Benchley, Peter (26 page)

Treece climbed aboard, turned off the compressor, told Sanders to haul in the air hoses, and started the engine. He looked back at Sanders, who was coiling the hoses neatly on the deck.

“Don’t bother with that. Just throw it on board.

Soon’s you’re done, take the wheel.”

Treece stepped onto the gunwale and walked forward, impatiently nudging the dog out of the way.

Sanders brought the air lift aboard and hauled on the hose.

“Take the wheel,” Treece called.

“Just a sec.”

“Now, dammit!”

Sanders looked at Gail and handed her the hose.

“Here. You finish it.” He took the wheel.

“Put her in gear,” Treece said, “and give me a bit of throttle. Want to run her up the anchor line.”

Sanders obeyed. Treece hauled the anchor aboard and came aft. As he dropped into the cockpit, Sanders said, “What’s the rush?”

Treece did not reply. He relieved Sanders of the wheel and pushed the throttle full ahead.

There was no conversation on the way back to St.

David’s. Treece stood at the wheel, preoccupied. David and Gail coiled hoses and counted ampules.

Nor did Treece say anything when they reached the house a few minutes before one o’clock. He poured himself

a glass of rum, put the pine cone and chain on the kitchen table, and pulled a box of documents out of a closet. He nodded when the Sanderses said good night.

At four o’clock that morning, Treece identified E.f.

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-was

“Just a precaution. I might take a wrong turn and walk