Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  “And because of it.”

  Nina thought about that. It made sense of many things, such as Dr. Crossman’s questions about her background, and Inge Standish’s reaction to the revelation that Nina’s parents had both died of cancer. And she thought of Bernie, when he learned of the great-grandfather with the Jewish name: “None of this would have happened.” That memory turned her body cold, made her want to disbelieve. “But is it possible?” she said.

  They went outside. The ambulance had gone. Dr. Robert was getting into his car.

  “Dr. Robert?” said Nina.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think Happy’s normal production of sperm was affected by the accident?”

  “That’s a strange question. No reason it should have been.”

  “And his erectile tissue?”

  Dr. Robert screwed up his face. “His erectile tissue?”

  “I’m asking whether someone could have … collected Happy’s sperm while he was in the coma.”

  Dr. Robert looked at her with disgust. “What a repulsive suggestion. Who would want to do a thing like that?” He got in the car, started to close the door. Matthias caught it with one hand. Dr. Robert kept pulling on the handle, but the door did not budge.

  “The question is,” said Matthias, “would it have been possible?”

  “Yes. Now get your hands off my car.” Matthias let go. The door slammed shut. Dr. Robert glared at them and sped away.

  “He’s going to call the police,” said Nina.

  “Probably.”

  “And we’ve got Dr. Crossman in the trunk.”

  “We’d better do something about that,” Matthias said.

  He opened the trunk, swung Dr. Crossman over his shoulder and carried him around the house to old Fritz’s cottage. Smoke drifted up from the chimney but no one was home. The door was unlocked. They went inside. There was one big room, with a kitchen at one end and a living room at the other. An empty bottle of Rüdesheim stood on the wooden table in the kitchen. Books, most in German, lined the walls: medical books, scientific books, history books. The fire in the stone hearth was almost out. Zulu lay in front of it with a bullet in his head. Matthias put Dr. Crossman beside him, removed Nina’s steak knife and cleaned it in the sink. He offered the knife to her, handle first. She made no move to take it.

  “Aren’t we tampering with evidence?”

  “Think of it as putting the investigation on the right track,” Matthias said.

  Nina took the knife. “They couldn’t trust him, is that it?”

  “Could you?”

  Matthias knelt by the fireplace, ran his hands through the ashes. “They’ve been burning paper,” he said. “Lots of it.”

  “Where are they?” Nina asked.

  “On the run,” Matthias said.

  “To where?” Nina asked. And thought: Bernie knows about my baby now. She felt herself beginning to tremble again. No time for that. Move. She hurried out of old Fritz’s cottage and was running by the time she reached the car.

  Matthias and Nina caught the last plane out of New York to Nassau. They sat side by side. The plane rose. The sun set. The plane droned through the night, warm, quiet, unreal: an escapism machine. Nina closed her eyes and began her escape. After a while she was aware of almost nothing; nothing at all, if she excluded the feeling of N. H. Matthias beside her. He was sitting straight up, not using the armrest, which he left for her, but still his body pressed against hers. As Nina fell asleep, she had a crazy thought, inappropriate and practical at the same time: I’m going to need a bigger bed.

  43

  That night Nina entered Matthias’s world. Was it too much to say it was the world of andros, in its Greek meaning? A world where she sat for the first time in her life on the back of a motorcycle, holding on to Matthias as they roared along a narrow Nassau road by the sea; a world where she boarded a little boat and skimmed over black water, with not a light on the horizon; a world where she stepped onto an island that smelled of pine, and walked under a sky full of stars so bright they sparkled in the pearly insides of the conch shells that lined the path, and into a deserted bar where a gorgeous bird said: “Bugger off, bugger off.”

  “That’s Chick,” Matthias said. “Ignore him.”

  “Amazona versicolor,” said Nina. “The St. Lucia parrot.”

  Pause. “How did you know that?”

  Nina smiled and said nothing. A bowl of pretzels lay on the bar. She offered one to Chick, aware of Matthias’s eyes on her. Chick pecked it from her fingers. She could survive on Andros. She was still congratulating herself on that when Matthias suddenly snapped off the lights. Nina heard him moving across the room toward the patio, but couldn’t see anything. Then a voice whispered:

  “Matt?”

