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3

16 September, Thursday

Sunset 7:28 P.M.

New moon sets 11:49 P.M.

Four tropical cyclones developing in Caribbean, one a tropical storm, another hurricane force, winds over 74 mph.

I told Jeth, “Your pal, Augie Heller, makes me regret emptying my shark pen before the hurricane hit.”

Jeth Nichols stutters when he’s nervous or mad. He was stuttering now. “I know, Doc, I know. Sorry. I was stuh-stupid to ever leave Dinkin’s Bay and work for another marina. Javier warned me. I shoulda listened.”

Javier Castillo—a Sanibel fishing guide until he moved his family across the bay. Jeth had followed because he was desperate for cash after the hurricane.

I was bending over a tray of salt water, my back turned so it was difficult for Jeth to observe. My left hand was submerged, holding a brooch-sized object encrusted with barnacles. With a surgical probe, I’d removed enough to see that a portion of the object was studded with clear stones.

Diamonds?

With the object cupped, I looked away from the tray. “You said Javier would meet us here.”

“That’s what he told me. He said he was gonna get his boat this afternoon. He was sure of it.”

I pictured a lean man with muscles, a broad African nose. Javier was a good father, a good fisherman. Years ago, he’d floated over from Cuba in an inner tube, which tells you all you need to know about Javier Castillo—he crossed the Florida Straits in a tire.

As if reading my mind, Jeth said, “I wish he’d show up. It’d be nice to see a friendly face.”

True. This place was decidedly unfriendly.

Jeth, Tomlinson, and I were off by ourselves, strangers on strange turf—what had once been a fishing village I’d known well but no longer. Developers had transformed it into an overpriced marina community, on the island of Sulphur Wells, twenty-five minutes by boat from our home base, Sanibel Island, Gulf coast of Florida.

Its name was the Indian Harbor Marina and Resort Community, a mall-sized project built by out-of-state investors, with acres of metal buildings, duplexes, condo sites and dockage, most of the new construction intact after the storm.

There was some damage, though. I saw bulldozers and a crane over there bucking twisted metal where the storage barn had collapsed; security guards stopping cars at the marina entrance. Boats that had survived had been dragged to the parking lot, several dozen of them listing on their keels. They were spaced incrementally like cemetery headstones. A hundred or more.

I said, “If Javier doesn’t show in the next ten minutes, I think we should stow your gear in my skiff and leave. I can’t tolerate much more of this place, or of your pal Augie.”

I was using the surgical probe, along with a magnifying glass and forceps, to clean one of several metallic objects Jeth had snagged while fishing a wreck he’d discovered a few days before. That morning, he’d reeled up a section of cable, a couple of pounds of marine growth attached, man-made objects embedded, most he couldn’t identify.

There was a U.S. silver dollar, some brass screws, and what now looked to be a diamond brooch. A dozen or so other objects were also attached but too heavily covered with barnacles and goop to make a guess.

A few hours ago, Jeth had called me on VHF radio, asking me to meet him here and have a look.

I hadn’t expected to find anything of consequence.

Surprise.

Jeth said now, “Augie isn’t my pal, I already told you. I’ve just got a business arrangement with him and the other guy. They have a boat, I don’t. They don’t know how to fish, I do. We been catching grouper offshore, sellin’ it for top dollar. There’s hardly any boats out since the hurricane. But we ain’t friends.”

Yes, he’d told me. Augie Heller and Oswald, the men who’d offered him a share of the profits to run this marina’s forty-three-foot Viking sport diesel. Jeth needed money, so he’d taken the job even though he didn’t like the duo and didn’t trust them.

My impression exactly. And now Jeth had stumbled onto something important. Valuable, too, depending on the identity of the vessel he’d discovered and what remained on the seafloor.

I hadn’t told Jeth that, not yet. I’d seen no reason to risk sharing the information with the two jerks who’d just stomped off to get reinforcements.

I knew they’d be back soon.

I returned my attention to the brooch. The metal filigree was black as gunpowder, scarred with barnacles and worm shell. Silver converts to silver sulfide when immersed in salt water. This object was silver, coated with a black sulfide patina. It had been underwater for a long time, judging from the empty worm casings. Years. Decades. But there was no fresh benthic growth, and the metallic structure was solid.

It had been preserved by something. Sand? Buried and insulated beneath a few feet of sea bottom.

Maybe the same was true of the wreck. Everything cosseted beneath underwater sand dunes until exposed by the recent hurricane.

Thinking about it, I pictured the Sahara desert. Peaks of undiscovered pyramids showing after a wind storm. I pictured the Stony desert and domes of ancient mosques.

As Jeth said, “Even if they weren’t such assholes, I don’t see how they can claim part of something I found.” I touched the object with forceps. A flake of black patina broke away as if it were a scab. I had my glasses atop my head. I removed the object from the water briefly, holding it close, squinting as nearsighted people do.

If this was a brooch, it was the strangest I’d seen. Staring back at me was a silver skull. It was a military-style skull known as a “death’s-head.” It had luminous stones for eyes. Several more stones created the upper blade of something…a symbol. A portion of leaf cluster framed the symbol.

A…swastika?

As I replied, “You discovered the wreck. You’re the one who snagged this stuff. The state of Florida may have claims but your partners don’t.” I took a double-ended mall probe and continued cleaning.

Yes. A swastika.

It was inset with stones, presumably diamonds. Tiny stones, valuable as gems, or maybe not. But part of an insignia from World War II Germany.

Symbols are a form of cipher. This symbol projected a historic energy, dulling the luster of the gems that formed it.

