The Deep

X

He refused to accept the first shred of evidence. He sat at the kitchen table for almost two more hours, cross-checking documents and making notes. When finally he had removed all doubt, he rose, poured himself another glass of rum, and went to wake the Sanderses.

Gail came into the kitchen first, and Treece said, “How you feeling?”

“Okay. No one tried to murder me in my bed.

I’m grateful for that.”

“Feeling rich?”

“What do you mean? Should I?”

Treece smiled mischievously. “Wait till David gets here.”

Gail looked at his face, at his red eyes and the pouches beneath them. “Have you had any sleep?”

“No. Been reading.”

Then she knew. “You found E.f.!”

In the bedroom Sanders stepped into a pair of bathing trunks. A polo shirt hung over the back of a chair. He reached for it, then stopped and thought: The hell with it; I’ll just be taking it off in an hour.

He looked at himself in the mirror and, pleased, slapped his flat stomach. He was brown and lean, and he felt good. Even his feet felt good, tough and callous; he couldn’t remember when he had last worn shoes. He went into the kitchen.

Gail and Treece were sitting at the table, cradling cups. As he walked toward the stove to pour some coffee, Sanders said, “Morning.” They didn’t answer him, and passing the table, he saw them exchange a glance. Annoyed, he thought: Now what?

He sat at the table and said, “Well?”

“Feeling rich?” Treece said.

“What?”

Gail could not contain herself. “He found E.f.!”

Now Sanders understood, and he smiled. “Who is he?”

“She,” Treece said. “You remember, a while back, when you found the medallion, you said, ‘Maybe it was a present for somebody.””

“Sure. And you said, Not a chance.”

“Aye, but then other things didn’t make any sense. A man might have worn the medallion, but he wouldn’t have worn the cameo you found; that was a lady’s piece. And certainly the pine cone was. Perhaps it was being carted home to a wife or lady friend; what you said made me think of that. I went through all the papers again, and I came up dry; there’s not a bloody E.f. among them. A captain of one of the naos, a cargo ship, was a Fernandez, but he went down off Florida.”

“So who was it?”

Treece ignored the question, sipped his tea.

“The pine cone got me thinking, that and the crucifix. It wasn’t possible for goodies like that to go unrecorded-the man who made ’em, the man who sent ’em, the man who commissioned ’em, somebody would have made a note of them. I figured I was nosing around the wrong alley, so I put all the New World papers aside for a while and went back to the history books. That’s where I found the first hint.”

“What?” Gail said. “The name?”

“Aye, and a shopping list. If I’m right”—Treece looked at Sanders—“and by now I know I’m right, what’s down there—flush up against enough live explosives to make angels out of half the human race—is a treasure the likes of which no man has ever seen. It’s beyond price. Men have been looking for it for two hundred and sixty years; people have been hung over it; and a King of Spain stayed randy all his life for lack of it.”

Sanders said, “Is it El Grifon?”

“Aye. It has to be. Listen. In 1714 King Philip the Fifth’s wife died. She wasn’t half stiff before Philip took a fancy to the duchess of Parma. He’d probably fancied her for quite a while, but now that his wife was gone he could bring the good duchess out of the closet. He asked her to marry him. She agreed, but she wouldn’t sleep with him until he had decked her out with jewels-quote-unique in the world. Philip must have had a fearsome lust, because he snapped off a letter to his man in Havana. The chap copied it in his diary, which was included in the appendix of a ratty old book about the decline of Spain in the New World in the eighteenth century. Anyway, Philip’s letter was a shopping list of jewels to be made in the New World and shipped back to Spain.

Below the copy of the letter, the fellow listed what he had assembled.” Treece recited from memory.

“Item: two ropes of gold with thirty-eight pearls on each. Item: a gold cross with five emeralds. And so on and so on. It spills over to the next page of the book, which some idiot tore out a hundred years ago.”

“No pine cone?”

“No, and no crucifix like ours, at least not on the page that’s still there. But there is a reference to a three-lock box.”

Sanders said, “That isn’t conclusive, is it? You said yourself that they used those boxes all the time.”

“For real high-priority goods. But you’re right; it isn’t special to El Grifon. So it was back to the papers.” He sipped his tea.

“The usual way for the King’s treasure to be transported was in a chest in a strong room near the captain’s cabin aboard the capitana. For some reason, Philip didn’t trust Ubilla, the commander. The King’s letter to Havana said that the jewels were to be shipped with the most trustworthy of all the fleet’s captains, and no one else comno one-was to be aware of their existence. Philip didn’t realize it at the time, but that last provision was a bad mistake.”

