Burke laughed mirthlessly. “I’ve thought of all that. I was hoping you’d have some bright ideas.”
“Shoot him.” I pointed at his camera. “When we get back to Halifax, we’ll have a crack at tracing him down. Provided you’re still interested, of course.”
At one P.M, I met Burke Sheffield and William Ryker on the starboard deck of the Savonarola.
The principal characters milled together like theatergoers at intermission. Lisl Slote steadied her boss’ wheelchair and wrapped blankets around his thin shoulders. From what I saw of Ryker’s face, he could use the extra warmth.
Commander Brazier fussed over the crew securing the rope ladders attached to the conning towers of the Marianas and Neptune, bobbling above the gray-blue swells.
One of Brazier’s starched-white ensigns compressed all of Burke’s camera gear down to one bundle, fitted it into a nylon sling, then lowered it down to a crewman braced atop the Neptune’s conning tower.
He straightened, looking Burke in the eye. “You’re next.”
He made a show of independence, but welcomed a steadying arm as he inched down the long swinging ladder. The man atop the Neptune grabbed Burke’s leg and guided him down the steel rungs, disappearing into the innards of the bathyscaph.
Seeing Burke was safe, Commander Brazier crooked an arm at Mike, who bent anxiously down to his boss.
“You’re sure you’re feeling all right, sir?”
Ryker’s voice was deadly chill. “Rogers, you’re not my mother, wife, or lover. Mind your own damn business.”
I tried to help Mike with the wheelchair but Ryker shooed me away. His wrinkled, shrunken neck corded with strain as he rose like a miracle man in a Katherine Kuhlman revival meeting. The pipe cleaner legs trembled like tuning forks and Mike and I lunged for his arms. But Ryker stayed erect, taking one step and then another.
A special winch was rigged above the rope ladder, complete with a harness usually used for air-sea rescue. Commander Brazier and Fräulein Slote buckled the harness across his shoulders and under his arms. Ryker grinned triumphantly at me. An old banty rooster with a few tricks still in him. I found myself returning his grin.
“All right, Mr. Hall,” said Brazier. “You go on ahead.”
The conning tower of the Marianas seemed a very long way down once I swung one leg over the edge of the ship. I took one rung at a time and tried not to think about falling.
An electric motor whined above me. Looking up, I watched Ryker swing out over the sea.
“Grab the ladder!” I yelled. And he did so in his feeble fashion.
I lowered my foot to the next rung but felt nothing. The deck of the Marianas rose and fell beneath my feet as the crewman reached for my legs. I waited until a swell rolled the conning tower to me, then jumped, grabbing hold of the crewman’s arm. I clambered down the access tube to the observation sphere under the main tanks.
A broad-shouldered man, hunched over a blinking instrument panel, looked up quizzically through the opening.
“Welcome aboard, Mr. Hall.” A Boston accent. “Come join the party.”
Captain Phillip Toffler was red-haired and freckled, with a ginger mustache that went well with Navy tans. He watched my eyes rove within the little sphere. “Homey, wouldn’t you say?”
“Very.” Two little circles of cool light caught my attention. I bent forward and bumped my nose against the glass.
Dark and threatening, the hull of the Savonarola faded into the mist. The surface sizzled like quicksilver butter frying in a pan.
“How thick is this glass?”
“About a foot. Very safe.”
Ryker arrived at the hatch with a wheezing clatter. We guided him into one of the two chairs.
The old man seemed shaken by his descent but was too stubborn to admit it.
“Well, Captain?” he rasped. “Are we going to get this thing underway or not?”
“Soon, Mr. Ryker.” He bent down to examine the seal of the hatch, then slammed it shut. It must have weighed the good side of three hundred pounds. Now I knew how it felt to be trapped in a bank vault.
The captain checked the instruments. “We’re just now opening the flood valves. That fills the access tube with sea-water. Then Mr. Noiret, who helped you two aboard, opens the valves of the water ballast tanks just before he jumps back onto the Savonarola.”
We sat still for a moment. The small rocking motion that I had taken for granted stopped.
Toffler checked the depth gauge. “We’re off.”
