18mm Blues Read online

  “Once a month every oyster gets a beauty treatment,” Kumura said. “Keeps them healthy.”

  “And happy,” Grady added.

  “And happy,” Kumura concurred.

  As the men continued cleaning and washing down the oysters they came to one that had a small starfish clinging to it. “Starfish adore oysters,” Kumura said, “that is, they adore sucking the life out of them. An octopus will do the same. We’re constantly having to battle those two.”

  The worker cleavered the starfish.

  The tender got under way again along the channel. After going a short distance it turned in between two sections of rafts that were being worked on. Stopped close alongside the one to starboard. Kumura stepped over the gunwale of the tender to be upon a raft. “What we have here are some of our three-year-olds,” he said, turned and stepped confidently along a length of bamboo, making it look easy.

  Grady didn’t try to keep up. Not only was the bamboo round, thus offering a meager surface, but also slippery wet. Rather than risk falling in among the oysters he limited his going to heel-to-toe lengths. Told himself that neither Kumura nor the workers were amused by his inching along. Shit, he’d never walked a wet bamboo pole.

  By the time he got to them they had a cage up and out. Kumura told Grady to choose one of the oysters the cage contained. They were as identical as silver lips could be, equally big, equally ugly. Grady heeded whatever it was in him that told him to pick the third from the right.

  One of the workers used the blade of a primitive hatchet to force that oyster partially open. He held the oyster up with the flat of both hands. Kumura peered into it. Then reached into it.

  It was, for Grady, like sleight of hand when he saw Kumura’s fingers emerge with a pearl. White as could be pearl, translucent and lustrous as could be pearl, an approximately sixteen-millimeter South Sea pearl, and round enough if not perfectly round.

  Kumura examined it, rolled it between thumb and second finger for an all-around look. Was apparently satisfied. He handed the pearl to Grady, who examined it thoroughly before extending it to Kumura.

  Kumura refused to take it back. “It’s yours,” he told Grady casually.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I want you to have it. In fact, I insist. A memento of your being here.”

  Grady couldn’t refuse, didn’t want to. He’d begun to like Kumura and now he liked him one sixteen-millimeter, top-grade Kumura pearl more. Maybe, he thought somewhat like a vow, he’d keep it forever.

  They went back aboard the tender and proceeded along the twisting channel. For whatever reason, his increased familiarity with the place, Kumura’s camaraderie and generosity or what, Grady was beginning to feel personally connected to this pearl farm. It was a feeling that bordered on proprietary. Grady knew how unreasonable that was.

  When they reached where the channel and the sea took and gave they headed back to the docking shed. It was then that Kumura found another couple of toffees and said, “Grady, I hadn’t intended to get to business for at least two or three days, but sometimes when people such as we get together and get along things accelerate. Haven’t you found that to be the case?”

  Kumura kept looking straight ahead as he said this, Grady noticed. As if he were talking to the wind. There was a space for Grady to put in a yeah, so he did.

  “Frankly,” Kumura said, “I had more than your company in mind when I asked you down here.”

  Here it comes, Grady thought.

  “I’m of a mind to want you to hook up with Kumura. You can gather from that I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s a right move but I’d say I’m in the high nineties.”

  “What do you mean by hook up?”

  “Kumura is in need of fresh representation in the United States market. Not a dire need but nonetheless a need. Our problem is we’re not first in the minds of the dealers as we should be. Anyway, that’s my opinion. The same applies, I think, to a great many of the retail outlets that handle our goods. They’re not all Neiman Marcus. Too often what they do is take a piece or two of ours to use as upscale leaders. Show them with the intention of shaking a customer down to something they say looks almost as good and is much less pricey. Have you known of that happening?”

  A nod from Grady.

  “We need to find a way to inspire the market, convince it that selling quality will benefit everyone.”

