by Morris West
“About the coins on the reef. Do you think it’s possible that any of the crew reached the island?”
“And took the treasure-boxes with them?”
“Yes.”
“Sweetheart,” I said patiently, “we’ve been over all this before. You heard what Johnny said about it. I tell you, I’ve been over the whole island. There’s not a trace of any such happening.”
“Aren’t there any caves?”
“Nary a one. There are a few rockholes and overhangs on the cliff-side. But they’re either too shallow or too high up in the wall. There’s a sort of narrow cleft up on the eastern horn. Jeannette and I looked at it once, but it was so dank and musty and full of goat-smell that we didn’t go inside. Apart from that, nothing . . . nothing at all.”
She sighed and made a little rueful mouth.
“Well, so much for my fine theory. Looks as though it’s up to you and Nino, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s up to us.”
Johnny was slacking off now and we were sliding in to anchorage. I stood up and walked forward to be ready with the hook. Pat followed me up.
“Ren?”
“Yes.”
“Johnny’s worried about something.”
“Did he say what it was?”
‘‘No, but he wants to talk to you tonight, Renn . . . after dinner. Alone.”
I tossed the anchor overboard and the cable went whipping down after it. Then the cable tightened. The Wahine stopped drifting and her stem swung round into the current. The first day’s work was over. We were home again.
Dinner was over. The stars hung low in a soft sky. Nino squatted beside the fire, carefully taping the hose-joint of his aqualung and crooning happily to himself. Pat had gone down to her tent to write up the thesis that would make my brown girl, incongruously, a Doctor of Science. I saw her shadow cast by the lamp against the glowing canvas of the tent. JOHNNY was going back to the Wahine to sleep. I walked down with him to the beach.
When we were out of earshot of the others Johnny told me, “Renboss, I am scared.”
“Of what, Johnny?”
“Something is going to happen with this Manny Mannix.”
“We know that, Johnny. We’ve always known it.”
“Yes, Renboss, but. . . .” He stumbled and groped for the words that would frame the thought and make its urgency clear to me. “How can I explain it, Renboss? It is like the old days on the trochus-beds. Word would go round that this one or that one had found a new place and was working it quietly. When he walked into the bar the others would watch him silently, with greedy eyes. They would measure his strength and his courage and the loyalty of his crew. If he were strong and his men loved him, they would fawn and smile and offer him drinks and try to wheedle his secret out of him. But if he were weak or cowardly or unloved, then they would growl and mutter. Someone would start a fight. A bottle would be thrown and the shell-knives would come out, and they would fight like animals. . . . This Manny is animal. Renboss. That is the way he will fight.”
I nodded gravely. Johnny was right. Manny Mannix was an animal with an animal’s courage. But Manny was a business-man and where money was concerned Manny would take no chances. If he moved at all he would move in strength. And if you stroll round the waterfronts of the north with money in your pocket you will find plenty of tough characters who are not too particular how they earn it. Johnny watched me with troubled eyes.
“You agree with me, Renboss?”
“I agree with you, Johnny.”
“What are you going to do, Renboss?”
“What do you want me to do, Johnny?”
He considered the question a long time before answering.
“For myself and for you and for this diver fellow, Nino, I would say we stay and fight. But there is the girl.”
I saw the point. There was the girl. If there were violence, she would be caught in the midst of it. She would be there when the animals began to rend and tear each other. And afterwards . . .? It was not a thing that should happen to any girl; and this was the girl I had come to love. There was only one answer.
“All right, Johnny. We send her back in the morning. If it’s fiat weather she can take the work-boat. She needn’t go to the mainland. There are two or three islands where she can put up and wait till it’s over.
Johnny Akimoto straightened up. It was as if a great load had slipped from his shoulders. He smiled and shook my hand.
“Believe me, Renboss, it is best. You will not want her to go, I know that. But when she is gone you will be able to fight with free hands. . . . Good night, Renboss !”
“Goodnight, Johnny!”