“Then screw ’em,” Jeth said. “They’ve been treating me like some low-life hick since my first day aboard. I ain’t sharing nothing with those two. And Javier, the bastards are trying to keep his boat. They’re calling everything on their property ‘salvage.’”

I replied, “I heard. They should be in jail.”

“You remember old man Arlis Futch. He’s been working here nights as a security guard. He says he’d quit the damn place if he could afford it.”

Arlis had once managed Sulphur Wells Fish Company. I was surprised to hear his name. It had to be embarrassing, him working as a night watchman.

Jeth took his cap off and slapped his leg. “Some of the crap we do for money, huh?”

I said, “It happens to all of us,” but was thinking: What’s a Nazi insignia doing in forty feet of water on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? Twelve miles off the usually cheerful vacation beaches of Sanibel Island, Florida?

“Does Augie have the numbers?” I was asking about the GPS numbers, latitude and longitude, that marked the wreck’s location. On a forty-three-foot boat, the navigational system would be interfaced. If Heller knew how to use the electronics, the autopilot could steer them back to the wreck. They didn’t need Jeth.

Jeth smiled, pleased with himself. “I never showed them how to use the GPS. I ran the boat, all they did was fish. Besides, those lat-long numbers were already in the system.”

“What?”

If true, it meant that someone else had found the wreck before Jeth.

“Not the exact numbers,” he said. “It was a waypoint left by the boat’s previous owner, that’s my guess. No way in hell was there a wreck down there before the storm, so maybe they punched in rough numbers for a pod of tarpon. Or a bale of grass.”

Jeth was grinning as he added, “I erased the numbers after I wrote ’em down.” He patted the pocket of his cargo shorts. “Got them here.”

“Smart,” I said. “I should’ve guessed.”

Jeth is the quiet type. Like most introverted people, he knows how to be aggressive without making a fuss.

M y magnifying glass has a 4-power wide-angle lens with a quarter-sized 9-power inset.

Amplified details: I was looking at an elite military decoration. A death’s-head made of silver, impressionistic design, lower jaw replaced by the upper blade of a swastika. The top of the skull sat upon the blade like a head on a platter.

The eyes were oversized and empty, the diamonds bending prismatic light on this pale September afternoon. The elemental combination—silver, fresh sunlight through crystallized carbon—seemed conflicted and obscene. Use natural pigments to create pornography, you might achieve the same effect.

Not pure silver. The galvanic pores indicated it was a ferrous amalgam. The pores were filled with salt that had crystallized when exposed to air.

Some metals absorb salt water, and deteriorate from within after long submersion. Which is why everything Jeth found was now soaking in a bucket of salt water, and why I was using this saltwater tray to keep items submerged while doing a preliminary cleaning.

From what I’d seen so far, the items warranted care.

I’d already removed a calcareous shell that covered an insignia of similar size, this one of forged bronze. It was an eagle that held part of a circular wreath in its talons. Most of the wreath had corroded away.

Tomlinson had come along out of curiosity. He’d seen the thing. Jeth had not.

Because of the death’s-head, I felt more certain that Tomlinson had correctly identified the bronze eagle. Anyone who’s read a little history could have made a good guess. It was an icon of the Third Reich, a German eagle, square-winged, industrial looking, as if designed by an architect who worked only with cement. The missing wreath had probably encircled a swastika.

Tomlinson had reached his finger toward the insignia reluctantly, as if it might be hot. “I don’t want to hold the thing,” he’d said. “Just a quick impression to confirm it’s the real deal. As you know, only crystals preserve human vibrations better than metal does.”

No. I didn’t know, and I doubted that it was true. But I’d stood patiently as he touched an index finger to the beak of the eagle, then pulled his hand away.

“God Aw’mighty,” he said. “I can’t be around that for more than a few minutes at a time. I’ll be wrestling with demons all night.”

It was authentic, he told me. It had a history. Then he jogged away.

Crystals and metal. Diamonds and silver. Tomlinson would have been even more unsettled by this death’s-head.

Two artifacts of similar derivation, each suggesting the authenticity of the other.

A pattern was emerging…and there were several more clumps of objects attached to the cable. It had looked like a tangle of garbage when they’d first dumped it at my feet, and that’s the way Jeth’s partners had treated it until I’d told him to hurry and get me a bucket of salt water before it all disintegrated. The two men had suddenly become interested because I was interested.

It was a mistake on my part. It’s not uncommon for me to make mistakes, but this particular screwup had spawned an argument about who owned the salvage if the salvage turned out to be marketable.

Salvage law. Augie talked as if he were an expert, which was unlikely. I’m familiar enough with the subject to know that admiralty law is ancient and complicated. It’s impossible to live near a Florida marina without meeting a random cast of treasure hunters and similar dreamers who believe the myth that anything lost at sea instantly becomes the property of the next person to come along and find it.

“Salvage” is a word, but it’s also a precise legal term, and people around Indian Harbor Marina were misusing it like a weapon.

Heller was no attorney, and he was certainly no expert. So it had been dumb of me to be so obvious when they’d first dumped the clutter of cable at my feet.

We’d argued. They’d threatened. Jeth has the size and hands of a country-boy fullback, I am not a small man, and probably look less bookish than usual because of stitches in my forehead, so finally they’d stomped off to get help.

Yes, it had been dumb, and disturbing, too. Since the storm, I’d felt upbeat, full of energy. I’d felt a letting-go sensation; freedom from all circumstances impossible to control.

Falling from high altitude—a suitable metaphor for much of life.

The headaches were still with me, though. I’d noticed that my balance and timing were off, and that my coordination—never great—was shaky.

Lately, I’d been making more mistakes than normal.