Benchley, Peter (5 page)

They had expected to ride into a tidy, contained community. What they found, instead, was a random assembly of limestone cottages connected by dirt paths. It was as if someone had taken a bagful of cottages ten thousand feet up into the air, and then emptied the bag carelessly, letting the contents scatter on the hillsides. Only one building seemed properly placed: a lighthouse at the top of a cliff.

They stopped on the side of the road, and Sanders unfolded the map he had gotten at the hotel.

“This is it,” he said. “It has to be. That’s St.

David’s light up there.”

“Let’s ask somebody.”

“Sure. Ask any one of those thousands of people.” He waved his arm at the hillside. There were no bicycles, no cars, no pedestrians. The town seemed deserted.

Fifty yards away, beyond a turn, they saw a hand-lettered sign that said, “Kevin’s Lunch.”

“It looks empty,” said Gail.

There was no door on the frame of the shack, but the remains of a bead curtain hung in tatters from a reed pole across the top of the doorway. Sanders rapped with his knuckles on the wall. There was no response. “Anybody there?”

They walked through the doorway.

“What you want?” said a voice at the far end of a long

counter. The man wore no shirt, his skin was dark brown, his belly fat and hairless. His eyes were black holes above globular cheeks.

Sanders said, “We’re looking for Romer Treece.”

“Not here.”

“Where can we find him?”

“He not a bloody goddamn tourist attraction.”

“We’re not tourists,” Sanders said. “That isn’t why we want to see him. We want to ask him about a ship.”

“He know ships,” the man said, less belligerently. “For sure. How bad you want to talk to him?”

“What?” It took Sanders a moment to realize what Kevin meant.

“Oh. Yes.” He took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and put it on the counter.

“You not want to see him very bad.”

Sanders started to say something, but he looked at Gail, and her expression said, Let’s get out of here. He put another five on the counter. “Is that bad enough?”

“Top of the hill, by the light.”

Gail said, “He lives in the lighthouse?”

“Right there by. It’s his light.”

The lighthouse sat on a flat promontory, so high above the sea that the light itself needed to be only fifty or sixty feet above the ground. There was a well-marked path directing tourists to the front of the lighthouse. A small white house, surrounded by a picket fence, was nestled in the lee of the light. The word private was painted on the gate. The Sanderses leaned their motorbikes against the fence, opened the gate, and walked down the short path toward the house. On each side of the front door, where there might have been flower beds, was a bathtub-size vat filled with a clear liquid. In the vats the Sanderses saw dozens of pieces of rusty metal-spikes, buckles, boxes, pistol barrels, and countless unfamiliar objects.

Gail held up the towel-wrapped bundle. “You suppose that’s stuff like this?”

“Looks like it. That’s probably a chemical bath, to clean stuff off.”

The front door to the house was open, but there was a screen door, closed and latched from inside. Sanders knocked on the frame and called, “Hello? Mr.

Treece?”

“There’s pamphlets in the bloody lighthouse!

Tell you all you want to know.” The voice was deep, the accent similar to, but not identical with, English or Scots.

“Mr. Treece, we’d like to ask you about some things we found.” Sanders looked at Gail. When he turned back to the screen door, he found himself staring up into the face of the biggest man he had ever seen.

He was nearly seven feet tall, and his chest was so immense that the sleeves of his T-shirt had begun to separate at the seams. His hair was black, cropped in a crew cut that rose from a sharp V in the middle of his forehead. His nose was long and thin, and it had a noticeable bend in the middle-as if it had been broken and never set. His face seemed triangular, an upside-down pyramid: wide, high cheekbones above hollow cheeks, a thin-lipped mouth above a sharp, jutting chin. His skin was brown and dry, like overdone bacon. The only

facial feature that betrayed

the presence of blood other than Indian was the eyes: light powder-blue.

“We’re not tourists,” Sanders said. “The man at Orange Grove said you might be willing to look at some things we got off a ship.”

“Whatman?”

“The bell captain.”

“Briscoe,” said Treece. “I’m not his bloody handmaiden.”

“He only said that no one else could help us, and that you might.”

“What ship?”

“Goliath.”