I watched him push off the dinghy, step lightly over the stem, and scull out to the Wahine with long, easy strokes. I turned away and walked up the beach to Pat’s tent.
She got up when I entered. We kissed and dung together for a moment, then I sat her down in the chair again and perched myself on a packing-case beside her. I said flatly, “Sweetheart, I’m sending you away tomorrow. There’s going to be trouble. You’ll take the work-boat and go over to South Esk or Ladybird Island and stay there until we come for you.”
She looked at me a long time without speaking; there were tears in her eyes and her lip trembled; then she took hold of herself and asked me, calmly enough, “Do you want me to go, Renn?”
“No. I don’t want you to go. I think you should go.”
“And Johnny?”
“Johnny thinks the same.”
She turned her face away and dabbed at her eyes with a small handkerchief. When she faced me again her mouth was firm and there was a proud lift to her chin. There was a note in her voice that I had not heard before.
“You are going to fight, aren’t you, Renn?”
“Yes.”
“For the treasure-ship?”
“Partly . . . yes. But not only for that.” Slowly, painfully, I tried to piece out for her the thought that had been growing in my mind for the past days. “I know now that we may never find the cargo of the Dona Lucia. There is still a chance, of course. There is an even greater chance that it may be buried so deep under the sand that we could never come to it in a million years. In that case the fight would be a monstrous and costly folly. But don’t you see? It’s not only that. It’s all the other things. It’s this—this life, my friends, this island. For the first time in my life I’ve stood a free man with my own land under my feet. I’ll fight for that, sweetheart. I think, possibly, I will kill for it.”
“And your own woman, Renn?” The words came out in a whisper. “I am your woman, aren’t I?”
“You’re my woman, Pat. From now to crack o’ judgment.”
I stood up. I reached out to draw her to me, but she pushed me gently away.
“Then I’m staying with you. You’re my man, and you can’t send me away.”
I tried to argue with her and she closed my mouth with kisses. I tried to threaten her and she laughed in my face. I tried to charm her to submission and she dismissed me, reluctantly.
“Go to bed, Renn. Tomorrow’s a working day. When this is over we’ll have all the time in the world—till crack o’ judgment, as you say.”
I was shorn like Samson. I kissed her again and went back to my tent.
Nino Ferrari was still squatting by the fire, tinkering with the delicate mechanism of the regulators. He looked up when he heard me and gave me a crooked smile.
“A fine girl you got yourself there. She’ll make a good wife for a diver. A deep-water man needs plenty of sleep.”
I grunted irritably and squatted down beside him. He flipped me a cigarette.
“Something on your mind, my friend?”
“Yes. We’re going to have a fight on our hands. Johnny thinks so. I think so.”
Nino cocked his dark head and whistled soundlessly.
“So! It is going to be like that, eh? I have seen these things before, with the sponge-fishers in the Aegean. They can be ugly. When the wine
flows and the long knives come out.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in a significant gesture. “What about the girl?”
I shrugged. “I wanted her to go, she refused. Short of running her off the island by force, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Nino tightened the last screw in the regulator and folded it carefully in clean cloth to keep the sand away from it, then he put the whole apparatus back in its case and snapped the lid.
“First rule for a lung-diver,” he said irrelevantly. “Clean the regulator after every dive. If it fails in deep water you are a dead man.”
There was a silence between us. I heard the cheep and clack of insects in the bush behind us. I watched the dipping flight of a bat. Then I turned to Nino again.
“Out there, this morning, you said you had something we might use against Manny Mannix when he comes. What is it?”
His dark eyes gave me a long, sidelong stare. Then he bent his head and seemed to be studying the backs of his hands. When he spoke his voice was level, without emphasis.
“My friend, one does not put a knife into the hands of a child, nor a loaded pistol into the fist of a man who is angry. The knowledge that I have came to me in a sad time, a time of violence and bloody destruction. If it is necessary to use it again, I will do so. Even though you are my friend, I will say what is to be done and how, and for the consequences, I will take the responsibility. I am sorry but this is a thing that I feel deeply—here in my heart.”
