Benchley, Peter (13 page)

inflation of that value, you’re well over a billion dollars.

That would be nice and neat-if it were true. The trouble is, everybody was corrupt, and for every dollar’s worth of registered treasure on a ship, there was probably another dollar smuggled aboard.”

“To avoid taxes?”

“A special tax. By law, the King of Spain got twenty per cent of every treasure, no matter who collected it. A businessman who traded European goods for New World gold still had to pony up the so-called King’s Quinto. It was much cheaper to bribe some fellow to overlook a few things than it was to give twenty per cent to the crown.”

“That explains the anchor caper,” Sanders said. “I ran across something at the

Geographic

about a captain who had his anchor cast in gold and painted black.”

“Aye. He was hanged. The point is, there’s no way to tell what could be on a ship. There’ve been a dozen cases of ships sinking and being half-salvaged-and the half that was salvaged toting up to more than was listed for the whole ship. The lead ship of a fleet, the

capitana,

might have had three million dollars in registered treasure on her. But this is no

capitana:

there’s no fleet to go with her. It’s possible that this ship was taking home some of the survivors of the 1715

fleet. And maybe some of the salvaged treasure.

But then there’d be some record-if not here, then in Cadiz or Seville-of the survivors leaving Havana and ending up here. There’s nothing.”

Treece reached inside his wet suit and pulled out an oval of gold. “Here’s another bit to the mystery.”

“A coin?”

“No.” Treece passed it to Sanders. “A medallion.”

There was a raised head of a woman on the medallion, and the letters “S.c.o.p.n.”

“I think it’s Santa Clara,” Treece said.

“The “O.p.n.” stands for

ora pro nobis—

Santa Clara, pray for us. Look on the back.”

Sanders flipped the medallion. The back was clear, except for the letters “E.f.” “Those same initials!”

“Aye. This morning I wasn’t able to find any officer or noble or captain with those initials, and I’ve looked through mounds of papers.”

Sanders returned the medallion to Treece.

“Maybe it was a present for somebody.”

“Not bloody likely. Nobody gave stuff like this away.” Treece dropped the medallion and the coin into his wet suit, turned off the overhead light, and started the engine. He sent Sanders forward to raise the anchor, and when he heard the clank of iron on the deck, he swung the wheel hard left and headed seaward.

Sanders returned to the cockpit and said, “What do we do now?”

“We stay away from this place for a couple of days while I try to figure out what the hell’s underneath

Goliath.”

“Cloche …”

“I know. Now he knows I’m interested, he’s bound to raise a ruckus before long. Best thing for you two might be to pack up and go home. Take the risk he’ll leave you be.”

Sanders didn’t reply; Treece was probably right. Maybe he should try to take Gail home on the first plane out in the morning. But if he left, it would mean he had been

lying to himself all his life. His dreams and ambitions-of working with Cousteau, of journeying around the world for the

Geographic—

would be stamped as the idle fancies of an armchair buccaneer. Here was a chance to do something he had never done before, a chance to live on the edge rather than slip through existence as an observer. The risks involved were genuine, not gratuitous or self-imposed, and that made them seem somehow more worthwhile.

He looked at Treece, then at the deck, trying to phrase a question. Finally, he said, “What if there is a lot of gold down there?”

“We’ll have a royal rumpus getting it up, around those explosives.”

“No … I mean, what if we do get it up?”

“Why, then …” Treece stopped. He grinned at Sanders. “I see the wheels a-whirrin’ in the brain. Okay. I’m tempted to lie to you, to convince you to leave, but that’s not my way. I figure, if a man wants to put his ass on the line, it’s not my place to stop him. So here it is: We go to the Receiver of Wrecks and apply for a license.”

“You need a license?”

“Aye, to dive on any wreck. The license is good for a year. We could say we’re working Goliath,

which is an open wreck, and not bother with a license.

But I’ll apply, to keep things tidy. They’ve never turned me down yet. The license’Us list you and me as equal partners. Normally, the boat counts as a person.”

“What’s that mean?”