There was no feeling of movement. Ryker and I stared through the viewing ports. Slowly the hull of the Savonarola seemed to rise up and out of sight. The surface faded away until I could see only a pale blue light. I figured the Neptune must be very close, but it was out of our line of sight.
A large swordfish swept in front of me, and I heard a strange hollow gurgling in the cabin.
“Hydrophones on the hull,” Toffler explained.
A vast school of flounders floated by. Then nothing.
“Have you had much experience with deep-sea salvaging?”
Ryker kept his eyes to the port. “Captain Toffler has a ship to run, Mr. Hall. I think we should let him do it in peace.”
Toffler looked at me, then at Ryker. He shrugged and returned to his instruments.
“Neptune calling Marianas.” A voice rattled from a hidden loudspeaker. “Passing one-hundred-fifty-foot depth.”
The captain grabbed the microphone. “Marianas calling Neptune. Ship at, mark, one hundred seventy-four feet. Out.”
I still couldn’t see the Neptune. Sitting back, I watched the light slowly fade beyond the port.
Two hundred feet. Two hundred twenty-five feet. Three hundred feet.
All trace of sunlight vanished. Toffler switched on the external spotlights.
Five hundred feet. Twelve hundred feet. Eighteen hundred feet.
Tiny white flakes flashed up past the port, resembling a snow flurry in reverse.
“Plankton.” Toffler answered my unasked question. “It appears to be moving up as we descend through it.” He eyed the depth gauge. “In fact, we’re descending a little too fast.”
He released ballast and a volley of steel pellets bubbled up by the port. The Marianas was falling faster than the weights Toffler had released. He increased the ballast until the pellets fell steadily away and vanished into the darkness below.
Twenty-one hundred feet. Twenty-five. Thirty-five. Forty. Fifty-five. Over a mile down. Six thousand feet.
“The halfway point.”
A long red snipe eel writhed under the lights and was gone.
Seven thousand. Seventy-six hundred. Eighty-two hundred. Nine thousand.
I flinched instinctively as a huge fish with long fangs and an immense bloated stomach chased by.
Ten thousand. I glanced at my watch. About an hour since our descent began.
“Neptune calling Marianas. Eleven thousand feet.”
“Marianas calling Neptune. Mark, ten thousand, three twenty-five feet.”
Eleven thousand. Far below I spotted a glow worm of light.
“The Neptune” Toffler staunchly replied when I pointed it out to him. He gestured at the echo sounder graph, which showed a few dark streaks. “There’s the bottom.”
Still over a thousand feet to go. Eleven thousand. Eleven five.
The floodlights seemed to brighten.
“We’re reflecting off the sand and silt.”
Toffler released more ballast, lowering the bathyscaph to the bottom with almost erotic care.
“Well, we have arrived. A little off the mark. The Titanic’s about a mile away, if I reckon correctly.”
The bottom of the observation sphere hovered about three feet from the sand. I watched a hatchet fish scamper away from the light.
“Peaceful, isn’t it?” Toffler said softly. “It’s hard to realize that an unprotected man out there would be pulped so quickly he’d never feel a thing.”
; The hydrophones picked up the propeller’s whir as Toffler inched the Marianas forward, raising her slightly at the same time until we rested about a hundred feet from the ocean floor.
The seabed was no longer smooth. Huge boulders glided beneath us. Once again I spotted the yellow light of the Neptune.
It was then that the misty silt below cleared and the Titanic congealed out of the haze.
The ship lay on its starboard side, on an eighty-degree angle. Although rusted to a brown-orange and encrusted with sea animals and ancient slime, the Titanic was still intact.
No one spoke. There didn’t seem to be adequate words. The bow of the ship crept past thirty feet below the port. A tangle of twisted steel from the crow’s nest had smashed into the bridge, where Captain Smith had stood fifty years ago, watching his ship founder.
A teacup drifted by, stirred by our passing. Our floodlights poured down on the Boat Deck, revealing the lifeboat rigs. The four funnels had been torn away, but I saw two of them on the rocks, attached to their supporting cables.