“Why?” Gail asked.

“Think, girl. It’s what we were talking about before, about Grifon. Up comes a storm; most of the ships go down. Only two people in the world know who had the jewels, the captain who had them and the man in Havana who assigned them to him. The captain survives, makes a deal with the man in Havana, who writes the King that he assigned the jewels to one of the captains who went down and was—poor chap—killed. Then he and the captain split the goodies. The captain waits awhile, rechristens his wreck of a ship, loads it with a relatively worthless cargo, and sets sail for home. If he makes it, he’ll never have to sail again. He’ll have enough to keep himself and his family and two or three small countries afloat. I don’t have even half the list of jewels, but the bit I do have lists more than fifty pieces. The only flaw in the plan was that the ship didn’t make it home. Got caught in a blow and seized up on the Bermuda rocks. Nobody knew there was anything on board worth worrying about.”

Sanders said, “Did the man in Havana admit this?”

“Hell, no! He makes all manner of lugubrious references to the sinking of the fleet and the loss of the King’s jewels. That put me off for a while.”

“I think you’re reaching: he might have done this, he could have done that. It’s all supposition.”

Treece nodded. “I thought so, too, until about four o’clock this morning.” He paused, enjoying the game. “What was the King of Spain’s name?”

“Come on,” Sanders said, feeling manipulated.

“Philip.”

“Aye. And what was his new wife’s name?”

Sanders sighed. “The duchess of Parma.”

“No!” Treece smiled. “Not her title, her name.” He waited, but they had no answer.

“Her name was… Elisabetta Farnese.”

It took a second for the initials to register.

Gail’s mouth dropped open. Sanders was stunned.

Treece grinned. “There’s still one unanswered question.”

Sanders thought for a few seconds, then laughed and said, “I know.”

“What?” The grin lit up Treece’s face.

“The question is, Did King Philip ever get laid?”

“Right! And about that, you contentious bastard,” he said, slapping Sanders” shoulder, “I would not presume to make a guess.”

Sanders tried to share Treece’s joviality, but his mind was crowded with conflicting images: jewels and drugs and explosives, the sight of Coffin’s twisted body, the tattered linen doll, the leer on Slake’s face. “How much is it worth?” he said.

“No telling. Depends what’s still down there, what we can get at, how much was lost, and how much the man in Havana made off with. What we have now is worth, I’d say, somewhere near a quarter of a million dollars-that is, once we can firm up the provenance. We have to find at least one jewel that’s on the list I’ve got, for the provenance to be perfect.”

“What are we going to do about the drugs?” Gail said.

“I’ve thought about it. There’s not a chance of our getting the lot up, not before Cloche makes his move. You know the numbers. What do you figure the value of the ampules we’ve got now is?”

“I don’t know for sure how many ampules we have, but take a round figure-say we get a hundred thousand altogether. That’s over a million dollars, maybe two million.”

“That leaves a bloody heap of glass out there for him. But of course, he doesn’t know that, does he?” Treece was talking more to himself than to them. “He doesn’t know what we’ve got and what’s still there.”

“So?”

“So we’ll go for the jewels; they’re much more important. Let him think we’re digging for glass.”

“We can’t just leave the rest of the drugs for him.”

“No, we won’t, but you have to weigh your risks.

There’s one thing certain: Cloche will try to get us out of the way, more’n likely by killing us.” Treece paused, letting silence give emphasis to his words. “If he kills us, you might say who gives a damn what he gets; it’s not our worry. But I care. I don’t want him to get those drugs, and I really don’t want him to get any of the jewels; dizzy bastard’d melt ’em down and sell the bloody gold, destroy ’em forever. That treasure is unique. It’d be criminal to let it fall into the hands of someone who doesn’t understand what it represents. If we work the glass until he tries something, we’ll lose the jewels. Even if he doesn’t kill us, he can keep us off the wreck-blow it up out of sheer perversity if he wanted to. But if we get the jewels, then we can take whatever time we’ve got left to work the glass. We can blow ’em up if we want to; Christ, I’d relish the chance.” There was no objection from David or Gail. “Let’s go down cellar.” He stood up and opened a drawer.

“You’ve got a cellar?” Sanders said.

“After a fashion.” Treece took a strip of maroon velvet from the drawer and wrapped the cameo, the medallion, the crucifix, the chain, and the pine cone. “Have to have something to anchor this shack in a breeze; else, she’d tumble off the cliff.”

He led them into the living room and moved a chair.

