palms.

  And the piece of rough was his.

  Next morning Grady tried to put the day before out of his mind. After a roll and coffee breakfast in the room he got dressed for business and went down to the Emporium.

  Julia, just for the change, she said, went along, despite his telling her that he doubted he could get her in because it was for dealers only, strictly. At the admittance table at the entrance Julia presented herself as a dealer, in fact, Grady’s partner (an ever so slight insinuative inflection on partner). Who could turn her away? Certainly not the stern, little official there whom she sprayed with smile. He wrote out and embossed a special pass for her, and she was in.

  Grady thought she’d want to stay close to him, go around with him as he looked at the various lots, want him to show her a few things. However, she wandered off on her own, and he looked to the bidding. What was up for sale at that moment and the next several lots to be offered were jade. The Chinese dealers were worked up. They both amused and irked Grady. They’d get what they came for, he thought, contrary to his own prospects. He’d decided to be there today only because he wasn’t entirely out of hope and not a quitter.

  He was looking at a fairly good ten-carat padparadscha when Julia came and appropriated his loupe. Left him bare-eyed, unable accurately to appraise anything. After a while he went in search of her, found her two rows down examining some blue sapphires in an amateurish way: without tweezers, bent over to them so she was shielding the needed light, and moving the loupe erratically trying to focus. Several dealers of different nationalities had stopped and stepped back, clogging traffic somewhat as they admired her position from the rear.

  She told Grady, “We must buy these.”

  “Oh?”

  “Definitely.” She was quite taken.

  “It’s not just a matter of buying,” Grady said, “not that easy.” He explained the Emporium’s required procedure.

  She grunted knowingly. “Anything that complicated has to be full of conniving. Anyway, at least we ought to try to buy them.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re pretty.”

  They’d have to be more than that, Grady thought. Rather indulgently he louped the sapphires. And saw Julia was right. These were clean blue bright number ones, as they were referred to in the trade. Extremely clean. If bought right they’d sell very right. He didn’t mind telling Julia that. “Good eyes,” he complimented. She exaggerated modesty with a big shrug.

  Grady continued looking into the stones. Sixty carats in the lot. Ten round cuts. Round cuts this good were a bit unusual. He felt his want activate, like someone had just thrown a switch.

  An hour later that lot, numbered 593, came
up for bidding. Grady was about to fill out his bidding slip.

  “How much do you think?” Julia asked.

  Grady’s decision was being tossed back and forth between eighty thousand and ninety thousand.

  “Better to pay a bit more and get them than scrimp and not,” was Julia’s advice.

  Grady wrote in ninety thousand.

  “They’ll go for a hundred and twenty,” Julia thought aloud.

  “I don’t have a hundred and twenty.” Grady regretted having bought that piece of rough.

  “Then forget it.”

  He made out a new slip, bid all he had, the hundred.

  It wasn’t enough.

  To make it worse he ran into Clifton, who was happy to relate he’d just gotten lot 593, those nice number one rounds, for a hundred fifteen. Grady didn’t let Clifton know he’d bid on them, just told him nice going, exchanged a few more words and drifted away.

  Julia was disappointed and perturbed. Saying shits under her breath. Grady asked if leaving appealed to her.

  “Anytime,” she replied.

  “I mean Burma.”

  “I’m with you.”

  She went up to the room to pack. Grady, meanwhile, had a taxi take him downtown. There was one important loose end he had to tend to. He was let off on the corner of Merchant Street and Barr in the heart of old British Colonial Rangoon. Walked along Merchant, cut up Thirty-sixth and around to Pansodan Road. Found on Pansodan the sort of shop he was looking for, a small, second-rate place trying to appear to be a jewelry store while also offering an array of way overpriced Burmese mementos.

  Grady came right to the point, asked to see some synthetic rubies. Was told that the shop handled only genuine rubies. How about genuine synthetic rubies? Grady pressed. The shop owner decided that when a large fraudulent sale wasn’t possible a small legitimate one would have to do. He brought out a dozen or so briefkes containing synthetics of various cuts and sizes. The same sort of convincing Burma-looking goods that retired General Tun had tried to pass off on Grady the day before yesterday. Grady bought a cushion cut of six carats for a hundred dollars a carat.