Yamashita's Gold

by Phillip Gwynne

  He wasn’t E Lee Marx.

  He wasn’t Felipe.

  He was Art Tabori.

  The man who had, in a weird sort of way, saved my life.

  He was older than my dad but younger than Gus. Mid-fifties, maybe – who knows with old guys?

  He had silver hair, and lots of it.

  Nice watch.

  Rings.

  Polished was the word that came to mind; he was a polished sort of man. Maybe once there had been some rough edges, but they had been dealt with and what was left was smooth and shiny. Like a gem.

  ‘Dom,’ he said, his voice, like his appearance, smooth. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met, properly. My name is Arturo. Arturo Tabori.’

  Tabori, like the crypt in the cemetery.

  I’ve spent some time with your relatives, the dead ones, I didn’t say.

  ‘There are some Taboris at my school,’ I said. ‘They play cello.’

  ‘No relation,’ he said, but then he quickly qualified that: ‘Though all us Taboris come from the same area in Calabria.’

  Four successful instalments, and I’d learnt a little about the information game: generally you withhold, but occasionally it works just to let them know you aren’t a fool.

  ‘From San Luca?’ I said.

  If he was surprised by this, his impassive face gave no indication.

  ‘San Luca,’ he repeated, though with the right stresses on the right syllables.

  ‘So what’s your position on the boat?’ I said, though I was already pretty certain what his position was.

  If Art Tabori wasn’t The Debt, he was as close as you could get.

  He didn’t have an opportunity to answer my question, because suddenly the cabin was full of people: E Lee Marx, Felipe, another man, and a woman.

  ‘Kid, you better not be playing some sort of trick, because –’ said the man, who had a distinct whiff of the sea about him.

  The skipper, maybe. Or the divemaster. The person in charge of Castor and Pollux.

  E Lee Marx cut him off. ‘Dom, tell us what you saw,’ he said.

  Had I imagined it, after all?

  No, I had to have faith in what my eyes had told me.

  ‘It was on that screen there,’ I said, pointing to the top one.

  Unfortunately those compatibility issues had reasserted themselves, and the top screen was displaying nothing but that unwavering line again, and I couldn’t really blame the man for letting out a pffft! of disbelief.

  ‘Felipe, can we see what’s on the goddamn disc?’ said E Lee Marx.

  ‘Already on it,’ said Felipe, showing Miranda-esque dexterity with the keyboard and mouse.

  ‘It was around three fifty-two,’ I said. ‘If that’s any help to you.’

  Felipe threw me a grateful smile and hammered the keyboard some more.

  ‘Okay, I’ve got something,’ he said eventually.

  Pointing to a blank screen, he said, ‘We’re looking at this monitor, folks.’

  All eyes were now on the screen.

  Had I just imagined it? Was it a combination of the nightmare I’d just awoken from, the strange surroundings I was in, the accumulated stress of repaying The Debt? Maybe I had post-traumatic stress disorder? I’d read about that; soldiers and ambulance officers get it, people who have seen terrible things, and it plays tricks with their minds.

  Is that what had happened to me?

  The screen was still blank.

  Another pffft! of scepticism from the man.

  But then the first flicker: the bottom of the sea, just as I had seen it. Relief, I hadn’t imagined that.

  The rocks, and the fish.

  A patch of sand.

  The tension was unbearable. You could’ve sliced it with a knife. Eaten it with wasabi.

  Had I imagined it? Did I have some sort of PTSD?

  I heard it before I saw it.

  ‘Oh, my living god!’ said the sceptic.

  ‘Stop it there!’ said E Lee Marx.

  The frozen screen, clear as the clearest photo, showed hundreds and hundreds of bars of gold bullion strewn along the bottom.

  ‘What do you think, Dr Muldoon?’ E Lee Marx asked the woman.

  ‘What do I think?’ she answered, her voice tremulous. ‘We’re looking right at Yamashita’s Gold.’

  I didn’t think anybody here could quite believe it.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Art Tabori.