Under the chair, a small brass ring was countersunk into the floor. Treece pulled on the ring, and a four-by-four-foot section of cedar boards separated from the floor. He set the trap door aside and took a flashlight from the mantelpiece, then sat on the floor and let his legs dangle into the hole. “It’s about a five-foot drop, not much more than crawl space, so mind your heads.” He dropped into the hole and ducked down.

The cellar was a packed-dirt square as large as the living room above, walled with heavy stones held together by mortar.

The Sanderses followed Treece’s crouched figure to a far corner of the cellar.

“Count three stones up from the floor,” Treece said, shining his light in the corner.

Sanders touched the third stone above the floor.

“Now move four to the right.”

Sanders ran his fingers along the wall until they came to rest on a cantaloupe-size rock.

“This?”

“Aye. Pull.”

Sanders could barely get his hand around the stone, but once he had a good grip, the stone slid easily from the wall.

There were two pieces of paper in the hole; behind them, another stone. “My birth certificate,” Treece said, reaching in and removing the papers.

Gail wondered what the other piece of paper was, and in the reflected glow of the flashlight she could make out a last name—Stoneham—and three letters of a first name:

Ha. Priscilla, she thought: his wife’s birth certificate.

“What’s that?” Sanders said, pointing to something small and shiny in the hole.

Quickly, Treece shifted the light away from the hole and put his hand inside. “Nothing.” He removed the object.

Gail thought, his wedding ring.

“Now reach in and pull that other rock.”

Sanders did as he was told. His arm went in the hole almost up to the elbow.

When the other stone was free, Treece placed the velvet-wrapped jewels in the back of the hole.

“Okay, put it back.”

Sanders replaced the rear stone, Treece returned the papers and the shiny object and set the front stone back into the wall.

Treece said, “All you have to remember is, three up, four over.”

“I don’t want to remember it,” said Gail.

“It’s none of our—”

“Just a precaution. I might take a wrong turn and walk off a cliff. Any of us might. Better we all know where things are.”

They went up into the house. “Might’s well have a bite to eat,” Treece said as he pushed the chair over the brass ring in the floor. “This is going to be a long day.”

They reached the reef at eleven o’clock in the morning.

It was a clear, calm day, with an offshore breeze barely strong enough to keep the boat off the rocks.

They could see twenty or thirty people, in twos and threes, on the Orange Grove beach, and a mother playing with her child in the wave wash.

While Treece set the anchor, Sanders found a pair of binoculars and focused them on the patch of sand where he had found Coffin’s body. “They’ve raked it clean; you can see marks.”

“Aye. Don’t want to leave anything that might upset the tourists. Hundred a day doesn’t include a corpse on the beach.”

Gail grimaced at the coarse, matter-of-fact dismissal of Coffin. She started to speak, but Treece, anticipating her, cut her off.

“A man dies, girl, he isn’t any more, least not down here. Respect and all that crap doesn’t serve the dead; it just makes the living feel better. The dead one, maybe he is somewhere else—maybe all he needs to be somewhere else is to believe he will be somewhere else. I won’t deny a man his belief, and I don’t know any more’n you about souls and all that stuff. But I know this: Speaking good or bad about something that isn’t any more is a bloody waste of time. I can’t feature Saint Peter sitting up there saying; ‘Hey, Adam, there’s folks bad-mouthing you down there. What’d you do to merit that?’” his Gail did not respond. She waited a moment, then said, “I can dive today.”

“No. Stay here. There won’t be much lugging. If we get all’s down there, it won’t be more’n a bag or two. And I want someone on the boat, today specially.”

“Why?”

“Because I think we might have a little excitement today.”

Treece checked the shotgun. “Just be sure you remember how to use this and how to shut off the compressor. If nothing happens, the least you’ll get is a royal fine suntan.” He started the compressor.

Treece and Sanders returned to the cove in the reef where they had found the pine cone. The tide carried the sand from the air lift away to the right, so they had a clear view of the bottom.

For the first few minutes, they found nothing but single ampules, ten in all. Sanders reached to take them from the hole, but Treece waved him off and let the ampules rattle up the aluminum tube. One shattered, and a small billow of pale liquid puffed from the end of the tube. Treece dug deeper, inching closer to the reef.

There was a change in the way the sand moved under the air lift’s suction. Instead of coming away smoothly in an unbroken pattern, now it moved in a rough V, as if it were surrounding something. Treece cupped his left hand over the mouth of the tube, cutting off its suction, and gestured with his hand for Sanders to dig in the hole.

