The Deep

III

Sanders stepped out of the shower, dried himself, and stood before the bathroom mirror. He tightened his pectoral and stomach muscles and was pleased to see the muscle fibers showing through the skin. He patted his stomach and smiled.

The bathroom door opened behind him, and he felt a cool breeze that carried the aroma of Gail.

Gently, Gail pinched the insignificant flesh that sat above his hipbones. “Don’t exercise too much,” she said. “I’d hate it if you lost your love handles.”

“Never.” Sanders turned and kissed her.

They dressed for dinner, and as they left the cottage, Sanders slammed the door, turned the key in the lock, and jiggled the doorknob to make sure the lock was fast.

“Who’s going to steal anything?” Gail asked.

“Anybody. Cameras, diving gear-it’s expensive stuff. No point in making it easy to get at.”

“Well, locking the door won’t do any good. The maid has a key.”

Holding hands, they walked along the path to the main building of the Orange Grove Club. It was like walking through a tropical nursery. Oleander, hibiscus, bougainvillaea, poinciana, and poinsettia, in a fusion of colors, crowded the sides of the path. Oranges and lemons dropped from trees in small well-tended groves. They passed a cluster of cottages similar to their own.

The limestone buildings were painted orange-all but the roofs, which shone soft white in the evening sunlight.

Gail said, “Have you ever seen cleaner roofs?”

“They’d better be clean. That’s what you drink off of.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no well water on Bermuda, no underground streams, no rivers, no nothing. All the water comes from rain. It runs off the roofs into cisterns.”

“I thought you said it never rains here.”

“What I said was, there’s never been a year with less than three hundred and forty days of some sunshine. It rains a fair amount, even in summer. But the storms are sudden and squally, and they don’t last long.”

“For someone who’s never been here, you’re full of groovy facts.”

“National Geographic training,” Sanders said. “Life is nothing but the pursuit and capture of the elusive fact.”

“Why did you quit the Geographic? Writing for them sounds like it’d be fun.”

“Writing might have been.” Sanders smiled.

“Doing anything might have been. I didn’t do, and I didn’t write. I only made up captions.

Legends, they call them. I went there because I wanted to live with wild apes, fight with crocodiles, and dive for wrecks no man had ever seen. Instead, I spent my days thinking up lines like, “Calcutta: In-Spot for India’s Teeming Millions.” I never did anything. I was paid to abbreviate what other people did.”

As they neared the club’s main building, another couple, younger, appeared on the path, walking toward them. Their gaits were awkward, for they had their arms around each other’s waists, and since the man was much taller than his bride, he had to shorten his steps into a mincing trot so she could keep up with him. As soon as he saw the young couple, Sanders dropped Gail’s hand.

When the couple had passed, Gail said, “Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Drop my hand.”

Sanders blushed. “Honeymooners make me nervous.”

She took his arm and touched his shoulder with her head.

“You’re one, too, you know.”

“Yeah. But I’ve already had one honeymoon.”

“It’s my first, though,” Gail said. “Let me enjoy it.”

They passed through the lobby-large, sedate, paneled in gleaming, close-grained cedar—and walked by the bil-Hard room, game room, card room, reading room, and bar on their way to the outdoor patio overlooking the ocean. They were shown to a table at the edge of the patio. The sun, setting behind them, lit the clouds on the horizon and made them glow bright pink.

A waiter came to take their drink order. He was young, black, and there was a name on the tag on his breast pocket. He spoke in monosyllables and addressed them both-not disrespectfully—as “man.”

As the waiter turned and left, Gail glanced after him and said quietly, “That must be a lousy job.”

“Why?”

“What’s he have to look forward to? Maybe, if he’s really good, he’ll become a headwaiter.”

“What’s wrong with that?” said Sanders. “It’s better than being out of work.”

“Did you notice his name? Slake. That doesn’t sound Bermudian.”

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as a Bermudian-sounding anything. There are black people with names like Bascomb who speak Saville Row British, and there are white folks who sound like they came out of a ghetto in Jamaica. I remember checking a Geographic caption with a guy, a fisherman, who was quoted as saying, “Holiday tomorrow. There’s going to be a tempest.” I thought, nobody says “tempest” any more. But by God, the man really talked that way. Ethnically, this place is a mess.”

When their drinks came, they sat in silence, listening to the waves below them, looking out at the few patches of reef visible on the windless evening.

Sanders reached into his pocket and took out the ampule he had found.

“In the morning, let’s see if anyone around here can analyze this for us. I’ll bet you a dime it’s penicillin-from the sick bay. All ships carry that kind of stuff.”

“I don’t think penicillin was that common till after the war. It looks more like a vaccine. Anyway, you’re on for a dime.”

He started to hand the ampule to Gail to put in her purse when a voice behind them said, “Where did you get that?”

They turned and saw the waiter. Slake had menus in his hand. “I beg your pardon?” Gail said.

He seemed embarrassed by the abruptness of his question.

“I’m sorry. I saw the little glass, and I wondered where you found it.” Slake spoke in a musical accent that sounded Jamaican.

Sanders said, “On the wreck right off there.”

“Goliath?”

“Yes.” Gail held up the ampule so Slake could see it more clearly. “Do you know what it is?”

Slake took the ampule and held it between his finger tips. A gas lamp burned behind him, and he twirled the ampule before the light. He gave it back to Gail and said, “I have no idea.”

Sanders said, “Then why are you so interested?”

“I am interested in glass. It looked old. It is pretty. Excuse me.” Slake put the menus on the table and walked toward the kitchen.

After dinner, the Sanderses walked, hand in hand, along the path back to their cottage. A quarter moon had risen, casting golden light on the leaves and flowers. The bushes were alive with the croaking of frogs.

Sanders unlocked the door to the cottage and said, “Let’s have a brandy on the porch.”

“We’ll be eaten alive.”

“I don’t think so.” He pointed to a yellow light above the door. “These things are supposed to keep the bugs away.”

He poured brandy into the two bathroom glasses and carried them out to the porch. Gail was sitting in one of the two rattan chairs that flanked a small table.

