18mm Blues (34 page)

That happened when Grady assessed her. Not to be caught staring he nonchalantly looked away, looked at Julia. The afterimage of Paulette persisted and for a long moment what it seemed he experienced was a double exposure, Paulette and Julia.

Paulette's was a fierce beauty. Without moving a lash or pupil or lip, capable of siege or incursion. Her eyes were a good part of her influence. Brown eyes, not exceptionally large but eloquent, so deep a brown in many lights they appeared black. She made the most of them, of course (knew her weapons), deepened the set of them with perfect dark smudges below and above her lids (no hard lines), plucked her brows and otherwise helped them into the shape of astonishment, skepticism, hauteur, any number of statements, depending on how they were read and who was reading. On her noble, her marchioness's head, was hair the color of wet coal, disheveled just so to suggest she'd come (not taken time to repair) from a vigorous entanglement.

Grady searched for the error of Paulette. If anything, he decided, it was her ears. They were proportionally correct but a bit too intricate, more convoluted than ears usually were. Still, they weren't unattractive, and he was made to think of them as maelstroms in which perhaps a million compliments had drowned.

He also couldn't help but speculate on how much passion she'd caused and received. The quality of it. A midthirty-year-old prime-time woman with such resources. How aggressive could she be? What would cause turnabout, set her off? Was there one ever so slight but extraordinary thing that could touch off her current? Her secret switch, so to speak, or perhaps not so secret, perhaps if one were able to remain objective enough while with her the requirements could be detected. Who knew? This Frenchman Lesage? Grady preferred to doubt that.

Lesage brought out a pack of Gauloises, took one from the pack with his lips and used a gold Dupont to light it. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked Julia within the exhale of his first puff.

“It's your funeral,” Julia smiled, as if she'd enjoy hurrying that eventuality.

Lesage took it as a jest.

More coffee was poured. It was regular brewed coffee. Paulette requested espresso and it was hurriedly prepared, served in a Limoges demitasse with a sliver of lemon peel. She spooned in five heaps of sugar, counted them aloud in whispers, which was her habit or superstition. She stirred and stirred, the spoon caused scrape and ring on the fine china.

The conversation had gotten to this house of Kumura's, how exceptional it was and so compatibly contrary in this setting.

“I have the same sort of mansion down the way,” Lesage said.

That explained that first gate on the road, Grady thought. He wondered why Lesage had chosen to refer to his house as a mansion, even if that's what it was.

“Both this place and mine are by Addison Mizner,” Lesage said. “You know, Mizner, the architect who was so much in favor with the American wealthy back in the twenties.”

Julia gave that information the slightest possible nod.

Grady gave it a glance up to the terrace's colorfully tiled ceiling. He spotted two places where tiles were missing.

Lesage was pleased to relate that the original houses had been built by Mizner in Palm Beach and had since been demolished. The architectural plans had survived, however, and he'd managed to obtain them for five thousand a set from a financially forsaken descendant of the original owners. “I'm superb at coming up with such valuable things,” he said, and when neither Grady nor Julia were impressed enough to suit him, he was prompted to tell them, “in fact, if it hadn't been for my resourcefulness there probably wouldn't be more than a dozen pearl oysters in this whole fucking bay.”

Kumura looked away intolerantly.

Paulette's sigh said this was an over-heard story.

Lesage was too primed to stop. He related how back in 1975 when Kumura needed oysters for the bay he, Lesage, had assembled a task force of six deep-sea fishing boats, specially equipped them with holding tanks, hired tough crews and the best divers and made out down through the Strait of Malacca and across the Java Sea and the Indian Ocean (some sailor!) to the northwest shoulder of Australia, a stretch of coast called Eighty Mile Beach. Reconnoitered the pearl farms along there while staying well clear of them and pretending to fish. Nothing was left to chance. He and a few of the crew went ashore for what appeared to be a night of carousing in the town of Broome, and again another night in La Grange. Learned from loudmouths and braggers which pearl farms were getting the better yields. The very next night they made their move. Several divers were sent in ahead with knives to take out the watchmen posted on the rafts. Then the rest of the divers went to work using directional underwater lamps attached to their foreheads. The oysters were suspended under water in rectangular wire cages, on the average twelve to a cage. Silver lips, about the size of a dinner plate, the kind capable of producing South Sea pearls ranging in size from ten to twenty millimeters. At first the divers cut into the cages and removed the oysters, but that went too slow, so they began cutting the suspension lines and sending the cages up loaded. In six hours they just about cleaned out the best of the two best farms and before dawn, before anyone was the wiser, all boats were headed full speed back to Thailand. With fifty thousand Maxis in the holding tanks. The Aussie pearl farmers complained to their government, which complained to the proper Thai officials, who expressed regrets and counted their end.