  And Matthias said, “Yeah,” and switched on the lights.

  A man appeared on the patio, entered the bar. He wore a moth-eaten sweater and a woolen tuque bearing the Boston Bruins logo. He glanced once at Nina, then spoke to Matthias.

  “Brock be here, mahn.”

  “On the island?”

  The man nodded.

  “You talked to him?”

  The man shook his head. “He be coming to the dock in a Whaler. I hide in the bushes.”

  “Why?”

  The man shrugged.

  There was a silence. Nina heard waves breaking on the beach, like an orchestra of cymbals. “You have no reason to be afraid of Brock, do you, Moxie?” Matthias said.

  Moxie looked at the floor.

  Matthias watched him for a moment. “Who threw the suitcase over the side, Mox?”

  Moxie took off the hockey tuque, wrung it in his hands. “Brock,” he said. “He be taking it out after the accident. I say, ‘What you doing, mahn?’ He say, ‘Best thing for Matt—he have no insurance.’” Moxie tried to meet Matthias’s gaze and couldn’t. “You be thinking it was me?” he said softly.

  “No, Moxie. I never thought that.” Moxie stopped wringing his hat, but still didn’t look at Matthias. “Where is he now?” Matthias said.

  “To the blue hole,” Moxie replied.

  “The blue hole? Did he have his gear?”

  “A lot of gear,” said Moxie. “And he have Danny too.”

  “Danny? What are you talking about?” Matthias didn’t move, but Moxie stepped back anyway.

  “Danny come yesterday. For a little break, he say.”

  Matthias ran outside. Nina followed. A crescent moon had risen above the trees, hard and white. It didn’t provide much light, but enough for her to keep him in sight. Nina ran, hearing the wind rising in the trees, catching glimpses of her surroundings in the moonlight: a cracked shuffleboard court, an orange land crab frozen on a rock, the trunks of the pines, narrow and bare. Then a dog bounded into their path, barking wildly. The jolt of adrenaline that went through Nina almost lifted her off the ground, and she wasn’t sure if she really had heard Matthias growl, but the dog’s ears drooped and it turned away.

  Little silver crescents glimmered through the woods. A few strides later, Nina saw that they were reflections of the moon in a round pool. Matthias was already kneeling by a tree at its edge. A boy was tied to the tree with nylon line. A broad-shouldered boy. Nina knew who he was right away. Matthias freed him.

  “Dad,” said the boy. He was shaking.

  Matthias took him in his arms. The boy tried not to cry, but he did. Nina watched Matthias’s hand on the boy’s back. At first it was still; then it began patting him. “You all right?” Matthias said.

  The boy nodded.

  “Where is he?”

  “In there,” the boy replied. “He said he’d take care of me later.”

  A look crossed Matthias’s face that Nina had no words to describe. He walked around the pond, stopped, picked up a cardboard box, the size a VCR might come in. There were scraps of wax paper inside. He sniffed at them. “Plastique,” he said.

  Matthias kept circling the pond, prowling now. He found more nylon l
ine, tied to another tree. He began pulling on the free end. Two scuba tanks came to the surface of the water. Matthias gazed at them; Nina saw the hard moon reflected in his eyes. Then he released the line and the tanks sank from sight.

  “I don’t understand,” Nina said.

  “Those are his decompression tanks,” Matthias told her. “I wouldn’t kill a man like that.”

  But that wasn’t what Nina had meant. “What is plastique?”

  “Plastic explosive. He’s going to try to blow the roof in.”

  “And cover the evidence?”

  Matthias nodded. “Moxie,” he said.

  “Yeah,” answered a voice in the darkness. Nina hadn’t known he was there.

  “I need my gear—two sets of eighties, three regs, compass, depth gauge, weight. Use the Jeep.”

  “I’ll help,” said the boy.

  Matthias smiled.

  Nina heard their running feet. Then it was quiet, except for the wind, growing louder all around them. It ruffled the surface of the pond, making the white crescents flicker like lights on a marquee.

  “You’re going in there at night?” Nina said.

