by Morris West
I told him. I told him what I believed had happened to the Dona Lucia. I plotted her course. I showed him how I pictured her end . . . foundering on the outer reef of the Island of the Twin Horns.
Nino listened carefully, nodding approval of my historian’s logic. When I had finished he reached for a pencil and a draughtsman’s pad and began to question me.
“First you will tell me what sort of island this is. Is it an atoll?”
“No. It’s a mainland island. A hump of ironstone and earth with cliffs on one side and a strip of beach on the other. The coral reef has grown round it.”
“All around it?”
“That’s what the surveys show. But there is a channel. I found it years ago.”
Nino sketched rapidly on the pad. He showed the elevation of an island . . . a small mountain heaving up above water-level. He showed a long shelf of sand fringed with ragged coral. And beyond the coral a shorter shelf, then a steep drop into deep water. Then he shoved the sketch in front of me.
“It is something like that, perhaps?”
“Very like that.”
“Good.”
He took up the pencil again and began to make a picture that grew as he talked.
“There are two things that could have happened to your ship. The first: she drives on to the reef in moderate weather. She is holed. She founders. She settles here . . . sliding down the shelf into the deep water. . . . How deep water . . . How deep would you say it is here?”
“I don’t know. That is the first thing I have to find out.”
Nino nodded. “It is also the most dangerous thing. But we shall return to that. If it is not too deep and if the ship is not already eaten by the coral, then you may have a chance. But . . . if the second thing happened . . . if she foundered in a storm . . . she would have been battered to pieces by the surf. Then, I tell you now, you have not one chance in a million. Her timber would have been shattered, her treasure-chests, too, perhaps . . . but even if they were not, they would have sunk to the bottom and two hundred years of coral growth would have devoured them . . . and you will never find them—not till judgment day.”
Nino raised his head from the drawing. His frank eyes searched my face.
I put the question to him bluntly.
“If you were in my place, Nino, what would you do?”
He smiled and shook his head.
“If I were in your place, with the experience I have now, I would forget all about the treasure-ship and save my money. But . . . if I were you, as you are now, with a dream in your heart and a few pounds in your pocket . . . I would go and look for it.”
I grinned at that. The tension between us relaxed. We settled down to talk of practical matters.
“First,” said Nino briefly, “you will buy yourself a marine survey map. You will note the depth of the water off this shelf. If it is no more than twenty fathoms . . . then you have a chance. A man can train himself to be comfortable and to work at that depth, provided he observes the decompression tables. Below it. . . no. After that there is the zone of rapture, where men get drunk on the nitrogen in their bodies . . . where every movement is a danger, even to the experienced. You understand enough of this business to know what I mean.”
I nodded agreement. I knew the terrors of the bends, when free nitrogen explodes like champagne in the joints and vertebrae and the careless or luckless diver is twisted into fantastic contortions. I had read of the strange, deathly rapture that comes to men in the blue zone, that urges them to talk to the fishes, to rip off their masks, to dance strange sarabands while death waits grinning in the underwater twilight.
Nino returned to his interrogation.
“You realize that you cannot do this thing alone?”
“I shan’t be alone. I’ll have a . . . a friend with me.”
“A lung-diver?”
“No . . . a skin-diver. An old hand from the trochus-luggers. He’s a Gilbert Islander. Worked with the Japanese. He’s used to deep waters.”
“So . . .” Nino pursed his lips. “He will dive with you. But he will not be able to work with you.”
“That’s the way I want it, Nino. I’ll work alone.”
He shrugged. “It is your life. I simply tell you the risks.”
“I want to know them.”
“Then I repeat that you will need training.”
“Can I train myself?”
“Ye-es. I will give you a set of rules and exercises. You will practise them daily, rigidly, increasing the dives each day, observing the stages for decompression. You will on no account deviate from the exercises or the directions. Is that understood? Your life will depend on that. This is a new world that you are entering. You must make friends with it—or perish.”
I knew that I was foolish not to accept Nino’s offer of a training course before I left for my island. But the black devils were at my back, goading. It was up stakes and away, for me, before the dream faded and the sour taste of disillusion settled on my tongue. Nino understood, I think, but he could not approve my folly.
He showed me the equipment, taught me how to maintain its simple mechanism. He put it on me and took me down in a series of short test-dives in the rock-pool below his workshop.
Then we dressed again and, while we sat over a glass of Chianti in his workshop, Nino listed the items with which he would have to supply me: the lung itself, goggles with safety-glass, a weighted belt, flippers, cylinders of compressed air . . .
“Mother of God!” Nino swore quietly. “I am a fool. I had forgotten!”
“What, Nino?”
“This island of yours. Is it far from the mainland?”
“Fifteen miles, more or less. Why?”
“Is there a town near by?”
“Yes, but once I’ve bought my stores and moved out, I don’t want to go back. It’s a small town. Visitors are a curiosity. Tourists make talk among the locals. That could be bad. But what’s the fuss about?”
