by Don Bruns
We both nodded.
“But in this case, if you’re careful, I think you’ve got to go for it.”
“Seriously?” I couldn’t believe she was 100 percent on board with this.
“Seriously.”
“We could get in a lot of trouble.”
“Could.”
“Serious trouble.”
“You’re digging in the beach, right?”
“Duh.” James frowned.
“That’s what people do. They dig in the sand. Kids do it. Adults do it. If you’re at a beach, it’s natural to dig in the sand.”
One of the few memories I had of good times with my mother and sister was going to Miami Beach and burying my ten-year-old sister up to her head. She was fine with it and Mom and I dug the hole with our hands. Marie lay in the sand cavern and we covered her up to her neck. Then I drew a butterfly around her head. There must have been ten people who came up and took pictures, and my sister was the hit of the beach. For about ten minutes.
“It’s just a strip of sand. As long as you’re not digging in the graveyard, it’s just the beach. I think we’re okay. Seriously.”
Em was buying in. I was amazed.
“Let’s go back to the Cove. Tomorrow night I think we’ve got some serious digging to do.”
“You know what happened the last time we dug, amigo?”
I did. We’d found a treasure map.
“Our luck is on course,” James said.
“In this case,” Em was smiling, her hand on my knee, “I don’t think it was luck. I think you guys have done some really good investigative work. You’re putting the puzzle together.”
“Yeah.” James had a smug, satisfied look on his face.
“Swing by the vacant property,” I said.
He turned off the highway and went back a block to the fenced-off boat dock.
“What are we looking for?”
I glanced at my watch. Eleven fifteen. Something that the girl at the front desk had said. That guests checked in at the Ocean Air in the very early morning and checked out very late at night.
“I don’t know, just cruise by.”
James slowed down to a crawl and we passed the camouflaged property, then the Ocean Air Suites.
“Whoa. Hold it.”
James braked.
We gazed back into the parking lot, sizing up the big tour bus parked in front. Its parking lights were on and with our windows down we could hear the hum of the big diesel engine.
“They’re just dropping off a late tour group. No big deal.” James shrugged his shoulders.
“Maybe.” Something was nagging at me. Tour buses don’t usually drop people off around midnight.
“Guys, I don’t think we want to sit here and debate what the bus is doing here. We’ve already been in trouble for hanging around this property.”
James pulled out and drove back to the highway.
“Park it over there, James.” I pointed to a deserted gas station. It was dark and there was no one around.
“Skip-” Em was not happy.
“Five minutes. Just watch the road over there, where traffic comes out from the Ocean Air.”
“Another one of your stakeouts?”
“Five minutes, Em. And the last stakeout turned up someone who looked a lot like Jim Weezle. We did have some success, am I right?”
She had nothing to say.
We waited, our engine running.
“Maybe it’s a good time to give the old girl a drink.”
James turned off the truck, went to the back, and came back empty handed. “No more oil, Skip. Not a good thing.”
“How long can we make it?”
“Won’t be many more miles she’ll be bone dry. It’ll freeze up the engine and we’ll grind to a stop. Not a good thing at all.”
“It’ll be nice when we get a new truck.”
With two million dollars, James could buy as many trucks as he wanted.
“What are we waiting for, Skip?”
And that’s when the big fancy tour bus pulled out, moving onto the highway headed north.
“We were waiting for that,” I said. “James, can you follow the bus?”
He started the truck and drove up behind the bus staying with it for a couple of minutes.
“Still don’t know what the purpose of this trip is.” He kept his eyes on the vehicle in front of us.
“Can you pass him?”
“At this speed, yeah.”
I felt the truck pick up speed. Maybe two or three miles an hour.
“If that bus was going fifteen miles an hour faster, probably not.”
It would be a good thing when James got a new truck.
Flooring the gas pedal, we eased around the lumbering bus.
“Look up at the windows.”
Em and James glanced up at the row of windows.
“What do you see?”
“People. In every seat.” Em nodded.
“So they weren’t checking in.” James was confused.
“No, they were checking out. At eleven thirty p.m. The whole group.” I was confused.
“Something very strange about that operation.”
“They’re smuggling stuff,” James said. “Drugs. Drugs or gold.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
At seven o’clock in the morning the room phone rang. Em never budged, so I reached across her and grabbed the receiver.
“Hello.”
“Skip?”
“What?”
“This is Maria Sanko.”
“Maria, Maria, if we find those coins, I promise you that-”
“Skip, I have a friend who would like to talk with you.”
I was still working the cobwebs out of my head. We’d come back to Pelican Cove and probably drank a little too much red wine and beer. We were pumped up with the prospect of actually having found something. Then we tracked down Mrs. T. who was at Rumrunner’s bar, and when we got her on board with the gold fever, we drank some more. I think she bought the entire bar a round. James’s ex, Amy, was nowhere to be found.
I was a little fuzzy.
“Do you hear me?”
“Why does someone want to talk to me?”
“This gentleman is Bernard Blattner, a gentleman who is almost one hundred years old. He has some information he’d like to share with you.”