Sanders rubbed the center of the V with his fingers and felt something hard. He brushed sand away and saw gold.

It was a rose, about three inches high and three inches wide, and each of its golden petals had been finely etched with a jeweler’s tool.

Sanders picked it from the sand, held it by the delicate stem for Treece to see, then put it in a canvas bag.

Treece nosed the air lift against the base of the reef. Lying on his stomach a foot from the mouth of the tube, Sanders saw more gold under a rock overhang. He tapped the air lift, and Treece backed off. Sanders reached under the rock, his fingers closed on the gold and pulled. It moved, but it felt heavy, as if it were attached to something. When his hand was clear of the reef, Sanders looked at his palm and saw a gold chameleon with emerald eyes. The chameleon’s mouth was open, and there was an opening near the tail. From the chameleon’s belly protruded a sharp, finlike spike of gold. Two strands of gold chain led from a ring on the animal’s back down into the reef. Sanders tugged at the chain, and, slowly, it came from the reef-ten feet of it, spilling in coils beneath Sanders’ face.

Treece took the chameleon from Sanders and held it to his mask. He pursed his lips and mimed blowing inside his mask at the chameleon’s head, telling Sanders that the figurine served as a whistle. Then he turned the animal on its back, curled his lip, and jabbed the spike toward his teeth: the spike was a toothpick.

They had been down for nearly five hours and had collected four gold rings (one with a large emerald); two huge almond-shaped pearls joined by a gold plate etched with the letters “E.f.” on one side, a Latin inscription on

the other; a belt of thick gold links; and two pearl-drop earrings. Then Treece spotted the first gold rope. It was deep in the reef, almost invisible except when shafts of sunlight caught the woven strands of gold and the tiny pearls held in place by the intricate weaving. Treece directed Sanders to reach for the rope.

Sanders was bitterly cold. Despite his wet suit, the hours of immersion had sucked heat from his body, and by now he was shivering constantly. He obeyed Treece without thinking, without worrying that something alive might be in the hole. His trembling hand reached into the reef, fingers closed around the gold and pulled: the rope was stuck, wrapped around a rock, perhaps, or covered with stones. Sanders withdrew his hand and shook his head at Treece.

Treece raised his right index finger and pointed at Sanders, saying: Watch. He made punching gestures at the reef with the air lift, then cupped his hands and pointed at Sanders.

Sanders didn’t understand what Treece was saying.

He shook his head; a cold tremor ran up his back and made his head quiver. He could not concentrate on Treece’s gestures.

Treece pointed at the surface, set the air lift in the reef between two rocks, and started up.

Sanders grabbed the canvas bag and followed.

“That’s the one,” Treece said when they were aboard.

“There’s our bloody provenance.”

“I know.” Sanders unzipped his wet-suit jacket and rubbed the goose flesh on his chest.

“We’ll have a rest and let you warm up a bit; then we’ll go get her.” He looked at the sun, then at Gail. “Coming up on five o’clock. Any trouble?”

“No. I’m frying, that’s all.”

Sanders said, “What were you trying to tell me down there?”

“We’ll have to break up the reef to get at the rope. I’ll bang the gun against the coral, and as pieces break off, you take ’em and set ’em aside. Don’t want ’em to fall into the hole.”

He walked toward the cabin. “Get you a pry bar.

Gun’ll break up the coral all right, but it won’t move boulders.”

They rested for half an hour. Sanders lay on the cabin roof, warming in the lowering sun.

Ashore, the few remaining people on the beach straggled toward the elevator, which moved up and down in the shadows of the cliffs and flashed as it rose into the sunlight.

“Let’s go,” Treece said. He touched Gail’s shoulder with a finger, and a circle of white appeared in her pink-brown skin and faded away. “Stay out of the sun. It’ll burn you, even this late in the day.”

“I will.”

“Go below and stretch out if you like. Charlotte’Us raise a din if anyone snoops around.”

The men went overboard-Treece with a canvas bag, Sanders with a crowbar. Gail watched until she could no longer see their bubbles, then went below.

The work on the reef was slow and, because of the diminishing light, difficult: every time Treece rammed the nose of the air lift into the coral, a cloud of fine coral dust would rise from the broken piece; Sanders had to grope blindly to catch the coral before it fell out of reach into the hole. The rope of gold was wrapped around the base of a large oval rock, most of it underneath the rock—as if it had fallen loosely into the reef and been forced, by centuries of wave and tide action, into every crevice and cranny around the rock.