  That was one of the oldest sorts of wishful thinking, Grady thought, recalling some of the powerful, slick, hardass dealers he’d known, some of those whom he mentally called his groaning moaners. Still, Kumura was on the brink of a proposal, and what gain in crapping on it? “The dealers would be the key,” he told Kumura. “They hate knowing or having it known that they’re being used, even if it’s for their own benefit. But they love being catered to, even when they know there’s an ulterior motive. It’s amazing how large their appetites are when it comes to eating up a guy’s time.”

  A pleased smile from Kumura. He believed Grady’s wheels were already spinning. “You’d be in charge of the entire U.S. market for Kumura.”

  “Who’d I be answering to?”

  “Only myself.”

  “Not Lesage?”

  “No.”

  “I doubt I could get along with Lesage. He may be as resourceful as he claims but for me the chemistry’s all wrong. Sure you won’t spring him on me after the fact?”

  “I promise I won’t. Furthermore, I’d see that you were smartly installed in San Francisco, which is where I assume you’d prefer to be located. First-rate offices, showroom, staff and all.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why not you?”

  Good question. Grady imagined the offices. He imagined Doris. He imagined Harold.

  “You haven’t asked about your compensation. On purpose? Even so, it’s impressive, I must say.”

  “All right, tell me.”

  “Tempt you? That what you said?”

  “No, tell me.”

  Kumura pulled a figure out of the air, but it sounded as though it was an amount he’d given serious consideration. “Six hundred thousand a year with increases negotiable yearly. An expense account that will allow you to live extremely well. A company car, a Bentley, and driven if you like, and an apartment in keeping with the Kumura image.”

  Better than having to hustle and hondle around for goods that he might be able to margin, Grady told himself. Better than crying over spilt rubies. “When do you have to have my answer?” he asked.

  “No hurry. As I told you, I haven’t quite made up my mind about you yet.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Julia was out of the shower and towel drying her hair. Humming a bright, every song. She still had her makeup to do, and Grady figured she was at minimum a half hour from being ready, maybe an hour if she got undecided about what to wear.

  She’d just returned from her swim with Paulette, brought back by Paulette in that year’s Rolls Corniche, top down. Grady had gotten back much earlier with the almost job offer by Kumura centrifuging in his head, anxious to tell Julia about it. When she wasn’t there and didn’t show up for a couple of hours it got anticlimactic, had lost so much edge that in telling he was offhand, and when she reacted enthusiastically and said she and her intuition, or whatever it was, were certain Kumura would be 100 percent sold on Grady before the night was over or within another couple of days, it didn’t have the positive effect on him it should have.

  “How was Lesage’s mansion?” Grady asked.

  “Not special,” she replied.

  “Did you swim?”

  “Yeah, and I got a little too much sun.”

  Her skin looked hot, tanned but pinkish. Grady noticed there weren’t any demarcating paler areas that her bathing suit should have covered. He decided not to mention it. Instead, he casually asked, “Was Lesage around?”

  “Off and on. Had his nose in a Wall Street Journal most of the while.”

  Checking out the figures, Grady t
hought and nearly said. “What about the marquise?”

  “She’s rather nice. In short doses. As a have-around friend I imagine she’d be a bitch. She is a stunner though, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How dreadful to be so handicapped.”

  Grady stifled a scoff.

  “I mean most people must be so zapped by her looks that they assume she’s shallow. Actually, given the chance, she has a share of depth. She’s no Simone de Beauvoir by any stretch but, still, a few fathoms.”

  “How great is her body?” Grady was trolling for a rise of jealousy.

  “From that I take it you’ve already found it great and just want to know the degree.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Anyway, you saw.”

  “Not as well as you.”

  “Want a mole by mole report?”

  “If that’s what it rates.”

  “Let me just say the body goes well with the face.”

  “I imagined as much.”

  Julia pretended exasperation, tightened her lips and vigorously transformed her damp hair into wild blond tendrils. “At times I don’t know how to take you,” she said.

