18mm Blues

by Gerald A. Browne

  Julia pelted him with more pearls, a fistful.

  “Con!” Lessage shouted. “Va te fair éculer!” He was seething, and when she threw another fistful he reversed the engine and shut it down. The most that would happen was the sloop would give one of the rafts a little bump, he thought. Even if a bit more than a bump he had to deal with this woman. She’d already thrown away a fortune. Paulette was to blame. If it hadn’t been for Paulette he would never have gotten into it. He’d make Paulette pay, and this Julia woman. He came around from the wheel and lunged at Julia.

  She easily evaded him, was up on the cabin trunk, retreating along it.

  He vowed to his anger that the first thing of hers he got hold of, arm, leg, neck, whatever, he’d break.

  At that moment Grady and William were working their way toward the open end of the docking shed. The overhang of the steel ramp four stories above helped conceal them, however it was only a matter of time before their adversaries went around to the ramp on the opposite side of the shed to have a clear shot at them.

  They sidled along, pressed against the wall, not swiftly enough to suit Grady. He knew that by now Lesage’s sloop would be at least halfway out the channel. Once it was out of the bay there’d be no catching it.

  He could only guess where the tender boats might be tied up. He believed they’d be somewhere near the end of the slip, which with all their daily coming and going to and from the bay was the logical place for them. The width of the dock and the distance from the edge of the dock to the water prevented him from seeing if they were there. He wouldn’t know until he got to the edge.

  They made a dash for it. Grady leading the way, William right behind, turning and firing up to the ramp.

  Bursts of bullets pocked the concrete close around, ricocheted and stung their legs. When they reached the edge they found no tenders there, but two were tied up back about ten yards. They ran back along the edge like conveyed targets in a shooting gallery. Anyone who was a half-decent shot with a rifle could have easily picked them off, however strafing and spraying, not precision, were the special merits of machine pistols.

  Grady and William dove into the tender. Grady scrambled to its outboard engine, dropped its drive shaft and propeller into the water and gave its starter rope a yank. And another. The engine nearly started on the third, desperate yank, definitely started on the fourth. Grady twisted the throttle on the steering arm. Wild shots were still being fired at them as they sped down the slip and out of the shed.

  Lesage was now up on the cabin trunk, stalking Julia.

  He was sure he’d eventually get her, corner her and have his way with her. He was going to enjoy killing her and, he suggested to himself, his pleasure shouldn’t end there. After killing her he should fuck her. And make Paulette watch.

  Julia jumped down from the forward edge of the cabin trunk to the foredeck.

  Lesage kept coming.

  She kept retreating in the direction of the bow. She didn’t go all the way to the bowsprit, held her ground short of it and defied Lesage. “Your old fat boat couldn’t handle rough weather, remember?” she said. “That old beat-up black boat with the rotting sails.”

  No doubt about what she’d said this time. It stopped Lesage, bewildered and distracted him so that when he lunged at her she ducked in under his grab and tauntingly proceeded up the portside deck access in the direction of the stern.

  He continued to stalk her, hated her. How could she know about that old boat? he wondered. All the more reason to kill her.

  She had no more pearls to throw.

  She reached into her shoulder bag for something else.

  At that moment she sensed physical changes taking place in herself. Sensed that the proportions of her body were being altered and that she was suddenly thinner, a little taller. Sensed that her hair was turning black and becoming more heavily textured. Her cheekbones more prominent, the shape of her eyes and the way they were set in their sockets, changed. Didn’t she now have more forehead, less chin?

  She sensed that she was undergoing mental changes as well. Somehow her memory was transformed, dilated so she could see inwards all the way to a small girl clutching her mother’s long hair and the mother instructing her to take deep breaths and telling her to hold on as she took the child on an underwater ride.

  Julia brought out the dah-she knife, held it up by its whalebone handle, allowed the moon to play upon its blade and disclose its razor-sharp cutting edge. “Buddha is generous,” she said. However, as those words came through Julia’s voice box she knew it wasn’t her voice, rather one higher pitched and delicate. “Is that not true, Monsieur Bertin?” were words she couldn’t restrain.

  Lesage became Bertin. For nearly twenty years no one had called him by that name. Hearing the name said further impacted his sudden terror. He tried to steady himself, told himself it was an apparition, not really the Japanese ama, Setsu, poised there flashing the knife at him. However, his eyes told his brain to believe it and he felt the blood rush from his extremities, leaving him weak and hardly able to take a breath, incapable of stopping her as she went to the stern, to the control console.

