The Deep

VIII

When the taxi had departed, leaving the Sanderses and their luggage outside Treece’s house, Gail said, “You think we’ll sleep in the kitchen?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s the only room in the house we’ve ever seen.

He’s never even let us in the front door.”

The screen door flew open, and the dog bounded down the path toward them. She stood inside the gate, wagging her tail and whining.

Treece appeared in the doorway. “It’s okay, Charlotte.” The dog backed away a few feet and sat down. “Need any help?”

“We can manage.” Sanders opened the gate, hefted the two large suitcases, and, with Gail following him, walked along the path to the door. Gail had an air tank slung over each shoulder.

“You have meat on you,” Treece told her. “Those aren’t light.”

He held the screen door for them and ushered them into the house. The doorway opened onto a narrow hall. The floor was bare-wide, polished cedar boards. An old Spanish map of Bermuda, the parchment cracked and yellow-brown, hung in a frame on the wall. Beneath the map was a mahogany case with glass doors, full of antique bottles, musket balls, silver coins, and shoe buckles.

“In there,” Treece said, pointing to a door at the end of the hall. “Here, give me those bottles.

Are they empty or full?”

“Empty,” Gail said.

“I’ll set ’em out by the compressor.”

Sanders said, “You have your own compressor?”

“Sure. Can’t dash into Hamilton every time I need a tank of breeze.”

David and Gail went into the bedroom. It was small, nearly filled by a chest of drawers and an oversize double bed. The bed was at least seven feet square, and obviously handmade: cedar boards pegged together and rubbed with an oil that gave them a deep, rich shine.

“This is his room,” Gail whispered.

“Looks like it. What do you think that was?” Sanders pointed to a spot on the wall above the bed.

A painting or photograph had hung there until recently: a rectangle of

clean white was clearly visible against the aged white of the wall. They heard Treece’s footsteps in the hall. Sanders dropped their suitcases on the bed.

“We can’t take your room,” Gail said to Treece, who stood in the doorway. “Where will you sleep?”

“In there,” Treece said, cocking his head toward the living room. “I made a couch big enough for monsters like me.”

“B…”

“It’s better I sleep there. I’m a fitful sleeper. Besides, I was told I snore like a grizzly bear.” He led them toward the kitchen.

As they passed through the living room, Gail decided that a woman had lived in the house and had decorated it, though how recently she couldn’t tell. Most of the decor reflected Treece: gimbaled lanterns from a ship, brass shell casings, old weapons, maps, and stacks of books. But there were feminine touches, such as a needlepoint rug and a gay, flower-pattern fabric on the couch and chairs.

The paintings on the walls were mostly sea scenes.

There were two empty spots, from which pictures had been removed.

In the kitchen, Treece said, “I might’s well show you where things are.” He looked out the window.

“It’s that time of day.” He opened a cabinet filled with liquor bottles. “Make yourself a charge if you like. I’ll have a spot of rum.”

Sanders made drinks, while Treece guided Gail through the other cabinets.

“Can’t we contribute something?” Gail said.

“By and by. Food’s not much of a burden.” Treece smiled. “Feel you’ve been asked to a house party?”

“Sort of. Show me what you want to have for dinner, and I’ll get to work.”

“Supper’ll be along. I’ll take care of it.”

Treece took a glass of rum from Sanders.

“We’ll start tomorrow; pick Adam up on the beach.”

“Coffin?” Sanders said. “He’s going to dive?”

“Aye. I tried to put him off, but he wouldn’t have it. He still thinks it’s his ship, and he’s hot to stick it to Cloche.”

“Is he good?”

“Good enough. He’s a pair of hands, and we’ll need all the hands we can get. We’ll have to work like bloody lightning, ‘cause Cloche will get on to what we’re doing fast, and then it’ll be dicey as hell. Another thing about Adam: He has a zipper on his mouth. Once he shuts it, nobody’ll open it. He learned a lesson from that beating.”

“Once we have the drugs,” Gail said, “what will you do with them? Destroy them?”

“Aye, but not till we’ve got every last ampule.

If we were to destroy the ampules bit by bit, as we recover them, and Cloche were to find that’s what we’re doing, we’d be finished. There’d be no reason for him not to have us killed on the spot. Same if we started turning them over to the government lot by lot. Cloche’d see his whole plan going up in smithereens, and he’d kill us just to keep his options open. But if we accumulate them… The best way for us to stay healthy is to keep Cloche hoping, let him think we’re doing all his work for him, gathering them up and saving them-and when we’ve got the lot he’ll try to pirate them from us.”

Sanders noticed that Gail was eying him quizzically.

At first he didn’t know why; then he realized that he had been smiling as Treece spoke-an unconscious grin that betrayed the strange excitement Sanders felt. He had felt it before: he had a particularly vivid recollection of the sensation as he was about to parachute for the first time. It was a potpourri of feelings-fear made his arms and fingers tingle and his neck and ears flush hot; excitement made his breath come too fast, bringing on lightheadedness; and anticipation (probably at the thrill of being able to say he had actually jumped out of an airplane) made him smile. The fact that he proceeded to sprain his ankle during the jump in no way diminished his glee, nor the fact that he had never jumped again.

Gail frowned at him, and he forced himself to stop smiling.

They heard a muffled thump outside the kitchen door. Treece stood and said, “That’ll be supper.” He opened the door and retrieved a newspaper-wrapped package from the stoop.

“Supper?” Gail said.

“Aye.” Treece set the package on the counter and unwrapped it. Within, still wet and glistening, was a two-foot-long barracuda. “It’s a beauty,” he said.

Gail looked at the fish, and remembering the barracuda that patrolled the reef and stared at her with vacant menace, her stomach churned.

“You eat those things?”

“Why not?” Sanders said, “I thought they were poisonous.”

“You mean ciguatera?”

“I don’t know. What’s that?”

“A neurotoxin, a nasty bastard. Nobody knows much about it, except that it can make you sick as hell and, now and again, put you under.”

“Barracudas have it?”

“Some, but so do about three hundred other kinds of fish. In the Bahamas they throw a silver coin in the pot when they boil a barracuda. They say if the coin turns black, the fish is poisonous. But here in civilization we have a much more scientific test.” Treece picked up the fish, held out his right arm, and measured the fish against it. “We say, ‘If it’s longer than your arm, it’ll do you harm.”

I got a full hand on this one, so it’s obviously safe.”

“That’s a comfort,” Gail said.

“It’s not as stupid as it sounds. Ciguatoxin is more common in bigger fish, and the bigger the fish, the more of the stuff he’s bound to absorb. We figure that in a little brute like this one, even if he is ciguatoxic, chances are pretty good of getting away with nothing more than a bellyache.” Treece reached in a drawer and found a filleting knife and a sharpening stone. “Don’t be put off,” he said. He spat on the stone and rubbed the slim blade in tight circles in the pool of saliva. “I’ve been eating beasts like that for the better part of forty years, and I’ve never been stabbed yet.” With quick, sure sweeps, he began to scale the fish. The silvery scales flew from the knife blade and floated to the floor.

“Where did he come from?” Sanders asked.

“The reef, I imagine.”

“No, I mean how did he get here? I’ve never heard of a fish that rolls itself in newspaper and deposits itself on your doorstep.” Sanders chuckled at his little joke.

“Somebody brought him. They do that. A person catches a few fish, has more than he needs, he’ll drop one

Gail said, “Is this what you mentioned before?

Looking after the keeper of the light?”

“Not really.” Treece flipped the barracuda over and scaled the other side. “We take care of our own. Kids’ mother gets sick, neighbors’ll feed ’em and look after ’em. Ever since…” He seemed to hesitate. “They know I don’t have time to go fishing and have to cook for myself, so they leave a little something.” With two sharp strokes, Treece severed the head and tail. He tossed the tail in the garbage.

“You want the head?”

David and Gail shook their heads, looking-with undisguised revulsion-at the fish head impaled through the eye by the point of Treece’s knife.

“It’s not bad, if you don’t have anything else,”

Treece said, flipping the head into the garbage. “But this fellow has a generous carcass.” He slit the barracuda’s belly from tail to throat and scooped out the innards. Then he turned the fish around and made a slit along its backbone. The whole side of meat came free.

