18mm Blues Read online

  “I’ll give it thought.”

  “Do that. I mean it. Anyway, do you still have those emeralds in stock?”

  “Yeah.” While this exchange was taking place Grady had gone through the briefkes and slid the stones from that particular one onto the surface of his white, tear-off desk pad. Had drawn a circle around the stones, as though to keep them from straying. A habit of his.

  The emeralds appeared special. And they were. A pair of older stones of exactly eight carats each. Like so many older stones their quality was superior, with a particular ideal green vividness that divulged their origin was Colombia. To be even more precise, out of the Muzo mine. They might very well have been part of the cache of a fifteenth-century conquistador and then counted in the riches of some Castilian duke. More recently they’d surely been the principle stones in the tiara of a Nob Hill matriarch, wife of one of San Francisco’s gold rush scions. Harold had purchased them discreetly from a relative of that lady, one who needed desperately to cover some unfortunate stock margins. Harold often plucked such treasures from such family trees, believed he was only second to the late Harry Winston in that regard.

  “Now, how much was it you were asking?” Lawler inquired, hoping lack of memory would convey lack of serious interest. “Twenty, wasn’t it?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Oh now I recall. Thirty was what you were asking. I can still hear you saying thirty and my thinking that was too much.”

  “You’re right, thirty was the number.”

  “But you’ll take twenty.”

  They were talking thousands, per carat. Grady put some silence to work. Lawler broke it with, “Anyway, at least you’ll consider twenty-five. Just consider.”

  “They’re worth more.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I’d agree with you if I had them here for another look, but as I remember what they were, the fair figure is twenty-five.”

  Grady was quite sure he could eventually get thirty a carat from someone. He could also memo the emeralds to Lawler at thirty. That was send them to him fully insured by way of Wells Fargo Armored Delivery. From the moment Lawler signed for them they’d be his responsibility. Grady decided against that because Lawler would probably get stuck in ambivalence again.

  “Take into account how long we’ve been doing business, you and me,” Lawler said. “Twelve years.”

  “Ten.”

  “Twelve with the two when you were in New York.”

  Lawler was right. It had been twelve years. Grady had brought him as a client to HH. The firm had done well with Lawler, who bought big and paid promptly.

  “All right, Grady, I’ll tell you,” Lawler went on, “although I’m embarrassed to say it. These emeralds, I won’t make on them. They’re not for a client, they’re for my wife.”

  Too often better goods such as these suddenly made certain dealers generous to their wives. It was, nine times or more out of ten, bullshit in order to get a lower, personal price. However, Grady couldn’t recall Lawler ever resorting to it.

  “Did I mention I got married again?” Lawler asked.

  “No.”

  “Thought I did.”

  “I didn’t even know you were divorced.”

  “Priscilla died a year ago last fall.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” Grady hadn’t ever met Priscilla, but Lawler had raved a lot about her, lopsided loving raves.

  “My present wife, Jessica, is much younger, which, of course, is edifying for me. You know what I mean.”

  “Sure, edifying.”

  “I want to show appreciation, do something really special for her, something that’ll knock her out.”

  Four hundred thousand worth of emeralds should do it, Grady thought cynically. Lawler, now in his midsixties, was having to buy his way, and considering these emeralds for this Jessica, there might be some matinees but no half fares. Now that he understood the circumstances, Grady was all the more certain he could get thirty thousand a carat from Lawler. Instead he said, “Tell you what, Fred, inasmuch as you have a new and, I’m sure, beautiful young wife…”

  “She’s twenty-five.”

  “… and because of all the future happiness you’ve got coming with her, you should have the emeralds at just that … twenty-five. Do you need terms?”

  “No. I’ll overnight you a check for the full amount. Four hundred, right?”

  “Four hundred, done.”

  When Lawler was off, Grady sat for a long moment with his gaze fixed on the gray nothing of the wall opposite his desk. Since leaving home that morning he’d managed to keep Gayle contained in a compartment back a ways from the front of his mind. But now she was rattling the gate of it furiously. If she got out she’d cause devastation.

