“The Czechs exported tons of the stuff,” Flagg replied. “SOS got its hands on some. Don’t ask me how, ’cause it’s too embarrassing to the feds. Now Uncle Sam is afraid SOS will use it.”
I remembered the way Walden Schiller’s eyes turned to ice when he talked about his cause. “That’s not good, Flagg, not good at all.”
“I agree. We’re doing the best we can on it, working with the FBI. Got any suggestions?”
“I’ll just keep digging around. I’ll let you know if anything turns up.”
“You do that.” He wrote something on a slip of paper. “Here’s my number if you want to reach me.”
We shook hands and he left. I watched him shoulder his way easily through the crowd and thought how strange and nice it was to run into Flagg. Sometimes his born-again Native Americanism annoyed me, but I knew he was trying to carve a cultural identity out of the shambles that years of white man’s indifference and misguided paternalism had left of the Wampanoags’ heritage. It was that same ancestry, I suspected, that gave Flagg his uncanny intuition, a sensitivity that picked up vibes far above or below the normal range of human understanding. If he hadn’t exercised those talents the last time we worked together, on a hunt for a missing undersea robot, I might not be sitting in the bar enjoying the pleasures of country-and-western music.
The jukebox was playing a Johnny Paycheck song. “Take This Job and Shove It.” I ordered another beer. Flagg was right about Rocky. If I listened real well, he’d have something to tell me. The question was, would I understand him when he did?
I drank my beer and headed out the door. It would have been tempting to lose myself in a quiet little binge, but I had promised Uncle Constantine I’d dive with him the next morning. From what I had seen of my uncle so far, I had the feeling I would need all the strength I could muster.
Chapter 22
A sea gull eyed me sleepily from a piling at the Lewis Bay Marina. The bird’s shiny yellow beak was pointed into the light southwest breeze that fluffed in off the water. I got out of the pickup and walked over to Uncle Constantine’s dock. Without a couple of well-oiled beauties like Kara and Maureen on board to distract my eye, the Artemis looked in rough shape.
She was a graceful vessel about forty feet long, with an upswept bow and a square stern, and in her day she must have been the pride of the Tarpon Springs sponge-fishing fleet. Her newly painted white hull and red-and-blue trim gleamed in the morning sunlight. The paint gave her a colorful jauntiness, and it covered the dings and knicks in the wood, but it couldn’t hide them. The nails holding the hull planking together were already bleeding rust streaks.
On the plus side, she was the perfect work boat, broad in the beam, with a wide deck forward of a small pilothouse. I hoisted the duffel bag holding my dive gear onto the deck and climbed on board. From below came the strains of bouzouki music. I yelled out my uncle’s name.
“Aristotle,” he shouted, “come, come.”
I went down into the gallery. Uncle Constantine sat at a dinette table digging into chunks of hard-crusted bread soaked in a bowl of hot chocolate. He turned down the volume on a portable tape player and brandished a dripping tablespoon mounded with soggy bread.
“Aristotle, you want to eat? Good stuff.”
“Thanks, Uncle, it’s too early for breakfast. Coffee’s okay.” Cocoa and bread isn’t a bad meal if you’re in a hurry, but Uncle Constantine has an incredible sweet tooth and I knew he’d lard the mixture with sugar. He shrugged as if I’d just passed up an invitation to dine at the Ritz and took a long-handled brass coffeepot with an hourglass shape from the stove. He poured the thick coffee into a demitasse cup and set it before me. I took a sip. The strong syrupy concoction was a nice change from Stop & Shop economy instant.
Uncle Constantine spooned the last of his breakfast from the bowl, wiped his mustache neatly with a paper towel, and patted his stomach.
“So, Aristotle,” he said grandly, “you ready to make a million dollars?” He was smiling like a kid with a pass to the circus.
“Anytime you say the word, uncle.”
He thumped his fist lightly on the table and his eyes lit up like lanterns. “Good. We go now, Aristotle.”
Uncle Constantine scrambled up the companionway to the deck and went into the pilothouse, with me following. He deluged the old diesel engine with a stream of curses and pleas in Greek and English and it started in a cloud of purple exhaust fumes and noisy exhortations that sent a score of gulls into the sky. Uncle Constantine made last-minute checks while the engine warmed up. Then we cast off the dock lines and he pointed the boat’s high-curved bow into Lewis Bay like an ancient trireme leaving an Aegean port.