Sanders had wanted to use the crowbar to tip the rock backward, but Treece stopped him, demonstrating with his hands the possible danger: the rope might have snaked around the back of the rock, too, and tipping it backward would crush the soft, fine gold strands beneath the sand.

It took them an hour to widen the hole three feet. Now Sanders could put his head and arms and shoulders into the hole and guide the mouth of the air lift along the gold rope, gently prying it free, inch by inch, as the sand was stripped from it. The pearls were set at three-inch intervals along the rope. Sanders counted the pearls already free-seventeen. If Treece’s research was correct, if there were thirty-eight pearls per rope, there were five more feet of gold rope yet to come.

The work became dreamy, unreal: encased in water, hearing nothing but the sound of one’s own breathing and the distant chug of the compressor relayed through the air hose, motionless save for the rote movement of fingertips-Sanders fantasized that he was doing multiplication tables in a cocoon.

Gail was sitting on one of the bunks, trying to concentrate on an article in an old yellowed newspaper, when she heard the dog bark. Then she heard an engine noise, drawing near, stopping.

Then more barks, then voices. She held her breath.

“She empty.”

“Seem so, ’cept for the dog.”

“Hey, dog! How your ass?”

“Hush your mouth. Sound carry.”

“How carry? Down the water? Shit.”

The dog barked twice, growled.

A third voice, familiar. “Cut that yammering. Rig up.”

Gail put a hand on the deck and crept off the bunk. Keeping her head below the starboard porthole, she crawled to the ladder. She stopped at the bottom of the ladder, hearing the beat of her pulse, breathing as quietly as possible through her mouth, thinking: If the other boat was abeam of Corsair, she could crawl into the cockpit without being seen, keep her back to the bulkhead, stand up, and reach the shotgun. If the boat was astern, they’d see her the second she poked her head out of the cabin.

She listened to the sounds of equipment being readied: the clink of buckles, the hiss of valves opened and closed, the thud of tanks on the deck. The sounds seemed to be coming directly from the left, abeam, so Gail climbed the short ladder and flattened herself against the bulkhead. The shotgun lay on the shelf by the steering wheel, four or five feet away.

To reach it, her hand would have to pass in front of the window.

“How many loads you got for that thing?”

“This and two more.”

“You?”

“Same. Shit, man, only three down there, and one a splittail.”

“Just mind you don’t mess with the pink hose. We don’t need it.”

Now, Gail thought; they won’t be looking this way.

She extended her arm, leaned forward, and grabbed the butt of the shotgun. She lifted it off the shelf with no trouble, but, at arm’s length, it was heavier than she remembered: the barrel sank a few inches and struck the steering wheel.

“What that noise?”

“What noise?”

Gail clutched the shotgun to her middle, one hand around the trigger guard, the other on the pump slide.

“That noise.”

“I don’t hear no noise.”

“Well, I do. Somethin’ on that boat.”

“Shit. Dog only thing on that boat.”

“Somethin’ inside that boat.”

“You jumpy, man.”

“You go “head over. I gon” cuddle this boat up to that boat and have me a look.”

A laugh. “You be careful. That dog bite your ass.”

“I shoot that sucker with a spear gun.”

A splash, another, a few incoherent words, then silence.

Gail waited. She heard the sound of a paddle sweeping through the water, looked aft, and saw the shadow of the other boat drawing near.

She stepped around the bulkhead, the shotgun at her waist. The man was in the stern of the other boat, looking down at the water and paddling. She didn’t have to see his face; the angry red scar shone black against his dark chest: Slake.

“What do you want?”

Slake looked up.

In the brief glimpse Gail had of his face, she saw surprise, then glee. What followed seemed a single motion: he dropped the paddle, bent to the deck, righted himself. Something shiny in his hand. A twanging sound, tightened elastic released. A flash of metal. The thunk of a steel spear in the bulkhead six inches from her neck.

Then (she would not remember all of this) the click-clack of the shotgun cocking. The roaring boom of the twelve-gauge shell exploding. The sight of Slake, three yards away, as the nine pellets struck him in the sternum-a baseball-size hole, red ooze flecked with white-staggering backward across the cockpit, striking the windward gunwale, sagging, hands clutching at his chest. A gurgling rush of breath. Echo of the explosion across the still water. Eyes rolling up in his head. Skin color graying as the blood left the head. Slump to the deck.

The steady chug of the compressor.

Open-mouthed, she watched the twitching body. The slap of water against Corsair’s hull brought her out of shock. She put the shotgun on the deck, walked aft to the compressor, found the wing nut, and turned it. The motor sputtered and died.