  He reinforced the gate with distraction. The briefkes, the sales report sheet. On the latter he included the four hundred thousand now forthcoming from Lawler. That increased the total to the more prideful figure $1,095,800.

  Then there was his leather-bound agenda and the notes to himself he’d jotted in it. He went through them. Without looking up he said to Doris, “Among the pearls we have on hand are some ten, ten and a halfs, pinkish white. Will you get them out for me, please?”

  Doris went to the vault across the hall. She returned empty-handed. “No ten, ten and a halfs.”

  “You sure? There were six strands. Kumuras. I noticed them myself just before I left on my trip.”

  “I believe Harold sold those yesterday.”

  An ironic grunt from Grady. “They’ve been lying in there six months and now that I need them they were sold yesterday.”

  “We’ve got several hanks of nice nines, nine and a halfs. Maybe some are Kumuras. Want me to check?”

  “No.” For years Grady had been trying to land a certain client in Atlanta. The man did a huge business throughout the South, knew his importance and was extremely demanding. Grady had promised him Kumura pearls of ten, ten and a half millimeters in a pinkish white, the current most popular shade. Expensive, but price was no problem. The man had asked how much, Grady had quoted top dollar and there’d been not a word of haggling, just the firm stipulation that the pearls be nothing less than Kumuras.

  Like most dealers Grady had a favorite precious gem. He appreciated the blood red impact of Burma ruby and the ethereal blue of Kashmir sapphire and, as well, the reviviscent green of Colombian emerald. However, foremost in his heart and head were pearls.

  Larkin, a New York dealer and Grady’s first employer in the trade, had been an indelible influence. Pearls were Larkin’s passion. He didn’t merely introduce Grady to pearls, he infused Grady with a high regard for them and a great amount of knowledge. Whenever an important pearl dealer from Kyoto or Bangkok or somewhere came to show his goods, Larkin would make sure Grady was present to hear and observe, to learn.

  Larkin would also take Grady along to the exhibitions of magnificent jewelry to be auctioned at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Together they’d examine the various lots, paying special attention to the pearl necklaces being offered, louping pearl after pearl of each strand. Larkin would point out what made them fine or less so. The larger, white, more translucent South Sea and Australian pearls, the now extremely rare Burmese and Persian Gulf creamy naturals, the more recently fashionable cultured blacks from Marutéa.

  Larkin imparted.

  Grady soaked up.

  They attended the auction sales, conscientiously noting next to each numbered lot in their catalogues how the bidding went, along with their opinions and comments. Most of the pearls sold at those auctions were in period jewelry, such as a necklace consisting of ninety-three Burmese cultured pearls graduating perfectly in size from ten and a half to fifteen millimeters. Once the treasure of a duchess, the bidding for the necklace spiraled swiftly to a million and was finally knocked down for a million seven. And to think that he, Grady, had had that necklace in his hands! Had run it through his fingers! Had magnified its complexion!

  Frequently, after a day, L
arkin and Grady would walk down to Forty-sixth and the Algonquin Bar. They’d sip Tennessee whiskey over ice while their conversation would hop, for instance, from the latest New York City controversies to baseball or boxing to the transparent greeds of politics. Inevitably it would land on the topic of pearls, and there it would remain.

  Larkin was a veritable archive when it came to pearl lore, things he’d read or heard about or experienced. Grady listened enrapt as Larkin told of the Hindu custom of placing a pearl in the mouth of the dead. To symbolically exemplify the deceased person’s purity in this life, thus increasing the chances of a more pleasant go at it in the next. The more perfect the pearl the greater the influence. The wealthy used valuable sea pearls for this purpose. The not nearly so wealthy used cheap placuna pearls, dull and calcined. The poor had to try to fool the gods with grains of rice.

  Did Grady know that Charles VI of France was given powdered pearl with distilled water for his insanity? Did he know that Pope Adrian was never without his amulet of Oriental pearls and dried toad?

  Now he did.