  “That’s the advantage of cave diving,” Matthias replied. “Day or night—it makes no difference.”

  “Is your friend going with you?”

  “Moxie? No.”

  Soon Nina heard the Jeep. She said: “I don’t think you should do it alone.” She couldn’t stop herself. “Maybe I could go with you.”

  Matthias smiled: another white crescent in the night. “Done much diving?”

  I’ve snorkled in Tahiti with Richard II, she thought. She said: “Never.”

  “This isn’t the place to start. You’ll be a big help just by staying right here.”

  “How so?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Moxie and the boy appeared with the gear. Matthias stripped off his clothes. Naked in the moonlight, his body was every bit as powerful as Nina had thought, but now there was something vulnerable about it too. Unaccountable: except perhaps for the vastness of the night sky and the two white scars curving across his back. His son watched with an unreadable expression on his face.

  Matthias put on a wet suit, fins, mask, a complicated-looking safety vest, tanks and a lot of other equipment Nina didn’t even know the names for. “Lower the spares down to forty feet,” he told Moxie. “Or so.” Then he moved to the edge of the pond, pulled the mask over his face and checked his watch.

  He stuck the breathing device in his mouth. “Ta-ta,” he said around it, then stepped into the water and disappeared. The white crescents broke into madly blinking pieces, then slowly put themselves back together. Moxie tied tanks to a line, fastened the other end to a tree and lowered them into the water. His skin was the color of ashes.

  “Luscas live down there,” he said.

  “Luscas?”

  “Monsters. They be hiding in the blue holes.”

  He pulled his tuque down a little further on his head. The wind blew a scrap of wax paper near Nina. She picked it up and held it to her nose. It smelled like burnt sugar. She stood by the side of the pond.

  Well shit, Matthias thought as cold water found its way under his wet suit, caves don’t kill divers, divers do. Switching on the torch he went down fast, through the fresh water layer, the brine shrimp, into salt water and down to the cave at 122 feet. He swam to the back, past the rock pile, to the tunnel entrance. There he shut off the light, peered inside—and saw blackness. He thought he felt a current flowing into the tunnel and remembered the rule about never entering an island cave on an ebbing tide. Then he kicked his way inside.

  His light picked out the familiar details: broken china, rusty nails, gray limestone walls. But Matthias wasn’t looking for any of that. He was looking for air bubbles flattened against the ceiling, and he saw them.

  Matthias swam quickly along the tunnel to the first division. His old line was still tied off to the limestone spur. Again he cut his light, again saw nothing but the afterglow on his retinas, and then blackness.

  He swam on, past the cave where he had found the military boot, past the rock fall where he had first seen the baby nurse shark, to the point where he had run out of line. His reel was there, still jammed between the stalagmite and the wall. That was the place where a diver should have tied off a new line, but Bernie Muller hadn’t done so. It was a vote of confidence: Bernie Muller must have thought that the tricky part was over. But it hadn’t been over, Matthias remembered: the tunnel had divided once more, but at his back, and he hadn’t known until he was on the way out. He swam on.

  The tunnel widened. Matthias played his beam along the walls, waiting for a glimpse of the edge. When he saw it, he switched off the light. He saw the after-image, blackness, and then a faint glowing cone of yellow in the distance. Leaving his light off, he kicked ahead, out of the tunnel and into the domed chamber.

  The yellow cone trembled slightly against the far wall, near the ceiling. It illuminated a niche in the limestone and the bare hands of a diver working with a canvas haversack in the niche; the diver’s body was lit in silhouette, but it was Bernie Muller—Matthias recognized the long spear gun that only he could load, dangling from his belt. Matthias swam closer.

  Long ago he had been trained for situations like this. One: approach from above and behind. Two: rip off enemy mask. Three: use knife on enemy or enemy regulator hose. But Matthias didn’t touch his knife. Here in the cave, it was only necessary to knock Bernie Muller’s torch from his hand. It would fall to the bottom and he would be helpless, with no choice but to follow Matthias out to safety. If he came too close all Matthias had to do was shut off his own light and swim away. Matthias rose until he touched the ceiling, then swam along the curve of the dome and came down on Bernie Muller from above.