And with that, I had to be content. I grinned, got up, clapped him on shoulder and took myself off to bed. I dreamt of a war-time beach-head with dead bodies rolling in the backwash and a man pinned down in a fox-hole by machine-gun fire from the palms.
The man in the fox-hole was myself. The man behind the gun was Manny Mannix.
Chapter 14
AT seven o’clock the next morning we dropped anchor in the diving area. We planned to make three dives a day and, allowing for rest periods and staging time, each dive would cost us three hours of daylight. I wanted to make four descents, but Nino was adamant. The gain would be an illusion, he said. After two days or three the strain would tell and we would begin to feel the effects of long immersion and nitrogen narcosis.
Today we were to make our first survey of the hold. We harnessed up quickly and I felt the tenseness of expectation as I climbed overside and followed Nino down, watching his air-bubbles stream upward past my face.
Once more we swam over the waving growths on the deck until we came to the gaping hole with its fringe of slime and sharp corals. Nino motioned me to wait. I saw him dive, slanting downwards along the beam of his own torch. I noted the care he took to avoid fouling his airlines against the jagged edges. Then he shone his torch backward and I dived in to him along the beam.
The space in which we found ourselves was, perhaps, three times as large as the cabin we had visited the day before. The sand sloped upwards and the timbers with their coating of sea-grass canted downwards wedge-fashion towards the rear of the chamber. The beam of my torch picked out a colony of lobsters clinging to the roof-timbers in one comer. I told myself I would take one up to the Wahine for lunch. I felt something brush my shoulder-blades. I turned sharply and flashed my torch on a large squid. I saw his black parrot-beak and his saucer eyes, then his tentacles stiffened beneath him and he shot upwards, leaving a puff of ink, like a ghost image, behind him.
Nino beckoned me to his side; together we made the circuit of the hold, standing where the roof was high, swimming on our backs or our bellies where the space narrowed between the sand and the timbers.
Our groping hands traced the outlines of ancient deck-beams under the sleek waving growths. We marked them carefully. They would serve as guides when we came to divide the area into sections for our daily searches. When we had made the circuit we swam back and forth across the bottom, groping with our hands among the weed and sand and coral for anything that might resemble a box. It was superficial, unsatisfying work, but we had to do it. Later we would begin the heart-breaking task of turning over hundreds of square feet with our hands and our knives.
When we had traversed the whole area Nino motioned me to stop. For a few minutes we hung suspended in the new element, grimacing at each other and making crazy dumb-show with our hands. Then Nino signalled to me to shine my torch along one wall of the hold. I did so. He swam over to the comer, measured with his outstretched arms a width from the comer, then swam from that point parallel with the wall to the other end of the hold. The beam of my torch followed him. I understood what he meant. He was marking out a narrow strip of sand for our first search.
He swam back to me and side by side we began to work. We scraped and scrabbled and probed, pushing ourselves backwards with our hands while our bodies hung suspended behind us like the bodies of fish.
We had not been working more than a few minutes when we heard the familiar impact of a bullet on the surface of the water. We stopped. I looked at Nino. Nino looked at me. We had not been down more than fifteen minutes. Then we heard a second impact and, immediately after it, a third.
Something was wrong on the Wahine. Nino gestured to me. We swam out of the hold and made our way as quickly as we dared to the surface.
Johnny and Pat hauled us aboard and, as we stood dripping on the deck, Johnny pointed across the water, westward.
“They’re coming, Renboss,” he said quietly.
She was a lugger, like the Wahine but bigger, broader in the beam. Her hull was black. Her spars were bare. She was coming under engines, fast, at about twelve knots. She would be with us in twenty minutes.
Johnny Akimoto handed me the glasses. I focused and saw that her deck-space was cluttered with machinery under canvas. I saw more bulky shapes forward of the main hatch. I saw men stripped to the waist moving round her decks. I saw a figure in a white duck suit braced against the forward stays—Manny Mannix.