  Not all of Larkin’s pearl talk was anecdotal. On one February night while the streets and sidewalks outside were being layered with fine prevailing snow, Larkin got onto the subject of the so-called Pearl Crash of 1930. Larkin related it as though it was as important as any other history. Prior to that year, he said, the only pearls that were recognized as true pearls were the naturals, those that oysters produced entirely on their own. The culturing of pearls had come a long way since its inception in Japan around the turn of the century, however it required that a bead-shaped pellet be implanted within the oyster to irritate it and cause it to coat the pellet with a nacrous substance. No matter that the nacre was the very same that created natural pearls or even that the procedure of layers of it aggregating was an identical natural reaction. A cultured pearl was just that, cultured, and therefore had no right to be called a pearl.

  The pearl dealers, who then numbered about five hundred in the world, felt strongly about this. They took their argument before an international court in France that decided in their favor. Cultured pearls, the court ruled, could not be represented as pearls, the word pearl couldn’t be used to market them. They were beads, nothing more.

  The problem that remained, however, was how to tell a pearl that was a natural from one that was cultured. No scientific method had yet been devised. The two appeared so similar that some pearl dealers began including less expensive cultureds in their lots of naturals, thus greatly increasing their profit. This practice became quite widespread, so it soon got out, and when it did, the banks that felt they’d been duped into lending on packets of pearls considerably overvalued refused to extend credit.

  Simultaneously, there was the stock market crash and world depression. The purchasing power of the wealthy weakened to near impotence. In a single day the prices of natural pearls dropped 85 percent. All but a handful of pearl dealers were ruined. There’d be no recovery. The Persian Gulf countries that had been so involved in pearling realized greater riches in their oil. The legendary pearl beds such as those in the Gulf of Minar were gleaned beyond control. Those that weren’t were already becoming polluted. Never again would there be a great natural pearling season.

  The opportunity for cultured pearls to flourish was so obvious and easy that it seemed like destiny. Only the Arabs refused to accept pearls that had been cultured. Their belief, that only God should create such beauty, still persisted.

  Larkin and Grady.

  They also used to play a little game to sharpen their perceptive abilities. They’d place two pearls of only five millimeters or so on the bar, a natural and a cultured, then challenge each other to tell bare-eyed which was which. Grady became uncanny at it, in fact, far better than Larkin. Grady would study the pearls so intensely that at times they seemed magnified, and when he held them enclosed in his fist it was as though they compliantly revealed their identities to his senses.

  Now, Grady was stymied. For two hours he and Doris had without success phoned around to various resources trying to come up with six strands of ten, ten and a half Kumura pinkish whites.

  “Do they have to be Kumuras?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have others.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  Kumuras, in Grady’s opinion, were the finest cultured pearls to be had. Most important, they were consistently fine. Kumura wasn’t a place in Japan, as so many people believed, but a pearl-growing family with pride and high standards. The local Kumura representative, Tad Katoh, called on Grady regularly. Grady had tried to reach Katoh in this crisis, but he was somewhere in Japan on vacation. Grady also attempted to explain his problem to someone at Kumura headquarters in Shikoku but to no avail.

  Now he was down to going through business cards he’d accumulated, many from the five-day Gem Trade Show he’d attended last February in Tucson. Transient encounters. The face that went with each card went unremembered. Who had been Arthur Kammerling, an amethyst and topaz carver from Idar-Oberstein, Germany? Or Hamid Naina Sally of Colombo, Sri Lanka, whose specialty was yellow, green and color-changing sapphires? Or a semiprecious dealer from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, an opal dealer named Bary from Coober Pedy, S. Australia, or for that matter a ruby dealer from, of all places, Moscow, Idaho?

  Then there was Yuji Ohimi, the San Francisco representative of the Deep Sea Pearl Company, located in Otsu, Japan. Grady thought he vaguely remembered Ohimi, a tall, nearly bald, white-haired man, calm mannered and well dressed. On impulse Grady dialed the number on the card. He told the man who answered, presumably Ohimi, what he was looking for, six hanks of ten, ten and a half Kumura pearls, pinkish white.