  ‘No, I’m not sure. But what else could it be? Those bars look to be about the right size.’

  ‘Mr Marx?’ Art said, turning to the world’s greatest treasure hunter.

  ‘Dr Muldoon’s right to be cautious, but every bone in my body’s telling me that this is the mother lode.’

  ‘So we start bringing it up?’ said Art Tabori.

  E Lee Marx and Dr Muldoon exchanged looks.

  ‘We’ll have to do a proper archaeological survey – map the area thoroughly before we disturb anything.’

  ‘No, I’m not sure you heard me properly,’ said Art Tabori, the smooth in his voice turning to something much more menacing. ‘We start bringing it up. Right now.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ said Felipe.

  All eyes immediately swung to him.

  He pointed to the radar, to a blip just to our right.

  ‘It looks like we might have us some company.’

  ‘The Hispaniola,’ I said.

  Sunday

  The Waiting Game

  I sat on the stern of the Argo, my feet dangling in the water, and looked across the mirror-calm surface towards the Hispaniola.

  It was, at the most, fifty metres away.

  Occasionally a figure would appear on its deck.

  Oh, that’s Bones, I would tell myself.

  Or That’s Otto.

  Or Zoe.

  Every now and then I’d hear snatches of conversation; the acoustics, far out at sea like this, played some strange tricks with voices.

  I even thought I heard one of them yell something out.

  ‘Dom, you dog!’

  The waiting game, E Lee Marx called it.

  ‘They don’t know where the gold is, but we do,’ he’d explained. ‘But we can’t let them know that we know. We can’t put anything in the water, not even a toe.’

  Guiltily I’d raised up my legs, but I knew he’d been talking figuratively: we couldn’t put a ROV or a diver into the water, because they would follow them to the treasure.

  I’d lowered my feet back into the deliciously cool water.

  ‘So we play the waiting game,’ he’d said. ‘Though it’s not really a game, because they’ve got no chance of winning. We have enough food on this boat for three months, and that’s without taking into account what we can take from the sea. We have enough fresh water in the tanks for a month. But that’s irrelevant because we have a desalination unit. So really we have enough water to last us forever. I reckon they’ve got a week in them, ten days at the most. There is a chance they could be resupplied at sea, but from what you’ve told me, Dom, I doubt it: their resources are already stretched. Ours haven’t even been touched.’

  I didn’t think I was very good at the waiting game, crazy with impatience as I was.

  Yamashita’s Gold was just sitting there on the bottom of the ocean and we were up here, twiddling our thumbs.

  Or cooling our feet.

  Or whatever the appropriate analogy was.

  ‘Watch out for the sharks,’ said Sal from behind me.

  Despite this warning she sat down next to me and did exactly what I was doing, immersing her feet into the sea.

  ‘It’s so hot,’ she said.

  Her words really didn’t give any indication of how hot it was. It was stinking. And there was absolutely no wind.

  Even the seagulls perched on the rigging looked like they were over it.

  There were footsteps on the deck, and E Lee Marx was standing behind us.

  ‘Day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor b
reath nor motion,’ he said. ‘As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’

  ‘Did you just come up with that?’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘No, not quite. It’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’

  ‘Do the scary bit, Dad,’ said Sal.

  Her father didn’t need any more prompting than that.

  ‘Water, water everywhere and all the boards did shrink; water water everywhere nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot; O Christ! That this should ever be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy sea!’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, pulling my legs out of the slimy water with its slimy things.

  ‘Speaking of which,’ said E Lee Marx, bringing a pair of binoculars up to his face, ‘looks like we have some movement on yonder vessel.’

  Even without the binoculars I could see the gangly figure on the deck of the Hispaniola; it had to be Otto.

  ‘Charming,’ E Lee Marx said, putting the binoculars down.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  He handed me the binoculars and I focused them on Otto Zolton-Bander, aka The Zolt aka the Facebook Bandit, and I sort of wished I hadn’t. He’d pulled his pants down and was shaking his very bare, very white bum in our direction.