“Nothing worth a damn on that scow. Least if there is, no one’s ever found it.” Treece looked beyond them to the gate. “You rode all the way out here on those things?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what’d you find?” Treece unlatched the screen door and stepped out onto the path, closing the door behind him. “Is that the stuff there?” he said, pointing to the bundle in Gail’s hand.

“Yes.” Gail handed him the bundle.

Treece squatted down, set the towel on the path, opened it, and looked at the forks and spoons, the pewter cup, the razor, and the butter plate. “That’s

Goliath

trash, no question.” He stood up. “You got your answer. Was it worth the ride?”

Sanders said, “There was one other thing.” He motioned to Gail, and she took the ampule from her shirt pocket and passed it to Treece.

Treece let the ampule rest in the palm of his hand. He stared at it, saying nothing. Sanders saw the muscles in his jaw move, as if he were gritting his teeth.

Finally, Treece closed his hand around the ampule.

He raised his head and looked at the sea. “God bloody damn!” he said. “Thirty-two years, and finally the sonofabitch comes true.”

“What-was

Treece spun on Sanders, cutting him off. “Who else has seen this?”

“Well…” Sanders stammered.

“I said

who else!”

“Last night,” he said, “a man tried to buy it from us. A black man. He said he was

interested in the glass. And a waiter at the hotel saw it, too.”

Treece laughed-a laugh of anger and contempt.

“Glass.” He held his fist under Sanders’ face and opened it, forcing him to look at the ampule. “You know what’s in there? Morphine, pure and sweet, enough to give a man a week’s holiday in the stars.

It’s no surprise someone tried to buy it from you.

It’s proof of the legend.”

“What legend?”

Treece looked at Sanders, at Gail, then back at Sanders. “I’d as soon not tell you, but now they know you found it, they’ll be letting you know soon enough. Come along.”

They followed Treece around to the back of the house.

He led them into the kitchen, a large and airy room with a view of the sea. Bottles and vials of chemicals, Bunson burners and tools-dentist drills, forceps, knives, hammers,

chisels-were strewn about everywhere, on the counters and on the one round table. He motioned them to chairs at the table.

Gail’s throat was dry, and she said, “Could I have a glass of water?”

“If I can find a glass,” Treece

said, rummaging around in the clutter on a counter.

Gail saw a half-full glass on the table.

“This’ll be fine,” she said, and she reached for the glass. “It doesn’t have to be cold.”

Treece watched her, waiting until the glass was within an inch or two of her mouth. Then he laughed and said, “Jesus, girl, don’t drink that stuff.

One sip and you’ll be in the history books.”

Gail was startled. “What is it?”

“Hydrochloric acid. Clean your pipes out, that’s for certain.” He found a glass, filled it with tap water, and handed it to her. “Here. All this’ll do is rust you.”

Sanders heard a growl behind him. He turned, not knowing what to expect, and saw a dog sitting on the window sill. It was a terrier of some kind, medium-size, its muzzle grizzled, and it snarled at Sanders.

Treece said, “It’s all right, Charlotte, you dumb bitch.”

The dog’s eyes did not move from Sanders. She growled again.

“I said it’s all right!” Treece grabbed the glass from Gail and flung the water in the dog’s face. The dog wagged her tail and licked the water from her whiskers. “You be nice. They’re not tourists. At least, not now.”

The dog jumped down from the window sill and sniffed around Sanders’ pants.

“She’s feeling pissy because you got in here without her seeing you,” Treece said. “She likes to get her licks in first.”

“Does she really bite?” Gail asked, as the dog’s cold nose explored Sanders’ ankle.

“I guess so! She’s purebred tourist hound.”

Treece leaned against the wall and said, “What do you know about

Goliath?”

“Nothing, really,” Gail said.

“Maybe one thing,” said Sanders. “The lifeguard on the beach said he had heard she was carrying ammunition.”

“Aye,” said Treece. “That, too.

Goliath

was a cargo vessel, a wooden sailing ship carrying supplies to Europe during World War II. There was a sound purpose to using wooden ships, slow as they were. The hull wouldn’t attract magnetic mines, and, under sail, she made no screw noise for U-boats to home on.

Goliath

was loaded. Her manifest listed a boodle of munitions and medical supplies. She went down in the fall of 1943, broke her back on the rocks, and dumped her guts all over the place.

