The Deep

by Peter Benchley

  “For real high-priority goods. But you’re right; it isn’t special to El Grifón. So it was back to the papers.” He sipped his tea. “The usual way for the King’s treasure to be transported was in a chest in a strong room near the captain’s cabin aboard the capitana. For some reason, Philip didn’t trust Ubilla, the commander. The King’s letter to Havana said that the jewels were to be shipped with the most trustworthy of all the fleet’s captains, and no one else—no one—was to be aware of their existence. Philip didn’t realize it at the time, but that last provision was a bad mistake.”

  “Why?” Gail asked.

  “Think, girl. It’s what we were talking about before, about Grifón. Up comes a storm; most of the ships go down. Only two people in the world know who had the jewels, the captain who had them and the man in Havana who assigned them to him. The captain survives, makes a deal with the man in Havana, who writes the King that he assigned the jewels to one of the captains who went down and was—poor chap—killed. Then he and the captain split the goodies. The captain waits awhile, rechristens his wreck of a ship, loads it with a relatively worthless cargo, and sets sail for home. If he makes it, he’ll never have to sail again. He’ll have enough to keep himself and his family and two or three small countries afloat. I don’t have even half the list of jewels, but the bit I do have lists more than fifty pieces. The only flaw in the plan was that the ship didn’t make it home. Got caught in a blow and seized up on the Bermuda rocks. Nobody knew there was anything on board worth worrying about.”

  Sanders said, “Did the man in Havana admit this?”

  “Hell, no! He makes all manner of lugubrious references to the sinking of the fleet and the loss of the King’s jewels. That put me off for a while.”

  “I think you’re reaching: he might have done this, he could have done that. It’s all supposition.”

  Treece nodded. “I thought so, too, until about four o’clock this morning.” He paused, enjoying the game. “What was the King of Spain’s name?”

  “Come on,” Sanders said, feeling manipulated. “Philip.”

  “Aye. And what was his new wife’s name?”

  Sanders sighed. “The duchess of Parma.”

  “No!” Treece smiled. “Not her title, her name.” He waited, but they had no answer.

  “Her name was . . . Elisabetta Farnese.”

  It took a second for the initials to register. Gail’s mouth dropped open. Sanders was stunned.

  Treece grinned. “There’s still one unanswered question.”

  Sanders thought for a few seconds, then laughed and said, “I know.”

  “What?” The grin lit up Treece’s face.

  “The question is, Did King Philip ever get laid?”

  “Right! And about that, you contentious bastard,” he said, slapping Sanders’ shoulder, “I would not presume to make a guess.”

  Sanders tried to share Treece’s joviality, but his mind was crowded with conflicting images: jewels and drugs and explosives, the sight of Coffin’s twisted body, the tattered linen doll, the leer on Slake’s face. “How much is it worth?” he said.

  “No telling. Depends what’s still down there, what we can get at, how much was lost, and how much the man in Havana made off with. What we have now is worth, I’d say, somewhere near a quarter of a million dollars—that is, once we can firm up the provenance. We have to find at least one jewel that’s on the list I’ve got, for the provenance to be perfect.”

  “What are we going to do about the drugs?” Gail said.

  “I’ve thought about it. There’s not a chance of our getting the lot up, not before Cloche makes his move. You know the numbers. What do you figure the value of the ampules we’ve got now is?”

  “I don’t know for sure how many ampules we have, but take a round figure—say we get a hundred thousand altogether. That’s over a million dollars, maybe two million.”

  “That leaves a bloody heap of glass out there for him. But of course, he doesn’t know that, does he?” Treece was talking more to himself than to them. “He doesn’t know what we’ve got and what’s still there.”

  “So?”

  “So we’ll go for the jewels; they’re much more important. Let him think we’re digging for glass.”

  “We can’t just leave the rest of the drugs for him.”

