Bay of Souls (19 page)

She blew him an imaginary bubble of impatience, in the French manner.

"You're a diver," he said. "You're very able. Why don't you dive it?"

"I've never done a night dive."

"Can that be true?"

"Never. Or a wreck. I go for the reefs, Michael. For the trip down the wall. God, don't you think I would if I could?"

This is where I have placed myself, he thought. If he did not panic, imagine tortures, if he accepted the consequences of his actions, if he was strong, he might imagine himself a lucky man. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen was cowering on his bed, demanding heroic measures. Life had gone that way. He thought of the man with the wheelbarrow. He listened to the drums.

"If we fail," she said, "we can die together. I can see to that." She might have been reading his thoughts. Yours in the ranks of death. "But I think it's an easy dive."

Undressing her, taking up her tense body, he felt like killing her then and there. Returning the perfect form to the entropy that composed it, sending it back through the drums.

She said "I love you," the old song, but it made him feel: Here is a companion in danger. Us against the wall. Here is a friend in an adventure. This, he thought, and clung to the thought, is where the drums had taken him, to a world other than middle-aged marriage and professorship and the tiny world of Fort Salines. He had never been a coward. Without physical courage, he had once told a couple of his colleagues, there is no moral courage. A couple of his colleagues who didn't want to hear it.

Unsheathing her, taking her up like a drink. He turned her over on her belly and said, "Let's see."

She said, "What?"

He had meant, Let's see in all the spaces of these bodies together on the edge, by the floating yellow cans that marked oblivion, headed down the wall, let's see if we can find what the other side of the drums is made of. Let's see if there are dark poison flowers in your cunt, if my finger on that little curiosity where love has pitched his mansion tonight produces visions to terrify.

"Let's see," he said.

When he made her come he could hear the language of everything created beyond his understanding.

Afterward he swigged the rum and offered her some. She was weeping, refusing to let his prick go down, a little comic pursuit like a kid worrying a balloon.

"Tell again," he said, "about the bottom of the sea." He asked because he had a notion that it was in some fashion where he was headed.

"Guinee," she said. "Because the slaves believed that by jumping overboard they returned to Africa. So it's where the soul goes for a while. Guinee, it's very beautiful there."

"So maybe we'll go there."

"We'll go there. John-Paul is there. My soul is there sometimes." Then she said, "It's not always beautiful. They're lonely there."

Someone knocked on the door. The knock was so soft as to seem childlike. They were scarcely sure they had heard it, yet it was there. Her eyes opened wide with fear, a look into the heart of the drums.

"They want me."

"Lara."

She nestled against him and said something he could not hear.

"Don't lie to me," he said. "I'm going to give you everything."

"No, never. On my soul." She smiled a little and moved away. "When I have one."

T
HE HOTEL'S
dive shop was a few kilometers past town, along the beach. Soldiers were smoking in the palm grove behind it. Michael and Roger Hyde went in quietly and turned on the light, waiting to see if anyone noticed them, but no one did. Several minutes later an islander who worked at the shop appeared in the company of two tiny children, who commenced an evening ramble of the premises. In all but one regard they played like children anywhere. Stalking each other above the bins and storage racks, they whispered in patois.

The shop was not large. It was plainly sinking into a state of abandonment that would render its equipment useless before too long. It had a single high-pressure, lowvolume compressor with an electric motor on its own generator. Parts were in need of lubrication. While Roger watched, Michael and the bare-chested Trinitejan, whose name was Hippolyte, worked on the gear. They got some linseed oil and rubber washers, checked the valves and rinsed salt off the masks. The Trinitejan soldiers had gone back to the road.

The tanks and regulators looked serviceable enough and the compressor seemed to draw its source air from the coconut grove outside the shop. Michael had once begun a dive in Baja where the compressor that filled the tanks was located in a service station. The air it supplied was liberally laced with the fumes of economy Pemex leaded, and a few minutes of down time provided an effect similar to the consumption of death cap toadstool. This Trinitejan outfit, by contrast, had been pretty safety-minded. According to Roger, a husband and wife from Martinique had run it. They had stayed on well into the major troubles and were only a few weeks gone.