The Artemis passed a miniature white-and-black lighthouse, plowing ahead as steadily as a good-natured draft horse, the chug-chug of the engine echoing off the shorefront houses. Within minutes, she broke out of Lewis Bay into Hyannis Harbor. The long stone breakwater that extends into the harbor from Hyannisport was off to starboard. Behind the stone jetty, the golden light of morning glistened off the white-painted houses of the Kennedy compound, known as Camelot North before that awful day in Dallas. We passed Point Gammon on our portside and headed southeast into Nantucket Sound.
Fair Athene of the flashing eyes was keeping watch, because Nantucket Sound was as calm as a bathtub and the water that hissed past our hull was Bahama green. Mistaking the Artemis for a fishing boat, gray-winged gulls hovered and dipped in our foamy wake. The air was a wonderful combination of salt, fish, and kelp. I drank it in like an addict, filling my lungs with each intoxicating breath until I got dizzy.
Pushing aside an adjustable wrench and a box of greasy engine parts, Uncle Constantine unrolled the NOAA marine chart of Nantucket Sound. He brushed away the ashes falling off the tip of the cigarette in his mouth and traced our course with a gnarled forefinger. Our heading would take the Artemis southerly, then east into Nantucket Sound after we passed the Bishops and Clerks gong buoy. Maybe ten miles in all. Our destination was between Cape Cod’s flexed arm and Nantucket. The sound is comparatively shallow. There are shoal areas less than a dozen feet deep right in the middle of it. We’d be diving in water between forty-five and fifty feet.
Uncle Constantine asked me to take the helm. He went below and returned a few minutes later with a tray holding two coffee cups and a plate of baklava. I bit into a diamond-shaped pastry, savoring the taste of honey and walnuts sandwiched between paper-thin layers of filo dough, and chased it down with coffee. It was a match made in heaven. I offered the plate to my uncle. He nibbled at the pastry and grinned.
“Not good to eat too much before a dive. You get the bends.”
Uncle Constantine was repeating the warning he’d probably heard when he was a young sponge diver back in Greece. He knew from personal experience eating had nothing to do with the bends. The body-twisting cramps hit a diver who surfaces too quickly because the nitrogen trapped in the blood from breathing air under pressure is suddenly released. Bubbles froth around the joints like champagne, and the agonizing pain can transform a diver’s body into a human pretzel. Sometimes it kills. Uncle Constantine had been lucky. The bends only left him with a limp.
“How’s the Tarpon Springs sponge fleet doing?” I asked.
Uncle Constantine lit up another Lucky and took a puff. “Very good, Aristotle. Thirty boats go out. We get many sponges, best in years. Market is good, too. Sponges go all over the world. We sell most in Europe now.”
“How badly do the synthetic sponges hurt your market?”
Uncle Constantine pretended he was spitting. Then he made believe he was scrubbing his back. “Plastic sponges okay to clean dishes, but not for skin.”
“Have you been sponging with the Artemis?”
My uncle knew I was fishing for information. “Aristotle, you want to know if your uncle Constantine can still dive. You think I am oldest diver in Ta
rpon Springs? George Stampas is three months older than me.”
I let it drop, but I was still worried.
I walked out onto the deck to inspect my uncle’s diving suit. It was lying neatly folded with the bulbous helmet on top of it. I squatted and felt the soft canvas fabric. There wasn’t a patch on it.
I went back in the pilothouse. “That’s a nice suit,” I said. “Looks new.”
“Only the best, Aristotle. Two-layer nylon canvas, gum rubber in between. They make them in Japan.” He tapped his head. “But we still make the helmet in Tarpon Springs.”
Absent-mindedly playing with his blue worry beads, Uncle Constantine squinted against the sun, his eyes reflecting the sparkle from the water, his leathery face wreathed in a smile as if he were looking into the face of an angel. I thought how very fond I was of him. And how sad it was that he was getting old and would die. I had distanced myself physically and psychologically from the warm and sometimes suffocating embrace of my family, choosing the life of a loner, always ready to pull up the drawbridge. It was a decision they lived with, but could never understand. I didn’t understand it myself, but I regretted it more than they would ever know.