“It’s nice,” she said, sniffing the air. “There are a thousand different smells.”

For several minutes, they sat and gazed at the sky and listened to the rustle of the breeze in the trees.

“Are you ready for another thrilling fact from the files of the Geographic?” Sanders said.

“Sure.”

“Back in the seventeenth century, this place was known as the Isle of Devils.”

“Why?”

“How would I know? My contract only calls for me to give you the “whats.” Someone else is paid to find out the “whys.””

Gail said, “I’m going to yawn now.”

“Feel free.”

“It will be the most sensual and suggestive yawn you have ever heard. It will promise wild, unimagined pleasures that will make me forget that you are a suicidal maniac. In short, it will be a real turn-on.”

“Do it,” said Sanders. He closed his eyes and listened. He heard her embark on a low, moaning, feline yawn. It stopped-as suddenly as if someone had jammed a cork in her throat. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Swallow your tongue?” He opened his eyes and saw her staring out into the darkness.

“What?”

“Someone’s out there.”

“It’s the wind.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Sanders walked to the edge of the patio. The path was empty. He turned back to Gail and said, “Nobody.”

“Look.” Gail was pointing to something behind him.

When Sanders looked again, he saw a man stepping out of the bushes onto the path. He walked toward them, stopped a few yards from the porch, and said, “Excuse me.” He was a black man, dressed in a black suit. All Sanders could see were his eyes and a patch of white shirt.

“How long have you been there?” Sanders said.

“Sir? I arrived this very moment.”

“From the bushes?”

The man smiled. “That is the shortest way.

The path is very roundabout.” His accent was crisp, establishment British.

“What can we do for you?”

“I would like a word with you, if I may.”

“Okay. But come up into the light.”

The man, who looked about fifty, stepped onto the porch. His blue-black skin was wrinkled, and there were flecks of gray in his black hair. “My name is Tupper. Basil Tupper. I am the manager of a jewelry store in Hamilton. Drake’s. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. No matter. My hobby is antique glass.”

Sanders looked at Gail. “Lot of glass freaks in Bermuda.”

Tupper said, “I understand you recently acquired a small item of glass from the wreck of the Goliath. I would like very much to see it.”

“Why?”

“What’s all the curiosity about?” Gail said, reaching for the purse beside her chair. “It’s just a medicine bottle.”

“No curiosity, really,” said Tupper, “except to those of us interested in fine glass. A chap named Reinhardt worked with glass in Norfolk in the mid-1940’s. His work is relatively scarce. It’s not worth much in the open market, but in our small circle it’s quite a coup to have a piece of Reinhardt glass.”

Gail found the ampule and handed it to Tupper. He held it to the light. “A nice piece,” he said.

“Not outstanding, but a nice piece.”

“It’s an ampule,” said Sanders. “You see them all over the place.”

“True, but there is a tiny bubble at one end of the glass. That was Reinhardt’s signature.”

“What’s in it? “Gail asked.

“I have no idea. It could be anything. That’s not my concern.”

Gail smiled. “For someone who doesn’t care what’s inside, you’re studying it awfully carefully.”

“I am studying the container, not the contents. The liquid looks yellow, but it might be quite clear.

Reinhardt glass often imparts its own hue to liquids.” Tupper returned the ampule to Gail. “Very nice. I’m prepared to offer you twenty dollars for it.”

“Twenty dollars!” said Sanders. “But it’s-was “I know, that sounds like a lot. But as I said, in our little coterie there is a certain rivalry. I’d like very much to be the first to have a piece of Reinhardt’s work. Frankly, the piece isn’t worth more than ten dollars, but by offering you twenty I know I’m offering more than most of the others could pay.

Someone like your acquaintance, Slake, couldn’t possibly go higher than ten dollars. I am making what could be called a pre-emptive bid.”

“Would you mind if we draw off some of the liquid?”

Gail said. “We’re interested in knowing what’s inside, even if you’re not.”

“No,” Tupper said. “That’s quite impossible.

To draw off the liquid, you would have to break an end of the piece. That would ruin its value.”

“Then I’m afraid there’s no sale,” Sanders said.

“Thirty dollars,” Tupper said, abandoning his deferential charm.

“No,” said Sanders. “Not even for fifty.”

“You’re making a mistake, you know. No one else will offer you anywhere near that much.”

“Then I guess we’ll just have to keep the piece ourselves,” Sanders said. “After all, you said yourself that it’s quite a coup to have a piece of Reinhardt glass.”

Tupper glared at him, then nodded to Gail, said good night and backed off the porch. A few yards down the path he parted some bushes, stepped into the underbrush, and was gone.

“What the hell do you make of that?” Sanders said.

Gail stood up. “Let’s go inside. If he could hang around in the bushes without our hearing him, God knows what else is creeping around out there.”

They went into the cottage, and Sanders locked the door. “You believe him?”

“No. Do you?”

“Who knows from Reinhardt glass?”

“If there’s such competition between glass nuts,” Gail said, “why would Slake have told him about the ampule? He’d have offered to buy it himself. No. I bet he isn’t interested in the glass. He’s after what’s inside.”

“I wonder why he didn’t say so.”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s pretty hard to pass yourself off as a liquid-collector.”

“Have you got the rest of the stuff we found?”

“Sure,” Gail said. “Why?”

“Tomorrow, let’s see if we can find someone who knows something about the wreck. Maybe there’s an old manifest; at least that’d tell us what Goliath was carrying.”

“There were no survivors?” Gail said.

“One,” replied the bell captain, a corpulent, middle-aged Briton, “but he’s about gone by these days.”

“Gone by?”

The bell captain touched his head. “Dotty. He’d tell you volumes, but two thirds of it would be fancy. There is one man who might be able to help you, Romer Treece. He’s been on every wreck off Bermuda; found half of them himself. If anyone knows these waters, he does.”

“Is he in the phone book?” Sanders asked.

“He has no telephone. The only way to contact him is to go out to his home, on St. David’s Island.”