"Looks like it was a busy shop," Michael said to his new friends.

"In the old days it was," Roger declared. "Really was."

Michael took one of the 80-cubic-foot cylinders and tried applying it directly to the compressor. He had only worked with portable machines before but the join seemed to work. He pumped the tank to something under 3,000 psi, screwed on the regulator and took a lungful. It seemed sweet enough. The taste of the air in the mouthpiece gave him a charge of anticipation, the thrill of game time. He tried the tank again.

"It's a beautiful reef offshore," Roger said. "They call it Petite Afrique because of the shape." He formed the curves of Africa with his hands, swelling breast and scimitar horn. "Two miles out."

"Is that where we're going?"

"We're going farther. To the ledge."

"How deep is the thing?"

"We don't know." He turned to the Trinitejan. "Hippolyte thinks he knows where the plane went down. He says you can see it down there. From the surface you can kind of make it out."

"Should be able to see the operating lights," Michael said with a shiver. "I presume the pilot's still down there?"

No one answered him. The shop employed old-style French-made auxiliary tanks that could be fitted to the diver's main cylinder. They engaged with the shift of a J-valve and Michael disliked using them. When you ran low on air with one attached, the supply in your main tank simply stopped cold. If blind groping over your shoulder failed to locate the valve, you went airless, an absolute condition. Nevertheless, he fitted one on. Frightened, out of practice, he knew he would overbreathe, use up his air in little more than half an hour. He filled two other tanks; it was heavy work and he was sweating, exhausted. It was getting late and he had not had a proper sleep in a long time. A false dawn seemed to rise across the bay from the Morne.

"The accident's been reported," Roger said. "Presumably the U.S. Coast Guard in the Mona Passage picked it up. Or the British in Grand Turk. But the Trinitejans have no helicopter operative we know about and they shouldn't have the location."

"A lot of people could have seen him fall," Michael said.

"That's right," Roger said. "That's why we have to move fast."

Michael carried his gear and a wetsuit down to the hotel's dive boat. Hippolyte had to fill the boat's engine with fuel. He himself brought along a mask and snorkel.

They got the tanks into the dive boat and poled the boat over the inshore reef. Even in darkness the bank of dead coral was visible below, a chalky mass catching the glow of the night sky. At the edge of the reef they shoved off into breaking surf. The seas were manageable, slowed by the outer barrier. Still they had to hold fast. The tanks, secured along the inboard rail, rattled together like conspirators.

Beyond the break, Roger started up the engine, giving the boat enough throttle to hold its place. Michael sat in the small cabin, in a folding chair with his back to the bulkhead. Hippolyte was muttering little songs, jesting rhymes and ditties. He seemed anything but tense as he studied a chart in the rusty dream of his muffled flashlight. The boat was running without lights and Michael thought he had the sense of other unlit boats around them.

"I've survived a couple of these," Roger told Michael. "Glad I didn't ride shotgun on this one."

"Who was the pilot?" Michael asked.

"Colombian," Roger said. "Lara rode down from Puerto Rico with him."

"She did?" That might have been the first time he thought about her fine raptures over the diving. Why should she think it was an easy dive? Unless something was laid out there for him to retrieve. These things went down. He read the papers as much as anyone else. Actually he read them less. But sufficiently. In any case, he was going to do it. Hers in the ranks of death.

While Roger read the island's offshore charts, Michael put on the lower part of his wetsuit over his shorts. They were large, top and bottom. He would have to be careful to get the air out of the suit before going down. Otherwise it might mean shooting to the surface on the way up, filling his lungs with his own death's blood.

Hippolyte spoke up. "
La lune! Regardez!
"

And there she was, a warp short of full, risen over the Morne. It lit up the bay far more effectively than the old town's unsteady municipal flickerings.

"Take the glasses and have a look around," Roger told Michael. "See if we have any privacy."

Michael scanned the horizon line. The binoculars were fancy strap-on navy night-vision items that turned the dark seascape into a digital optic entertainment. No vessels appeared, no one. Dead ahead, the edge of ocean was broken by two tangled shapes, mangrove cays whose leaves, weirdly tinted in the night glasses, shuddered on the wind.