  “No, we won’t, but you have to weigh your risks. There’s one thing certain: Cloche will try to get us out of the way, more’n likely by killing us.” Treece paused, letting silence give emphasis to his words. “If he kills us, you might say who gives a damn what he gets; it’s not our worry. But I care. I don’t want him to get those drugs, and I really don’t want him to get any of the jewels; dizzy bastard’d melt ’em down and sell the bloody gold, destroy ’em forever. That treasure is unique. It’d be criminal to let it fall into the hands of someone who doesn’t understand what it represents. If we work the glass until he tries something, we’ll lose the jewels. Even if he doesn’t kill us, he can keep us off the wreck—blow it up out of sheer perversity if he wanted to. But if we get the jewels, then we can take whatever time we’ve got left to work the glass. We can blow ’em up if we want to; Christ, I’d relish the chance.” There was no objection from David or Gail. “Let’s go down cellar.” He stood up and opened a drawer.

  “You’ve got a cellar?” Sanders said.

  “After a fashion.” Treece took a strip of maroon velvet from the drawer and wrapped the cameo, the medallion, the crucifix, the chain, and the pine cone. “Have to have something to anchor this shack in a breeze; else, she’d tumble off the cliff.”

  He led them into the living room and moved a chair. Under the chair, a small brass ring was countersunk into the floor. Treece pulled on the ring, and a four-by-four-foot section of cedar boards separated from the floor. He set the trap door aside and took a flashlight from the mantelpiece, then sat on the floor and let his legs dangle into the hole. “It’s about a five-foot drop, not much more than crawl space, so mind your heads.” He dropped into the hole and ducked down.

  The cellar was a packed-dirt square as large as the living room above, walled with heavy stones held together by mortar.

  The Sanderses followed Treece’s crouched figure to a far corner of the cellar.

  “Count three stones up from the floor,” Treece said, shining his light in the corner.

  Sanders touched the third stone above the floor.

  “Now move four to the right.”

  Sanders ran his fingers along the wall until they came to rest on a cantaloupe-size rock. “This?”

  “Aye. Pull.”

  Sanders could barely get his hand around the stone, but once he had a good grip, the stone slid easily from the wall.

  There were two pieces of paper in the hole; behind them, another stone. “My birth certificate,” Treece said, reaching in and removing the papers.

  Gail wondered what the other piece of paper was, and in the reflected glow of the flashlight she could make out a last name—Stoneham—and three letters of a first name: Ila. Priscilla, she thought: his wife’s birth certificate.

  “What’s that?” Sanders said, pointing to something small and shiny in the hole.

  Quickly, Treece shifted the light away from the hole and put his hand inside. “Nothing.” He removed the object.

  Gail thought, his wedding ring.

  “Now reach in and pull that other rock.”

  Sanders did as he was told. His arm went in the hole almost up to the elbow.

  When the other stone was free, Treece placed the velvet-wrapped jewels in the back of the hole. “Okay, put it back.”

  Sanders replaced the rear stone, Treece returned the papers and the shiny object and set the front stone back into the wall.

  Treece said, “All you have to remember is, three up, four over.”

  “I don’t want to remember it,” said Gail. “It’s none of our—”

  “Just a precaution. I might take a wrong turn and walk off a cliff. Any of
us might. Better we all know where things are.”

  They went up into the house. “Might’s well have a bite to eat,” Treece said as he pushed the chair over the brass ring in the floor. “This is going to be a long day.”

  They reached the reef at eleven o’clock in the morning. It was a clear, calm day, with an offshore breeze barely strong enough to keep the boat off the rocks. They could see twenty or thirty people, in twos and threes, on the Orange Grove beach, and a mother playing with her child in the wave wash.

  While Treece set the anchor, Sanders found a pair of binoculars and focused them on the patch of sand where he had found Coffin’s body. “They’ve raked it clean; you can see marks.”

  “Aye. Don’t want to leave anything that might upset the tourists. Hundred a day doesn’t include a corpse on the beach.”

  Gail grimaced at the coarse, matter-of-fact dismissal of Coffin. She started to speak, but Treece, anticipating her, cut her off.