“The boat counts as a shareholder, to take care of wear

and tear and depreciation and expense. All that. But we won’t worry about that this time. We’ll make some arrangement for expenses. So you and your wife will split half, or however you settle it with her. Whatever we find belongs to Bermuda, technically, but unless they think we’re brigands, they’ll be reasonable. The stuff the Bermuda Historical Wrecks Authority wants, it’ll make us an offer on. If there’s something they’re really hot to get, we’ll have to accept their offer, which is figured out by an arbitrator appointed by-who bloody else?-the government. Whatever they don’t want to pay for they’ll return to us, and we can do as we damn please with it.”

“Sell it?”

“Perhaps.” Treece pause. “But I’ll tell you now, even though we’re daydreaming, that’s where we may come to blows.”

Sanders was startled. “About selling it?”

“Aye. We’ve our differences. I don’t need money; I imagine you do. I care about preserving finds intact. You don’t know enough about wrecks to care.”

The remark stung. “I’ll learn.”

“Maybe.” Treece smiled. “Anyway, the way the market is, we probably couldn’t sell it.

Buggers.”

“Who?”

“Back in the late fifties and early sixties, people found a lot of goodies. That’s when I found my first, and Wagner found the eight 1715 ships.

Everybody wanted Spanish gold, so a few sonsofbitches got cute and started dummying it.

It’s easy to do and hard to detect. You can’t carbon-date gold, andwiththe technology what it is, a crook can make a right-perfect Spanish coin.”

“Can’t you spot a phony?”

“Sometimes, but it’s hard. Last year, I got a call from the Forrester Museum. A Professor Peabody wanted me to come look at some stuff.

He didn’t tell me why, but I figured he smelled a rat or he wouldn’t be paying me to go all the way to Delaware. I looked at the coins, and I was goddamned if I could find anything wrong.

But I knew there had to be

soijiething.

I sat in a room staring at the bloody things for a week. They were perfect! I started talking to myself, arguing with myself about every mark on every coin. I argued right into the answer. The coins all carried a “P.”

It was the mint mark, meaning that they were minted at the Potosi mint in Peru. It’s Bolivia

now. Then I looked at the date on one of the coins: 1627. There it was.”

“There what was?”

“The Potosi mint didn’t put out any gold coins until the late 1650’s. We had the bastard cold. It turned out he’d spent thousands of dollars buying gold in Europe and having coins made.”

“What for?”

“Some folks do it for the premium on authentic Spanish gold. You used to be able to get five thousand dollars for a good royal doubloon. I have a bar with only forty-eight ounces of gold on it-even at two hundred an ounce that’s less than ten thousand-and I’ve been offered forty thousand for it. But this lad had a grander scheme. He dummied the coins to convince people he had found a wreck he’d been looking for: the

San Diego,

went down in the 1580’s.

He did convince a few, too, and suckered them into investing money in his corporation. He called it Doubloons, Inc. I believe they got him on some fraud charge.”

“Did his coins get into circulation?”

“That’s the bitch of it. Nobody can be sure. But even if his didn’t, someone else will come up with even better coins. You can’t hope to sell a coin or a gold bar these days unless you’ve got papers on it from the Smithsonian and every Christ agency in the world.

I’ve seen coins up for auction that couldn’t have cost more than fifteen dollars. Made in the Philippines. Squeeze “em too hard, you’ll rub the date off. It’s gotten so bad that some blokes-upright, honest chaps who’ve got the real thing-are being forced to sell Spanish coins to dentists, who melt them down for fillings. Coins three and four hundred years old, rich with the stink of history. And they’re goin” into a hole in some old lady’s mouth.”

“What can we do with what we find?”

Treece laughed.

“If,”

he said. “God knows. One good thing, though: It does look like there’s more than coins on this one.

Jewelry, too, at least some. There hasn’t been too much faking of jewelry yet.” He took the medallion from his wet suit and held it in the dim light from the binnacle. “The Indians used to say, “Gold is the god of the Spaniards.”

It buggered up the Indians, buggered up the Spaniards, and it looks like it’s going to keep buggering up people till the end of time.”

It was after eleven when Treece throttled back and turned

Corsair

into the cove beneath St. David’s light. By the glow of the descending moon, Sanders could see that the rickety pier was deserted. Treece’s two other boats, a dory and a Boston Whaler, hung limply at their moorings.