“Okay. I saw some motorbikes out front.

Are they for rent?”

“The little ones—the mobilettes—yes.” The bell captain paused. “Mr. Sanders… do you know about St. David’s?”

“What’s to know? I’ve seen it on the map.”

“They’re not exactly… hospitable… out there. They don’t consider themselves Bermudians; they’re St. David’s Islanders.

There’s a bridge, the Severn Bridge, connecting the island to the rest of Bermuda. They’d as soon it fell down and was never rebuilt.”

Sanders laughed. “What are they, hermits?”

“No, but they’re a proud people, and a bit bitter, too. They make their own rules, and the Bermuda Government looks the other way. There’s a mutual agreement, I guess you could say a recompense for slavery.”

“Slavery?”

“The ancestors of St. David’s Islanders were slaves. Half of them were Mahican Indians, troublemakers sent down by the American colonists.

The other half were unruly Irish, shipped over by the British. Over the years they intermarried, and they created as hard a bloodline as you’d care to see.”

“They sound fascinating,” Gail said.

“In daylight, ma’am. Don’t linger in St. David’s after dark.”

Sanders said, “Thanks for the advice. I left our air tanks down in the equipment shed. Can we get them filled again?”

The bell captain didn’t answer. He looked uneasy. “I… I meant to ask you, Mr. Sanders.” He held up two wallet cards. “The cards you gave me. Forgive my ignorance, but I’m not familiar with NIDA.”

“Oh sure,” Sanders said smoothly. “National Independent Divers Association. There are so many divers these days, NAUI and the y can’t handle them all. NIDA’S a new group.”

“Of course.” The bell captain made a note on a pad. “It’s regulations. I hope you understand.”

“No problem.”

Gail and David went outside and ordered motorbikes from the Orange Grove cycle shop.

While the clerk was filling out forms, Gail whispered, “What was that business with the cards?”

Sanders said, “I thought that might happen. They’re getting tighter every year. You can’t get air without a certification card.”

“But we’ve never been certified.”

“I know. I had the cards made in New York.”

“What’s NIDA? Is there such a thing?”

“Not that I know of. Don’t worry. They never check. They just have to have something to put on file.”

“We probably should have taken the y course,” Gail said. “Yesterday was the first time I’ve dived in a year.”

“Who’s got fourteen Tuesday nights to waste in a swimming pool?” Sanders put his arm around her waist. “You’ll be fine.”

“It’s not just me I’m worried about.”

They listened to instructions about how to operate the motorbikes. The clerk pointed to a row of helmets and said, “What are your hat sizes?”

“Forget it,” Sanders said. “I hate those things.”

“It’s the law. You have no choice. The police can confiscate the bikes.”

“It seems to me,” Sanders said irritably, “that I should be able to decide for myself…” He stopped, feeling Gail’s hand on his arm. “Oh, all right.”

Gail put the towel full of artifacts from Goliath in the basket on the rear fender of her bike and patted her shirt pocket to make sure the ampule was there.

They set off, heading northeast on South Road.

The wind had gone around to the southeast, and as they putted along the road overlooking the south shore, Sanders pointed to the reefs: what yesterday had been a calm anchorage for the Whaler was now a churning boil of foam. Waves crashed on the rocks. Even shoreward of the reefs, the wind-whipped water gathered enough force to make surf on the beach.

The road was crowded with small slow taxicabs, whose drivers-though they had known each other all their lives and saw each other every day-impulsively waved and honked their high-pitched, bleating horns at each other.

There seemed to be no social order, no evident neighborhoods, among the houses they passed.

Generally, the houses on the right side of the road, with spectacular ocean views, were large, well kept, and obviously expensive. Those on the left, nestled close together on hillsides, were smaller. Every puff of breeze was rich with thick aromas, sweet and sour, spicy and fruity.

They passed through Devonshire and Smith’s Parishes, turned left on Harrington Sound Road, and followed the long causeway across Castle Harbour to St. George’s Island. A sign indicated the town of St. George to the left; they went right, across the Severn Bridge, and rode along the narrow road paralleling the airport toward St. David’s.

They had expected to ride into a tidy, contained community. What they found, instead, was a random assembly of limestone cottages connected by dirt paths. It was as if someone had taken a bagful of cottages ten thousand feet up into the air, and then emptied the bag carelessly, letting the contents scatter on the hillsides. Only one building seemed properly placed: a lighthouse at the top of a cliff.

They stopped on the side of the road, and Sanders unfolded the map he had gotten at the hotel.

“This is it,” he said. “It has to be. That’s St. David’s light up there.”

“Let’s ask somebody.”

“Sure. Ask any one of those thousands of people.” He waved his arm at the hillside. There were no bicycles, no cars, no pedestrians. The town seemed deserted.

Fifty yards away, beyond a turn, they saw a hand-lettered sign that said, “Kevin’s Lunch.”

“It looks empty,” said Gail.

There was no door on the frame of the shack, but the remains of a bead curtain hung in tatters from a reed pole across the top of the doorway. Sanders rapped with his knuckles on the wall. There was no response. “Anybody there?”

They walked through the doorway.

“What you want?” said a voice at the far end of a long counter. The man wore no shirt, his skin was dark brown, his belly fat and hairless. His eyes were black holes above globular cheeks.

Sanders said, “We’re looking for Romer Treece.”

“Not here.”

“Where can we find him?”

“He not a bloody goddamn tourist attraction.”

“We’re not tourists,” Sanders said. “That isn’t why we want to see him. We want to ask him about a ship.”

“He know ships,” the man said, less belligerently. “For sure. How bad you want to talk to him?”

“What?” It took Sanders a moment to realize what Kevin meant.

“Oh. Yes.” He took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and put it on the counter.

“You not want to see him very bad.”

Sanders started to say something, but he looked at Gail, and her expression said, Let’s get out of here. He put another five on the counter. “Is that bad enough?”

“Top of the hill, by the light.”

Gail said, “He lives in the lighthouse?”

“Right there by. It’s his light.”