“You might heat me up some oil,” he said to Gail.

“What kind?”

“Olive oil. It’s over there by the burner. Dump half a bottle in a pan and fire her up.”

Treece sliced the two fillets in half and dropped them in the pan of hot oil, where they bubbled and spat and quickly turned from gray-white to golden.

Gail made a simple salad-Bermuda onions and lettuce-and asked Treece where the dressing was.

“Here,” he said, handing her an unlabeled bottle.

“What is it?”

“Wine, they say. I don’t know what’s in it, but it goes in most everything-salads, cooking, your stomach. Don’t want to drink too much of it, though. Give you a fearsome head.”

Gail poured an inch of the liquid in a glass and drank it. It tasted bitter, like vermouth.

The sun had dropped below the horizon when they sat down to eat, and rays of pink, reflected off the clouds, streamed in the window and washed the kitchen with a warm, soft glow.

Treece saw Gail toying with her fish, reluctant to eat it. “I’ll risk my mortal bones,” he said, smiling. “If he’s ciguatoxic, you’ll know it in a few seconds. One fellow was lugged off to hospital with the poisonous morsel still in his craw.”

He didn’t use a fork, but broke off a big piece of barracuda with his fingers and put it in his mouth. He cocked his head, feigning dread at the possible onset of crippling cramps. “Nope,” he said. “Clean as a Sunday shirt.”

The Sanderses ate the fish. It was delicious, moist and flaky with a crisp coating of fried oil.

At 9:30, Treece yawned and announced, “Time to put it away. We’ll want to be up early. Have to fuel the compressor on the boat and show you how the air lift works. Ever used a Desco?”

“No,” Sanders said.

“Have to give you practice, then. There’s no trick to it, once you learn how to watch your air line. If it fouls on something, or kinks, you’ll think the beast from twenty thousand fathoms has grabbed you by the throat.”

“We won’t dive with tanks?” Gail said.

“We’ll take some, just in case. That’s another thing: WV11 have to fill them in the morning. That compressor out back makes a God-awful din. But you should try to use a Desco. You never run out of air, unless the compressor on the boat runs out of gas. You use a tank for five hours and you’ll think you’ve been kissing prickly pears. The mouthpiece begins to smart after a while.”

“There’s no mouthpiece on a Desco?”

“No. It’s a full-face mask. You can talk to yourself all you likesing, make a speech, give yourself a royal cussing. You can talk back and forth, too, if you read lips worth a damn.”

They were in bed by ten. The wind whistled outside, swooping up from the sea and over the cliff. As Sanders leaned over to turn off the bedside light, he saw the dog standing, tentatively, in the doorway.

“Hi,” Sanders said.

The dog wagged her tail and leaped onto the bed.

She curled up and lay between Gail and David.

“Shoo her off,” said Gail.

“Not me. I need all my fingers.”

They heard Treece call, “Charlotte!” and the dog’s ears

stiffened. Treece appeared in the doorway.

“Forgive her. That’s her rightful place. It’ll take her a day or two.” He said to the dog, “Come along,” and the dog raised her head, stretched, and went to Treece, who said, “Sleep well,” and shut the door.

The first bark seemed to be part of Sanders” dream.

The second, loud and prolonged, woke him. He looked at the radium dial on his watch: It was 12:10. A faint yellow light seeped around the edges of the closed window shade and flickered on the walls. The dog barked again. Gail stirred, and Sanders shook her awake.

“What is it?” she said.

“I don’t know.” He heard Treece walking in the hall. “It might be a fire.”

“What? In here?”

“No, outside.” He rolled off the bed and pulled on his boxer shorts. “Stay here.” He walked toward the door. “If there’s trouble…”

“If there’s trouble, what?” Gail reached for her bathrobe. “Hide under the bed?”

Sanders opened the bedroom door and saw Treece standing at the front door, naked except for a brief bathing suit. The dog stood beside him. Though Treece filled the doorway, beyond him Sanders could see a glow of firelight and some dark forms.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Treece turned at the sound. “Not sure. Nobody’s said anything.”

Sanders approached Treece and stood beside him, slightly to the side. By the gate there were two men, dressed in black and holding oil torches that sent streams of thick black smoke into the night air.

“Well?” Treece said aloud. He put his left hand on the door jamb and shifted his weight. Sanders saw that the apparently casual change of position put Treece’s hand within easy reach of a sawed-off shotgun that stood in the corner behind the door.

The two torchbearers stepped apart, and between them, walking slowly toward the gate, was Cloche. He was dressed entirely in white, against which his black skin shone like graphite. The firelight sparkled on the gold feather at his neck and on the round panes in his spectacles.

Sanders heard Gail’s barefoot steps on the wooden floor and smelled her hair as she came next to him.

“What do you want?” Treece said, his tone a blend of anger and disdain. “If you’ve business here, state it. Else, be on your way. I’m in no mood for silly games in the middle of the night.”

“Game?” Cloche raised his right hand to his waist and dipped the index finger.

Sanders heard a buzz. Instinctively, he ducked, and there was a thunk against the wooden door frame. A featherless arrow quivered in the wood, six inches from Treece’s head.

Treece had not flinched. He pulled the arrow from the wood and tossed it on the ground. “A crossbow?” he said. “Put feathers on it; it’ll fly truer.”

“Your… friends… are not very prudent,”

Cloche said. “They paid a visit to the government. I told them not to. Now the police are asking about me.”

“And?”

“You know what I want. I know they’re down there-ten thousand boxes of them.”

“That’s myth.”

“Your friends do not think so. They seemed quite convinced when they spoke to Mason Hall.”

Still looking at Cloche, Treece whispered to Sanders, “Go ’round back and make sure nobody’s there.”

As Sanders padded down the hall, he heard Treece say, “You know tourists. They hear stories….”

The kitchen was dark, and the door and windows were closed.

Sanders found the handle of a drawer, opened it, and fumbled with his fingers for a knife. He found a long heavy blade of carbon steel and slipped it into the waistband of his shorts. The cold metal against his thigh made him feel secure, though he knew it was a delusion: he didn’t know how to fight with a knife. But he was quick and strong, and he knew the house. In the dark, against a man unfamiliar with the house, he thought he would be able to handle himself.

He opened the kitchen door. There was no movement outside, no sound except the wind. He closed the door and locked it, then locked both windows. Now, he told himself, if somebody tries to get in, we’ll hear the sound of breaking glass. He went back to the front hall-pleased with himself-and stood beside Gail, his left hand resting on the hilt of the knife.

“…a mystery to me,” Cloche was saying. “Why you should be willing to help the British swine. After what they did to you.”

“That’s not your affair!” Treece snapped.

“Yes, it is. You have as much reason as I to hate them. Look what you lost.”

Sanders saw Treece glance quickly at him and Gail. Treece looked uncomfortable, eager to change the subject.

“Leave it be, Cloche. All you need know is that I’ll not let you get those drugs.”

“What a pity,” Cloche said. “The enemy is there and you will not fight him. Are you worried about your little kingdom on St. David’s? I have no designs on that.”

Treece said nothing.

“Very well,” Cloche said at last. “With you or without you, the result will be the same.”

Two men moved out of the darkness and stood behind Cloche. Each carried a crossbow, loaded and cocked and pointed at the door. Cloche took a small bag from one of the men behind him. He held the bag by the bottom and flung its contents toward the door. Three linen dolls, each with a steel feather-dart in its chest, rolled in the dust.

Treece did not look down.

The crossbowmen fired.

Sanders slammed Gail against the wall and shielded her with his body. Treece dropped onto one knee and, in the same motion, reached for the shotgun. Sanders heard the arrows buzz through the doorway and clatter against the stone fireplace.

Treece fired three times, holding the trigger down and pumping the action. In the narrow hallway, the sound of the explosions was thunderous and painful.

When the echo of the last explosion had died, and all that remained was a ringing in Sanders” ears, he turned and looked at Treece. He was still on his knee, the gun cocked and ready to fire.

Where Cloche and his men had stood, now there was nothing but the two torches-abandoned, burning scattered pools of spilled oil.

“Hit anybody?” Sanders asked.