For weeks, folks gathered every Christ kind of crap you ever saw off the beach. I went down on her two-three times in the fifties and hauled a ton of brass off her-depth charges and artillery shells.

There were radios all over the bottom. You never saw anything like it. But nobody ever found those medical supplies.”

“What were they supposed to be?” asked Gail.

“Nobody knows for sure. The manifest said medical supplies, period. It could have been anything-sulfa, bandages, iodine,

chloroform-anything. A couple of years after the war, though, forty-seven I think it was, a bloody great hurricane beat it all to rubble.

Most people forgot about

Goliath

after that, but some didn’t.”

Sanders said, “The bell captain told us there was a survivor.”

“Aye, one. He was damn near in worse shape than the wreck, but he lived. For a time after he got out of hospital he sold scraps from Goliath,

and for drinks he’d tell tales of the wreck. One night, he was in his cups and he spun a web about a fortune in drugs aboard

Goliath.

Thousands and thousands of ampules of morphine and opium, he said, carried in cigar boxes. He claimed to have been personally responsible for them, said he knew where they were but he’d tell no man. A day later he was waylaid and thrashed by people wanting to know more about the drugs. He swore he’d forgotten what he’d said, claimed he didn’t know anything about any drugs. He never told that story again. But once was enough. Rumor spread, and before long the rumor was that there were ten million dollars in drugs down there. People looked-Jesus, they did a bloody autopsy on the wreck with everything save tweezers-but they never found a single ampule. Not till now.”

“Why would one turn up now?” Sanders asked.

“The bottom of the sea is a living creature.

She’s whimsical, the sea, a tease. She loves to fool you. She changes all the time. A storm can alter her face; a change in current can cause her to heave her insides out. You can dive on a wreck one day and find nothing. The wind blows that night, and the next day, in the same spot, you find a carpet of gold coins. That’s happened. And we’ve had four juicy blowups in the past six weeks.”

Gail said, “David thought this ampule could have come from the sick bay.”

“Goliath

didn’t have a sick bay. They likely carried some medicine for the crew, and if this were any other ship, I’d write the ampule off as from the medicine chest.

But not this one. The best hope is that you found the one and only ampule left.”

“Why?” asked Sanders.

“Because there are people who’d slit your throat for a fraction of what the rumors say is down there. How much did you tell that fellow last night?”

“Nothing. We didn’t

know

anything, except that we found the ampule in the general area of

Goliath.”

Treece looked out the window. Finally he said, “Would you be willing to take another plunge, have another look? Not today. The sea’d turn a diver to hash. But tomorrow?”

Sanders looked at Gail. “Sure.”

“It’s important to know if there’s anything more down there. If there isn’t, fine. But if there is, I’ll want to get it up before every hophead between here and the Bahamas finds out about it and starts diving for a cheap charge. I’d go myself, but that would be like running a flag up a pole.” Treece began to search through some cabinets. “Any time I get my feet wet, the papers start trumpeting about treasure. And now that someone knows there may be something on Goliath,

for me to go down would be a dead giveaway.” He reached deep into the back of a cabinet and brought out two fist-size rocks, which he put on the table.

“If you come across another ampule, set one of these on

the spot. The shiny chips are infrared reflectors. I’ll go down of a night with an infrared torch and poke around.”

“Okay,” said Sanders. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

“If the wind behaves.”

Gail stood up, and as she lifted her bundle from the table, she noticed the black lump David had found. She pointed at it and said to Treece, “Is that coal?”

“No.” Treece picked up the lump. “It’s a sulfide of some kind. I can look inside for you, but there’s a risk of ruining it.”

“That’s okay.”

Treece took a hammer and chisel from the counter, sat down at the table, and set the black lump in front of him. The hammer looked like a toy in his huge, scarred hand; his thumbnail was as big as the face of the hammer head. But he used the tools as gently and deftly as a gem-cutter. He probed the lump, chipping here and there, found a hairline crack near the center, and lined the chisel blade on the crack. He banged the chisel once, and the lump fell apart in two pieces. Examining the two halves, he smiled. “It’s a nice one. Can’t quite read the date, but otherwise, it’s a dandy.”