  She turned on the engine, pushed the throttle lever to full ahead, waited a few moments to attain speed before spinning the hydraulic helm.

  The sloop veered so sharply to port it seemed it would overturn. It pitched up and slammed down on the side of its hull and hadn’t recovered balance when it collided with a section of rafts from which pearl oysters were hung and sleeping. It raked those rafts, disturbed them, scraped along the uneven ends of the heavy bamboo poles that formed the rafts.

  It didn’t stop there, was hardly slowed. As though it was a drunk bent on causing destruction the sloop caromed diagonally across the channel to ram another section of rafts. Plowed bow first right into it, causing the fiberglass hull to scream as it was abraded and the cross-hatched bamboo poles of the rafts to splinter and snap apart.

  The collision sent Bertin flying from the side deck access all the way forward to the bowsprit. He made a grab for the headstay, the line that ran from the bow up to the masthead, had it for an instant, but his momentum was too great for his grasp, and next he knew the lifeline cut across the small of his back to flip him overboard.

  He caught a glimpse of one of the green strobing buoys before he struck the water and plunged past the shreds of bamboo afloat on it. Then all was dark, wet and he was completely disoriented. Which way to the surface? He could only guess, and even if he guessed right he couldn’t get to it.

  Because of his white flannel suit.

  Saturated, it seemed to outweigh him and it wasn’t something he could just simply let go of. It and its weight had him contained, buttoned and belted. He’d never be able to get out of it in time. What’s more, one of the trouser legs was caught on something, caught on the wire mesh of one of the oyster cages.

  Going to drown, Bertin thought.

  Among the oysters.

  Julia was also in the water. She spotted his white suit and swam to him. Swam around him like a predacious sea creature, observing his struggle, enjoying his plight. She still had the dah-she knife in hand, was slashing the water around him with it, coming closer and closer, taunting him with his death.

  Before she got to use the knife on him, bubbles emerged from his nose and mouth and he began breathing water.

  No matter that he was dead, the need to slash him still had its hold on her. He was hung there limply, the current of the bay slowly moving his free extremities, his head alternately floating chin down and chin up. When it was chin up there was the stretch of his throat for her desire to open his flesh from earlobe to earlobe. She extended the moment, noticing with pleasure his eyes were fixed corpse-wide, their whites an eerie bluish-white, a bit fluorescent.

  His head floated back.

  His throat was presented.

  However, Julia’s hand that held the dah-she knife for some reason refused to supply the force needed to make the slash.
That which had been providing it with the fuel of vengeance had all at once departed, leaving Julia so that she was only Julia with the dah-she in hand.

  A vile thing, the knife. Julia released it abruptly and it spiraled, whalebone handle first, down the dark steeps. Only moments ago she’d had an ample reserve of breath but now her lungs were complaining. She kicked to the surface.

  How grateful she was to see the night sky, the speckled heavens, and then Grady and William coming in the tender to pull her aboard.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The next morning.

  Grady, Julia and William joined Kumura at his usual spot on the far end of the terrace. He was having a light breakfast, no Devonshire splits or any of that, just melon, toast and jam, coffee and tea.

  When they’d taken places and were settled, Kumura commented on how rested they looked, how they must have slept soundly. “Except you, Grady,” he said wryly. “You appear to be a bit … how shall I best put it?… depleted, yes, that’s it exactly … depleted around the edges.”

  “Thank you,” Julia arched.

  “Pity about Lesage drowning like that,” Kumura said to get that obligatory subject over and done with. “I’ve already made arrangements. In fact, at this very moment his body is on its way to France, presumably for a Foreign Legion funeral with all the military trappings. Lesage would have wanted that, don’t you think?”

  The irony provoked grins.

  “As for Paulette, she departed sometime during the night. Abandoned the Corniche at the airport and took off for who knows where.”

  To meet someone someplace whom she can say she’d met any number of other places, Julia thought.

  “She certainly made a mess of the cabin door,” Kumura said. “Shot the bloody hell out of it. Evidently in a panic trying to get out, although I still don’t see how she could have possibly locked herself in.”

  “That’s just one mystery,” Grady said.

  “What about these?” William asked. He placed two bright blue pearls on the pale blue tablecloth.

  Kumura took them up, studied them briefly with intense interest. “Where did you get these?”

  William told him.