The lighthouse sat on a flat promontory, so high above the sea that the light itself needed to be only fifty or sixty feet above the ground. There was a well-marked path directing tourists to the front of the lighthouse. A small white house, surrounded by a picket fence, was nestled in the lee of the light. The word private was painted on the gate. The Sanderses leaned their motorbikes against the fence, opened the gate, and walked down the short path toward the house. On each side of the front door, where there might have been flower beds, was a bathtub-size vat filled with a clear liquid. In the vats the Sanderses saw dozens of pieces of rusty metal-spikes, buckles, boxes, pistol barrels, and countless unfamiliar objects.

Gail held up the towel-wrapped bundle. “You suppose that’s stuff like this?”

“Looks like it. That’s probably a chemical bath, to clean stuff off.”

The front door to the house was open, but there was a screen door, closed and latched from inside. Sanders knocked on the frame and called, “Hello? Mr. Treece?”

“There’s pamphlets in the bloody lighthouse! Tell you all you want to know.” The voice was deep, the accent similar to, but not identical with, English or Scots.

“Mr. Treece, we’d like to ask you about some things we found.” Sanders looked at Gail. When he turned back to the screen door, he found himself staring up into the face of the biggest man he had ever seen.

He was nearly seven feet tall, and his chest was so immense that the sleeves of his T-shirt had begun to separate at the seams. His hair was black, cropped in a crew cut that rose from a sharp V in the middle of his forehead. His nose was long and thin, and it had a noticeable bend in the middle-as if it had been broken and never set. His face seemed triangular, an upside-down pyramid: wide, high cheekbones above hollow cheeks, a thin-lipped mouth above a sharp, jutting chin. His skin was brown and dry, like overdone bacon. The only facial feature that betrayed the presence of blood other than Indian was the eyes: light powder-blue.

“We’re not tourists,” Sanders said. “The man at Orange Grove said you might be willing to look at some things we got off a ship.”

“Whatman?”

“The bell captain.”

“Briscoe,” said Treece. “I’m not his bloody handmaiden.”

“He only said that no one else could help us, and that you might.”

“What ship?”

“Goliath.”

“Nothing worth a damn on that scow. Least if there is, no one’s ever found it.” Treece looked beyond them to the gate. “You rode all the way out here on those things?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what’d you find?” Treece unlatched the screen door and stepped out onto the path, closing the door behind him. “Is that the stuff there?” he said, pointing to the bundle in Gail’s hand.

“Yes.” Gail handed him the bundle.

Treece squatted down, set the towel on the path, opened it, and looked at the forks and spoons, the pewter cup, the razor, and the butter plate. “That’s Goliath trash, no question.” He stood up. “You got your answer. Was it worth the ride?”

Sanders said, “There was one other thing.” He motioned to Gail, and she took the ampule from her shirt pocket and passed it to Treece.

Treece let the ampule rest in the palm of his hand. He stared at it, saying nothing. Sanders saw the muscles in his jaw move, as if he were gritting his teeth.

Finally, Treece closed his hand around the ampule.

He raised his head and looked at the sea. “God bloody damn!” he said. “Thirty-two years, and finally the sonofabitch comes true.”

“What—”

Treece spun on Sanders, cutting him off. “Who else has seen this?”

“Well…” Sanders stammered.

“I said

who else!”

“Last night,” he said, “a man tried to buy it from us. A black man. He said he was

interested in the glass. And a waiter at the hotel saw it, too.”

Treece laughed-a laugh of anger and contempt.

“Glass.” He held his fist under Sanders’ face and opened it, forcing him to look at the ampule. “You know what’s in there? Morphine, pure and sweet, enough to give a man a week’s holiday in the stars. It’s no surprise someone tried to buy it from you. It’s proof of the legend.”

“What legend?”

Treece looked at Sanders, at Gail, then back at Sanders. “I’d as soon not tell you, but now they know you found it, they’ll be letting you know soon enough. Come along.”

They followed Treece around to the back of the house.

He led them into the kitchen, a large and airy room with a view of the sea. Bottles and vials of chemicals, Bunson burners and tools—dentist drills, forceps, knives, hammers, chisels—were strewn about everywhere, on the counters and on the one round table. He motioned them to chairs at the table.

Gail’s throat was dry, and she said, “Could I have a glass of water?”

“If I can find a glass,” Treece said, rummaging around in the clutter on a counter.

Gail saw a half-full glass on the table.

“This’ll be fine,” she said, and she reached for the glass. “It doesn’t have to be cold.”

Treece watched her, waiting until the glass was within an inch or two of her mouth. Then he laughed and said, “Jesus, girl, don’t drink that stuff. One sip and you’ll be in the history books.”

Gail was startled. “What is it?”

“Hydrochloric acid. Clean your pipes out, that’s for certain.” He found a glass, filled it with tap water, and handed it to her. “Here. All this’ll do is rust you.”

Sanders heard a growl behind him. He turned, not knowing what to expect, and saw a dog sitting on the window sill. It was a terrier of some kind, medium-size, its muzzle grizzled, and it snarled at Sanders.

Treece said, “It’s all right, Charlotte, you dumb bitch.”

The dog’s eyes did not move from Sanders. She growled again.

“I said it’s all right!” Treece grabbed the glass from Gail and flung the water in the dog’s face. The dog wagged her tail and licked the water from her whiskers. “You be nice. They’re not tourists. At least, not now.”

The dog jumped down from the window sill and sniffed around Sanders’ pants.

“She’s feeling pissy because you got in here without her seeing you,” Treece said. “She likes to get her licks in first.”

“Does she really bite?” Gail asked, as the dog’s cold nose explored Sanders’ ankle.

“I guess so! She’s purebred tourist hound.”

Treece leaned against the wall and said, “What do you know about Goliath?”

“Nothing, really,” Gail said.

“Maybe one thing,” said Sanders. “The lifeguard on the beach said he had heard she was carrying ammunition.”

