18mm Blues (38 page)

“I paint,” she said plainly.

“Like whom do you paint?” Lesage asked, and inasmuch as he'd planned the point didn't wait for her reply. “American painters are blatant derivers, not an original brushstroke ever. Except, of course there's Andrew Warhol and his piss paintings.”

Lesage allowed the invisible question mark to form.

“For those of you who aren't familiar with the achievement, what Warhol did was coat canvases with metallic copper paint and have just about anyone who happened into his studio relieve her or his bladder on them. The copper oxidized where it was splattered, creating a green, black and orange pattern. Quite a few American critics, including some quite notable, had praise for these canvases, said they had significant meaning and merit. Others went so far as to propose they expressed an affinity to the staking out of territory by animals.”

“In my opinion they were remarkably alchemical,” Julia said for spite.

Grady read her eyes and thought Lesage should fear for his life.

The conversation again sputtered.

Which gave Lesage the opening to soliloquize on his knowledge of oysters. Not the pearl-producing kind (species ostreidae) but those for eating (aviculidae). He expounded on the Belons and the Portuguese varieties, the young
claires
compared to the
fines de claires
compared to the plumper, more preferred older
spéciales
. He explained, as though he were tutoring, how the French dealers classified from triple zeros and double zeros (rarest and best) to the less desirable single zeros and ones and twos and finally the small, cheapest threes. Lesage claimed a three had never passed his lips, never would.

From oysters the topic had only to shift slightly to be pearls and all at once a rich, conversational vein had been tapped with everyone taking a share.

“Cultured pearls weren't allowed to be sold as pearls.”

“They had to be called beads, didn't they?”

“According to international law.”

“Until the crash in 1930.”

“Before then the only pearls considered to be pearls were naturals.”

“Think of all the naturals there were back in those days.”

“Tons.”

“And now it's said there might not be more than four or five truly gem-quality natural pearl necklaces in existence.”

“That's hard to believe.”

“Doesn't seem possible.”

“What about all those long strands of pearls women wore in the twenties? I believe Chanel made them fashionable. Women used to twirl them and tie them different ways.”

“They weren't naturals.”

“So officially they weren't pearls, is that it?”

“Fuck the distinction.” From Lesage.

“Dear, the distinction has been fucked.” From Paulette.

“Fortunately.” From Kumura.

“What happened to all the naturals, I wonder? The regular rich and the royal rich had so many.”

“They got stashed away.”

“Or mistreated.”

“Both. Reminds me of something that's said to have happened in the seventeen hundreds. A maharaja of somewhere, his name escapes me at the moment, possessed a huge fortune in pearls, kept them hidden away in a large cask. When he died his son claimed the hoard, opened the cask and found only peels of nacre and pearl dust.”

“The pearls had also died.”

“They do, you know, dry up and die unless they get attention.”

“Pearls and people.” From Paulette.

Grady was now in a more comfortable element, sure that he could hold his own when it came to pearl trivia. For him the evening had now turned enjoyable. “Roman women wore pearls to bed to sweeten their dreams,” he said.

“Caligula had his boots encrusted with them.”

“And the trappings of his horse, as well.”

“Mary, Queen of Scots, owned a great many remarkable pearls, loose and in strands.”

“They went when her head did, I suppose.”

“Queen Elizabeth got the most and best of them. According to Walpole, Elizabeth wore a mass of pearls in her hair, on her ruff and on a huge fardingale.”

“What the hell's a ruff?”

“I know what it sounds like it might be.” From Paulette with a wicked smirk.

“A huge fardingale, you say?”

Laughs, a league of laughs.

“In ancient times…”

“How ancient?”

“Ancient ancient. It was believed that pearls grew in the brains of dragons.”

“The Japanese tell of a pearl with so much luster that its glow was visible three miles away.” That from Julia.

Grady assumed that tidbit was something she'd read and just now was prompted to recall. Or else she'd made it up. What amused him was the wide-eyed, serious-faced way she'd said it.

