18mm Blues (40 page)

The man now known as Lesage had been an unintended child, and later on in his life he'd not be able to recall a moment when he wasn't aware of being unwanted. A mere week after his birth, although Claire hadn't healed enough nor regained all her strength, she made off with a local vineyard worker who'd been waiting four months for her to become unburdened. Her departure wasn't unexpected by Gilbert, the father, inasmuch as Claire had always had an exaggerated opinion of herself, her looks, and had never believed mirrors. She'd loathed being a laundress and said that her hands were red and sore in protest of the low tasks demanded of them, the scrubbing and bleaching of bed linens to remove the stains of monthly blood and nightly coitus.

So, she was that soon gone, leaving the father with the responsibilities, including the naming of the child. He settled on Leon-Charles and saw that it was legally recorded on a certificate of birth.

Leon-Charles Bertin.

Gilbert Bertin, the father, had been employed at the château for ten years and hoped to continue on. He had no specific duties, was expected to do whatever might be necessary around the place, from light work such as unstopping a toilet to such heavy work as extracting a tree trunk. For impression the owners of the château, Monsieur and Madame Rocard, sometimes referred to Gilbert Bertin as their caretaker. Ordinarily he was only the oafish hulk of a man who was convenient to have around. His most appreciated virtues were he kept to himself, said little and was satisfied with a wage less than would need to be paid to someone else.

Thus, the boy Bertin grew up in the shadow of the thirty-room eighteenth-century château. He wasn't permitted inside and there were strict limitations on where he could set foot on the grounds. The gardens were especially off limits to him and so were the orchards and arbors. The barnyard, the animal pens and the thickly wooded acreage beyond the barns were his domain.

As a small boy he accepted these territorial decrees, abided by them. It wasn't until he'd added years and growth that he began stealing peeks through the ground floor windows of the château, ducking down in the shrubbery and cautiously popping up to have a look in. The comforts and luxuries he saw inside made him question why he should be grateful and resigned to his meager lot, excluded.

Being on the outside looking in became more and more unbearable for Leon-Charles. As he grew, so did his rancor. It got so he could think of little else other than his getting back at these dictatorial people and the imposed confines of this place. He'd certainly have his way and leave when the time and circumstances were right.

As it so happened they were on that Saturday during the same month as his fifteenth birthday. Monsieur and Madame Rocard were away on an extended holiday in Antibes; the servants had been given time off. Leon-Charles broke into the house, helped himself to it. In the pantry he took a bite straight from an intact wedge of Cantal. In the library he swigged very very superior cognac straight from a decanter.

Upstairs in the main bedroom he took off his shirt and trousers and flopped down on the Madame's
chaise de la reine
. Plump of cushions, slick of silk.

He lay there in the late afternoon light mimicking arrogance and languor. At dusk a strip of light across the Savonerie carpet caused him to realize that the Madame's dressing room door was ajar. He got up and went in. Obviously the Madame had dressed and departed in a rush. Not only had she left the light on, but also her silk nightgown and robe and high-heeled slippers were strewn about, her makeup and various little brushes were scattered on the surface of her vanity. A tissue she'd used to blot her lips had missed her wastebasket. The door to one of her closets had been left open, the closet where she kept her shoes and handbags, where she kept her Boule-worked jewelry case.

The case contained what the Madame called her better everyday jewelry. To Leon-Charles it was a treasure. His fingers got right into it: a straight-line emerald bracelet, a pink topaz and diamond crucifix, a Cartier tortue watch, a pendeloque aquamarine pendant, black opal ring, diamond double-clip brooch, diamond tremblant, gold bangles, various other rings. And more.

Leon-Charles grabbed out the valuables and placed them in the center of the Hermês scarf he'd spread on the floor. He was kneeling, gathering and knotting together the corners of the scarf, when Monsieur Rocard appeared in the dressing room doorway.

Caught! Stealing and naked.

Leon-Charles tried to charge past the Monsieur, however the Monsieur got ahold of his arm and flung him, sent him reeling over the chaise and down hard in a sprawl on the hearth of the marble fireplace.