“I doubt it. They broke and ran when they saw this.” Treece patted the gun. “I don’t think they expected it.”

Sanders felt Gail trembling and heard her teeth chattering. “Cold?” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders.

“Cold? Terrified! Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Sanders said honestly. “I didn’t have time to think about it.”

Gail touched the knife in Sanders’ undershorts.

“What’s that for?”

“I had it… just in case.”

Gail said to Treece, “Will the police come?”

“The Bermuda police?” Treece stood up.

“Hardly. I told you, they don’t muck about with St. David’s. If they heard anything-and I don’t imagine they did-they’ll pay it no mind. Just the half-breeds shooting each other up. It’s the Islanders that concern me.”

“Why?”

“They’ll have seen, and heard. They’re a superstitious lot. I venture that was part of the purpose of Cloche’s visit, to throw the fear into them.”

“Fear of what?”

“Of him. They see a coal-black man, dressed all in white comt’s what they dress ’em in when they die-coming up a hill in the dark of night with two torchbearers and two crossbowmen: that’s powerful bush. If he comes again, there’s nothing short of holocaust that’ll bring people out of their houses.”

Sanders said, “Should we set watches?”

Treece looked at him. “Watches?”

“You know: four hours on, four hours off… in case he comes back.”

“He won’t be back tonight.”

“How do you know? Christ, you didn’t think he’d dare come up here in the first place!” Sanders was surprised at the harsh sound of his own words. He was challenging Treece, which was not what he had intended, and from the look on Treece’s face, a challenge was not what he had expected. Sanders knew he was right, but he didn’t care. He wanted to expunge his words. “I didn’t mean…”

“If he comes back,” Treece said evenly, “I’ll hear him. Or Charlotte will.”

“Fine.”

“It’s late. There’s a lot to be done tomorrow.”

Treece nodded to Gail, turned, and walked down the hall toward the living room.

David and Gail went into the bedroom and closed the door.

“Bite your tongue,” she said.

“I know.”

“Never mind. There’s no harm in letting him know we’re scared.”

“It wasn’t that. It’s just better to be prepared.”

Sanders pulled off his shorts and climbed into bed.

Gail sat on the edge of the bed and hugged her bathrobe around her. “I can’t go back to sleep.”

“Sure you can.” Sanders stroked her back. He smiled, wondering if the sudden, surprising flood of ardor had anything to do with the danger they had just been through.

When they awoke in the morning, they heard voices in the kitchen. Sanders put on a pair of trousers and left the room.

Treece was sitting at the kitchen table, cradling a cup of tea. Across from him, dressed in a stained sleeveless T-shirt, his mouth full of dark bread, was Kevin. They looked up when Sanders entered the kitchen. Kevin’s face conveyed no sign of recognition, even when Treece said, “You’ve met.”

“Sure,” Sanders said. “Hello.”

Kevin said nothing, but Sanders thought he saw him blink in his direction. He poured himself a cup of coffee and took a seat at the table.

Treece said to Kevin, “Does he have anybody who can use the equipment?”

Kevin shrugged.

“Does he have an air lift?”

“Papers didn’t say.”

“What’s this?” Sanders asked.

“You remember Basil Tupper, the

jewelry-store fellow who paid you a visit? Two crates of diving gear came in on the Eastern flight from Kennedy this morning, addressed to him.”

“How do you know?”

“A friend in customs. There were bottles, regulators, suits-six of everything.”

“Didn’t the government ask questions?”

“Nothing illegal about it. He paid the duty-in cash. Besides, he imports so much crap for his jewelry business that most of the customs people are his chums. He could say he was starting a dive shop.”

Treece cocked his head, listening, and for the first time Sanders noticed the low, muffled chugging sound of an engine, coming from somewhere outside the kitchen.

“Compressor’s running out of juice.” Treece stood and said to Kevin, “Call Adam Coffin for me. Tell him to be on the beach at high noon.”

Then he said to Sanders, “You better rouse your lady. If Cloche is training divers, we’ve just lost our practice time. You’ll have to settle for on-the-job training.”

“She’s up,” Sanders said.

They went outside. Kevin left, and Sanders followed Treece to a small shed behind the house.

Inside the shed, a gasoline-powered air compressor was coughing and sputtering as it used up the last of its fuel. Two scuba tanks were connected by hoses to the compressor. Treece checked the gauges atop each tank. “Twenty-two hundred,” he said.

“Want to top them off at twenty-five.” He stopped the compressor, filled it with gasoline from a jerry can, and restarted it. “Gonna get me an electric system one of these days. Gasoline’s a mean hazard.”

“Fumes?”

“Aye. That’s why you see that hose there.” He pointed to a metal exhaust pipe that led from the compressor down to the dirt floor and out through a hole in the wall of the shed. “When I first got the thing, I left it outside, just covered over by a lean-to affair. The wind swirled all around it, but I paid it no mind-till one day it swirled the exhaust fumes right back into the air intake. That was a memorable dive; almost bought me a one-way ticket to the glooms.”

“How did you find out?”

“Started to doze off at fifteen fathoms. I figured pretty quick that was what was happening, so I chucked the tank and let her rip for the surface. I made it, but barely.”

Gail appeared at the door of the shed, a piece of toast in her hand. “Good morning,” she said.

“That’s about all I’d eat if I was you,”

Treece said. “Got a hell of a lot of work to do, and you don’t want to be puking in your mask.”

They left Treece’s dock a few minutes before eleven. In the cockpit of Corsair there were three coils of yellow rubber hose. One end of each hose was screwed into the compressor; the other was attached to a full-face mask. Six scuba tanks were arranged in the racks along the gunwales. The aluminum tube lashed to the starboard gunwale had been rigged to a coil of pink rubber tubing, and it, too, was connected to the compressor.

On a ledge in front of the steering wheel Treece had placed the sawed-off shotgun. The dog rode on the pulpit, swaying slightly with each swell but never stumbling. David and Gail flanked Treece at the steering console.

“You really think they’ll come for us?” Sanders said, gesturing at the shotgun.

“Never know.” He looked at Gail. “Ever use a gun?”

“No.”

“Adam’ll take the first shift aboard, then. It’s better, anyway. He knows how to turn off the compressor, and he won’t have any second thoughts.”

“Turn it off?”

“Aye. That’s the only way to let us know if something’s cooking topside. We’ll get the message pretty quick when we start sucking nothing.

Long as you don’t hold your breath on the way up, there’s no problem. Of course,” Treece smiled, “if things are really hopping up here, we might be better off staying down there breathing sand.”

Treece throttled back and began to pick his way through the reefs. The offshore breeze was strong enough to cause foam to roil around the rocks, so he had no trouble finding the slim passages between the reefs.

As they neared the Orange Grove beach, they could see Coffin standing in the wave wash, a rawhide figure in torn denim shorts.

There were no swimmers in the water, so, once inside the reefs, Treece opened the throttle and sped toward shore. When the boat was within ten yards of the line of gentle surf, he shifted into neutral, and the boat glided to a stop. Coffin ducked under a wave and swam to the boat. Treece put a hand over the side and, with one heave, brought Coffin into the cockpit.

“I’m glad you dressed formal for your trip to Orange Grove,” Treece said.

Coffin spat sea water over the side and wiped his nose. “Buggers. Told me not to use their elevator; told me it was private property. I told ’em to call my solicitor.” He laughed. “Rode down with the nicest piece of flesh I’ve seen in years. I fell deeply in love; almost got engaged.”

Treece swung the boat seaward. On the way to the reef, he briefed Coffin about Cloche’s threat and about the diving gear that had cleared customs that morning.

When he told Coffin that he wanted him to stay aboard, Coffin protested, but Treece convinced him, praising his supposed skills with firearms and his rapport with complex machinery.

They anchored behind the second line of reef.

“Once we get everything fired up,” Treece said to the Sanderses, “we’ll go down. I’ll take the air gun. David, stay on my left. You ever see an air lift work?”

“No.”