  Grady disagreed lovingly. “You always know.”

  “Damn it!” Julia exclaimed, feeling the temperature of her shoulders and then presenting her face to Grady. “Is my nose terribly red? It is, isn’t it?” She scrunched it up. “I’ll bet anything it peels. Nothing less attractive than a peeling nose, and what a time to have one.”

  A flare-up of vanity provoked by the proximity of Paulette, Grady surmised.

  “I wish I’d thought to bring along some aloe vera lotion,” Julia said. “Might Kumura have an aloe vera around?”

  Grady recalled vaguely having seen some aloe vera plants along the drive.

  “Go out and look, would you?”

  It occurred to him that he’d need a knife to cut the aloe vera. It was meaningful, he thought, that he didn’t carry a pocketknife these days, indicated a change of heart, perhaps a hardening. Throughout most of his young life he’d possessed such convenient little knives. One of sterling silver from Tiffany that had been a gift from himself stood out in his memory. He’d lost it just as he’d lost all the others. Even when he took special care not to lose them they slipped from his trouser pockets to hide in the crease of the rear seats of taxis as if they couldn’t wait to escape him.

  He got a nail file from her toiletry case and went out. He was already dressed and everything for the evening, had on a cream-colored linen suit, nearly matching voile shirt, no tie and a pair of woven, white leather loafers. Some of the wrinkles had hung out of the suit. Maybe it didn’t still look as though it had been slept in, only as though it hadn’t been taken off for a nap.

  He was feeling too white and creamy to go mucking around the grounds. Some of the sprinkler system was on, he noticed. Still, this was a mercy mission for his lady and perhaps his motive was more macho than chivalrous, but either way or both he wasn’t going to just stand out there a long enough while and then go back up and tell her no aloe vera. Besides, how would he explain if later on she spotted one of those fat-speared plants, he being a landscape expert and all that.

  He walked down the pebbled drive quite a ways. Saw a red car coming in. As it drew nearer the car became a Porsche convertible, and then when nearer still the driver became William.

  William stopped the car and was quickly out of it. Bringing a genuine smile, offering his right hand, glad to see Grady.

  Grady kept his right hand to himself.

  William’s smile vanished. “What’s wrong?”

  “You fuck!”

  “What’s the matter with you? What the hell are you doing here? I didn’t expect—”

  Grady clutched William’s shirt front with both hands, drove him against the trunk of a nearby tree, hard. “You set me up, you son of a bitch.”

  William allowed the manhandling. “What are you talking about?”

  Grady jerked William away from the tree trunk so that he could again slam him against it.

  That really hurt. William had had enough. He brought his hands up through Grady’s hold, breaking it. Within the same motion he got Grady by the arm, twisted it in such a way that the rest of Grady had to go with the twist.

  Grady was surprised to be in the air, surprised when he landed in a front-down sprawl on the damp grass. Dazed by the impact, he managed to get up on all fours. With an efficient side kick, William swept away the support of Grady’s arms, dropped Grady and rolled him over. Next thing Grady knew William was above him, had his right arm straight up and rigidly locked, just short of causing severe pain and damage. Also, William had a knee pressed into Grady’s neck with some weight and threatening more. Grady thought of trying to break the hold, but his immediate second thought was he’d be better off just lying there.

  “Now,” William said, “what’s your problem?”

  Grady related, with as little breath as he was being allowed, the run-in he’d had on the river, how it had caused him to lose the rubies. He didn’t repeat the accusation that William had been behind it because, now, as the account of it came out, that reasoning deserted him. He tried to convey that with his eyes, and when, after a deciding moment, William smiled a little, Grady knew he was going to be let off without having to apologize outright. William released him and he got up. They walked over to the Porsche and leaned against the driver’s side.

  “What made you think I had something to do with it?” William asked.

  “I ran down the possibilities and you came to the top.”

  “That’s insulting. I should have broken your arm.”