Lovers once walked the surface of the Boat Deck—now all I saw were two lobsterlike prawns lazily skimming about, searching for prey.
The light in the distance grew stronger. The Neptune was cruising over the Titanic’s, stern. I could imagine Burke frantically running through his bulk film magazine.
The Marianas moved over the exposed portside flanks of the ship. Porthole after porthole. A few with glass still in them. I remembered that the iceberg struck the ship on the starboard side; thus the three-hundred-foot gash in the hull remained hidden by the sand and rocks.
We inched our way over the Promenade Deck. I noticed the first evidence of Ryker’s salvage operation. Long acetylene torch scars had cut into B Deck, burning away sea life and rust to expose bright shiny metal.
“Isn’t this where you found the blank movie film?”
“That’s right,” Toffler volunteered.
Moving toward the forepeak of the ship, I saw further torch marks around the bow, where freight had been stored.
“You’re interested in the cargo hold, I suppose.”
Ryker didn’t look away. “Many priceless items were lost aboard the Titanic. The passengers carted some very expensive trinkets. Many have decomposed by now. But other things remain for the taking. Automobiles lying down there in the hold, for example.” His canny eyes wrinkled around the edges. “How much would you pay for a restored Silver Ghost rescued from the Titanic after fifty years?”
“It sounds a little ghoulish to me.”
“Fortunately, others will not agree. I know human nature.”
The Neptune passed our starboard side. We skirted around her, resting over the Titanic’s poop deck and elegant stern. A length of chain waved languidly in our wake.
For the first time in my life I suddenly knew why primitive people established taboo grounds. The Titanic smelled of death. I’d seen dozens of people killed before my eyes in the war, but I’d never felt such remorse as I did staring at this broken metal dinosaur lying gutted on the ocean bottom.
Ryker stared out the port with wide unblinking eyes. Ever since our meeting I felt that he was a possessed man—now I knew the cause. The dead ship provided a dreadful, obsessive image, and I could almost see it enter through his eyes to fester in his brain, stirring old memories and filling his waking and sleeping hours.
We swept past the Titanic’s huge triple propellers, then turned to begin another pass of the ship. And another. And another.
Toffler finally brought the Marianas to a halt. “Our batteries are running low. I’m going to head for the surface.”
He adjusted the ballast controls and the Titanic slowly faded away in the darkness.
“Soon,” Toffler said, “we’ll begin a thorough interior exploration of the ship. Sometimes I think of the keepsakes and mementos lying in the darkness all these years. Mail openers and loose change. The pillboxes of the old woman and the doll of the young girl. Things that meant so much and now mean nothing.”
I smiled at Toffler’s unexpected poetic urge, but Ryker paid no mind.
“There’s something else down in that ship.” He kept staring down even as the Titanic vanished. “My wife.”
I leaned comfortably back in the rear seat of the Bell chopper and watched the Savonarola dwindle beneath me.
“Mr. MacKendrick,” I asked, “did you have any trouble refueling?”
“Not at all. A very cooperative crew.”
“Anything unusual to report?”
“Not really.” He absently ran his fingers through his hair. “I hate to disappoint you, Mr. Hall, but the whole operation looked aboveboard to me.”
“What do you think?” I asked Burke.
“About the Savonarola?” He shrugged. “Except for our tail on board ship, I didn’t see anything suspicious. But what can I say? If Ryker had something to hide, he’d be damn sure you wouldn’t stumble across it.”
“Not intentionally, anyway.” I rubbed my chin, realizing I needed a shave. “But one thing Ryker couldn’t cover up. That ship on the ocean floor. The Marianas and Neptune have been tearing the Titanic apart and they’re going about it in a very strange manner. No one has ever given a plausible reason why they started exploration on B Deck portside.”
“Isn’t that where the roll of film was recovered?” Burke asked.
“That’s right.” I gazed out the window for a last glimpse of the Titanic’s burial ground. “And it’s also where Albert and Martha Klein spent their honeymoon.”
Five hours later the helicopter passed over the outskirts of Dartmouth.
“Almost home, gentlemen,” MacKendrick grinned. “And don’t think it hasn’t been a pleasure.”