  The waiting game, I thought as I moved away from Otto’s bum and scanned the horizon.

  I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but right on the western horizon I saw what looked like a smudge of grey.

  ‘Is that something out there?’ I said, handing the binoculars back to E Lee Marx.

  He focused on the horizon for a while.

  ‘Maybe the waiting game won’t go on for that long,’ he said.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I said.

  ‘Well, we’ve been monitoring a storm that’s been flirting around this area for a while, looks pretty sizeable on the satellite. Seems like it might be headed towards us.’

  My first thought was: We’ll have to make a run for it.

  I was just about to say this, too, but I gave it some more consideration instead. We were a ship, a hundred metres of hi-tech maritime engineering. We didn’t have to run anywhere.

  The Hispaniola was a tough old boat, but that’s all it was – a boat. They would be the ones hightailing for the coast, not us.

  Now I understood the smile playing on E Lee Marx’s lips; if the storm kept coming, the waiting game was pretty much over.

  Mother Nature had seen to that.

  E Lee Marx disappeared below decks and it was just Sal and me again.

  The smudge on the horizon was getting darker, and the water had changed colour; it was a sort of weird bronze.

  If it had been still before, it was stiller than still now.

  I looked over at the Hispaniola.

  So idle.

  So painted.

  But why wasn’t it moving?

  Surely they knew about the approaching storm.

  E Lee Marx appeared again, but this time Art Tabori was by his side. Half the sky was black, swirling with clouds.

  ‘Time to get below decks,’ said E Lee Marx. ‘The weather bureau has just upgraded its warning.’

  ‘To what?’ I said.

  ‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves a cyclone,’ said Art Tabori, looking over at the Hispaniola, a smile on his face.

  ‘Category one,’ added E Lee Marx.

  He must’ve seen the alarm on my face, because he quickly added, ‘That’s the weakest grading, winds only up to eighty-eight kays.’

  Only eighty-eight kays?

  Again I looked over at the Hispaniola, the painted ship on the painted sea.

  I thought of Zoe, and Otto, and Maxine and Brett and Skip and even Bones.

  ‘But what about them?’ I said.

  Art Tabori turned to me, and suddenly, again, his voice didn’t sound so silky smooth. ‘We all make our decisions in this world,’ he said. ‘And we live with the consequences.’

  ‘If they need help, then we’ll offer it, of course,’ said E Lee Marx. ‘But I’m afraid you can’t make somebody accept your assistance.’

  I thought about what Tabori had said; but what if Otto or Zoe hadn’t made that decision? What if it had been made for them?

  And I also thought about what E Lee Marx had said.

  Maybe, in special circumstances like these, you actually had to force your help on people.

  ‘Okay, let’s get below decks,’ said E Lee Marx. ‘Nerve centre is as good a place as any.’

  Sunday

  Cyclone

  In the nerve centre, all eyes were on one screen and one screen only: the radar, with its approaching cyclone, an angry white swirl.

  The Argo, apparently, had all the latest in hi-tech stabilising equipment.

  Still, when the cyclone hit, I sure felt it. The ship lurched this way, and that way, and for a second I thought we would be the ones who needed help.

  But then all that hi-tech hardware kicked in and the ship became much more stable.

  E Lee Marx got on the mike. ‘Skipper, can you patch me to the Hispaniola’s radio?’

  A few seconds later the reply came: ‘You’re right to go.’

  ‘Argo to Hispaniola, do you copy me?’ said E Lee Marx.

  Silence from the other end.

  ‘Argo to Hispaniola, do you copy me?’

  Not a sound.

  ‘Maybe they sunk already,’ I blurted.

  Felipe pointed to the radar, to a white spot in the middle of the swirling storm.

  ‘I’m pretty sure that’s them,’ he said.

  I knew that the Hispaniola was a tough ship, but was she this tough?

  E Lee Marx tried again, but all he got was silence.