My father is a kind-hearted, hard-working guy, but as a kid, I never saw him because he always labored incredibly long hours. A shrink would say I fixated on Uncle Constantine as sort of a substitute father figure, and it might be true. He was so different from all my family. He had a wildness about him and a love of the sea that struck a chord in my own psyche. Without too much trouble, I could picture him standing in the prow of an ancient black ship as it coursed through the misty isles, ready to dare the gods of Olympus. I laughed inwardly, and despite my misgivings about this salvage project, I was glad to be there beside him, flying on the wings of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, in search of grand adventure.
“Uncle Constantine,” I said, “do you remember the story you told me years ago, about the giant octopus that attacked you?”
“Sure I remember, Aristotle.”
“I’ve always wondered, was he really as big as a house?”
He thought about it, then held his hands about a foot apart. “Maybe as big as a birdhouse. But don’t worry. I catch him a long time ago and your aunt Thalia cook him for dinner.”
I put my arm around his shoulders and gave him a hug, then got my own dive gear ready. I laid out the neoprene wet suit, hood, booties, fins, mask, sheath knife, and weight belt. Next to them I set my buoyancy compensator. I had brought along a spare tank as well. I checked the air pressure and the regulator action. Everything seemed to be in good shape.
Uncle Constantine rapped on the pilothouse window to get my attention. I went inside and he asked me to take the helm. He put on a pair of reading glasses and consulted the numbers scrawled in a battered brown notebook. Then he began to give me directions. Right, left, ahead, back, over there, stop, go again. While I maneuvered the boat around Nantucket Sound like a drunken sailor, he read his notes, checked his watch and compass, grimaced at the sea, peered at his chart, and kept his eye on the loran receiver. Loran is shorthand for long-range navigation, a system that collects and displays the signals sent out by land stations. You check the readings against the coordinates on the chart and can know your position within a few hundred feet.
My uncle made a circle on his chart to mark our location. It was next to the X he had penciled in earlier. He took the wheel and handed me a pair of scarred binoculars. He pointed off our starboard bow.
“I run the boat, Aristotle. My eyes not so good now. Look to southeast maybe quarter mile for the orange marker.”
I scanned the water as Uncle Constantine moved the boat on a long shallow arc. At first there was nothing to see except the low blue-green waves. Then I caught a glimpse of Day-Glo orange.
I pointed in the buoy’s direction.
“Over there, Uncle.”
He gunned the engine and we moved closer. Within minutes we came up on an inflated plastic sphere the size of a basketball. Uncle Constantine put the engine on idle and I took the wheel. He tossed over two anchors to hold us, then killed the engine. According to the fathometer, depth was forty-seven feet. Without wasting a second, Uncle Constantine went below to start the air compressor, then came out on the deck to unfold his dive suit. I offered to make a quick reconnaissance dive to make sure we had the right target, but he would have none of it.
“This is my wreck, I go first, you dive later.” He slapped my back. “I teach you how to be good tender.”
Keeping his clothes on, Uncle Constantine sat down on the dressing bench and stretched his legs out. He shoved his stockinged feet into the diving suit and stood erect. I grabbed the suit by the shoulders and pulled it up. He sat again, and from a bucket of soapy water, lubricated his wrists and worked his hands through the tight rubber sleeve cuffs. I fastened the back of the suit. Next came the breastplate, a copper collar eased past his ears and nose and attached by wing nuts to the suit. Then I helped him on with his leadsoled shoes, lacing them around the ankles with leather thongs.
“My God, Uncle, how much weight are you going to be carrying?”
“Not too much. Twelve pounds in shoes, eighteen pounds in suit, collar is twenty-two pounds, helmet thirty-eight pounds, and seventy-pound weights on feet.” He figured using his fingers. “Maybe one hundred seventy-two pounds. Not bad for an old grandpa, eh, Aristotle.”
“Not bad for anyone, Uncle. Do any divers in Tarpon Springs use scuba? It’s a lot lighter.”