He swung the copter in a wide arc across Halifax harbor, taking us over the path of the departing RCMP ship Alberta. The captain hooted three times in greeting.
“Everyone get his gear together. We’ll be landing in a couple of minutes.”
I peered over MacKendrick’s shoulder, trying to spot the helipad amid the jumble of waterfront buildings, but was distracted as he tapped the tachometer in irritation.
“Hell of a time for the thing to go haywire.”
My nose stung with an acrid odor.
Burke smelled it, too. “What in God’s name …”
Smoke drifted from under the instrument panel. MacKendrick swore, tugging at his seat belt.
“Quick!” He pointed at the fire extinguisher. “Over here!”
Gripping the extinguisher in both hands, I passed it to MacKendrick. The image of my fingers clamped around the metal cannister was stamped on my retina as blue sparks strobe-flashed from the instruments.
The roar of a million igniting gas burners. Black clouds filled the cockpit.
Hands and arms scrambling around me. High screams through smoke.
Blistering faces. Flaming hair. A stench of burned plastic and roast meat.
Thrashing rotor blades. Hitting the roof, the floor, the roof. Fire licking my face.
A life preserver in my hands. A door handle burning my palm. Falling—metal hunks following me. A rush of blue. Freezing water down my lungs.
Then nothing. Nothing at all.
16
February 22, 1962
White. My eyes opened upon an infinite expanse of white.
Oh, God. I’m blind. My gaze moved down.
Still more white—the white of a sheet-covered bundle. My body stretched out before me on a bed.
Thick bandages covered both arms. Under the bedsheet my legs had a curiously bulky look, as if in a cast. I tried wiggling my toes but the sheet draping my feet didn’t move.
“Nurse!” I heard myself shouting. “Nurse!”
A startled female face appeared at the white-painted door, vanished, then reappeared a few moments later with a man in tow.
“Mr. Hall, I’m Dr. Malle. I’m very glad to see you’ve regained consciousness. At least your vocal cords sound healthy.”
T
he doctor watched my eyes rove dazedly around the room. “I imagine you’re curious to know where you are. This is the Burn Unit of Victoria General Hospital in Halifax.” He walked to the window. “You’ve been here nine days.”
I blinked densely at him.
“You’re very lucky to be alive.” Dr. Malle ran his fingertips over the windowsill. “In fact, some of my colleagues are still debating the fact. By their reckoning, you shouldn’t be. Second-degree burns on your legs, arms, shoulders, and chest. Half-drowned and exposed to near-freezing seawater. If it wasn’t for a very competent medic aboard the Mountie ship that picked you up, you would be the concern of the mortuary down the street, not me.”
“My wife,” I asked quietly. “You’ve notified her?”
“She’s waiting outside,” said the nurse.
Malle and the nurse checked the catheter bag by my bed and spirited away. Low voices muttered on the other side of the door, which then swung open as Jan entered the room.
Her hands were strangling the straps of her handbag and her eyes and nose were red. She looked wonderful.
“How do you feel?”
“Numb. How about yourself?”
She smiled feebly, dabbing at her eyes with a knotted handkerchief. “Damn it, I promised myself not to cry.”
Canting my head toward the end table, I said, “There’s some Kleenex. Blow your nose.”
Jan grabbed a handful of tissues from the dispenser. “You must think I’m a silly ass. I’ve been very square-chinned until now.”
“I’ll tell you what I think of you when I’m able to feel it.”
She dropped the tissues in the wastebasket and kissed me on the cheek. “You always were a horny bastard.”
I scowled at the heaped bouquets in the corner. “Who sent all these damn flowers?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Your folks. Your son. Your ex.”
Nodding dully, I pointed at a huge bunch of lilies planted in a silver tankard. “Not from you, I hope.”
“No. I know you can’t stand them.” She read the accompanying card.
“Well?”
“‘Best wishes for your speedy recovery,’” she said softly. “It’s from Ryker.”
My answering laugh was brittle. It brought back an unpleasant subject to mind.
The Memory of Eva Ryker Page 14