The Monsieur was furious, rushed to press his advantage. He would have stopped in time and out of range if he could have, but his momentum carried him into the arc of the swing of the heavy metal fireplace poker on the end of Leon-Charles's arm. The poker caught the Monsieur on the side of the neck below his left ear. The impact took the Monsieur's legs out from under him, and he was on the way down, already unconscious when a second blow in nearly the same place killed him.

Only then did Leon-Charles realize the Madame was there in the room. She rushed for the door to get out. Leon-Charles got to it first.

There were no reasoning nor pleas from the Madame. She glared ascendantly at him, straight into his eyes, down at his nakedness.

He swung the poker.

The arm she put out to fend it off was fractured at the wrist. The blow was barely impeded. The force of it continued on, crushed her right hip.

The Madame went lopsided, was turned sideways, her head snapped back from the pain. To Leon-Charles it seemed from her position that her head was being offered. He brought the poker down full force upon her profile, across the bridge of her nose. Smashed her nasal spine and drove the nasal process and other encasing bone back into her brain.

She lay dead on the carpet. In a contorted position, legs apart, crotch exposed, white underpants visible.

Leon-Charles bolted the door. He arranged the Madame's legs so he could pull off her underwear. Saw that she was menstruating. Spread her legs enough, stroked himself to hardness and got between. He didn't try to pretend she wasn't dead. Even if she had been alive only his own sensations would have mattered.

He came almost at once. Used her dress to wipe her blood from his penis and testicles. Got dressed, gathered up the jewelry-laden scarf and went out. Took one of the cars from the garage, the blue Mercedes sedan. He'd driven it a few times up and down the private roads of the château, teaching himself. It had an automatic shift, was easy.

When he was past the point where the château's drive gave to the public road he felt he'd gotten away. He didn't look back, not even mentally. He followed the road signs to Le Puy and from Le Puy to Valence and then on down alongside the Rhone to where the car ran out of gas twenty miles from Marseilles.

He slept in the car, slept well, and early the next morning hitched a ride into the city. Found a likely looking jewelry shop on a side street off the Boulevard de Briancon and believed the fifteen hundred francs (three hundred dollars) the sober-faced lady there paid him for Madame Rocard's jewels was a fair price. After all, he'd never had more than ten francs in his pocket at any one time.

He bought a pair of better shoes, a football jersey. Hung around the streets, especially the Quai du Lazaret and the streets of the Port Moderne. Fascinated by the large ships, he tried to sign on one as a deckhand for a trip to anywhere. He was tall and hefty enough for his lie about his age to be believed. The reason he was turned down was he didn't have any papers, either personal or union, and no passport.

His money was soon down to thirty francs. He needed papers. Where could he go without papers?

A barman told him.

Leon-Charles went that same day to the recruiting office located at the Bas-Fort Saint Nicolas. The recruiting corporal didn't ask for any papers, just asked a lot of personal questions. Leon-Charles replied to all but a few with lies. His name, he said, was Raymond Sorel. He was eighteen. The corporal wasn't there to disbelieve. He issued Raymond Sorel a black two-piece track suit and had him sign a five-year contract. Raymond was taken by truck to Aubagne, the holding station, as a potential for the Légion Étrangère (Foreign Legion).

He was big enough, strong enough, mean enough. Week by week, the grading band on his arm went from yellow to green and, finally, to red. He was in. His
le paquetage
(uniforms and equipment) was issued. He was sent for training at Castelnaudary, located between Carcassone and Toulouse.

As an
engagé volontaire
, as the Legion calls them, he ordinarily would have undergone four months of training. However, due to the dire situation in Indochina, training was accelerated, cut to two months.

Raymond hated the service from the moment of his first salute. He kept that and all his complaints to himself, however, maintained the image that he had the makings of a good Legionnaire. Why the fuck should he care about tradition and the other shit they tried to stuff into his head?

In February 1954, on the Wednesday prior to the weekend that Raymond planned to desert, he was shipped out. One of the reinforcements for the Thirteenth DBLE
(Demi-Brigade de la Légion Étrangère)
in Dien Bien Phu.