“There’s a tube alongside it that forces compressed air up through it. Creates a kind of vacuum and sucks up the sand. It can buck like a bastard, so stay clear, and don’t get your hands too close to the mouth or it could drag your fingers up inside and cut the crap out of them. It’ll clean sand off the bottom faster’n you can believe. When we uncover ampules, you pick them out as quick as you see them. I’ll have to be bloody careful not to let ’em get sucked up with the sand, or they’ll smash in the gun. And you,” he said to Gail, “stay on his

left. You won’t be able to see a damn thing down there beyond about two feet, so don’t wander. Here.”

He gave her a canvas tote bag. “He’ll pass you the ampules as he gathers them; you put ’em in there. When the bag’s full, you tap him, he’ll tap me, and you’ll lug it up. Don’t come up without telling me;

I need time to move the gun. If I get too far ahead of you, the sand’ll cover the ampules before you can gather ’em. If anything goes wrong, Adam’Us shut off the compressor. It’ll get hard to breathe right away, but you can probably get one more breath out of it. Come up as close to the bow as you can and hug the boat. You’re hard to see up there, and if there’s anybody aboard wants to do you dirt, you’ll have at least a couple breaths before you have to go down again.

Okay?”

“Okay,” said Sanders.

“I…” Gail hesitated.

“Say it,” Treece told her. “Get it out now.

I don’t want you springing surprises on me.”

“I don’t like that…” She pointed at the Desco masks and coils of yellow tubing. “It scares me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Claustrophobia, I guess.

I can’t stand the thought of being… tethered. If someone turned off the compressor, I think I’d have a stroke.”

“C’mon,” Sanders said.

“It’s the truth,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

Treece said, “No problem. Rather have you comfortable than all jeebly and upset. Use a tank. We’ve got plenty.”

“Thanks.”

“Anybody got anything else to say, say it now.

Once I fire up that beast, you won’t be able to hear yourselves think.”

“You want wet suits?” Sanders asked.

“Aye. We’ll be down a long time. The water’s warm, but not that warm. After an hour, you’ll be shedding body heat like feathers.” Treece took a screw driver from a tool box, primed the compressor, and touched the screw driver to two contact points on the starter motor. Sparks jumped from the contacts, and the compressor roared to life.

Sanders went below. The cabin of Corsair looked like a divers” flea market. Coils of rope and chain hung from the overhead. Two salt-spotted fishing rods rested on bulkhead brackets. In one corner there was a tangle of old regulator hoses, the rubber cracked and rotten. Tools-hammers, chisels, screw drivers, wrenches-littered the bunks. There was no door on the compartment that housed the head; for toilet paper, a Sunday newspaper supplement had been shredded and tacked to the bulkhead. Sanders found a heap of wet suits, masks, and flippers. He sorted wet-suit tops and bottoms, trying to make matches for himself and Gail. Beneath the pile, he saw a rusty knife and a rubber sheath with straps designed to bind it to a diver’s calf. He put the knife in the sheath and took it and the wet suits topside.

Gail was threading two-pound weights onto her belt. He gave her a wet suit and said, “What do you normally use, six pounds?”

“Yes.”

“The suit’ll double your buoyancy. You might dump those twos and load up with three or four fours.”

Gail nodded. She saw the knife in his hand.

“What’re you planning to do with that?”

“I don’t know. Dig in the sand. I found it below.”

Treece threw the aluminum tube overboard. It lay on the water for a moment, churning the surface, then slowly sank, trailing the coil of pink tubing behind it. A stream of bubbles popped to the surface.

Treece yelled to Sanders. “Throw that coil over to port. I’ll put mine over starboard. Keep ’em from snarling right off.”

Sanders threw the yellow coil over. It floated, and air bubbled from the face mask. He mounted a harness on a scuba tank, checked the regulator, and helped Gail into the straps. Then he strapped the knife onto his right leg, added ten pounds to his own weight belt, and buckled it around his middle. He wiggled his feet into his flippers and said, “I guess I’m ready. It feels strange: no tank, no mask.”

Gail said, “Throw me the sack when I get myself together, okay?”

“Sure.”

Gail rolled backward off the gunwale. She cleared her mask and held up a hand. Sanders leaned over the side, gave her the handles of the canvas bag; she waved and dove toward the bottom.

Treece went over next, then Sanders-jumping beside the coil of hose, retrieving the mask, and slipping it over his head.

As Sanders lacked downward, he sorted out his feelings about diving with the Desco apparatus. His field of vision was much greater than with an ordinary mask; he could see his nose. The air hissing in front of the opening above his right eye felt cool. It was nice not to have a rubber mouthpiece in his mouth; he found he could talk to himself. But he was also aware of a faint tug at his head. He looked up and saw the rubber coil snaking down behind him. He saw Treece’s air hose leading across the bottom toward the reef, and he followed it.

Treece was waiting at the mouth of the cave, holding the aluminum air lift well above the bottom.

Even underwater, it emitted a loud noise, like a strong wind rushing between buildings.

When David and Gail joined him, Treece positioned them beside the cave. He made a circle of thumb and forefinger and looked at them. He said, “Okay?” The word was thick and indistinct, but the meaning was clear. They responded with the “okay” sign. Treece touched the mouth of the air lift to the sand.

Instantly, sand vanished from the bottom. It looked to Sanders like a speeded-up film of a vacuum cleaner working on a pile of cigar ashes. In seconds there was a hole a foot wide and half a foot deep.

Sand and pebbles were blown out the back end of the tube, causing a dense, blossoming cloud. The tide was running to the right, tending to carry the cloud away from them, but the wave action on the reef fought the tide, and soon Sanders found he had to lie on the sand to see the hole.

The tip of an ampule showed through the sand, quivering against the force of the suction. Sanders grabbed the ampule and passed it to Gail. She set it on the bottom of the bag.

The hole was deeper now, and suddenly a side gave way. Sand rose in Sanders’ face. Through the fog he saw a shower of glimmers; he reached into the hole and closed his hand around several ampules.

Treece raised the air lift, letting the sand settle so Sanders could see to collect the ampules. Then Treece moved the tube a few feet to the right and started another hole. Right away, he was in a field of ampules, some clear, some yellow, and a few amber.

Gail moved closer to Sanders, taking the ampules from his hand as carefully as possible, setting them, one by one, in the canvas bag. It felt good to move around. The water inside her wet suit was warming to body temperature, and when she moved her arms or legs, pockets of water were squeezed from one part of the suit to another. She tried to count the ampules in the bag, but there were too many. She worried that if she kept adding more and more ampules, they might be crushed when she took them out of the water. Here they weighed almost nothing; out of water the liquid might be dense enough to cause the ampules on the bottom of the bag to crack. She tapped Sanders on the shoulder and pointed to Treece, a hazy gray figure only three or four feet away. Sanders tapped Treece, who raised the air lift off the sand.

Gail kicked over to him and showed him the bag. He nodded and pointed upward.

As she surfaced, the bag acted as a sea anchor, holding her back. She had to struggle to make way, kicking as hard as she could and using her hand to force herself upward. She looked down and saw Treece tap Sanders and beckon him toward the reef.

Coffin had seen her bubbles, and he was waiting on the diving platform. He took the bag from her, and as he looked into it, his eyes glazed in recollection.

All he said was “Aye.”

Gail hauled herself onto the platform and lay on her stomach, panting.

“Next time,” Coffin said, “leave your weights on the bottom. Makes it easier.”

Gail said, “Yes,” and chided herself for not having thought of it.

“I’ll have this bag emptied for you in a jiff; just want to stow the glass.”

She pushed herself into a sitting position. “No rush.”

Coffin walked forward, and Gail could hear a tinkling sound as he removed the ampules from the bag.

“No trouble?” she called.

“Not a peep. I don’t guess the bastard’ll try anything with all them folks on the beach. He’s a piece of work underwater, ain’t he?”

“Treece? I suppose. Is the air lift hard to handle?”

“For most men. It can buck like a goat. But Treece’ll hold it steady as a tree for five and six hours at a go. I think he’d stay down there all his life if he could. He’s been happiest down there, away from people, for a long time.” Coffin’s voice trailed off.

“What do you mean, a long time?”

“You don’t know?”

“I guess not.”

“Well, it ain’t my place to tell tales.”

“Mr. Coffin,” Gail said, controlling her annoyance, “I’m not asking you to tell tales. But there’s something about Treece that everybody but us seems to know, and nobody will say. We’re living in the man’s house, sleeping in his bed. I think we have a right to know something.”