“This.” Nino slapped his hand on the metal air-bottle. “You wear two of these. You have enough air for an hour and a half under water. But they have to be refilled, and that needs a three-stage compressor, which is heavy equipment. Probably there is not such a machine even in your town.”
It was my turn to swear. I swore . . . competently.
“What’s the alternative?”
“There is none. I will sell you twenty bottles, which is nearly all my stock. You will have to freight them to your island. That will give you enough for fifteen hours under water. After that you will have to send them to Brisbane to be refilled.”
Twenty air-bottles at seven pounds each was a hundred and forty pounds—plus air-freight. When I left Nino’s I would be two hundred and eighty pounds poorer and all I would have would be fifteen hours to find my treasureship. On the other hand, if I didn’t find it in fifteen hours I would never find it.
Nothing to do but pay with good grace and hope that my money would turn to yellow gold, stamped with the head of His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain.
We closed the deal. We talked of technicalities. Then, when the wine was finished and I stood up to leave, Nino Ferrari laid his hand on my shoulder. There was more than a hint of irony in his smile; but whether the irony was directed at me or at himself I could not tell.
“Signor Lundigan,” he said, “I will tell you something. When I was diving first round the Mediterranean, you could walk into any bar and meet a man—half a dozen men—who knew about a treasure-ship waiting to be raised. In all my life I never met one who had brought up more than a few shards of pottery or a piece of marble or a bronze figurine. And yet you know, and I know, that the treasures of Greece and Rome and Byzantium lie still on the continental shelf. And if you ask me why I tell you this, it is to say to go, go, dive for your ship. Find her if you can. And even if you fail you will have done what the heart demands . . . and that is a more precious thing than all the gold of the King of Spain.”
Nino Ferrari is a Genoese. Genoa
is a fine, bright adventurous town with a statue of Christopher Columbus in the public square. The craggy old visionary would have been proud of Nino Ferrari. I know that Nino Ferrari made me, for a brief while, proud of myself.
The gentleman in the Lands Department was cheerful and courteous—and quite convinced that I was a lunatic. He pointed out that the Queensland Government was disinclined to alienate any more offshore islands, but would be happy to lease my island for ten years or twenty or ninety-nine if I really wanted it so long. He made it clear that no man in his right mind would want a place like that for more than ten minutes. There was no water and no channel through the reef. When I told him there was both water and a channel he clucked dubiously and asked me to send information on both to the Chief Surveyor—that is if I still wanted to become a tenant of the Crown.
I did want to. I wanted it even more when I discovered that the leasehold would cost me only twenty pounds a year and that I could secure my base of operations without paying out a large slice of hard-won capital.
The lease was drawn, attested, stamped and lodged with the Registrar-General, and Renn Lundigan, Esq., became a tenant of Her Majesty’s Government with rights to free and undisturbed possession of a green island with a white beach and a coral reef, fifteen miles off the coast of Queensland.
The whole transaction was so simple, so obviously trivial, that I quite forgot one important fact. To sign, seal, stamp and deliver a document is a legal act, irrefutable as the shorthand of the recording angel—and a damn sight more public. But of this I had no slightest thought as I tucked the copies in my pocket along with my letter of credit and the consignment notes from Nino Ferrari and walked, in the raw sunlight towards the freight office of the airline.
My equipment was waiting for me, packed in three wooden crates. I was faced immediately with the problem of getting them out to my island. They could be taken by air up the coast, railed to the small town opposite the island and then taken out by launch. But this did not suit me at all. There was the risk of delay and damage. There was the even greater risk of gossip and unwelcome interest when such bulky stores were shipped out to an island where even the tourists could not be landed for their picnics and their paddles round the Barrier Reef.
Cautiously, I discussed the problem with the freight clerk.
He told me there was a bi-weekly flying-boat which served the tourist islands in Whitsunday Passage. My packages could be landed on one of these. I could collect them in my launch. He presumed I had a launch. I told him I had—which wasn’t strictly true. I hoped to have a launch. But I had to find one first and then buy it at my price. I paid the stiff freight-bill, signed insurance papers and accepted his personal assurance that my crates would be available for collection any time after Thursday—provided the weather was right and the engine didn’t fall out of the ancient Catalina.
Then I bought a ticket for a north-bound flight the following afternoon and walked round to Lennon’s Hotel to buy myself a drink.
July is the tourist season in Brisbane. The sun has moved north from Capricorn to Cancer. The rains are over and the sky is blue and the air has a crispness that is worth a fortune to the land-sharks and the publicans and the keepers of guest-houses and the owners of furnished flats from Southport to Caloundra.
The wealthy move north from Melbourne and Sydney. The playboys flourish their bank-rolls and the playgirls peddle their charms. The social weeklies send in their spies, and the camera-men have a field day with the mannequins from the rag-houses. You can’t get a room for love; though you may get one for money—big money. The tourist islands are packed and the rotogravures turn out colour pages and special supplements on the Riviera of the South Pacific and the Waikiki of the near north.
The shrewd, drawling business-men in tropic suits smile over their drinks in Lennon’s bar and add another thousand to the price of a hundred feet of sandhills in the sucker-belt.