  “Someone set me up, someone at your factory maybe, one of your cutters.”

  William doubted that. “Finished goods leave my place practically every day, so why hasn’t it happened before?”

  Grady thought it probably had, said so.

  “It would have gotten back to me,” William contended. “Sure, people sometimes get harrassed on the river, but not hijacked. In my opinion what you were up against was a couple of free-lance bullies, farang assholes out for the pleasure of scaring.”

  “Scaring shit, they killed the water taxi guy, point-blank killed him. And they took at least fifty shots at Julia and me.”

  “They might have been on drugs.”

  “The universal excuse.”

  “What makes you so sure those guys even knew you had the rubies? Did they say or do anything to indicate that?”

  “Not really.”

  “The fact is they didn’t jump aboard the taxi or even try.”

  “No.”

  “And, bottom line, they didn’t steal the stones, you lost them.”

  That was true, that bottom line, Grady admitted to himself. He’d been in need of someone to blame other than himself. His inward-aimed anger had turned and burst out and in its place now was regret and embarrassment. “Christ, you threw me ten feet like I was a featherweight. I should know better than to mess with a puny Oriental.”

  “Half Oriental, or I could have thrown you twenty. I’m sorry about your suit.”

  Grady took stock of it. The cream linen was badly grass stained at the knees and elbows. “How’ll I explain? Think they’ll believe I tripped over a sprinkler?”

  “Looks more like you’ve tripped between some hot Thai girl’s legs.”

  “Does, doesn’t it?” Grady smirked.

  “I phoned your hotel and was told you’d checked out. I thought you’d left for San Francisco. Is Julia here with you?”

  “We’re houseguests. Do you know Kumura?”

  “By reputation, of course. What business he and I have done in the past has been through one of his middlemen. This time he was in too much of a rush to be bothered with that sort of arrangement, so I volunteered personally to make delivery. In return he insisted I stay over, at the very least for dinner.”

  “Oh, so you’re the sixth I’ve been wondering about. Great! C’mon
, help me find an aloe vera.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The table was brought out and placed in the inner courtyard, and because of the antique pavers there, the unevenness of them, the servants had to place wedges beneath the legs to make it steady.

  That was always a problem when Lesage decided the inner courtyard was where he wanted dinner served. It took two servants over an hour to get the table so it didn’t wobble, and while they were at it they risked mumbling how unreasonable it was that Lesage hadn’t chosen elsewhere for dinner, such as the smooth-surfaced loggia or the balcony outside his second-floor study, two places he more occasionally favored.

  It wasn’t that Lesage didn’t have a proper dining room and a fine mahogany table that could seat fourteen roomily and eighteen with only cozy squeezing. In fact, the dining room was where he’d usually eaten with or without guests—before Paulette came upon his scene to suggest he be not so conforming in that regard and, as well, in numerous other ways. “Give in to whim,” Paulette advised, “you’ll be surprised what you can get away with and the puissance you’ll feel.”

  This night was a good example of how much to heart Lesage had taken Paulette’s advice. He couldn’t have been more vague about what time dinner would be, simply because he wasn’t of a mind to be precise. “Possibly around nine or perhaps later” was what he’d told his majordomo. He’d also expressed his preference of which silver service he wanted used, then changed his mind from the Christofle to the Puiforcat to the Buccellati, and the crystal from the Baccarat Harcourt to the Saint Louis to the Waterford, merely to give his prerogative a little exercise.

  Now it was ten-thirty. The table was set and the three Thai servants who would do the immediate attending had been standing by, practically stock still, since eight. Their lower legs were burning and they were close to giving in to a relieving few minutes of sitting on the edge of the courtyard fountain. They’d tried chants and meditations and appeals to various good-natured spirits. They’d even tried willing desensitization of their bodies from the hips down by disregarding all else but the music that was emanating from the house—alternate five-minute, transition-free segments of Debussy and Reba McEntire.