Coffin picked the last of the ampules from the bag.

“Maybe you do. All I’ll tell you is this: He was married.” He walked aft.

“Where’s his wife?”

“Dead.” He handed her the bag. “Two hundred and forty-six. Got a long way to go.”

Gail looked at Coffin, debating whether to press him for more information. She decided not to try: If he wanted to talk, he would-when he close to.

Pressing might anger him. She lowered her mask over her face, bit down on her mouthpiece, and slipped off the diving platform into the water.

Underwater, she rolled the bag into a ball to keep it from dragging. She looked down and saw Treece and Sanders working in the reef, several yards to the left of the cave. Through the cloud of sand that billowed above them she could not tell which man was which. She started down, and the water that seeped into her wet suit felt cold.

She wondered how much air she had left, looking forward to the interlude that would come when she had to change tanks. The sun would feel good, and perhaps she could coax Coffin into sharing a few more facts about Treece’s wife.

She swam through the floating sand and felt dusty motes cling to her hair. She heard a hammering sound, as though someone were working on an anvil.

Blinded by the sand, she was suddenly rammed in the chest by a blast of air and pebbles; she had swum to within inches of the discharge from the air lift. She recoiled and let herself fall to the bottom. Debris rained around her as she crawled forward.

Treece was banging the end of the air lift against the coral, trying to break off a piece so he could put his hand in a hole. A fist-size chunk of coral broke loose and rattled up the tube. Treece felt with his fingers, then shook his head: his hand was too large. He pointed to Sanders, who worked his fingers into the hole and withdrew them, clutching a green crusty piece of metal, which he passed to Treece.

Gail tapped Treece, to let him know she was there.

He turned and gestured for her to open the bag. She unfolded it, and he dropped the relic inside.

Then he led them back toward the cave.

Sand had drifted into the hole Treece had made, and now there was a barely perceptible dent in the bottom. Treece positioned the Sanderses as they had been before and touched the air gun to the sand.

For the first six inches, as Treece redug the hole, there was nothing but sand. But soon he found the carpet of ampules, and Sanders plucked them, in twos and threes, from the shifting bottom and passed them to Gail.

Lying prone on the bottom, moving nothing but her hands, Gail felt a deep, unpleasant chill.

The water in her suit was still and clammy.

Her body, needing to generate heat, sent a shiver into her arms, then her shoulders, then her neck. She hoped she would run out of air soon.

Sanders picked the last two ampules from the hole.

Treece backed up a foot or two, touched the gun to fresh sand, and, in half a minute, exposed countless new ampules.

A lump appeared in the bottom of the hole, a hard cone. Sand slipped away from it until Sanders could see a metallic green peak. Suddenly he knew what it was: an artillery shell. He reached for it, and quickly Treece hit his hand with the air lift, then raised the air lift over his head and looked at Sanders. He held up the index finger of his left hand: Pay attention, he was saying. He pointed to the green cone and shook his finger, then pointed at himself: You stay clear; I’ll handle it. He pointed at Sanders, at the air lift, at the cone: Take this and train it on that thing. Sanders nodded and reached for the tube. There was a circular grip near the mouth.

Treece kept his hand on the grip until Sanders seemed to have firm grasp, and then Treece let go.

Watching Treece use the gun-his hand on the grip, the tube tucked snugly under his arm-Sanders had concluded that the air lift was a docile beast, so he held the grip loosely. The mouth of the tube drifted across the bottom, sucking up sand and stones. Suddenly the tube inhaled a stone it couldn’t pass, and, clogged, it jumped from Sanders’ hand and slammed into his armpit. Whipped by a hundred feet of hose full of compressed air, the tube bounced Sanders along the bottom like a Yo-Yo.

Sanders wrapped his arms around the tube and tried to dig his heels into the sand, but the tube snapped him upward and swung him back and forth. He saw flashes of the surface and streaks of gray and brown as he was swept past the reef. He relaxed his hold, trying to free himself from the tube, and it cracked him across the ribs.

Then the tube fell still. Gasping, peering through a swirl of sand and bubbles, Sanders saw Treece holding the bottom of the jumping air lift against the reef, banging it on a rock. He slammed it down again and again until, finally, the stone was disgorged.

The tube swayed slowly in the tide.

Treece made the “okay” sign and raised his eyebrows, questioning. Sanders touched his ribs and nodded. Treece gestured at the grip: Hold it steady, and it’ll behave. He led Sanders back to the hole.

Gail touched his shoulder and looked worriedly into his eyes. He made the “okay” sign and dropped to his knees. Treece handed him the grip and fit the tube under his arm. Sanders held the grip so tightly that his knuckles whitened. When he was sure he was in control, he nodded at Treece and dipped the gun to the sand. It twitched and hummed against his body, but held firm.

Treece swam to the other side of the hole, facing Sanders, guiding him around the green cone, directing that he dig the hole wide enough so that it wouldn’t collapse on itself.

The shell was standing on end, and it widened-as sand was stripped from it-to a diameter of about six inches.

It was coated with marine growths, but, judging by the way Treece was handling it, it was still very much alive.

When the shell was almost free of sand, Treece wrapped his hands around its middle and gingerly lifted it from the bottom. He inspected it, then set it on the sand at the base of the reef. He took the air lift from Sanders and scoured the ragged hole for more ampules.

The bag filled quickly. Gail was marrow-cold, longing for the sun’s warmth but unwilling to admit it to the men. She would force herself to wait the last few minutes until the bag was full enough. Then, to her delight, she felt the tightness of breath that signaled a nearly empty tank. She tapped Treece, ran her finger across her throat, and pointed to the surface. Treece gestured at the bag and raised his left hand, with two, then three, fingers extended comtelling her to bring down more bags. She nodded. As she rose toward the surface, she saw that Treece and Sanders were staying at the hole instead of moving to the reef. They were going to dig as many ampules as they could, as fast as they could.

Ten or fifteen feet above the bottom, the weight of the bag reminded her to drop her weight belt.

She unsnapped the belt buckle and watched the twelve pounds of lead drop to the sand.

Again Coffin was waiting for her at the surface. As she passed him the bag, she said, “There’s something in the bottom.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. They found it on the reef.”

Gail took off her tank and passed it to Coffin.

“You want a fresh one?” Coffin asked.

“Yes. He wants more bags.”

“Shouldn’t wonder. If what’s supposed to be down there is down there, it’ll take a bleeding eon to get it up with one bag.”

Gail pulled herself onto the diving platform and unzipped her wet-suit jacket. She leaned back against the stern of the boat, letting the sun warm her cold, wet skin. There were tender spots on her face, at the pressure points from the mask, and her mouth felt stretched and sore from the mouthpiece—as if a dentist had been working on a back tooth and hyperextended her lips. She wiped her nose and saw blood on her hand.

“Tired?” Coffin said as he unloaded the ampules.

“Exhausted.”

“I’ll take a trip, then. There’s nothing going on up here.”

“No, it’s all right,” she said, not sure why she was rejecting his offer. “I’ll take one more. If something does happen, better to have you here.”

“At least we’ll rig up something to make it easier.”

Gail rested for a few more minutes, then climbed into the boat and disconnected her regulator from the empty air tank. As she prepared a new tank, she tried to think of a subtle way to get Coffin talking about Treece’s wife. There was no subtle way, so finally she said, “What did Treece’s wife die of?”

Coffin glanced at her, then concentrated on the bag.

“I’m counting,” he said, dropping ampules into plastic sandwich bags. “There. Fifty.” He tied off the sandwich bag and started to fill another one.

Gail was silent until she had finished working on her tank. Coffin dropped the last ampule in the plastic bag and tied it off.

“Has she been dead long?”

Coffin ignored her. “Two-ten,” he said. “That’s four fifty-six altogether.” He reached into the bottom of the canvas bag and removed the piece of green metal. “Hello.”

“What is it?”

“An escutcheon plate.” He held it up. The plate was shaped like a fleur-de-lis. In each of the leaves there was a keyhole. Around the edges were six holes where nails had been. “Covered the lock on a box or chest. What’s he want with that?”