“As you may know,” Lesage said, “oysters normally don't like being disturbed, but these took the trip as if it was a pleasure cruise. We didn't lose more than a couple hundred. The others got strewn into this bay and have been showing their appreciation ever since. More coffee!” Lesage snapped at the servant and lighted another Gauloise as though it was a reward he deserved.

Stolen pearl oysters, a few killings, a bit of corruption, Grady considered. Who would have thought it? Certainly not some decorous woman deciding her will, unable to make up her mind about which daughter deserved which strand.

Paulette changed the subject radically, asked Julia, “Have you spent much time in France?”

“Not lately.”

“Perhaps you've been to Saverne.”

“I don't recall ever—”

“It's a short distance from Strasbourg partway to Nancy. I'm from there, Saverne.”

“I spent a few days in Nancy years ago.”

“So, chances are we came within seventy-five kilometers of an encounter.”

“Possibly.”

Paulette slashed Grady with a glance before aiming exclusively at Julia with: “Have you ever given thought to the spaces you've created throughout your life, how you've disturbed the air? For instance, now, there you sit, the air pressuring around you, the shape of you. Let us say you vacate that space, move to another chair or whatever. The instant you move the air rushes in to fill the space you've left, the air collides and causes reverberations that never cease. No matter how unmeasurable they might be or how more unmeasurabie they might become, those vibrations, so to speak, continue eternally. It is interesting,
n'est-ce pas?”

Julia thought this was something Paulette had said numerous times before, a seemingly offhand demonstration of a philosophical side to prove there was more than physical reason to desire her. The validity of the premise wasn't as important as whether or not Paulette had thought it herself. Had she merely read it and remembered it for future use? Julia gave her the benefit of the doubt, although she'd known women (and men, too) who gathered up and carried along with them a supply of such cerebral displays. Didn't she herself have a reliable few?

“Being from Saverne makes me Alsatian,” Paulette said. “The usual comment is I don't look Alsatian and I happen to agree, considering my coloring as well as my moral temperament. I believe I must be a throwback from the Dark Ages or some such time, from an Italian rapine perhaps. Or”—she laughed—“from nothing quite so spectacular, a trip my sexually suppressed mother made alone to Milan might be all there is to it. Don't you adore lurid possibilities?”

“Possibly,” Julia arched.

“Daniel and I didn't meet in Saverne,” Paulette volunteered. “We met on the Paris to Lyon run of the TGV going one hundred and sixty miles an hour.”

“TGV?”

“Train à grande vitesse
. In first class, of course. I had noticed him, or rather we had noticed each other earlier in the restaurant of the
gare
. Just a catch of the eyes but it was enough so that when we encountered on the train we felt acquainted. We had splits of champagne, two each. He had on a smartly tailored gray suit and an eccentric necktie. I adore the TGV. It resembles a striped orange, gray and white snake,
très chic.”

As Paulette related this the volume of her voice diminished decibel by decibel, so gradually that Julia didn't realize she was leaning closer and closer in order to hear. By the time the words
très chic
came from Paulette's exquisite lips, her and Julia's faces were only inches apart.

Julia wasn't daunted, didn't draw back. “Why this?” she asked privately.

“So I may smell you,” Paulette whispered. “You have a personal scent
provocant.”

Lesage was talking dinner. “There'll be five of us.”