Sanders freed the last two inches of gold rope.

He tapped the aluminum tube and saw it withdraw from the hole, gathered the rope in his right hand, and backed out onto the reef. The light was fading fast, but in the blue-gray mist he could still see Treece and the reflections off the air lift and the outline of the reef. Assuming that they would keep digging for more gold, Sanders opened his wet-suit jacket and stuffed the gold rope inside.

Sanders sensed a change in the sound patterns; something was missing. He exhaled, drew another breath, and realized what was missing: the compressor. He strained to fill his lungs one last time, looked at Treece, and saw a glint and a shadow falling toward him. The glint moved-a knife. Treece’s air hose stiffened, the glint slashed back and forth, and the air hose went limp. Treece turned and raised his arms over his head.

Two men struggled in a twisting ball of shadows, a flurry of arms and hoses and bubbles, the shape of the knife falling to the bottom. Thrashing and kicking, the forms rose toward the surface.

Sanders held his breath, fighting panic. He kicked off the bottom and followed the thrashing figures, rising slowly, remembering to exhale, searching for other shadows in the gloom.

The shape of the figures changed. He could see Treece clearly now, his long body extended vertically, flippers kicking steadily. His hands were clasped around the other man’s head. The man’s regulator and mouthpiece floated away from his tank. For a moment, Sanders thought Treece was helping the man reach the surface. Then, as he saw the man’s arms-pinned to his sides-struggling to wrestle free, saw the legs kicking feebly, Sanders knew what Treece was doing: his hand was clamped over the man’s mouth and nose, preventing him from exhaling. The compressed air in the man’s lungs would be expanding as he was dragged to the surface. With no exit from mouth or nose, the air would be forced through the lining of the lungs.

Sanders had a split-second recollection of a diagram he had seen in a diving book: a ruptured lung, a pocket of air in the chest cavity collapsing the lung, forcing still more air into the chest cavity, that air ramming the collapsed lung and other organs across the chest cavity and collapsing the other lung. Bilateral spontaneous pneumothorax. The man might well be dead before he reached the surface. Briefly, Sanders wondered if the man would feel pain or would simply pass out and die of anoxia.

Sanders was ten feet from the surface, and now all he could think of was getting air. The tightness in his chest lessened as he rose nearer the top; he knew he could make it. But what was up there waiting for him?

Suddenly his head was snapped backward, and he was pulled toward the bottom. Something had grabbed his air hose. He reached for his mask, trying to wrench it off his head, but the pressure on the straps was too great. His flailing hands found the hose and pulled against the downward force. In the twilight blue, he could only see a few feet of the yellow hose. Then there was a flicker of steel, and he saw, rising at him-climbing his air hose-a man with a spear gun.

Sanders’ head throbbed with the need for oxygen.

He yanked frantically at the hose, but the man had a firm grip.

They were six feet apart when the man released the air hose, raised the spear gun, and aimed it at Sanders’ chest. Sanders kicked at the gun with his flippers, hoping to deflect the aim, but the man was patient. His cold eyes watched and waited for an interval between kicks.

A fuzz of dizziness passed through Sanders’ brain, and he knew he was dead. He waited for the flash of pain that would come as the spear pierced his wet suit and stabbed between his ribs. Maybe he would pass out first….

The man fired. Sanders saw the spear coming at him, felt the blow as it struck his chest, waited for the pain. But there was no pain.

A yellow blur. The spear gun jerked upward, spun out of the man’s hand, and fell. The man’s fingers tore at his throat; the mouthpiece flew from his mouth. Huge, gloved hands on each side of his neck knotted a length of air hose around his throat.

Then Sanders fainted. The pain in his head was gone, and he felt as if he were flying through a warm darkness.

He awoke on the surface. Gail’s hands cradled his face, holding the back of his head against the diving platform. He became aware of a face against his, a wet mouth engulfing his mouth, a blast of breath rattling down his throat. His eyes fluttered open and saw Treece’s face pull away.

“Welcome back,” Treece said.

Sanders’ mind was still foggy. “Did I drown?”

“Gave it a try. Another couple of seconds, you’d’ve been up there with Adam giving us the celestial eyeball. You’d better be glad the duchess was a greedy bitch.”

“What do you mean?”

“That bastard hit you full in the chest with his spear.

If it hadn’t been for the gold, you were dead.”

Sanders looked down and saw a neat hole in his wet suit. The spear had penetrated the rubber but had caromed off the gold rope he had stuffed inside his jacket.