“He didn’t say.”

Coffin set the escutcheon plate on the shelf in front of the steering wheel. “It’s just brass.”

Gail paused. “If you won’t tell me,” she said, “I’ll ask him.”

Coffin opened a locker and took out two canvas bags and a coil of three-eighths-inch hemp. “That would be a cruel thing to do.” Coffin fed an end of the rope through the handles of one of the bags and tied a bowline. He paid out twenty or thirty yards of rope, cut it, and tied the cut end to a cleat on the stern. He repeated the procedure with the other bag, securing the rope to a cleat amidships.

When he was finished, he stared at the knife for a moment, thinking. Then he stabbed it into the gunwale and turned to Gail. “All right. I don’t want you asking him. I don’t want you giving him pain. He’s had his fill of that.”

Embarrassed, Gail started to say something, but Coffin cut her off.

“When he was a lad, he raised his share of hell on Bermuda. No more than most boys, I guess, but his hell-raising seemed to have a direction, as if he was trying to say something. He never shoplifted or robbed anything from common folks. Everything he did was against authority-the police or the British. I remember, the British tried to confiscate some common land on St. David’s to build an installation of some kind. The Islanders got all hot about it, claiming the land was theirs by rights. ’Course, the British took it anyway, but they had the devil’s own time building anything. Treece and his cronies tore things down as fast as they were built, sugared the gas tanks of all the construction equipment, things like that.

“Anyway, when he was about twenty-three, he met a British girl, Priscilla. I forget her last name. She was here on holiday, and she met Treece in St. David’s, pretty much by accident. Lordy, she was a gorgeous girl! And nice. A kinder, sweeter lass never drew breath. Treece taught her how to dive, how to look for wrecks-Christ, how to do everything but talk to fish. She taught him how to handle people, how to handle himself. Calmed him down like an oil slick on a wave. She went home to England but came back the next summer and took a job in Hamilton “working with kids. A year after that, Treece and her got married-that must have been about 1958, thereabouts. The proper Brits on Bermuda didn’t take kindly to the marriage. They never did know what to make of St. David’s people. Sometimes they called ’em red niggers; most often they pretended St. David’s didn’t exist. But once Priscilla moved in with Treece on St. David’s—rather than the other way around, bringing him out into civilization where he could embarrass someone-they forgot about it. She kept her job in Hamilton, and he stayed on the island.

“It was like Treece was all of a sudden a new person. There was no more anger in him, no room for it. There was too much happiness.

“For two, maybe three years, everything was fine. They raised wrecks together. To keep the larder full, Treece did salvage work. His father was still alive then, so he didn’t have the job with the light. One spring in the early sixties, Treece found his first treasure wreck, the Trinidad. It didn’t yield much as treasures go—a gold bar, an emerald ring, a few other things—but it was enough to give him a fair poke. Right away, Priscilla got pregnant. Nobody knew it at the time; it didn’t come out till after. But they should’ve known: she had the glow of life about her. She wore that emerald ring so proud, and she was near bursting with love and… well, I guess goodness is about the only word.

“Like I said, she worked with kids, troubled kids, the ones who hadn’t done enough to merit a stay in the brig but who couldn’t quite handle everything society said they should handle. She loved those kids like they was her own.

“This was around the time the drug thing was just getting big in the States. Not here; it’s never amounted to much here. But there was talk about Bermuda being used as a halfway station for smugglers. A ship arriving in Florida or Norfolk with a European cargo raises eyebrows, especially if it’s stopped at, say, Haiti or the other islands on the way. But sailboats on a round trip from the States to Bermuda, or businessmen down here for long weekends-nobody paid them no mind.

“One day, one of Priscilla’s kids got loose-lipped and spilled something about a schooner due from down south with a load of drugs. She thought it was just talk, but she mentioned it to Treece. Treasure-divers are wired into everywhere, every bar and fish market. They have to be, to pick up clues: so-and-so saw a pile of egg-rock ballast here; somebody else spotted a strange timber there; ‘Hey, look at the coin I found off Spanish Rock.’ That kind of thing. So it wasn’t hard for Treece to check the rumor, and it was true. A private yacht was due into St. George’s with ten kilos of heroin. Part of it would be moved aboard a cruise ship in loaves of bread; the rest would be stowed here and taken up north little by little by “businessmen.”

“In those days, Treece still had some trust in the government. Priscilla had taught him that all authority wasn’t necessarily out to get him. So they went to the government, right to the top, and told what they knew. Well, the government didn’t believe them, and, to be fair, there wasn’t much evidence for them to believe-fair, that is, considering that they were pigheaded about Treece from the start. They didn’t have any idea how much he knew. As far as they were concerned, this was all rumor started by a kid.

“That got Treece pretty riled, partly out of pride. Here he had the bloody goods on some people smuggling heroin, and the government wouldn’t take his word. He decided to stop them himself and present the drugs to the government on a platter. He didn’t know what he was getting into, and he did a couple of foolish things, like tell one too many people what he was up to. He was threatened a few times, and that got him still hotter. Priscilla tried to calm him down, but it was hard “cause she agreed with him.

“Not to burden you with all the details, Treece and some chums met the yacht outside St. George’s harbor and tried to board her. There was a bloody great rumpus, and the yacht steamed away.”

“With the drugs?” Gail asked.

“Aye, but their plan was a wreck. Four days later, Priscilla was found dead at her desk in her office. The medical examiner said she had died of an overdose of drugs, and the case was closed. What people figure happened, one of the smugglers’ contacts here—his operation ruined—waited for her in her office one morning and, before anybody else got there, stuck a needle in her. There were track marks on her arms, but they were all fresh, put there to make it look like she was a user.

“Treece near went crazy, with grief and guilt and fury. He half-blamed himself, half-blamed the government.”

“Did he ever find the man who killed her?”

“No one knows… for sure. But about a week after she died, a man was found in St. George’s, high in the top branches of a tree.

Every bone in his body had been broken at the joints.

His fingers were all bent upward, his arms bent backward, same with his knees and his toes. His head was turned full around, like someone had tried to unscrew it. He was a bartender, mostly unemployed but always with ready cash. Nobody was ever prosecuted, and the only reason anybody connects it with Treece is that it had to have been some powerful man who splintered that fellow and hauled him fifty feet off the ground.

“For about a month, Treece stayed drunk, morning, noon, and night, guzzling anything that had a charge to it. He sat in his house, and the only people who dared go near it were the folks delivering booze and food. Then one day he came out and started diving, did all manner of crazy-ass things: dove alone, in foul weather, went too deep and stayed too long. It was like he was trying to purge himself, or kill himself, and he damn near did that: got bent up like a pretzel and had to spend three days in a decompression chamber. A fisherman found him floating on the surface.”

“What brought him down?”

“Down? You mean back to normal? Time, I guess. But what’s normal? He’s never been the same as he was before she died. I doubt he ever will.”

“Was Cloche involved?”

Coffin paused. “I’d bet on it, but there’s no proof. Anyway, the important thing is, Treece sees the same thing happening again.”

After a moment’s silence, Gail said, “Thank you.”

She felt a sadness, a vicarious pain for Treece. She tried to form a mental picture of his wife, but the only image that fit was herself.

Coffin held the scuba tank for her while she put on the harness and straightened the straps. He handed her the canvas bag she had brought up and said, “When you’re in, I’ll give you the other two. Take ’em down and set a rock on ’em so they won’t drift away. When they’re full, give three tugs on the line, and I’ll haul ’em up. Follow ’em, though, to make sure they don’t tip.”

“Okay.” She stepped over the transom onto the diving platform, checked tank and mask, and jumped into the water.

Pulling the ropes behind her, she swam for the bottom.

Without weights, she tended to float, and she had to use both arms to aid her descent. She found her weight belt on the bottom, strapped it on, and made her way toward the cloud of sand.

She had been gone longer than she thought. A mound of ampules more than a foot high and two feet wide rose in the sand beside David. She kneeled on two bags and opened the third. She found she could scoop handfuls of ampules off the mound and drop them in the bag; they floated safely to the bottom. She filled one bag, then another, then the third. She tapped Sanders to let him know she was going up, and tugged three times on the two ropes. As she unbuckled her weight belt, the two ropes tightened and the bags rose. She grabbed the ropes with one hand and, holding the untethered bag with the other, let herself be dragged to the surface.