“Six,” Kumura corrected. “That is, if you don't mind. A dealer from Bangkok is having someone bring me a little something and I've promised to put the fellow up for the night.”

“Six, then. And instead of
don't be late
you can be as late as you wish. I prefer dining late.”

“This afternoon I'm showing Grady around the facility,” Kumura said. “Julia, you're more than welcome to come along.”

There was nothing Julia wanted less. “What are my other options?” she asked.

Paulette rescued with, “Our place for a swim.”

“Yes,” Lesage hissed.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Grady and Kumura walked along the edge of the bay with sneakers tied together by the laces and slung over their shoulders. The tide was ebbing and the sand was fringed wet and packed, punctuated with fragments of scallops and cowries, and mites and parts of crab shells that had been pecked clean. Kumura had loaned Grady a top-open cap with a magenta-colored clear plastic visor, so whatever Grady saw was affected by that softening, pleasant shade.

Their pace was slow, an observing pace. No need to hurry; they had all of the afternoon. For the first five or so minutes they remained silent, and it was during then that Grady had gotten to thinking about where he was geographically: there on the beach of this pearl-oyster-laden bay in Bang Wan, a village he'd never heard of in southern Thailand not far from either the border of Burma or that of Malaysia. He tried to visualize the immediate area, the houses, bay and all, as it would appear from above, from, say, a couple of thousand feet. Then what he got was a mental map of Thailand, which more or less expanded on its own to include all Southeast Asia and next, like a demonstration of the powers of distancing perspective, that flat map changed into the ball that was the entire world, the blue and white, clean-looking and flourishing-looking world as seen from the moon. God, wasn't he ever infinitesimal and inconsequential!

The fragment of a sharp shell he stepped on snapped him back to proper relativity and he said
Grady Bowman
to himself four times, like it was the prominent chord in a vast orchestration. The breeze was for him, the sun was for him, the hoochie-koochie of the air above the baking beach ahead was for him. As also were Kumura's words at that moment. “How much do you actually know about pearls, Grady?”

“Not all that much,” Grady believed he was tactically right in admitting. “Anyway, not as much as I pretend.”

“How about the market?”

“I keep up.”

“I'm sure you do,” Kumura said, inferring that was another facet of Grady he knew about, his ability to overview.

“Strong market right now,” Grady said.

“Yes, the demand for pearls has never been so great, however … the situation for pearls has never been worse. Quite a paradox.”

“Because of pollution?”

“That, but not only that. Sure, industrial waste, chemical fertilizers and so on are spoiling the pearl-growing waters, but the pearl farmers themselves are also to blame.”

“How's that?”

“Ever heard of the Japan Pearl Exporters Association?”

Grady had but he sensed it best that he ought to just let Kumura go on.

“It's a government agency established in the early sixties,” Kumura said, “to oversee the pearl industry. I happened to be among those who pushed to form it. Its purpose was to set standards of quality and make sure they were lived up to by the pearl farmers. All pearls intended for export had to be inspected and approved. If a batch wasn't good enough in one way or another, it wasn't allowed to be shipped. Instead it was confiscated and destroyed. You thirsty?”

“Yeah.”

“So am I. We should have brought along a thermos of orange squash or something. Thoughtless of me.”

Kumura went to the water and cupped a double handful. Didn't drink it, just took some into his mouth, swished it around and spat it out. He continued walking and talking. “Although the standards were high and rigidly enforced the pearl farmers for the most part realized it was for their own good and went along with it. Sure, there was some grumbling and disputes and incidents involving corruption, but the export inspections prevailed. For about ten years. That is, until pearls became such a staple of fashion and the demand heated up.”

Kumura stopped again, this time to hitch up his shorts. He took a couple of Callard and Bowser licorice toffees from his pocket. “Forgot I had these,” he said. Didn't ask if Grady wanted one, just assumed and tossed it. They remained stopped while they unwrapped and put the toffees in their mouths. Grady watched Kumura take the time to fold the silver and black foil wrapper into a tiny triangle, sort of origamilike. He put it to pocket for discard elsewhere. Grady crushed his, rolled it into a ball and had it for his fingers to play with as they went on down the beach.