They made fast

Corsair’s

lines, put their diving gear away, and walked to the end of the pier. The first few yards of the dirt path leading up the hill were visible in the moonlight. Then the path turned left and vanished in the dark underbrush.

“This’d be a hell of a place to jump somebody,”

Sanders said, walking with his arms before his face to ward off slapping branches.

“For anyone fool enough to try,” said Treece.

Sanders felt a pang of irritation at Treece’s manifest faith in his invulnerability. “What are you, bulletproof?”

“I don’t imagine. But there’s bush about me. A lot of people believe that anyone who mucks with me will be a goner within the day. It’s a nice myth to foster.”

They reached the top of the hill and walked to the picket fence surrounding Treece’s house. The dog, feeling spry again, had already vaulted the fence and was sniffing at something on the front doorstep.

“Tomorrow?” said Sanders.

“I’ll be looking through papers all day.”

“Should we call you at Kevin’s?”

“If you want. Or come out, if you’re curious to see how thrilling it is to root around in dusty papers looking for a set of initials.” Treece opened the gate and stepped into the yard. “Either way, we’ll talk.” He walked toward the front door.

Sanders removed the padlock from the front wheel of his motorbike. Like all mobilettes rented to tourists, his had

no automatic starter, no gears, and a maximum level speed of 20 mph. He sat on the seat, opened the throttle halfway, and pushed on the pedals. The bike moved slowly; the engine chugged twice and caught.

He heard Treece call, “Hey!”

He throttled down and pedaled the bike in a tight circle back to the gate.

“Have a look at this.” Treece held something in his hand. It was a Coke bottle, with a white feather inserted in the neck.

“What is it?”

“Bush. To scare me, I guess-though I don’t know how they expect voodoo to work on a Mahican Indian brainwashed in Scotch Presbyterian schools.” Treece gazed out over the dense underbrush surrounding the yard. “But I’ll give “em this: They’ve got balls, just to come around here.”

He cradled the bottle in his hand. Then, angrily, he pegged it high in the air. The bottle spun, catching rays of light and breaking them into shimmering green and yellow fragments, and fell out of sight behind the cliff.

The headlight on Sanders” motorbike was weak, barely adequate to illuminate the potholes on St. David’s Road. He traveled slowly, sensing the road rather than seeing it. At the bottom of a short hill, the road bent sharply to the right.

Sanders braked on the way down the hill, and by the time he reached the bottom the motorbike was moving so slowly that it wobbled. The road rose again immediately. He opened the throttle and pedaled with his legs, but he could not generate enough momentum. The bike tipped.

Sanders dismounted and began to push the bike up the hill, helping himself with short bursts from the hand throttle.

When at last the road leveled out, Sanders stopped to catch his breath. He sat on the seat and hung his head. When he looked up again, he saw a black shadow standing just beyond the reach of his light.

A voice said, “Have you thought about our offer?”

Sanders didn’t know what to say. He looked around, and heard only cicadas, saw only darkness.

“We … we didn’t find anything.”

The voice repeated. “Have you thought about our offer?”

“Yes.”

“And have you come to a decision?” The accent was liking, Jamaican. Not Cloche.

“Well …” Sanders stalled. “N…”

“Yes or no?”

“Not exactly. There hasn’t been much time.

I…”

“We’ll see, then.” The shadow moved back into the underbrush. There was a rustle of foliage, and the road was empty.

We’ll see, my eye, Sanders thought. If they want to do something to me, why didn’t they do it then?

Then a shock went through him: Gail.

VI!

He fell twice on South Road. The first time, rounding a corner, unable to see more than ten yards ahead, he banked the motorbike too sharply. The rear wheel hit some gravel and skidded, and Sanders landed on the road on an elbow and knee, shredding the skin. He fell a second time right before the turnoff for Orange Grove. He had the throttle wide open and was moving fast, with too little light to give him notice of a sudden left turn in the road. He went straight, plowing into the bushes. Thorns and branches lashed his face and tore at his clothing.

As he righted the motorbike and pushed it back onto the road, he felt frantic,

almost hysterical. He gunned the engine, and the bike lurched off down the road. He tried to calm himself, arguing that if anything had happened to Gail, he was too late to stop it-nearly an hour had passed since his talk with the man on the road. But what if she was hurt and he could help? What if she was gone?