Gail put her hands under Sanders’ armpits and, with Treece pushing from below, hauled Sanders onto the platform.

“How many were there?”

“Three. One’s floating out there somewhere, making terms with the devil. Your girl splashed another one all over their boat. The third one’s here.” Treece yanked his right hand, and a rubber-hooded head popped out of the water, a piece of yellow hose still wrapped around his neck.

Sanders looked at Gail. “You killed one?”

“I didn’t mean to. I had no choice. He…”

Treece said, “What’d I tell you? When you’re up against it, you do the damnedest things.”

Sanders rolled onto his stomach and stood up.

“Here,” Treece said, extending the still body to Sanders. “Take this trash and haul it aboard while I dive to fetch the gear.”

Sanders took the hose. “Is he dead?”

“I imagine. But don’t take it for granted.

Dump him on the deck and put the shotgun on him till I get back.”

“Don’t you want to start the compressor?” Gail asked.

“No, just toss me a mask. If I can’t make it on one good heave, it’s time to find another line of work.”

While Gail looked for a face mask, Sanders pulled the inert man onto the platform. He let go of the hose, bent down, and took the man’s arms.

“Don’t bother with that,” Treece said. “Just haul him up with the hose.”

“I…” Sanders knew that, practically, Treece was right: it would be much easier to pull the man aboard by the hose around his neck. But he couldn’t do it. If he knew the man was already dead, that would be one thing. If he wasn’t dead… Sanders was not ready to be his executioner.

“Don’t be so delicate,” Treece said.

“He’s as good as dead.” He took the mask from Gail, hyperventilated for a few seconds, breathed deeply one last time, and slipped below the surface.

“What did he mean by that?” Gail said.

“I don’t know. Help me with this, will you?”

Each holding one arm, they pulled the man over the transom and lay him on the deck.

“He’s heavier than he looks,” Gail said.

“Dead people are.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I read it somewhere.”

“You mean really heavier, or just heavier than they look?”

“I don’t know. Where’s the shotgun?”

“Over there.” Gail pointed. “I don’t think you’ll need it.” She looked at the still black form and shivered.

Sanders picked up the gun, sat on the gunwale, and rested the gun across his knees. “What was it like?”

He nodded toward the other boat. Sanders found that he envied Gail for having killed Slake. The thought of killing the man who lay helpless at their feet was repulsive. Unfair. But to kill a man in pure self-defense, to take up the challenge and beat the man who was trying to kill you-a fair fight.

Vengeance.

“It was horrible,” Gail said. “I didn’t know what I was doing, not till afterward.”

It was dark now; the moon was creeping over the horizon, and the stars were pale dots against the black sky. Sitting on opposite gunwales, David and Gail saw each other as faceless silhouettes.

They did not see the first faint tremors in the black rubber body on the deck, nor the opening of the eyes, nor the slight movement of fingers toward the calf of the left leg; did not hear the soft snap of the strap on the sheath around the leg or the sliding of the blade from the sheath.

The dog was the first to hear the new sounds. It whined.

Sanders looked toward the bow, and as he turned his head, the body sprang into a crouch and screamed-a high-pitched guttural yowl that sounded like a cat fight.

Sanders whirled back and leveled the gun. “Hey…”

He did not finish the command. The man leaped at him.

Sanders squeezed the trigger. Nothing. The gun wasn’t cocked. He pulled on the pump slide, leaning backward to gain one extra tenth of a second. He saw the blade swooping down at him, raised an arm in self-defense, and fell overboard. The slide snapped forward, and as Sanders hit the water, feeling a new, unspecific pain-in his arm or his side; he couldn’t tell which-his finger squeezed the trigger. The shotgun fired into the air.

The man turned to Gail-crouching, waving the knife slowly in front of him, daring her to grab for it.

He murmured low, throaty sounds, yips and growls and half-words, feinted with the knife, and, little by little, moved closer. Moonlight illuminated his face, and Gail saw his eyes—wild, fevered—and saw a trickle of drool on his chin. She wanted to talk to him, plead with him, but she was not sure the man even knew where he was or what he was doing. He yowled again.

Gail backed against the gunwale, glanced down at the water, and wondered if she should dive overboard.

No: he’d be on her in an instant. She hedged forward along the gunwale, hoping that, when the man lunged, she could dodge him in the darkness of the cockpit.

The man screamed and jumped, swinging the knife in a wide arc.

Gail ducked and threw herself to the left, hearing the sound of breaking glass: the momentum of his swing had carried the man’s hand through the pane of glass in the bulkhead. She crouched by the steering wheel.