I was slowly waking up. I stretched the phone cord as it tightened over Em’s throat. She jerked up, awake and short of breath. Pulling the cord from her neck, she ducked under it and headed for the bathroom.
“Maria, I don’t understand.”
There was a long silence on the other end.
Finally, “Look, you and your partner have used me several times in the last couple of days.”
It was my turn to be silent.
“You’ve played plumbers, historians, and treasure hunters. And I’ve gone along with you, largely because I was sucked in on several of your ruses, but also because I find you both charming con men. I tend to have a soft spot for guys like you.”
I wondered if her husband, who lost the motorcycle in the divorce settlement, was one of those charming con men. She’d apparently outconned him. She now owned the Harley-Davidson.
“And what does he want to talk to us about?”
“Listen, I feel we had an unfortunate moment, and I’d like to help you guys out. Over the years I’ve sold a lot of property to Bernie. The gentleman has a lot of knowledge about Islamorada. He’s lived here all his life, and he may be able to help you find your hidden treasure.”
I hesitated and my heart jumped. “Our what?” How the hell did she know about the treasure?
“You know, your wrecker’s camp. The gold coins or whatever it is you’re looking for.”
“Maria,” I was thinking this through, “if this old guy has information why hasn’t he dug up the treasure himself?”
“No, no. He can give you some history about the wreckers, some idea of how it all work
ed. I thought it might be beneficial. That’s all. Unless, you’ve found what you’re looking for?”
“No. We haven’t.”
“I’m not trying to interfere, but if you guys want a little history, from someone who’s seen it all, then this might be your chance.”
I was suddenly wide awake. Someone who had actually survived the storm. One of the handful of people who’d been alive and stayed alive during the massive hurricane that blew away Flagler’s Folly. This is what we’d been waiting for. He may or may not have information, but this was a true survivor.
“Yeah. Sure. Of course. We’d love to talk to Mr. Blattner.”
“Okay then. I can have him visit you guys or you can-”
“This would be great. I owe you an apology. It’s just that-could he meet us here this morning sometime? If he’s not busy maybe.”
“Skip?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s ninety-nine years old. How busy do you think you’ll be at ninety-nine?”
“How about around ten?”
“Make it eleven. I don’t think his pacemaker starts till then.”
I smiled. We were going to talk to someone who had actually been there when that train blew off the track. When a twenty-foot tidal wave rose out of the ocean and tore the tracks from their foundations. When almost every building in the town was ripped from the ground and destroyed and when five hundred people were killed by an act of God. We were going to talk to someone who’d lived through it. I was excited and terrified at the same time.
We were sitting at a white, glass-topped table by the pool when I heard the roar. Looking out into the parking lot, I saw the Harley, a blur of shell dust rolling over the ground as Maria screeched to a halt.
Behind her, a slim, frail man with wispy-white hair pulled off his helmet and struggled to step off the bike.
Like a true lady, she walked around and helped him, waiting until he was steady and on his feet.
Shuffling his feet, the old man moved forward, seeing us as we stood around our table.
“Well, hello children.” His voice was dry and breathy and his old face pulled tight on his skull. It was the eyes that were still young. My grandmother used to call them smiling eyes. I’d always asked her how eyes could smile, and she’d just give me that look-the smiling eyes look.
James, Em, and I nodded politely.
I was surprised that Maria had come. And yet I don’t think I expected a ninety-nine-year-old man to drive himself. Still, riding with Maria Sanko? At my age I’d be petrified. The old guy must have had nerves of steel.
He reached out, shaking our hands as we introduced ourselves.
“Glad to meet all of you. As you may know, I almost didn’t make it here this morning.”
“Oh, my God.” Em reached out and took his withered hand. “What in the world happened?”
“Ms. Sanko was driving.”
His eyes sparkled and he barely kept his mouth from smiling.
“Mr. Blattner, we have some questions.” I didn’t want to discuss this in front of Maria, but it was our one chance to get all the information we could.
“Shoot.”
“You were here when the hurricane of thirty-five hit?”
“I was. Damndest storm I’ve ever seen.”
“You were-” James was fishing.
“I was twenty-four years old. I worked on the pineapple docks.”
“The boats came in from Cuba, right?” I was seeing it all in my mind.
“They did. Loaded with pineapples and limes. Most of the time they’d come in on freight cars, already loaded. It was my job to get those cars onto our spur tracks up to the main track and head ’em up to Miami.”
“So they were already packed in freight cars? All you had to do was get them on the tracks?”
“Well, it wasn’t as easy as that. Took four of us to get the car off the boat, down the dock, and to the spur.”
“Lots of physical work.”
“You bet.”
He smiled at Em. Almost like he was flirting.
“And we’d sort and load some of the local farmer’s products on those docks too.”
“So there were pineapple growers down here?”
He nodded, his white hair falling over his face.
“There were. They ended up hating us, the railroad people.”
“Why? Weren’t you shipping their fruit to Miami as well?”