I was a stranger among them. They would be friendly to me as they always are to southerners; but I would still be an outlander.
I moved from the bar into the lounge, and toyed with a mug of beer while I watched the tourists staging through to the reef islands north or the bikini parade south.
I envied them their freedom and their small or great opulence. True, they had no islands of their own. True, they had neither hope nor thought of bullion-chests among the coral-branches. But they had no devils on their shoulders either; no goading imps thrusting them out into lonely sea-roads to desolate landfalls under the cold moon. They had no compulsion to dive into deep waters, to make company with painted monstrosities in the forests under the sea. I envied them—but envy is a dangerous vice and self-pity is a more dangerous one still. I had risked too much and lost too much and won my stake too painfully to indulge myself again.
I had just made up my mind to finish my drink and take myself to a theatre, when I saw her.
A waiter in a silk shirt and a red cummerbund was showing her to a table under the palms. He was giving her the treatment reserved for the known and the favoured guest. He added a little something of his own, because he was young and she was beautiful—and too careful to show that the beauty was cracking at the seams.
He bent close to her as he drew out the chair. She smiled at him over her bare shoulder and gave her order with the practised gesture of the mannequin. When she raised her hand I heard the rattle of her bracelets and saw the dull-gold flash of my Spanish piece.
It was Manny Mannix’s girl, the model with the shrewd eyes and the drooping mouth, the girl who had seen me busted at the tables and boosted into the street when I was too drunk to care.
I felt a small cold hand tighten round my heart. If his girl was here, Manny must be here; and Manny was a carrion-bird for ever circling round a kill.
Then I lit a cigarette and told myself I was a fool. The girl was here alone. She wasn’t Manny’s girl any more. She had been paid off as the others had been paid off and she had come north to the gold coast to invest her winnings in a new man with a promising bank-balance.
The waiter brought her drink. She paid for it. That was a good sign. Girls like this one never paid for their drinks if they had someone else to pay for them. I saw the coins flicker as she raised her glass to drink, delicately, self-consciously, like a trained animal. Then I had a sudden foolish idea. It restored my confidence and good humour like a drug.
I stubbed out my cigarette and walked across to the quiet comer under the palms. She saw me coming over the last ten paces, but her eyes were blank and her lips held no hint of welcome.
I bent over the table, smiled my little rueful smile, and said, “Remember me?”
“I remember you.”
Her voice had changed as little as her face. It was still flat, sulky, unlovable.
“Mind if I sit down?”
“No.”
“Thanks.”
I sat down. She finished her drink and pushed the glass towards me. The gesture was a patent insult.
“You can buy me another if you like.”
“You mean if I can afford it.”
“Oh, I know you can—Manny told me you were in the money.”
Again the small, cold fingers crisped round my heart, but I managed a grin and the words came flatly enough.
“Trust Manny. He’s a clever boy.”
“He doesn’t like you very much, Commander.”
“It’s a mutual feeling.”
She blew a cloud of smoke full in my face and handed me the terse little tag, “That makes three of us, Commander.”
“Meaning what?”
“I don’t like Manny, either.”
“I thought he was here with you.”
“No. Manny has other interests. This one’s a brunette.”
I said I was sorry to hear it. I was about to say that men who treated girls the way Manny treated girls were no kind of men at all. She cut off my little philippic with a gamin gesture.
“Save it, Commander. You don’
t like me. I don’t like you. Let’s not make pretty speeches. You know Manny gave me your coin?”
She held out her wrist so that the old piece dangled provocatively under my nose.
“Yes. He told me he’d give it to you.”
For the first time she smiled. She moistened her lips with a small darting tongue. Her eyes were alight with malicious amusement.
“Like to have it back?”
“Yes.”
“How much will you pay?”
“Thirty pounds. That’s what Manny gave me for it.”
“Make it fifty, Commander, and you can have the rest of the junk as well.”
I took out my wallet, counted out ten five-pound notes and laid them on the table without a word. She unclasped the bracelet and tossed it across to me, then picked up the notes and stuffed them into her handbag.
“Thanks,” she said flatly. “I was down to my last fiver. Now you can buy me that drink.”
I took out a ten-shilling note and put it carefully under the ash-tray. Then I stood up.
“I’m sorry. I’m moving out of town. You’d do better with the tourist traffic. They’re playing. I’m working.”
It sounded cheap and it was cheap. Manny Mannix himself couldn’t have made it any dirtier. I tried to find grace enough and words to make an apology.
“I—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
She shrugged and reached for her compact.
“I’m used to it. There’s one thing, Commander . . .”
“Yes?”
“You overpaid me for the bracelet. To make up the difference, I’ll tell you something.”
“Well. . .?”
“Manny told me you’ve got something he wants.”
“That’s the way Manny lives—wanting what someone else has.”
“This time he swears he’s going to get it.”
“He’ll have to find me first and he’ll be a long time looking. And even if he does find me . . . ”
I was moving away as I spoke but she stopped me in my tracks.
“When he finds you, Commander . . . when he finds you, he’s going to kill you.”