“Aye,” said Treece. “That, too. Goliath was a cargo vessel, a wooden sailing ship carrying supplies to Europe during World War II. There was a sound purpose to using wooden ships, slow as they were. The hull wouldn’t attract magnetic mines, and, under sail, she made no screw noise for U-boats to home on. Goliath was loaded. Her manifest listed a boodle of munitions and medical supplies. She went down in the fall of 1943, broke her back on the rocks, and dumped her guts all over the place.

For weeks, folks gathered every Christ kind of crap you ever saw off the beach. I went down on her two-three times in the fifties and hauled a ton of brass off her-depth charges and artillery shells.

There were radios all over the bottom. You never saw anything like it. But nobody ever found those medical supplies.”

“What were they supposed to be?” asked Gail.

“Nobody knows for sure. The manifest said medical supplies, period. It could have been anything-sulfa, bandages, iodine, chloroform-anything. A couple of years after the war, though, forty-seven I think it was, a bloody great hurricane beat it all to rubble. Most people forgot about Goliath after that, but some didn’t.”

Sanders said, “The bell captain told us there was a survivor.”

“Aye, one. He was damn near in worse shape than the wreck, but he lived. For a time after he got out of hospital he sold scraps from Goliath, and for drinks he’d tell tales of the wreck. One night, he was in his cups and he spun a web about a fortune in drugs aboard Goliath.

Thousands and thousands of ampules of morphine and opium, he said, carried in cigar boxes. He claimed to have been personally responsible for them, said he knew where they were but he’d tell no man. A day later he was waylaid and thrashed by people wanting to know more about the drugs. He swore he’d forgotten what he’d said, claimed he didn’t know anything about any drugs. He never told that story again. But once was enough. Rumor spread, and before long the rumor was that there were ten million dollars in drugs down there. People looked—Jesus, they did a bloody autopsy on the wreck with everything save tweezers-but they never found a single ampule. Not till now.”

“Why would one turn up now?” Sanders asked.

“The bottom of the sea is a living creature.

She’s whimsical, the sea, a tease. She loves to fool you. She changes all the time. A storm can alter her face; a change in current can cause her to heave her insides out. You can dive on a wreck one day and find nothing. The wind blows that night, and the next day, in the same spot, you find a carpet of gold coins. That’s happened. And we’ve had four juicy blowups in the past six weeks.”

Gail said, “David thought this ampule could have come from the sick bay.”

“Goliath didn’t have a sick bay. They likely carried some medicine for the crew, and if this were any other ship, I’d write the ampule off as from the medicine chest.

But not this one. The best hope is that you found the one and only ampule left.”

“Why?” asked Sanders.

“Because there are people who’d slit your throat for a fraction of what the rumors say is down there. How much did you tell that fellow last night?”

“Nothing. We didn’t know anything, except that we found the ampule in the general area of Goliath.”

Treece looked out the window. Finally he said, “Would you be willing to take another plunge, have another look? Not today. The sea’d turn a diver to hash. But tomorrow?”

Sanders looked at Gail. “Sure.”

“It’s important to know if there’s anything more down there. If there isn’t, fine. But if there is, I’ll want to get it up before every hophead between here and the Bahamas finds out about it and starts diving for a cheap charge. I’d go myself, but that would be like running a flag up a pole.” Treece began to search through some cabinets. “Any time I get my feet wet, the papers start trumpeting about treasure. And now that someone knows there may be something on Goliath, for me to go down would be a dead giveaway.” He reached deep into the back of a cabinet and brought out two fist-size rocks, which he put on the table.

“If you come across another ampule, set one of these on the spot. The shiny chips are infrared reflectors. I’ll go down of a night with an infrared torch and poke around.”

“Okay,” said Sanders. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

“If the wind behaves.”

Gail stood up, and as she lifted her bundle from the table, she noticed the black lump David had found. She pointed at it and said to Treece, “Is that coal?”

“No.” Treece picked up the lump. “It’s a sulfide of some kind. I can look inside for you, but there’s a risk of ruining it.”

“That’s okay.”

Treece took a hammer and chisel from the counter, sat down at the table, and set the black lump in front of him. The hammer looked like a toy in his huge, scarred hand; his thumbnail was as big as the face of the hammer head. But he used the tools as gently and deftly as a gem-cutter. He probed the lump, chipping here and there, found a hairline crack near the center, and lined the chisel blade on the crack. He banged the chisel once, and the lump fell apart in two pieces. Examining the two halves, he smiled. “It’s a nice one. Can’t quite read the date, but otherwise, it’s a dandy.”

“What is it?” said Sanders.

“The bones of a piece of eight, ancestor of the bloody dollar.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Look.” Treece held the two halves of the lump to the light. In the black mass, Sanders saw the faint imprint of a cross, a castle, and a rampant lion. “That was once a silver coin. When it hit the briny, it began to oxidize.

Then it became silver sulfide. That’s all that’s left, a shadow. Silver does that, unless there’s a heap of it, or it lies up against iron. Then it’s preserved pretty well.”

“You mean a Spanish piece of eight?” said Gail. “It can’t be.”

“It is that, girl. Eight silver reals, as common as a shilling in those days.”

Gail said, “It was worth a dollar?”

“No. What I meant was that it’s from the piece of eight that the dollar sign came. Look here.”

Treece spread the dust from the black lump and drew in it with his finger. “Spanish accountants used to register pieces of eight like this: a P next to an 8. That got to be a burden, so they shortened it like this.” He drew an 8 and a P together, rubbed out a few lines, and was left with: …

“How old is it?” asked Gail.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t read the date. A couple of hundred years, anyway.”

“It can’t be!”

Treece laughed. “Do tell,” he said tolerantly. “Where did you find it?”

Gail said, “We found it on Goliath.”

“Not possible.” Treece paused, then said quietly, “Goliath went bubbles in 1943. She was carrying no Spanish coins.”

“Well, that’s where we found it. David did. In the rocks.”

“Ah well,” Treece said. “You do find them now and again. Sometimes they even kick up in the surf.”

“Could there be more?” Gail asked.