  Twenty minutes later Felipe said, ‘They’ve just upgraded to a cat two.’

  Again E Lee Marx got on the radio.

  ‘Argo to Hispaniola, do you copy me? Do you need any help? I repeat, do you need any assistance?’

  Why bother? I thought, but just as I did there was a crackle from the other end and a voice, barely audible, said, ‘Hispaniola to Argo, yes, we require assistance.’

  Thank god, I thought.

  ‘You can kiss my hairy butt,’ said Bones Zolton in that broken voice of his.

  And the line dropped out.

  E Lee Marx threw down the handpiece in disgust – the first time I’d seen him lose his temper.

  I stayed there for half an hour more, a cyclone of anger brewing inside me. I so hated adults and all their rules and their protocols and their regulations.

  ‘I have to use the head,’ I said, thinking that using the proper term would make it more authentic.

  I actually did use the head, but afterwards, instead of returning to the nerve centre, I went up the stairs. The door that led out onto the deck was shut tight and for a second I thought I wouldn’t be able to open it. But, using all my might, I managed to wrench it open.

  Immediately I knew why it was shut so tightly. The wind was so strong, it almost blew my teeth into the back of my head. The deck was awash with water, like some sort of crazy physics experiment – what happens when waves from every possible direction meet, over and over again.

  I stepped outside. Hooking one arm around the doorhandle, I brought the binoculars to my eyes with the other.

  If the deck was a physics experiment, the ocean was a perfect lesson in chaos.

  A seascape of troughs and peaks, the air full of wind-whipped spray.

  Despite this, I found it almost straightaway, like it wanted me to know where it was.

  Unlike the Argo, which sat low and let the sea wash over it, the Hispaniola was getting tossed from wave to wave, like some sort of plaything.

  I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be on board, to be below decks, to be continually smashed from side to side.

  The very thought sent an arctic chill right through me.

  I was about to put the binoculars down when I saw it: flapping from one of the portholes was a white sheet.


  So what? I thought.

  But I knew there was nothing so-what about this, because people don’t randomly hang sheets out of portholes.

  And it wasn’t exactly the time or place to dry your bed linen.

  I had no doubt that it was a cry for help.

  And I knew who it was from, too.

  There was a nudge in my ribs.

  Sal was standing behind me. She brought her mouth to my ear and said, ‘What are you doing?’

  I, likewise, brought my mouth to her ear and explained what I’d seen.

  ‘But who did it?’ she said.

  ‘Otto and Zoe,’ I said.

  She looked at me blankly.

  ‘These two kids,’ I explained, thinking again of all the adult rules and protocols and regulations. ‘I’m going to get them.’

  ‘But Dad said –’ she started, but I didn’t let her finish.

  ‘I’m going to get them.’

  Immediately her bottom lip disappeared into her mouth. Until it eventually reappeared, I held grave fear as to whether it would still be whole.

  It was, though.

  ‘Okay,’ said Sal. ‘Let’s go get those kids.’

  She walked onto the heaving deck, leaning into the wind. I followed her every step, her every motion. When we reached the Zodiac, she motioned for me to get into the front.

  I pulled myself in.

  She got into the back, getting as low as she could on the floor. She turned on the ignition and the outboard coughed into life. She pointed at the bow, to where the Zodiac was tied up.

  I released the ratchet, let out some rope and unclicked the karabiner.

  Theoretically we were supposed to now slide down the rails and off the stern and into the water.

  Theoretically, because we stayed exactly where we were.

  But then the Argo’s bow rose up, and the Zodiac began sliding, gathering speed as it flew down the rails. It happened so quickly – one second we were on the deck and the next the Argo’s stern was five metres away.

  On my knees, I grabbed the rope that was tied to the bow, wrapping it around one hand like a bronco rider.

  Sal gave some throttle and the Zodiac started to move.

  But then we slid down a trough, and all around us were these huge walls of water.

  We’re goners, I thought.

  But then, somehow, we were lifted out of this, and we were now on the crest of a huge misshapen wave.