  It was a clear, logical plan, but clear logical plans formulated in underwater caves at night didn’t always work. That was one flaw. Flaw number two: Bernie Muller was a good diver and good divers have a sixth sense. It made him glance up from his work just as Matthias swam down at him. He saw Matthias coming out of the darkness and terror filled his eyes, but it didn’t stop him from reaching for his spear gun. Matthias grabbed at Bernie Muller’s torch. There was no time for Bernie to load the gun; he just swung it up and out with one hand.

  Bernie Muller was a strong man. Even one-handed and underwater, his blow had power. But it might not have done any damage if it hadn’t caught Matthias on his left elbow. The barrel of the gun struck him. His hand went numb. He dropped his own torch.

  At the same time, his right hand closed on Bernie’s torch. He yanked at it. But Bernie held on. They wrestled in an explosion of air bubbles. Something hit Matthias in the throat. Then the only hand on the torch was Bernie’s. He backed away, trying to find Matthias in the dark. The beam swept across the niche. Matthias reached out, grabbed the strap of the haversack. He saw the tube sticking out, saw that its copper top hadn’t been crushed. That meant Bernie hadn’t yet triggered the explosive. Until he did, it was nothing but a bag full of nitrates. Matthias ducked down between Bernie and the wall and let it go.

  Bernie’s beam stabbed at the empty niche, at Matthias, at the haversack, falling fast. It sank to the end of the beam and disappeared. Then the beam came up and shone in Matthias’s face, blinding him. Matthias didn’t see the spear gun. It came out of darkness and glare and hit him in the side of the head.

  Matthias opened his eyes. Or were they already open? He felt for his mask, his regulator: still in place. He looked around in all directions, or what he thought were all directions. Blackness surrounded him. No ceiling, no floor, no walls; no up, no down. He still had his depth gauge, his pressure gauge, his watch, but he couldn’t read any of them. Think. Don’t panic. But all he could think of was the woman waiting at the edge of the blue hole. His mind stuck on the image of her. Mental paralysis was a form of panic. You’re panicking. Think. He thought: Is she real or did I will her into being, imagining her, i
magining everything? Was this still his first dive in the domed chamber; and was he narced out, down so deep and in so long there was no hope?

  No. Her name was Nina. He couldn’t have imagined her. He blinked a few times to make sure his eyes were open. And then he saw a flicker of light, far away. The light disappeared and everything went black again. Think. The light must have been Bernie Muller, going back into the tunnel. Therefore Bernie was up and he was down. He had fallen after Bernie hit him, fallen deeper than Bernie cared to go. Or perhaps Bernie had thought that even if he regained consciousness he would never get out of the cave without a light; and even if he found the entrance to the tunnel, there was nothing to stop Bernie from waiting for him around some corner with his spear gun ready.

  Good. He was having clear and logical underwater cave thoughts again. Bernie was up. He was down. The tunnel was in the west wall. Judging from the last position of Bernie’s light, he himself must be near the east wall. There was a ledge on the east wall at 320, the ledge where he had found Felix’s suitcase. He thought of the back door to the blue hole in the diagram he had drawn on Nina’s windshield, and hoped it was a true picture.

  Facing west, he thought, Matthias began backpedaling. His tank banged against rock. The east wall. Now the clear and logical question was this: had he already dropped below the ledge at 320, or was it still beneath him? If he was below it and had been there for more than a few minutes he would soon run out of air, or need so much decompression he would never survive anyway. Therefore he felt for his bubbles, and trying to hold a feet-first vertical position, slowly finned his way along the wall in the opposite direction: down.

  Down, down, he went. He began to reconsider: perhaps it would be better to take his chances with Bernie in the tunnel. But he might not find it at all, and once in he had no chance. He thought of Nina and tears came to his eyes. Real tears for the second time in the domed chamber. There had been no other real tears since his last encounter with Stepdaddy Number Two. He was remembering Stepdaddy Number Two’s Coupe de Ville when his fins touched down on solid rock.

  The ledge. Matthias lowered himself onto it, ran his hands along the limestone. He found the edge of the outcrop, then turned what he hoped was one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and went the other way, keeping within touching distance of the bottom.