  “A man dies, girl, he isn’t any more, least not down here. Respect and all that crap doesn’t serve the dead; it just makes the living feel better. The dead one, maybe he is somewhere else—maybe all he needs to be somewhere else is to believe he will be somewhere else. I won’t deny a man his belief, and I don’t know any more’n you about souls and all that stuff. But I know this: Speaking good or bad about something that isn’t any more is a bloody waste of time. I can’t feature Saint Peter sitting up there saying; ‘Hey, Adam, there’s folks bad-mouthing you down there. What’d you do to merit that?’ ”

  Gail did not respond. She waited a moment, then said, “I can dive today.”

  “No. Stay here. There won’t be much lugging. If we get all’s down there, it won’t be more’n a bag or two. And I want someone on the boat, today specially.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think we might have a little excitement today.” Treece checked the shotgun. “Just be sure you remember how to use this and how to shut off the compressor. If nothing happens, the least you’ll get is a royal fine suntan.” He started the compressor.

  Treece and Sanders returned to the cove in the reef where they had found the pine cone. The tide carried the sand from the air lift away to the right, so they had a clear view of the bottom.

  For the first few minutes, they found nothing but single ampules, ten in all. Sanders reached to take them from the hole, but Treece waved him off and let the ampules rattle up the aluminum tube. One shattered, and a small billow of pale liquid puffed from the end of the tube. Treece dug deeper, inching closer to the reef.

  There was a change in the way the sand moved under the air lift’s suction. Instead of coming away smoothly in an unbroken pattern, now it moved in a rough V, as if it were surrounding something. Treece cupped his left hand over the mouth of the tube, cutting off its suction, and gestured with his hand for Sanders to dig in the hole.

  Sanders rubbed the center of the V with his fingers and felt something hard. He brushed sand away and saw gold. It was a rose, about three inches high and three inches wide, and each of its golden petals had been finely etched with a jeweler’s tool. Sanders picked it from the sand, held it by the delicate stem for Treece to see, then put it in a canvas bag.

  Treece nosed the air lift against the base of the reef. Lying on his stomach a foot from the mouth of the tube, Sanders saw more gold under a rock overhang. He tapped the air lift, and Treece backed off. Sanders reached under the rock, his fingers closed on the gold and pulled. It moved, but it felt heavy, as if it were attached to something. When his hand was clear of the reef, Sanders looked at his palm and saw a gold chameleon with emerald eyes. The chameleon’s mouth was open, and there was an opening near the tail. From the chameleon’s belly protruded a sharp, finlike spike of gold. Two strands of gold chain led from a ring on the animal’s back down into the reef. Sanders tugged at the chain, and, slowly, it came from the reef—ten feet of it, spilling in coils beneath Sanders’ face.

  Treece took the chameleon from Sanders and held it to his mask. He pursed his lips and mimed blowing inside his mask at the chameleon’s head, telling Sanders that the figurine served as a whistle. Then he turned the animal on its back, curled his lip, and jabbed the spike toward his teeth: the spike was a toothpick.

  They had been down for nearly five hours and had collected four gold rings (one with a large emerald); two huge almond-shaped pearls joined by a gold plate etched with the letters “E.F.” on one side, a Latin inscription on the other; a belt of thick gold links; and two pearl-drop earrings. Then Treece spotted the first gold rope. It was deep in the reef, almost invisible except when shafts of sunlight caught the woven strands of gold and the tiny pearls held in place by the intricate weaving. Treece directed Sanders to reach for the rope.

  Sanders was bitterly cold. Despite his wet suit, the hours of immersion had sucked heat from his body, and by now he was shivering constantly. He obeyed Treece without thinking, without worrying that something alive might be in the hole. His trembling hand reached into the reef, fingers closed around the gold and pulled: the rope was stuck, wrapped around a rock, perhaps, or covered with stones. Sanders withdrew his hand and shook his head at Treece.

  Treece raised his right index finger and pointed at Sanders, saying: Watch. He made punching gestures at the reef with the air lift, then cupped his hands and pointed at Sanders.

  Sanders didn’t understand what Treece was saying. He shook his head; a cold tremor ran up his back and made his head quiver. He could not concentrate on Treece’s gestures.

  Treece pointed at the surface, set the air lift in the reef between two rocks, and started up. Sanders grabbed the canvas bag and followed.