“Aye.” Treece smiled. “And beneath that could be Atlantis. You found one coin—not even a coin, a skeleton of one. Imagine: Suppose there was an earthquake right now that broke off this bloody cliff and plunged us into the sea. And suppose three hundred years from now some divers come across the wreckage, and the first thing they find is a penny that spilled out of my pocket. Now, they’d be fools to conclude that they’d come upon the treasure hoard of some Bermuda panjandrum.”

Sanders said, “But there could be more.”

“Possible, aye, I won’t deny it. There’s more mysteries hidden by the sea than you or I can fathom, and once in a while she unravels one, in her own time. But usually she just teases you, gives you trinkets to keep you interested. Then she spits in your eye.”

“I read somewhere about a kid who was walking in the sand and scuffed up a fifty-thousand-dollar gold chain.”

Treece nodded. “It happens. But if you wait around for it to happen to you, you’ll go mad.”

“Should we look for more coins tomorrow?” Gail asked.

“No. You wouldn’t recognize them if they fell on yonr foot. Don’t go picldng up every Christ lump of black rock you see.”

Treece led the Sanderses out the back door and around to the front of the house. The dog followed, sniffing and wagging her tail.

“How will we get in touch with you?” Sanders said.

“As you did today. A long ride it may be, but it keeps visitors infrequent and sincere. In an emergency, you could ring my cousin Kevin.”

“Not Kevin’s Lunch. We stopped for directions.”

A hint of displeasure must have shown on Sanders’ face, for Treece laughed and said, “How much did they cost you?”

“Ten dollars.”

“He is some kind of mercenary bastard, Kevin is. He’s all right, but if there’s a way to suck money from dirt, he’ll find it.”

Gail said, “He seemed very… protective of you.”

“He is. Most folks here are. It’s a tradition.”

“To protect you?”

“To shield whichever one of us Treeces is keeping the light. When the bloody bastards dumped us here as slaves in the eighteenth century, they put a sheriff and a band of thugs in charge of keeping us in line. But we didn’t take well to slavery, and after a bit we scalped the sheriff and threw him and his lot to the fish. Then they jolly well let us be.

We set our own order. A Treece was elected chief, for two reasons: We were always bigger than anybody else, and there were more Treeces around than anybody else, so we always had ample blood kin to help put down any dust-ups. It’s been this way for over a century.”

“You’re the chief now?” Gail said.

“In a way. The job doesn’t amount to much. I arbitrate disputes, and I deal with the Bermudians whenever we have something to deal with them about, which is blessedly seldom. And I keep the light, which is the only part of the job that pays. But it’s not a bad job, especially in the years before you take it. It’s like being the bloody Prince of Wales. When my father was alive, the Islanders paid for my education in England. There’s a feeling that the chief should be educated. I don’t know why: a degree isn’t much help in thumping a rascal or returning a fellow’s stolen goat.”

“There is crime here, then,” said Gail. “We were warned not to stay after dark.”

“Not to speak of, at least not among St. David’s people. But the warning has merit: Off-islanders are fair game.”

“And when you retire,” Gail said, “your son takes over?”

“He would,” Treece said evenly, “if I had a son.”

The flatness of Treece’s tone embarrassed Gail. Sanders noticed her discomfort, and he said, “We’ll leave the ampule with you?”

“I would,” Treece said. “Nobody’d be fool enough to come in here after it, and it’s for sure no dizzy bugger’s going to knock me down and try to rifle my pockets.” He moved to the gate. “Be sure you want to do this. You’re on holiday. There’s no reason for you to muck about with this if you’d rather not.”

“What could happen?” Gail asked.

“I imagine nothing. But you’re never sure what people will do when they smell money. Especially some of the black bastards around here.”

Treece noticed that Gail started at the words “black bastards” and he said, “Racist.

Prejudiced bugger. Fascist. No. I have no prejudice. But I do have my biases. And my reasons. The blacks on Bermuda have ample to complain about, and they do ample complaining. But they’ve got a way to go before they earn my respect.”

“But you can’t—”

“Come on,” Sanders said, cutting her off. “Let’s not turn this into a symposium on ethnic attitudes.” He said to Treece, “See you tomorrow.”

“Good.” Treece opened the gate for them and shut it after them. As soon as the gate was closed, the dog reared up on her hind legs, put her front paws on the fence, and began snarling and barking.

Treece laughed. “You’re tourists again.”

They walked their motorbikes down the hill toward the road in front of the lighthouse.

“We should be sure we want to do this,” Gail said.

“I’m sure. What an opportunity to do something. I’m sick of reading about what other people have done or writing about other people’s good times. You can’t live your whole life vicariously. It’s like masturbating from cradle to grave. Anyway, all we’ve agreed to do is dive tomorrow, which we want to do anyway, and see what’s there. If we find anything-then we can worry about what to do next. But I’m not walking away from this before we know more.”

When David Sanders was seventeen, a junior in high school, his English class had been assigned Walden.

Most of Sanders’ classmates found the book dull and lifeless, a collection of maxims to be underlined, memorized, regurgitated on an exam paper, and forgotten.

But Sanders had found Thoreau’s attitudes toward life so inspiring that he had two plaques made.

One said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; the other: “…I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Though they had chipped and faded with time, the plaques still hung over his desk.

When he was a junior in college, Sanders went to a lecture by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and by the end of the evening he knew that Cousteau’s was the life he wanted to live. He wrote letters to Cousteau (none was ever answered) and drove two hundred miles or more to hear Cousteau lecture and see one of his films. Once, after a lecture, he had spoken to Cousteau, who told him—graciously but firmly—that there were hundreds of applicants for positions aboard the Calypso and that unless Sanders had credentials as a marine scientist or underwater photographer, he had no chance of being considered.

Immediately after graduating, Sanders entered the Army’s six-month program. When his active duty was over, he married the girl he had been dating since his sophomore year. He didn’t particularly want to get married, but, now that it was obvious that he would have to seek routine employment, Sanders thought of marriage as an adventure: at least it was something he had never done before.