“You’re bleeding,” Coffin said.

Gail crossed her eyes and saw bloody water washing around her nose. She tilted her head back and blew her mask clear. “I know. It’s nothing.”

“Sure you don’t want me to take a trip?”

“I’ll do one more.”

Carefully, Coffin pushed the ampules out of the bags onto a tarpaulin he had spread on the deck. “I’ll count ’em while you’re down,” he said, passing the bags to Gail.

She went down again, and this time she felt pain-a tight ache in the sinus cavities above her eyes.

She stopped a few feet below the surface, struggling to maintain depth, and waited for the pain to subside. She descended farther, until the pain stopped her and forced her to wait. This is the last one, she thought: too many ups and downs.

There was pressure now on her ears, too, and she made herself yawn. She felt two squeaky pops, and the pressure was gone. As she started down again, she saw something move-a grayish blur at the edge of the gloom beyond the reef.

She looked harder, straining to see through the haze.

Nothing. Then, farther to the left, another flicker of movement. She turned her head, trying to anticipate where it might appear next. Behind her, away from the cloud of sand, the water was clearer, and as she turned, she saw it: gliding out of the fog as if from behind a curtain was a shark. It moved with sure, unhurried grace, thrust through the water by smooth strokes of its crescent tail.

A knot of panic struck Gail’s stomach. She was more than halfway to the bottom, and she remembered David’s warning about not fleeing for the surface. She could not tell how big the shark was, for, in open water, there was nothing against which to measure it. Nor could she tell how far away it was; it cruised at the outer limit of her vision. But how far could she see? Fifty feet? Sixty?

The shark swam in a wide circle, and as streaks of sunlight caught its back, Gail could see faint stripes along its sides, light brown slashes against the gray-brown skin. One black eye seemed to be watching her, but it registered no interest, no curiosity.

Still holding the ropes, she continued down toward the belching air lift. She found her weights, strapped them on, and tapped Treece. When he looked at her, with her right hand she made a sinuous swimming motion, then, with her fingers, a biting motion.

She pointed off to the right, where she guessed the shark would be by now. Treece looked in the direction she was pointing, but, surrounded by drifting sand, he saw nothing. He looked back at her, shook his head, and, with a curt wave of his hand, dismissed the danger.

Sanders was not sure he understood what Gail had told Treece. He recalled her nervousness in the company of a barracuda and assumed she had seen another one. But seeing the wide-eyed fear on her face, he wondered. He put the heels of his hands together, spread his fingers, then slammed them closed—a fair approximation of a big mouth. He looked at her, raised his eyebrows, and spread his arms, asking, How big? She shrugged: Can’t tell. But she spread her arms as wide as she could: At least this big. Sanders noticed that half an inch of bloody water was washing around in her mask. He pointed to it and shook his finger, telling her not to clear the mask, not to put blood in the water.

She nodded, but misunderstood. Before he could stop her, she pressed the top of her faceplate and exhaled through her nose. A stream of green, mucous water flushed from her mask and drifted off in the tide.

Sanders smacked himself on the forehead and shook his head. He pointed to the drifting threads of blood.

Gail’s eyes looked stricken. She touched his arm and pointed to the surface, asking if she should go up.

He held her wrist and shook his head firmly: No. He pointed to an empty canvas bag, picked up a handful of ampules, and dropped them into the bag.

The ditch Treece had excavated contained a major lode. There were ampules everywhere, poking up through the sand like raisins in a rice pudding.

Picking carefully with the air lift among the artillery shells, Treece would touch a leaf of rotten wood and let the suction peel the leaf away, revealing forty-eight ampules, in eight neat rows of six.

Sanders could not keep up with Treece. He plucked four, six, ten ampules from the sand at a time and passed them back to Gail, but always Treece would have uncovered more. He tried to lift a full box, but though it looked intact, it had no bottom, and the ampules fell away in the sand. He cupped his hands, scooped fifteen or twenty ampules, and turned to give them to Gail. Her hands weren’t there.

He turned, angrily, to face her, and saw her staring at the reef.

The shark was no more than ten feet away, moving from right to left between them and the coral. It was six or seven feet long, a sleek torpedo of muscle.

It watched them, but made no move toward them, and Sanders wondered if it was seeking the source of the blood in the water. He reached to his calf and unsheathed the knife. He saw that Treece had not noticed the shark. He tapped him and pointed, as the shark swam away to the left, keeping a steady ten or twelve feet from the divers and four or five feet from the reef.

Treece watched the shark pass Gail and turn, perhaps twenty feet away, diasppearing behind the cloud of sand. He rapped his knuckles on the air lift and shook his head. He seemed to be saying, Stay calm.

With the knife in his right hand, Sanders had only his left free to gather ampules, and that hand couldn’t accomplish much because Gail wouldn’t take any more ampules from him; she stayed rigid on her knees, clutching a half-full bag and waiting, panicked, for the shark to reappear.

He saw it first. As before, it came from the right, still keeping its distance but, Sanders thought, slightly closer than on its previous pass. It approached the preoccupied Treece and moved toward Sanders, who crouched, holding the knife in front of him. Then Gail saw it, and, shocked, she flailed her arms. The shark saw the movement, and its head twitched, dipping toward Gail.

Gail’s arm touched Sanders” side, and the sensation was a trigger that snapped him forward. His right hand was extended, the knife blade pointing up.

The shark saw him coming and dodged, its head jerking to the right, its tail thrashing twice. But instinct told it to avoid the reef, and, apparently confused, it slowed enough to let Sanders jab the knife into its underside, a foot ahead of the tail.

Sanders’ only conscious thought was how soft the flesh was; the knife went in up to the hilt. Then the body convulsed and tore the knife from his hand.

Blood spurted from the wound in a thick green cloud.

The shark darted away, swimming erratically, its body shuddering, tail twitching. The head turned and the jaws snapped at the bleeding belly. The shark was trying to eat itself.

The knife had fallen a few feet away, and Sanders swam to retrieve it, worried that the shark would return and, in anger, attack.

But it was not the shark that attacked. Sanders felt a hand grip his ankle and drag him backward. Lying on his back, he gazed into Treece’s furious eyes. He saw Treece’s lips moving, and he heard sounds, but no words.

Treece grabbed Sanders’ arm and yanked him to his feet. His fingers completely circled Sanders’ upper arm and, on the inside of the arm where they met, pinched painfully.

Scared and confused, Sanders didn’t know what he had done to enrage Treece, and as he looked into the shouting face, he was genuinely afraid that Treece might kill him.

Treece grabbed the knife from Sanders’ hand and rammed it into the air-lift intake. It rattled up the tube. Then Treece pointed at the surface and started up. He stopped, returned, and gathered up one of the artillery shells.

Gail still crouched on the bottom. Sanders took her arm and helped her to her feet, pulled three times on one of the ropes, and guided her hand to it when the rope was tightened by Coffin’s pull.

As he swam with Gail to the surface, Sanders saw a gray shadow moving in the distance. Hazy as it was, Sanders could see that it was big, much bigger than a man.

When he neared the boat, he looked down and saw the wounded shark, twisting and rolling on the reef. Then the air stopped flowing into his mask.

He kicked to the surface, exhaling the last of his air. He grabbed the diving platform with one hand, removed his mask, and said, “Hey, what…” The sound of Treece’s voice silenced him. “dis … dumb, goddamned, idiotic, crazy thing to do I ever saw in my life!” Treece was already in the boat, railing, Sanders assumed, at Coffin, who had turned off the compressor.

Sanders dipped his face in the water to clean his nose, so he didn’t see the hand that reached for him.

He heard the word “You!” and felt himself grabbed under one arm and hoisted out of the water and over the transom.

His feet slammed onto the deck.

Gail, hanging off the platform, watched Sanders fly out of the water, and a picture struck her: a man, wedged high in a tree, with his limbs splayed backward.

Treece held Sanders by the arm and shook him, snapping his head back and forth. “What in the name of the gentle Jesus do you think you’re doing? You think you’re goddamned Tarzan? You’re a goddamned hazard, that’s what!”