I handed Nino the glasses. He scanned the lugger for a few moments, then lowered them.
“Diving gear,” he said curtly. “Pumps and a winch. A lot of other stuff for’ard .Could be anything.”
I turned to Johnny Akimoto.
“Do you know her, Johnny?”
“Yes. She is a trochus boat, Renboss. Twin diesels. The number says she is registered on Thursday Island.”
Clever Manny. Clever, clever, Manny. Never forget a face, never neglect a contact. Manny had chartered a boat like this before, when he went north, with a legitimate buyer’s licence to buy war surplus in the islands. Manny had brought it back with a false manifest, loaded with gear he had plundered from forgotten dumps in a hundred lonely bays. A simple telegram would bring the same boat and the same tough skipper and the same crew of plug uglies racing down the reef to pick him up at Bowen. And if the business turned out to be dirty business, a cut for the skipper and a bonus for the boys would guarantee Manny silence and security.
“What do you want to do, Renboss?” said Johnny.
‘‘Wait for her, Johnny. Just sit here and wait. Stow the gear, Nino. Pat, get below and make us something to eat. If we’re going to have trouble I’d like to be fed first.”
She gave me a wan smile and padded aft. Nino picked up the lung-packs and began drying them carefully. Johnny Akimoto stood watching the black shape of the lugger as she raced towards us across the fiat water.
As she drew closer I could see the white numerals on her bows. I could see the bearded faces and tanned bodies of her crew. I could see Manny Mannix waving his cigar as he talked. I was still puzzled by the curious shapes under the canvas in the forepeak. I pointed them out to Johnny. They meant nothing to him, either. He bent down, picked up the rifle from the hatch-cover, ejected the spent shell, slid another shell into the breech and rammed the bolt home. Then he slipped on the safety-catch and laid the rifle carefully in the scuppers, out of sight.
Then Pat and Nino came on deck with mugs of tea and a plate of beef sandwiches. We sat on the hatch and ate together, watching the black lug
ger move closer and closer. The warm sun streamed down on us through the canvas awning. The Wahine rocked gently in the quiet water. We might have been a fishing party, out on a picnic cruise, had it not been for the tension between us and the menacing black hull with its motley crew.
We had hardly finished our meal when they came up with us. Thirty yards to starboard they cut the motors. The way brought her across our bows. The helmsman swung her beam to and we saw the anchor go down with a rattle and a splash. Then we were lying broadside to with no more than ten yards of water between us.
The crew lined the rail, laughing and shouting. They whistled and called ribaldries when they saw there was a woman among us. There were, perhaps, a dozen of them—black, white and in-between. Some were young and some were not so old. Some were bearded—others wore careless stubbly growth. But all were brown and tough and dangerous—veterans of the shabby towns on the fringe of the law.
In the midst of them stood Manny Mannix, incongruous in his white suit and his gaudy tie. His panama hat was tilted on the back of his head. The inevitable cigar was stuck in the comer of his mouth. He took it out to hail me.
“Hiya, Commander! Nice weather we’re having!”
I said nothing. I felt Pat stiffen beside me.
“I’d like to come aboard, Commander. Business talk. Private.”
“Stay on your own deck, Manny.”
Manny waved a tolerant hand. He shouted back, “Just trying to be friendly. The market’s still open if you’re interested.”
“I’m not interested, Manny.”
“I’ll split with you, Commander—fifty-fifty. Look, I’ve got the gear and the men to work it.” He made a sweeping gesture that embraced the whole boat and her ragged crew. “If you don’t like that, I’ll still buy you out on the same terms.”
“The answers no, Manny. If you want it, you’re got to take it.”
“It’s open water, Commander. Show me a salvage claim and I’ll leave you to it.”
“No claim, Manny. We were here first, that’s all.
The men lining the deck sent up a great bellow of laughter. I saw Johnny’s hand go down to the rifle lying in the scuppers. I stopped him before he touched it.