David and Gloria moved to Washington. The romance of Camelot was in full flower, and David fancied himself in the Kennedy style. He swam, sailed, played touch football. He even brought with him a letter of recommendation from one of his history professors who had been a classmate of JFK’S at Harvard. He thought he might become a speech writer—junior, of course—sitting at Ted Soren-son’s right hand, writing quips for the Leader of the Free World. He was advised that the best way to get into the government was to take the Foreign Service examination. He passed the written exam but failed the orals. He never knew why he had failed, but he guessed that one of the examiners had disapproved when he responded to a question about his outside interests by saying, “Scuba diving and killer whales.”

A letter from a friend of his father’s got him a job at the National Geographic.

After a year of writing captions-chafing at the sight of full-time writers returning, tanned and leathery, from exotic assignments-he asked his boss how long it would take him to become a staff writer. He was told there was no guarantee he would ever become a staff writer. The best way to demonstrate his talent to the editors, said his boss, was for him to write a free-lance piece for the magazine.

He quit his job and began to deluge the editors with one-paragraph story ideas about far-off places, but he soon discovered that before the editors would consider assigning a piece, they wanted an outline so extensive and so detailed that only someone intimately familiar with the place in question could prepare the outline. Sanders had never been west of the Mississippi, and the only place he had visited outside the continental United States was St. Croix. He started to work on a novel. He had written nearly twenty pages when Gloria announced that-despite the diligent use of every birth-control device known to science except abstinence-she was pregnant.

Sanders first considered Wall Street during a glum, drunken evening with a college classmate.

The bull market of the mid-sixties was just beginning, and Sanders’ classmate was making thirty thousand a year for doing, by his own admission, practically nothing. Certainly, Sanders reasoned, he was no less qualified than his classmate, and he found a roguish appeal in the stories about the young “gun slingers” on the Street. He moved to New York, rented an apartment in the East Seventies, read a few books, made a few contacts, and found a job-all in less than a month.

To his surprise, Sanders liked the work. It was easy and exciting and remunerative. He was gregarious, liked to take chances with money, and his early successes (accomplished simply by following the advice of more experienced brokers) brought him as many clients as he chose to service. He was bright enough to realize that though the Dow might hit the fabulous 1,000 mark, something would eventually happen to bring the market down, so he learned about hedge funds and selling short. The slide that began in 1968 made him, on paper, reasonably well off.

He took himself off salary and became a “customer’s man,” surviving solely on commissions received from buying and selling stocks for his clients. He was very good at his job (he believed he had a special gift for sensing impending changes in the market, and he relished taking risks based on hunches), and three rival firms tried to hire him at handsome salaries. He refused, preferring the unpredictable life of the customer’s man. The fact that he never knew, from one month to the next, how much money he would make, excited him.

He viewed it as freedom. If he failed to make a living, he had no one to blame but himself. If (as was the case) he succeeded, there was no one with whom he had to share credit.

His wife, Gloria, however, regarded this freedom, this so-called courage, as madness. She was an orderly person who did not take chances, who liked to know exactly how much money would be in each of the envelopes she kept in a file drawer labeled “budget.” There was envelopes for food, clothing, toys, entertainment, and schoolbooks.

By 1971, Sanders had two children, a co-operative apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street, and a house in Westhampton. He knew he should have been a happy man, but he was bored. Gloria bored him. She was interested in, and knowledgeable about, only two things: clothes and food. Their sex life had become routine and predictable. Gloria professed a fondness for sex, but she refused to discuss—let alone attempt—ways of making it more interesting. Sanders found himself, during love-making, fantasizing about movie stars, secretaries, and Billie Jean King.

Soon his work began to bore him. He had proved to himself that he could make money in every kind of market, and he enjoyed both the making and the spending of money.

But the challenge was gone. He grew restless and began to do careless things.

He still dreamed, from time to time, of working with Cousteau.

He kept himself in excellent physical condition, as if in anticipation of a phone call from Cousteau.

But he was not satisfied with fine-tuning his body: he liked to test it. Once, he intentionally gained ten pounds, to see if, as he believed, a special diet he had concocted would strip off the poundage in three days. Another time, on a bet, he set out to run ten miles.

He collapsed after six miles, but took consolation in a doctor—friend’s statement that—considering that Sanders hadn’t trained for the marathon-he should have collapsed after two or three miles. He saw a television show about hang-gliding-soaring through the air suspended from a giant kite-and determined to build himself a hang glider. He built it and intended to test it by jumping off an Adirondack cliff, until a hang-gliding expert convinced him that his kite was aerodynamically unsound: the wing struts were too weak and probably would have broken, causing the kite to fold up and Sanders to fall like a stone down the side of the mountain.

There was only one week a year when he wasn’t bored, the week in winter when his children visited their grandparents, his wife went to an Arizona health spa, and he went diving at one of the Club Mediterranee resorts in the Caribbean.

He met Gail at the Club Med on Guadalupe—or, rather, under the Club Med. They were on a guided diving tour of some coral gardens. The water was clear, and the sunlight brought out all the natural colors on the shallow reef. After a few minutes of following the meticulous guide, who stopped at every specimen of sea life and made sure each diver took a long look, Sanders left the group and let himself glide down the face of the reef toward the bottom. He was vaguely aware that he was not alone, but he paid no attention to the figure who followed him. He let himself float with the motion of the sea, turning in lazy circles.

He swam along the base of the reef, peering in crannies. A small octopus darted across his path, squirting black fluid, and disappeared into the reef. Sanders swam to the hole the octopus had entered and was trying to coax it out of its den, when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned and saw a woman’s face, white with fear, her eyes wide and bulging. She made the divers’ signal for “out of air,” a finger drawn across the throat in a slitting motion. He took a breath and handed her his mouthpiece. She breathed deeply twice and passed the mouthpiece back to him. Together they “buddy-breathed” to the surface.

They reached the support boat and climbed aboard.

“Thanks,” Gail said. “That’s an awful sensation-like sucking on an empty Coke bottle.”