“I've seen some remarkable pearls in my day.” That from William. No one asked him to elaborate and his statement was lost as the verbal sallying continued.

“Cleopatra…” Lesage began.

“Oh Christ, don't pull out that old stale story. Everyone's heard it.”

“I haven't,” Julia said.

“I'll make it short,” Lesage promised and began. “Cleopatra, during the height of her passionate days with Mark Anthony, wagered with him that she could serve him a dinner so expensive it would never be equaled. Indeed, the meal she served was sumptuous, however Mark Anthony found nothing so expensive about it. He thought he'd won the wager, until Cleopatra removed one of her pearl earrings and dropped it into her goblet of wine, where it quickly dissolved, and she had Mark Anthony drink it down. That pearl—”

“Was worth a lot of drachmas.”

“Ten millions dollars today.” From William.

“You fucked me out of the punch line!” Lesage complained loudly. He was really irked at William, looked at Julia, his lone audience, for support.

She wasn't about to be that generous.

“That never happened, that Cleopatra pearl-in-the-wine business,” Grady contended. “It's just a romantic myth.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because pearls don't dissolve in wine,” Grady replied. “Except in the movies. In the movies they drop a pearl into the wine and right away the wine starts bubbling to dramatize that the pearl's dissolving.”

Kumura agreed.

Lesage challenged. He resented having his story debunked.

“I'll prove it,” Grady said. He brought out the sixteen-millimeter pearl Kumura had given him that afternoon. With a little showmanship he dropped the pearl into his goblet of wine, and waited. “See, no bubbles,” he said. He brought the goblet to his lips and drained it, peered into the goblet and did a perplexed take. “No pearl!” he exclaimed convincingly, and when Julia laughed rather unsurely he pursed his lips and allowed the pearl to appear.

“Such talent,” Paulette remarked cynically.

“However,” Grady admitted, “I do believe the old, true accounts are best. The shark charmers, for instance.”

“Shark charmers?”

Kumura knew of the shark charmers, but didn't let on, allowed Grady a total audience.

“The pearl divers who took part in the great pearl fishing seasons in the Gulf of Manaar in 1905 and 1906 were—”

“When did you say?” From Julia with keen interest.

Grady repeated the years and went on. “The divers were a superstitious bunch. Easy pickings for certain individuals who exaggerated a mystical demeanor and claimed to be able to provide protection against attacks by sharks. Naturally, some ritual was involved. The so-called shark charmer was locked in a windowless room and would remain there throughout the day while the divers were out in the gulf working the bottom. The only things in the room with the shark charmer were a brass basin of sea water in which there were two miniature replicas of fish made of silver, supposedly a male and a female. The charmer's job was to prevent the silver fish from attacking each other. If during the day none of the divers suffered a shark bite the mystical power of the charmer was the reason. If, on the other hand, a shark bite had occurred, the charmer had any number of excuses to fall back on, that someone had doubted his power, for example, or he was dissatisfied with the pearls with which he was being compensated. For his services the charmer received a twentieth of each day's catch.”

“Interesting if true,” Lesage commented.

“It's true,” Julia asserted firmly.

“Oui,”
Paulette put in, “I've known quite a few such charmers.”

Lesage took silent exception to her remark.

Kumura was about to contribute the old belief that pearls represented the tears of unhappiness that would be shed in married life—when Julia beat him to it. “I'll tell one,” Julia said and went right on to relate how at one time in Borneo it was believed by the pearl divers that if every ninth pearl found was placed in a bottle along with an equal number of grains of rice the pearls would breed, multiply. The bottle had to be corked with the finger of a dead person. “Practically every house had such a bottle,” Julia said.

“How macabre,” Paulette thought aloud.

What was it with Julia? Grady wondered. Was she making things up for the hell of it? He'd heard various Borneo anecdotes but never that finger stopper one. It was farfetched. The thing of it was how earnestly Julia had put it across, as though she knew of it firsthand.