He laughed and lit up a cigarette. “Only crazy man. Hard-hat sponger can work two or three hours in the water. How long you stay under, Aristotle?”
“Twenty-five minutes. I see what you mean. Still, does anyone else in Tarpon Springs use a rig like yours?”
“Sure, maybe one or two. Most use mask and wet suit, like you have, with hose and compressor. I don’t like. Too dangerous.”
“More dangerous than a hard-hat rig?”
“Sure, Aristotle. What happens when your tank is empty? You going to run to the store and buy more air? I stay down as long as compressor works. Compressor feeds into a tank, so if it stops, I still have reserve. I have trouble, suit gives me buoyancy. I fall asleep, can’t use exhaust valve, suit fills with air and up I come.” He mussed my hair. “Too much talk, Aristotle. Help me finish.”
He wrapped a short piece of line tightly around his waist as a belt, then hung a small weight off his chest from a loop of rope just below the collar of the breastplate. The weight would help him walk with a forward pitch. He tied a nylon line from a long coil around his chest, explaining that it was a safety line and his means of signaling me on the surface. He would jerk the line three times if he wanted to take in slack. Four times to stand by for him to come up, five if he found the tin ship. Any more jerks meant he was having problems. The biggest danger was getting the airline tangled. He warned me sternly to keep an eye on it.
He stood for a few seconds and wriggled to make sure the suit was neither too tight nor too loose. He took a final puff on his cigarette, flicked it over the side, then sat down and gestured toward the helmet. I set it on his head and gave it a clockwise turn. Air poured through the hose in his helmet and into the suit, blowing it up until he looked like the Michelin man. With the height added by the diving shoes and the wide shoulders of the suit, he cut an imposing figure, more like a many-eyed monster from the deep than a seventy-plus-year-old man who refused to recognize his own mortality.
He tested the chin valve to make sure it was working, curled his finger and thumb into an okay sign, and pointed to a small steel staging hanging over the side. I would have collapsed under all the cumbersome weight he carried, but Uncle Constantine put one leaded foot in front of the other. With me holding an arm, he scuffled slowly to the ladder, got his legs onto the staging, and clutched the rail to steady himself. I played out some slack in the hose. He winked at me through th
e circular porthole. A second later, he stepped down to the water level, leaned forward, and jumped in feet first.
His suit had filled with air and he only sank an instant before he bobbed up again to float at armpit level in the low waves. I towed him by the lifeline as close to the Day-Glo buoy as I could. He hit the exhaust valve to release air from his suit and sank into the sea. He waved from just below the surface, then faded into the ocean in a circle of bubbles.
For the next few minutes, I tended the safety line and watched coil after coil of air hose slither into the water like a reddish-brown python. Then it stopped. He was on the bottom, probably getting his bearings. The line tugged again. He was walking. He went another twenty feet, stopped, then headed off to his right, his progress marked by widening circles of bubbles.
Holding the line between my thumb and forefinger, as if I were jigging for flounder, I pulled at it lightly so as to take in slack without dragging him back.
Time passed. I listened to the low throb of the compressor, the cry of seabirds, the slurp of waves against the hull. The sun’s warmth made me sleepy.
A sharp tug on the safety line jerked me out of my lethargy. Uncle Constantine knew about tenders, he was just making sure I was still awake. Minutes passed. Three more tugs. A quick pause, then two more. He repeated five in a row so there would be no mistaking his message. He had found the tin wreck! I got up and paced the deck, frustrated because I wasn’t with him. I stripped down to my bathing suit and pulled on my wet suit. I wanted to be ready to go when he surfaced.
The safety line jerked violently. One, two. Then one. Then a half-dozen times. For several terrible minutes I felt nothing. I pulled gently on the line. It wouldn’t give. Tugged again. The line didn’t move. It was as if Uncle Constantine had tied the line to a solid object and walked off. The rising bubbles surfaced in one place, indicating that he wasn’t moving.
I had my air tank on in one minute. I jumped feet first over the side and followed the hose down. The water was murky, maybe a dozen feet of visibility. A large dark object loomed against the lighter sand on the bottom. It was the hulk of a ship, lying at a slight angle with its hull sunk nearly three-quarters into the sand. It was covered with vegetation, but still largely intact.
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