“What…”

“Bugger up a day’s work… Jesus Christ!”

Treece pushed Sanders away and turned to take Gail’s tank off the platform.

Sanders rubbed the welts on his arm. “She was bleed—!”

“Cat shit!”

“She was! In her mask. She cleared it into the water.”

Treece looked at Coffin and said, “Christ, spare me from idiots.” He turned back to Sanders and opened his mouth to shout, but apparently changed his mind. “All right,” he said, struggling against his temper. “First off, that little fish wasn’t about to eat us.”

“Little!” Sanders said. “That thing was at least seven feet long.” Confident now that Treece was not going to hurt him, he felt embarrassed, aggressively resentful. He wanted to question Treece’s declarative cockiness.

“If it was five feet, I’m the King of Spain.

Water magnifies everything.”

Sanders felt himself blush. “Even so…”

“Second,” Treece said, “there wasn’t enough blood in the water to make him more than a little nosy.

He was having a look-see. If he’d have got serious, you’d have seen the excitement ripple along his body; he’d’ve got real agitated. And soon as I spotted that, all we had to do is gather together in the air-lift cloud. Sharks won’t go in it, or if they do, they’ll get the hell out in a hurry without waiting to bite anything. The sand clogs their gills, and they hate that: it can kill ’em. I had his grandfather try to eat me once—a big bastard of a tiger shark, all of fifteen feet long comand I just waited him out in the cloud. But sticking him with a knife is the last bloody thing in the world you want to do. The last! When you’ve got no other choice, when it’s either stick him or be dinner, then you stick him. But not before.”

“Why?”

“He’s liable to bite you. They’re not supposed to have enough brains to get angry, but I tell you, I’ve seen ’em do a right fancy imitation of being pissed off. You want to see another reason, get in the water.”

“What? Where?”

Treece tossed him a face mask. “Put this on and hang off the platform.” He said to Gail, “You, too. But for Christ’s sake, don’t go tooting off somewhere.”

Tentatively, not knowing what to expect, David and Gail slipped off the platform and clung to the chains that attached it to the boat. They held their breaths and put their faces in the water.

The scene thirty feet away, on the reef, looked like a gang fight. All that remained of the shark Sanders had stabbed were a few mutilated pieces, and those were being fought over, with savage frenzy, by countless other sharks. Half a dozen large tiger sharks flailed in a blurred ball around a piece of offal. A smaller shark chased a shred of flesh to the bottom, took it in his mouth, and sped away, pursued by two others. There were sharks everywhere, swimming in frantic bursts, responding to smells and sounds and commotion in the water, searching for prey. Some were gray, some brown, some striped.

Large sharks took random swipes at smaller ones, who darted out of reach-or, when they were not quick enough, were wounded and set upon by the mob.

As the Sanderses watched, more and more dark, sinuous shapes glided out of the twilight blue. One cruised directly beneath the boat, and, seeing something on the surface, rose toward them. They hoisted themselves onto the platform and climbed into the boat.

Treece and Coffin were counting ampules on the deck. Treece did not look up. “See what you did?” He was not gloating; his tone of voice said simply: Now you understand.

“I see.”

Gail said, “How long will they stay around?”

“Till the food runs out. But if they’re beating up on each other like they usually do, the food won’t run out. They’ll be there a good long while.”

“So today’s wiped,” Sanders said. “I’m sorry.”

“Aye.” Treece relented. “It’s no great tragedy. We got a fair load for today, and one thing about those beasts: They’ll keep anybody else from messing around down there.”

Gail shivered. She removed her wet-suit top and dried herself. “How many have you got?”

“Four thousand”-Treece looked at Coffin-“eight hundred and seventy,” Coffin said, wrapping the last plastic bag of ampules.

“Not enough.” Treece looked at the shore. “And not much bloody time. I imagine Cloche has had people on the bluffs all day.”

Coffin said, “He can’t make ’em into good divers in two days. And he’ll have to build an air lift.

Can’t send a bunch of bunnies out here to pick around in the sand with their fingers.”

“Two days, no. But not much more than that, to make ’em middling competent. And when he’s ready, they’re going to come fast. I think maybe we’ll be working nights, too.” He saw a look of chagrin on Gail’s face, and he said, “Not tonight. We’ll give your bugle a rest.”

“What will you do with this?” Sanders rested his hand on the artillery shell.

“Nothing, for now. I just wanted to get it out of there.

Later on, I’ll clean it up and sell the brass.”

“Is it really live, after thirty years?”

“Aye.” Treece said. He set the shell in a vise bolted to the starboard gunwale. From a locker he took a huge wrench which he fit to the bottom of the shell. He tugged on the handle, but the wrench didn’t budge. “Corroded into a bloody weld.” He braced his foot against the bulkhead, wrapped both hands around the wrench, and leaned back.

His biceps balled into tight knots; the sinews in his neck strained against the skin, and a red hue suffused his face.

There was a metallic squeak, then the sound of a crack, and the wrench handle moved. Treece heaved again and broke the seal. He unscrewed the bottom of the shell and dropped it on the deck. “Look here.”

The interior of the shell was filled with stiff, gray, spaghettilike strands, bunched tightly together.

Coffin handed Treece a pair of pliers and a box of matches. Treece fished one of the strands from the shell casing and, holding it with the pliers, gave Sanders the matches. “Light it.”

“What is it?”

“Cordite. That’s what makes everything explode.”

Sanders held a match to the end of the cordite strand.

There was a flash, and the strand burned with the brilliance of magnesium.

Gail said, “That’s all there is to a shell that big?”

“All? Christ, girl, pack a hundred of ’em together and touch a primer charge to ’em, and you can blow Bermuda to pieces.”

“How many are there?”

“No way to know,” Coffin said. “There was about ten ton when we started, but some of it’s been salvaged.”

Treece tossed the cordite overboard. It hissed as it hit the water, and, sinking, emitted a stream of bubbles.

They fetched the air hoses from the water and coiled them on the deck. Treece fastened the air-lift tube to the gunwale, then started the engine.

Charlotte, who had been sleeping on the bow, lurched to her feet and-like a soldier reluctantly assuming a midnight watch-took her post on the pulpit.

Coffin hoisted the anchor, and Treece eased the boat through the reefs and headed for shore.

“What time tomorrow?” Coffin said.

“Early. Say eight o’clock. We’ll do four or five hours in the morning, dry off for the afternoon, and start again around six.” He teased Coffin. “I know you old folks need your afternoon nap.”

“The hell you say!” The boat was still seventy-five yards from shore. “I’ll outlast ’em all.”

Coffin hopped onto the gunwale and dove overboard.

Treece watched, grinning, until he saw Coffin surface and start to swim toward shore. Then he swung the boat seaward.

As the boat rose and fell in the gentle swells, something slid off the steering console and clattered to the deck: the escutcheon plate. Gail picked it up and handed it to Treece.

“Lordy, I almost forgot about that,” he said, adding, with a smile at Sanders, “what with all the excitement caused by the daredevil shark hunter.”

“Adam said it was a plate that went around a lock.”

“Aye, but not just any lock. I’ve heard of these, but I’ve never seen one. I don’t know that any others still exist. It was called a three-lock box.

See the three keyholes; it took three keys to open the lock.”

Sanders said, “What was the point of that?”

“To keep one or two people from making off with the goodies inside. Three partners, three keys. Say someone was sending something from the New World back to Spain. The King had a master set, all three keys. The man in wherever it was-Havana-probably had two, the captain of the ship one. They locked the box in Havana, and the captain took it aboard ship. He couldn’t open it with only one key. When he got to Spain, he presented the box to the King.”

“Wouldn’t be hard to pry open.”

“No, but they didn’t usually. The Spaniards took locks as… well, not holy, but special. The British and Dutch sent documents and what-all back and forth in regular boxes; if a ship was pirated, that was that. No lock would do any good. The Spaniards locked everything, almost symbolically. But a three-lock box!” Treece ran his fingers over the escutcheon plate. “Aye, that is interesting.”

“Why?”

“It means there was something very damned important in that box. More’n likely, something very damned important to the King of Spain.”