"Nothing."

Roger and Hippolyte were talking earnestly in Creole, Hippolyte pointing from the cays to the hulk of the mountain.

"He thinks if we follow the reef from Sauvequipeut toward Haut Morne we'll go over it."

"How can he tell in the dark?" Michael asked.

"There should be an oil slick when we get there. And it's not as dark to him as it is to you. He's a shrimper."

"A shrimper?"

"He knows the bottom very well. It's his house. He's counting off the little mangrove islands," Roger told Michael. He himself opened the throttle and they chugged along at a deliberate speed. After a few minutes Hippolyte asked for a cigarette. He took it and leaned forward to let Roger light it for him.

"He figures distance by smokes," Roger told Michael.

They followed the reef line, Hippolyte keeping the field glasses focused on the two mangrove cays across a spur of reef. In a while, he requested another cigarette. The swell increased. Finally he tossed the stub of his Marlboro overboard and said, "
C'est là.
"

"Oop!" Roger quickly came about.

He held the bow to the wind with one arm. Hippolyte and Michael hurried to the port rail. Hippolyte leaned down with the viewing glass he used for spotting sponges, a four-sided wooden box with a window at the end. Roger peered into the box with the night glasses. He muttered something and passed them to Michael.

They were over the wall. Using the binoculars and Hippolyte's contraption it was possible to see the higher ledges, patterns of elkhorn and tube coral descending into red and gray murk. A few gas cans and fan belts littered the highest shelf.

"What's he seeing?" Michael asked.

Hippolyte was looking across the reef toward the mountain range.

"
C'est là,
" he told them. "
Voilà isir. Ici.
"

They tried using the hand light in his viewing box but saw no more at first than the outline of their own anxious faces.

Michael took the box and, with Roger and Hippolyte holding him, had a long look down the slope. After a minute or so he thought he saw a faint green glow. In a little time, the glow doubled. Trick of the eye? The points shifted, fluttered, blinked in his bleary vision, but they were light and they were constant. There was a little red light as well.

"I think it might be an instrument panel. It's deep."

"Well," Roger said after a moment, "let's get it, brother."

They went below to a cramped cabin with a nonfunctioning compressor and some empty tank racks. Michael fixed a regulator to the tank and tested it.

"So what's down there, Roger?"

Roger had a photograph of an airplane. He showed it to Michael under a cabin light.

"This is a Cessna 185. Two seats up front, a single seat behind it. Behind the single seat is a four-and-a-half-by-five storage compartment. It contains two watertight cases weighing about ten pounds each. Also a metal tube of drawings and paintings. Get the paintings if you can. But the two cases are the thing."

"I thought it was always packaged to float?"

"What can I say?" Roger asked him. "Rash optimism."

Michael took his fins and went on deck. Roger came up behind him.

"I don't know your temperament, Mike. You might find some upsetting things that you should just, ah, leave alone."

"Like what?"

"Like the pilot."

"Oh."

"He was a very determined guy," Roger explained. "Nice fella."

"You knew him?"

"Oh," Roger said, "I knew them all to talk to. Some of them were charming."

Just then, at the far end of the bay, a high-speed helicopter made the crossing from Point aux Riches to Mont Cesar. It moved in a circuit of whirling lights.

"Shit," Michael said. The helicopter probably indicated the American presence in one of its aspects.

Roger took him by the arm. "Wear your salutation. Wear it for Erzule. And for Lara." He tied the red band around Michael's forehead over the mask.

Michael was looking at the helicopter.

"Go, Michael," Roger said. "Never mind them. Go. Go." He put his palm against the red band. "
Ave Maria Purísima.
Go, for Christ's sake."

Michael, to his own considerable surprise, made the sign of the cross and fell backward into the darkness.

He had taken a hand light. For a while he treaded water, squeezing air from his oversized buoyancy compensator. Then he let himself slowly descend, sweeping the top of the wall with his light. There, it was eel grass and fans, litter, beer cans and wrenches, bristling with spiny urchins. There was a good deal of chalk, dead elkhorn. Hardly any fish, a few tangs. More or less what he had expected.