“Pearl divers are ignorant, always have been. Otherwise they wouldn't do what they do.” That from Lesage.

Julia glowered at him.

“Their exploits have been greatly exaggerated,” Kumura said. “For example, I've read sworn, recorded accounts of divers in the Society Islands who've gone down thirty fathoms and stayed under—ten minutes.”

“When was that?”

“A hundred years ago.”

“Anyone could go down thirty fathoms and stay under … forever,” Grady quipped.

“How deep is thirty fathoms?” Paulette asked.

“About a hundred and eighty feet.”

“Without diving gear?”

“Just a mask.”

“Impossible.”

“The best divers are the Japanese amas.”

“Think so?” Julia challenged.

“I know so,” Lesage told her.

“Then it's true.” Julia did a sweet smile. “In fact everything you say is true.”

At that moment beneath the table Paulette's hand reached and found Julia's hand. Enclosed upon it and held it captured for a while and then, as though it were an object without a will, brought it to herself and placed it just so, palm down on the bare skin of her inner thigh.

Julia's immediate reaction, even to just the hand holding, was to jerk her hand away, and she would have, however she was undergoing the same loss of control she'd experienced in the river when it had been impossible for her to reach out for the pouch containing the rubies. Again her arm and her hand wouldn't mind her.

She didn't panic. Mainly because this paralytic sensation had occurred before and she wanted to understand it. It seemed her hand and arm were separate from the rest of her. As though they were being persuaded to misbehave, not heed. The persuasion spread to her shoulder and neck and within her head, and she no longer considered that her hand and its fingers, kneading gently as they were, stroking and skimming, upward and downward lightly, were performing against her will. Rather, something told her what they were doing would be beneficial.

Lesage stood suddenly, causing the legs of the table to slip from the wedges and wobble drastically. “We'll have coffee and whatever else you might want up in my study,” he said, turned and walked into the house before the others had a chance to rise.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Lesage's second-floor study was a huge high-ceilinged room with a series of tall french doors leading out to a balcony. It was paneled in antique walnut boiserie. One entire wall was inset with bookcases that held so many leather-bound volumes they looked painfully squeezed. On the surface of the lower shelves was an array of precious little
objets:
lots of shagreen-covered things, boxes, clocks and such, a collection of gold and jewel-embellished ladies' compacts, a premeditated scatter of ancient Greek coins, a few of a hundred litrae showing Herakles slaying a Numean lion.

The
bureau plat
that Lesage now called his desk had originally belonged to someone within personal range of Louis Quinze. Among the things on it was a Sèvres spyglass provenanced to Madame de Pompadour and a silver-framed enlarged snapshot of Lesage and Paulette. Paulette immediately drew attention to it, as though she'd not seen it prior to now.

“That was taken the afternoon Daniel and I met at Lake Como. We were both staying at the Villa d'Este. The Count and Countess Del Vecchio and I needed a fourth for bridge and Daniel obliged.”

Julia shrugged and plopped down into one of the plump cushioned sofas. There were three such sofas. Grady sank in next to her.

Coffee was served from a silver pot created by Paul de Lamerie. Cigars were offered from a Buccellati humidor. The cigars were Flor de F. Farach Extras, true Havanas. Grady and William declined the smokes. Paulette took one from the humidor, held it beneath her nose, whiffed it and replaced it. “I prefer them unlit,” she said. Lesage bit the puffing tip off one and lighted up. He motioned Kumura to sit behind the desk, and Kumura settled in the antelope skin-covered
bergère
that Lesage's rump had broken in.

Grady gulped the coffee. It was French brewed, extremely strong and nearly viscous. Made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. He'd have a problem sitting still if he drank more, maybe even get to grinding his teeth. What the hell … he held his cup up for a refill.

“Grady,” Kumura said loud enough to get everyone's attention. “From what I understand you have a unique ability.”

“Such as?”

“I'm told you're one of the few people able to distinguish a natural pearl from a cultured one without technical means.”