Sanders smiled and watched her as she dried herself with a towel.

She was the most attractive woman he had ever seen-not classically beautiful, but vibrantly, viscerally appealing. Her hair was short and light brown, streak-bleached by the sun. She was almost as tall as Sanders, nearly six feet.

Her skin was smooth and flawless, except for an appendectomy scar that showed above the bottom of her bikini. Her tan seemed impossibly even: the only patches of skin that were not honey-brown were between her toes, the palms of her hands, and the tips of her breasts, which Sanders saw as she leaned over to stuff the towel under the seat. Her legs and arms were long and lithe. When she stood, the sinews in her calves and thighs moved as if her skin were paper. Her eyes were deep, brilliant blue.

Gail saw him staring at her, and she smiled. “You deserve a reward,” she said. The tone of her voice was not extraordinary, but the way she spoke-with a breezy confidence-gave her words authority. “After all, you saved my life.”

Sanders laughed. “You weren’t in any real trouble. If I hadn’t been there, you probably could’ve made it to the surface okay. There was only about fifty feet of water.”

“Not me,” she said. “I would’ve panicked. Held my breath or something. I don’t dive enough to know how to handle trouble. Anyway, I’ll buy you lunch. A deal?”

Sanders suddenly felt nervous. Never, not in high school or college or the years since, had a woman asked him for a date. He didn’t know what to say, so he said, “Sure.”

Her full name was Gail Sears. She was twenty-five, and she worked as an assistant editor at a small, prestigious New York publishing house that specialized in nonfiction books about social, economic, and political affairs.

She was a member of Common Cause and Zero Population Growth. For the first year after her graduation from college she had shared an apartment with a friend, but now she lived alone. She described herself as a private person—“I suppose you could say selfish.”

After lunch, they played tennis, and if Sanders hadn’t been at the top of his serve-and-volley game, she would have beaten him. She stood at the base line and slugged long, low ground strokes that landed deep in the corners. After tennis, they swam, had dinner, went for a walk on the beach, and then-as naturally as if the act were the next event in the day’s athletic schedule-made noisy, sweaty love in Gail’s bungalow.

When they had finished, that first time, Sanders raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. She smiled at him. Beads of perspiration glued strands of hair to her forehead. “I’m glad you saved my life,” she said.

“So am I.” Then he added, without really knowing why, “Are you married?”

She frowned. “What kind of dumb question is that?”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to know.”

She said nothing for a long moment. “I almost was. But I came to my senses, thank God.”

“Why ‘thank God’?”

“I would have been a disaster as a wife. He wanted kids; I don’t, at least not yet. I’d resent them for strangling my life.”

Two days after he returned to New York, Sanders moved out of his apartment and filed for separation from his wife. He knew he would miss his children, and he did, but, gradually, his guilt faded and he was able to enjoy his afternoons with them without suffering such painful regret that they no longer lived with him.

He had neither sought nor been offered a commitment of any land from Gail. Though he knew he was in love with her, he also knew that to pursue her like a heartsick adolescent was to invite rejection. He took her to dinner twice before telling her he had left his wife, and when finally he did tell her, she didn’t ask why. All she wanted to know was how Gloria had taken the news. He said she had taken it well: after a short, teary scene, she had acknowledged knowing that Sanders was unhappy and that the marriage was a shell. In fact, once her lawyer had convinced her that Sanders’ offer of a one-time settlement was as generous as he had claimed-so generous that it left him without a single stock or bond-she hadn’t seemed upset at all.

For the next several months, Sanders saw Gail as often as she would permit. He knew she was seeing other men, and he tortured himself with wild fantasies about what she was doing with them. But he was careful never to ask her about them, and she never volunteered any information. Though he and Gail talked about the future, about things they wanted to do together, places they wanted to go, they never discussed marriage. Practically, there was little point: Sanders was still legally married. Emotionally, he was afraid to talk about marriage, afraid that to suggest limiting Gail’s freedom might make her regard him as a threat to that freedom.

Sanders had always thought of himself as a normally sensual person, but in those first months with Gail he discovered a reserve of raw lust so enormous that he occasionally wondered if he might be certified as a sex maniac.

To Gail, sex was a vehicle for expressing everything—delight, anger, hunger, love, frustration, annoyance, even outrage. As an alcoholic can find any excuse for a drink, so Gail could make anything, from the first fallen leaf of autumn to the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation, a reason for making love.

The day Sanders’ divorce became final, he decided to ask Gail to marry him. He had examined his motives, and they seemed logical, if old-fashioned: he adored her; he wanted to live with her; and he needed the assurance-however symbolic-that she loved him enough to commit herself to him.

But behind the curtain of logic there also lurked a shadow of challenge. She was young, widely courted, and, by her own admission, averse to marriage. If he proposed and she accepted, he would have achieved a certain conquest.

He was terrified of, but prepared for, rejection, and he wanted to phrase his proposal in such a way that she couldn’t take it as an all-or-nothing request. He wanted her to know that if she declined marriage, he would rather continue their current arrangement than stop seeing her. He intended to remind her of their several areas of compatibility. He compiled a list of twelve points, ending with the undeniable fact that it made financial sense for them to live in one apartment instead of two.

He never got a chance to present his brief. They were having dinner at an Italian restaurant on Third Avenue, and after they had ordered, Sanders took the divorce papers from his pocket and held them up to Gail.

“These came today,” he said. He picked an anchovy from the antipasto plate.

“Wonderful!” she said. “Let’s get married.”

Stunned, Sanders dropped the anchovy into his glass of wine. “What?”

“Let’s get married. You’re free. I’m free. I’ve gotten everyone else out of my system. We love each other. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Sure, yeah,” Sanders stammered. “It’s just that…”

“I know. You’re too old for me. You think I’m a sex fiend and that you’ll never be able to keep up with me. You don’t have any money any more. But I have a job. We’ll make out.” She paused. “Well, what do you say?”

They decided on Bermuda for their honeymoon because neither had been there and because it had good tennis courts, good swimming, and good scuba diving.