  “That’s the one,” Treece said when they were aboard. “There’s our bloody provenance.”

  “I know.” Sanders unzipped his wet-suit jacket and rubbed the goose flesh on his chest.

  “We’ll have a rest and let you warm up a bit; then we’ll go get her.” He looked at the sun, then at Gail. “Coming up on five o’clock. Any trouble?”

  “No. I’m frying, that’s all.”

  Sanders said, “What were you trying to tell me down there?”

  “We’ll have to break up the reef to get at the rope. I’ll bang the gun against the coral, and as pieces break off, you take ’em and set ’em aside. Don’t want ’em to fall into the hole.” He walked toward the cabin. “Get you a pry bar. Gun’ll break up the coral all right, but it won’t move boulders.”

  They rested for half an hour. Sanders lay on the cabin roof, warming in the lowering sun.

  Ashore, the few remaining people on the beach straggled toward the elevator, which moved up and down in the shadows of the cliffs and flashed as it rose into the sunlight.

  “Let’s go,” Treece said. He touched Gail’s shoulder with a finger, and a circle of white appeared in her pink-brown skin and faded away. “Stay out of the sun. It’ll burn you, even this late in the day.”

  “I will.”

  “Go below and stretch out if you like. Charlotte’ll raise a din if anyone snoops around.”

  The men went overboard—Treece with a canvas bag, Sanders with a crowbar. Gail watched until she could no longer see their bubbles, then went below.

  The work on the reef was slow and, because of the diminishing light, difficult: every time Treece rammed the nose of the air lift into the coral, a cloud of fine coral dust would rise from the broken piece; Sanders had to grope blindly to catch the coral before it fell out of reach into the hole. The rope of gold was wrapped around the base of a large oval rock, most of it underneath the rock—as if it had fallen loosely into the reef and been forced, by centuries of wave and tide action, into every crevice and cranny around the rock. Sanders had wanted to use the crowbar to tip the rock backward, but Treece stopped him, demonstrating with his hands the possible danger: the rope might have snaked around the back of the rock, too, and tipping it backward would crush the soft, fine gold strands beneath the sand.

  It took them an h
our to widen the hole three feet. Now Sanders could put his head and arms and shoulders into the hole and guide the mouth of the air lift along the gold rope, gently prying it free, inch by inch, as the sand was stripped from it. The pearls were set at three-inch intervals along the rope. Sanders counted the pearls already free—seventeen. If Treece’s research was correct, if there were thirty-eight pearls per rope, there were five more feet of gold rope yet to come.

  The work became dreamy, unreal: encased in water, hearing nothing but the sound of one’s own breathing and the distant chug of the compressor relayed through the air hose, motionless save for the rote movement of fingertips—Sanders fantasized that he was doing multiplication tables in a cocoon.

  Gail was sitting on one of the bunks, trying to concentrate on an article in an old yellowed newspaper, when she heard the dog bark. Then she heard an engine noise, drawing near, stopping. Then more barks, then voices. She held her breath.

  “She empty.”

  “Seem so, ’cept for the dog.”

  “Hey, dog! How your ass?”

  “Hush your mouth. Sound carry.”

  “How carry? Down the water? Shit.”

  The dog barked twice, growled.

  A third voice, familiar. “Cut that yammering. Rig up.”

  Gail put a hand on the deck and crept off the bunk. Keeping her head below the starboard porthole, she crawled to the ladder. She stopped at the bottom of the ladder, hearing the beat of her pulse, breathing as quietly as possible through her mouth, thinking: If the other boat was abeam of Corsair, she could crawl into the cockpit without being seen, keep her back to the bulkhead, stand up, and reach the shotgun. If the boat was astern, they’d see her the second she poked her head out of the cabin.

  She listened to the sounds of equipment being readied: the clink of buckles, the hiss of valves opened and closed, the thud of tanks on the deck. The sounds seemed to be coming directly from the left, abeam, so Gail climbed the short ladder and flattened herself against the bulkhead. The shotgun lay on the shelf by the steering wheel, four or five feet away. To reach it, her hand would have to pass in front of the window.