  “Are they naturals?” Kumura asked.

  “You tell me,” William said.

  “No, I defer to an expert.” Kumura handed the two pearls to Grady, who barely made a fist around them before pronouncing them cultured and dyed. (He’d had a look at them earlier with his loupe.)

  “I trust your insight,” Kumura said, “but I must say I’ve no idea how such blues should be in Lesage’s possession.”

  “Then it remains a mystery,” Julia put in conclusively. She’d been looking out at the bay and imagining how she’d paint it. She felt newly spirited, longing to face a fresh canvas, eager to get on with her life with Grady. So different a person than she’d been before. She loved him, no doubt about that. He would be the recipient of her time. She wasn’t going to try to understand the various strange ways she’d behaved, no use chasing after such answers. Better that she accept what she’d experienced, benefit by it, know that from here on in she needn’t give any energy to doubt or despair at being insular. “May I please have more coffee?” she said to one of the attending servants. Grady passed her the toast. She slathered a piece deservedly with damson preserves.

  Kumura folded the London Times he’d been reading, placed it aside, revealing beneath it a legal document. “The agreement I had with Lesage now proves to be a provident one,” he said. “It stipulates without the hindrance of fine print that upon his untimely or”—he said aside—“even his timely death, all rights to the pearl farm here shall revert to me. That includes as well the house down the way, its contents, cars, and so on, everything of Lesage’s.”

  “Some deal,” Grady commented.

  “As it turns out,” Kumura agreed phlegmatically, “the only distressing thing is how this farm could tie me down if I let it. Not that I’m not interested and proud of it and all that, but I’m at the point where I’d prefer to be able to come and go when I please. For example, this afternoon I leave for New York and then on to London and Milan. I have pressing appointments in those places, and I’d like to have the liberty of getting waylaid if I so choose. So, I desperately need someone to look after Bang Wan for me, someone who knows pearls, loves pearls.”

  “What would that person get in return?” Grady asked.

  “Same as Lesage received,” Kumura told him, “limited partnership, proportionate share of profits.”

  “Lesage’s house?”

  “Included.”

  “And contents.”

  “Of course. Will you do it?”

  It was a sweet offer. Grady appeared to be turning it over in his mind. He pictured himself either here forever in Bang Wan or in San Francisco. No contest. “William’s your man,” Grady said.

  William sat up.

  “He told me just the other night that he was ready to fold the Lady So Remembered Gem-Cutting Factory,” Grady said. “Didn’t you, William?”

  William managed a yes.

  “I’d considered putting it to William,” Kumura improvised. “It was just that I thought, considering the circumstances, you should have first shot.”

  “But you agree to William?”

  “Offhand I can’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t,” Kumura replied.

  “Is that a yes?”

  Kumura considered a moment and said it was.

  “That’s good,” Grady said, “because I promised him we’d be doing a lot of business together.”

  Kumura was genuinely satisfied with this spontaneously revised arrangement. He extended his hand.

  William shook it.

  Done?

  Done.

  “Now,” Grady said, “what about my San Francisco deal? I suppose now you want no part of me, or maybe that was just bullshit all the way.”

  Kumura was amused. “To the contrary, Grady,” he said. “I’ve had your contract drawn up. In fact, I have it right here.” He handed the legal document to Grady, who, in looking it over, skipped those parts that said what he had to do and read twice those parts that said what he’d get. Kumura, true to his nature, had been more generous than he’d initially proposed.

  “Will you sign?” Kumura asked.

  Grady had already given it enough advance thought, just in case. “On two conditions,” he said. “First, I get time off to get married.” He glanced to Julia. This still wasn’t asking her properly, but she let it go.

  “And your second condition?”

  “I get to borrow your ketch for a week starting tomorrow.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 1989 the State Law and Order Restoration Council of Burma officially changed many well-established names. It was decreed that henceforth the Union of Burma would be referred to as the Union of Myanmar and the city of Rangoon would be called Yangon. For the sake of clarity the author has taken the license of using the old and more familiar designations.

  About the Author

  Gerald A. Browne is the New York Times–bestselling author of ten novels including 11 Harrowhouse, 19 Purchase Street, and Stone 588. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages, and several have been made into films. He attended the University of Mexico, Columbia University, and the Sorbonne, and has worked as a fashion photographer, an advertising executive, and a screenwriter. He lives in Southern California.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by Pulse Produc
tions, Inc.

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-4804-7853-4

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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