  “Do you have them?”

  “Of course,” Ohimi said.

  “When could you show them to me?”

  “Eleven o’clock.”

  Grady didn’t see how that was possible. It was already quarter to eleven. Nevertheless, at eleven sharp Ohimi showed up at the HH reception room and was escorted into Grady’s office.

  Ohimi wasn’t the man Grady had thought he recalled. This man was short, no more than five feet, and so stocky he was bulging his clothes. He had on a dark blue gabardine suit shiny from too many consecutive wearings and pressings, and his abundant black hair banged down over his forehead and ears. He was also wearing a fixed Japanese grin. He bowed perfunctorily and placed his black, scarred case on the seat of one of the chairs across the desk from Grady.

  From the looks of the man Grady thought he wouldn’t know much, if any, English, but as it turned out, he spoke it so well Grady suspected he might be more Los Angeles than Otsu.

  “Please, show me,” Grady said.

  Ohimi had difficulty with one of the snaps on his case. Grady recognized the man’s embarrassment, felt sorry for him, told him, “Take your time.”

  After considerably more pushing and pressing at the sticking snap it sprung open. From his case Ohimi removed an imitation chamois necklace folder, white but very soiled from being handled. He peeled away its Velcro closure and placed the floppy folder on the desk. Stepped back.

  Apparently Grady was supposed to open the folder further. Anticipating that he was about to be pleased he lifted its overlapped flaps aside, left and right.

  There were the pearls.

  Eight hanks strung on acrylic line, each tied off with an elaborate royal purple tassel made up of slippery silk thread. Grady knew instantly and bare-eyed that before him lay a perfect example of everything that could be wrong with cultured pearls. He took up one of the hanks. It was much too heavy. A giveaway that in the culturing process the shell beads that were implanted in the oysters had been inordinately large, in order to produce more swiftly a pearl of larger size. Too swiftly for Grady, who without trying could make out the shadowy shape of the bead beneath hardly more than a couple of layers of nacre. He’d be willing to bet these pearls hadn’t been allowed even six months to develop. What luster they possessed was superficial, would w
ear away in practically no time, and the unknowing owner, seeing her precious necklace becoming dull, would wonder what had happened, probably blame herself.

  Hell, these pearls weren’t even drilled well, Grady noted as he sighted them through his Nikon ten-power magnifying loupe. The edges around many of the drill holes were flaked, and the solution of Merthiolate that had been used to give these pearls a pinkish cast had concentrated in those places.

  All in all these pearls were the antithesis of Kumuras. Grady told Ohimi that, bluntly.

  Ohimi wasn’t fazed. “Kumura quality,” he contended.

  Grady put the hank back into place and closed the folder.

  Ohimi reached across and flipped the folder open. “Kumura quality,” he insisted.

  Grady had the urge to sweep the whole mess off his desk and into his wastebasket. Instead he stood, towered over Ohimi, sent down an unmistakable, dismissive glare.

  Ohimi surrendered his smile, kept his head lowered but his eyes up and was mumbling gripes in Japanese as he took up his goods, dropped them negligently into his case and, without performing the obligatory bow, did his exit.

  Some morning, Grady complained to himself. He turned and looked out the window for a long moment, as though something out there would be offered as a palliative. It occurred to him that he’d set and kept his own borders. How long had it been since he’d given serious thought to expanding his existence, to annexing another’s? Not just a momentary impulse, squelched as swiftly as it came to mind, but serious thought.

  “Mister Havermeyer won’t be in today.”

  “Oh?” Grady didn’t need to turn, knew that haughty affected voice belonged to Eunice.

  “But he wants you to join him for lunch at two.”

  “Where?”

  Eunice told him, and at half past one Grady was on his way to Harold’s house across the bridge in Belvedere. One of the Bay Area’s choicest residential roosts. Houses there went for millions even though only a few were situated on what might qualify as estate-size acreage. The large houses right on the water were especially side-by-side close, which, in a way, attested to the class-bonded sociability of their occupants.