“At first we did. We shipped pineapples grown right here. But they wanted a lot more money than the Cubans. We wanted to help out the local farmers, so for a while anyway, we used to take old scrap iron from the railroad and add more weight to the local producers’ crates of fruit. That way, they’d make more money. We’d hide small pieces of iron in the shipment, but somebody up in Miami found out that we were adding iron to increase the weight and they stopped buying shipments of pineapples grown in the Keys. We had come up with the idea, so the farmers blamed us for the loss of business.”
It sounded like a James Lessor scam. Add some iron to the package so you could bill extra. As long as no one figured it out. He pushed his hair back. “Same thing that happens today, young man. Foreign countries are willing to work cheaper. Folks in Cuba could and would do it for a whole lot less. So, with our services and the cheap fruit from Cuba, we eventually shut out the local grower. Those growers threatened to shut us down, but it never happened. Took a two-hundred-mile-an-hour wind and a tidal wave to do that. And the wind and water did that very effectively.”
James had both hands folded on the tabletop. He glanced at me, then looked at Bernie, ready to ask the serious questions.
“Mr. Blattner-”
“Bernie.”
“Mr. Blattner”-he couldn’t do Bernie-“where were you when the train blew off the tracks?”
He smiled. “We had an old shack where we could take a break from the hot sun. We could go into the back room of the shack to, excuse me, ma’am”-he looked at Em-“relieve ourselves.”
“That’s where you were?”
“I was. But when the tidal wave broke, I believe I was running like the wind. That’s what I remember. I don’t know where I thought I was going, but I was running.”
We all took a breath. The horrific storm scared me in the present. I couldn’t fathom how it must have been back in Bernie’s present.
“Can we talk about what happened after the storm?” Em asked.
“We can talk about anything you want to talk about, beautiful lady.” He gave her a wide smile, his crooked yellow teeth showing.
“Did you get a look at the train?”
“Oh, yes. Cars all over the place. Some of them were five hundred feet away from the track. Funny thing was, the engine never fell over. Heavy metal engine it was, and it never went down. Almost everything in the town, in the entire area, went down. But not old four forty-seven. Nope. Stood as a tribute to the strength of the railroad and I took that as a sign that we’d be back again.”
“Didn’t happen, did it?”
“No.”
“Mr. Blattner,” I started.
“Bernie.”
A ninety-nine-year-old guy was not Bernie. I had some respect for my elders.
“There was a man from Miami on that train. He was in the finance department for the railroad.” I did not want to go there because up until now we seemed to be the only ones who knew about the gold. Well, not counting Stiffle, Markim, and Weezle.
“Was he killed? Most of ’em were.”
“He was the great-grandfather of the lady who hired us. Look, I know it’s a long shot, but it seems there were very few of you left. You might have run into this guy. He had ten small wooden crates and he was looking for a place and for someone to help him bury them.”
He nodded. “Jackie Logan worked with me on the pineapple docks. Strappin’ young boy. We both worked with our hands, arms, backs, and legs. Couldn’t be in much better shape than we were back then.” He smiled and sat back, his mind drifting into ninetee
n thirty-five.
“So this guy, Matthew Kriegel, he was looking for someone like you. A survivor who could do some heavy lifting and someone who might know the island.”
Nodding and smiling, the old man folded his hands on the table.
“We didn’t hurt for work for the next week. We collected bodies, with masks on our faces so we wouldn’t get sick. Boy Scouts from Miami come down, I believe, and helped.”
James cleared his throat. “Do you remember anyone asking you to help bury some wooden boxes?”
“This all has to do with the wrecking camp?” Maria looked confused, but that was to be expected. We’d made a game out of confusing her.
“Then there was the cleanup of the train itself. And pickin’ up debris all over the island. We’d set up tents, unpack medical supplies when they got there, but it was a slow process, yes it was.”
“But no wooden boxes? None that you can remember?”
A white seagull with a black face hovered overhead, checking our table for a sign of food.
“There was a guy.”
“What guy?” I didn’t want to seem too anxious, but I was.
“Offered to pay me and Jackie five dollars if we’d help him load some crates on a horse-drawn wagon. That I do remember. Those were good wages.”
“Oh, my God.” James’s eyes were wide open. “So you do remember this guy. And you worked for him?”
“Jackie and some of the Negroes took the job. Those crates were heavy, Jackie told me. And me, I was still employed by the railroad and I was cleaning out the cars, thinking we could salvage some of them.”
“This guy, the one who employed Jackie-” I had to ask the question.
“It was a long time ago, young man. I don’t remember everything because I think we were all in a state of shock. God all mighty, no one had ever seen that many dead people. Friends, a girl I had dated, my boss.”
“Do you know where they took the crates?”
“I remember he had a broken arm. Just hung loose by his side. And he wasn’t well. I believe he may have died of fever if it’s the same man. Some did.”
Em finally spoke. “Bernie”-no respect for the old man-“you have a fantastic memory.”
“It was a horrifying time, young lady. Something you can’t put out of your head, hard as you try.”
“Bernie, did Jackie ever tell you where they buried the crates?”