The man turned, whispering incomprehensible curses, searching for her in the shadows. He saw her and raised the knife.

A noise behind him stopped his move. He half-turned.

Gail decided to dash for the stern. She took a step, then saw that escape was unnecessary: there was a heavy thump, the man’s eyes rolled back in his head until only two slivers of white were showing, and he fell to the deck.

Sanders stood where the man had been, a wrench in his right hand. He had hit the man with the flat side of the wrench, and it was matted with blood and hair.

Sanders said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Gail said. She saw that he was holding his left arm across his chest, as if in a sling. “You’re hurt.”

Sanders touched his arm. “I can’t tell, but I don’t think it’s too bad.”

They heard Treece come aboard.

“He try something?” Treece said, noticing how the body now lay on the deck.

“Yeah. I wasn’t quick enough.”

“Well, looks like you made up for it.” Treece bent over and felt for a pulse on the man’s neck.

“Iced him clean.”

“He’s dead?” Sanders said.

“I’ll say.” Treece went below.

Sanders still held the wrench. He looked at it, then at the body on the deck. A moment before, it had been a man, alive; now it was a corpse. One swing of one arm, and life had become death. Killing should not be that easy.

Sanders heard Treece say, “Where’s the shotgun?”

He looked up and saw Treece playing a flashlight over the water, searching for the other boat.

“In the water,” Sanders said. “I’m sorry.”

“Did you get a sudden attack of the mercies? They can be fatal.”

“No. I tried to shoot him, but the gun wasn’t cocked.”

“You’re lucky.” Treece handed him the flashlight, dove overboard, swam to the other boat, boarded it, walked forward, found a length of rope, and made it fast to a cleat on the bow. Then he dove off the bow, holding the free end of the rope, and towed the boat to Corsair.

He lay the dead man on the gunwale and tied the rope around his neck.

“What are you doing?” Gail asked.

Treece looked at her, but said nothing. He found a knife, slit the corpse’s belly, and before any viscera could ooze onto the deck, rolled the man overboard.

“What are you doing?”

Gail said again.

“Feedin’ him to the sharks.”

“But why?”

“A warning. Cloche is loading these animals with some fiery shit, to hop ’em up, turn ’em into kamikazes. It’s all bush, but you feed a bird like that hallucinogenics and then talk bush to him, and he’s a rightful maniac. Believes he’s serving some crazy-ass god, and when he wakes up in the morning he’ll be in Valhalla or some such. But they believe the only way you’ll get there is whole; can’t have anything missing, so being lunch is bad bush. Cloche’s people find what’s left of that fellow hanging off the bow rope, maybe they’ll think twice before pulling a stunt like this again.”

They could see the other boat, outlined against the moonlight. The corpse’s head bobbed to the surface, jerked up by the rope, then sank again.

Gail turned away and said, “My God!”

“Don’t waste sympathy on him,” Treece said.

“He can’t feel a thing.”

There was a thump against the leeward side of Corsair, followed by a grunt and another thump.

“What’s that?” Sanders said, worried that, somehow, more of Cloche’s divers were attacking. He looked over the side and saw white foam boiling up beside the boat.

Treece shined the light on the water, then quickly turned it off and said, “Next thing, they’ll eat the boat.” He went forward.

Sanders felt an acid pool rise in his throat, and he gagged at the taste. The few seconds of light had branded a nightmare image on his brain. What had thumped against the boat was a body, not that of the man tied to the other boat, but of the man Treece had killed earlier by preventing him from exhaling. And what had slammed the body against the boat was the broad, flat head of a shark. The head was the size of a manhole cover. Two nostrils flared on the snout, and the jaws snapped as the tail thrust forward, forcing more and more rubber and flesh into the mouth. The eyes looked sleepily evil, two-thirds covered by a white shield of membrane. While Sanders had watched, the head shook fiercely from side to side, and a two-foot crescent of flesh had begun to tear away.

Now, in darkness, Sanders could still see the white foam and hear the slapping of the tail and the crunch of teeth against bone and sinew.

“What is it? “Gail asked.

Sanders shook his head, trying not to vomit.

Gail looked out over the dark water at the receding shape of the other boat. “It’s so quiet,” she said.

“Aye,” Treece said, standing at the wheel. “Death is that.” He started the engine.

The trip back to St. David’s didn’t take long, for the night was calm and the moonlight bright.

They were still several hundred yards at sea when the offshore breeze brought them the strident sounds of taxi horns.