War? He wanted no part of it. Fellow Legionnaires talked about the glory of dying and how outnumbered they were. Casualty figures were quoted as though they were something to boast about. Raymond felt neither his life nor his death was his own, blamed lousy circumstances for suckering him into this situation. He was assigned to a 120 millimeter mortar crew dug in on a strong point named “Beatrice.”

The French garrison consisted of 11,000 men.

The Vietnamese under General Giap had three divisions of infantry and one artillery division, altogether about 50,000 men, and were supplied by 100,000 coolies.

It seemed to Raymond, when the attack began at five in the afternoon of March thirteenth, that all 50,000 enemy were coming at him. He wasn't hit, not a scratch. He pulled the twitching bodies of dead Legionnaires over him like a blanket. Their final defecations were suffocating, their blood soaked him. He didn't move, barely breathed. At nightfall the battle was still raging, but his position had been overrun. For the moment, at least, and merely by a fluke he'd been spared.

He crawled out from under, ripped off all his insignias, threw away his helmet. Thought how fortunate it was that he hadn't gotten tattooed with a regiment designation as so many of the other new guys had during the last leave. There was nothing on him to identify him as an enemy. Except, of course, his battle fatigues. He kept down, moved in a crouch, crawled, and finally reached the cover of some undergrowth. Came across a dead coolie, whose plain shirt and trousers were too small for him but were safer than his own battle fatigues. He was reluctant to give up his combat boots but knew they'd be a sure giveaway.

The impression he hoped for was that of just another French civilian with Vietnamese sympathies. Caught up in the war. He invented the details to substantiate that, new name and all, and made his way south, kept to the narrow, circuitous paths until he was far enough from the action to risk the roads, went begging and taking from village to village.

When the French forces pulled out in defeat in May, Leon-Charles Bertin who'd become Raymond Sorel (missing in action) was one George Gaucher with stolen, incomplete but adequate papers to prove it. He got hired aboard a shorthanded freighter out of Kampot, Cambodia, bound for Java.

Over the years Bertin learned Asia, sometimes the hard way, at other times the soft. He became increasingly chameleonlike, able to blend against nefarious backgrounds and circumstances, altogether a tough Asia hand. Quite a few times he came within a little more nerve or luck of making what he thought of as his big score. The problem was he never recognized these situations as big scores until they were past him. Usually he ended up having to fall back on some menial job, such as sacking oyster shells in Tuamoto.

Then, in 1974, Bertin won half of the boat in the poker game in Bangkok and killed for the other half and went on the pearling expedition with the two amas and the boy in the Andaman Sea. The natural blue pearls he came back alone with transformed his life.

He sold one of the smaller blue pearls, a nine millimeter, to a Bangkok dealer for ten thousand dollars. That staked him to a better presentation of himself and got him up the line to Kumura. He knew with Kumura he was in the presence of top dollar. He placed all the larger blue pearls before Kumura. They measured on the average about eighteen millimeters. Kumura examined each pearl thoroughly and asked if there were more. Bertin had planned on keeping the others, the smaller and malshaped, to sell to someone else, however, under the pressure of the moment he brought them out and showed them.

Kumura offered fifty million dollars for the lot.

Bertin was stunned. A spurt of adrenaline made his throat go dry. All he could manage to say was:
“D'accord.”

He wouldn't divulge to Kumura where the natural blues had been found. Kumura tried various ways to get it out of him, but all Bertin would reveal was they'd come from an island in the Andaman. It wasn't difficult for Bertin to stick to that because that was all he knew. He had only a vague idea where the island was located. Every so often he'd get to thinking about it, the wealth that was still there, and his determination to find it would get worked up. He'd sail off and find other similar islands but not the one.

Each time Bertin left on one of those sails, Kumura anticipated that he'd be bringing back another batch of blues. That prospect, not the appropriating of the Australian silver lip oysters, was the main reason Kumura cut Bertin in on the Bang Wan Bay farm. The limited partnership kept Bertin around and kept hope in Kumura's outlook.