Benchley, Peter - Novel 08 Page 10

  Ammonia. Ammonia? Here?

  As he edged along the side of the cabin, the boat suddenly heaved sharply to starboard.

  Christ! What was that?

  He heard wood crack and splinter.

  The boat was listing badly now, he had to struggle to keep his footing. He jumped down into the cockpit. The gin pole was gone, snapped off three feet above the deck.

  He looked over the transom, and what he saw froze him and drove the breath from him. It was an eye, an eye as big as the moon, bigger even, in a field of quivering slime the color of arterial blood.

  He shouted—not words, just noise—and snapped upright, to flee the eye. He lurched to the right, took a step, but the boat heaved again, and he was thrown backward. His knees struck the transom, his arms flailed out and he tumbled overboard.

  13

  MARCUS SHARP CHECKED his fuel gauges and saw that in another fifteen or twenty minutes he’d have to turn back to the base.

  He had been aloft for a couple of hours, ostensibly on a routine training patrol, in fact trying to spot shipwrecks. He had circled the island, flown low over the reefs in the north and northwest, looking for ballast piles. He had spotted the known wrecks, the Cristobal Colon and the Caraquet, but nothing new.

  He had hoped to find a virgin wreck for Whip, preferably a late-sixteenth-century Spanish ship laden with ingots and gold chains and perhaps some uncut emeralds. But he’d settle for anything old and untouched, to replenish Whip’s rapidly depleting reserves of enthusiasm, hope and money.

  Sharp was feeling guilty, because he’d all but promised Whip he could keep that raft, and he’d heard that the police had confiscated it, on the orders of that self-important little shit, St. John.

  And it was Sharp’s fault, at least partly, because—as Captain Wallingford had pointed out in his most patronizing way—Sharp had had no authority to deputize Whip Darling to do anything, let alone to give Darling what amounted to evidence. The logic of Sharp’s defense had failed to move Wallingford, who had subjected him to a half-hour lecture on the proper behavior for American servicemen stationed in foreign countries.

  Now Sharp was cruising along the South Shore, off Elbow Beach. He could see scores of people frolicking in the surf, and a few snorkelers offshore exploring the wreck of the Pollockshields.

  Shark bait, Sharp thought… if there are any sharks left.

  The Pollockshields had been a menace for generations. An iron steamer loaded with World War I ammunition, she had sunk on the shallow reefs in 1915. Though much of the ammunition was still live, that wasn’t the problem. The iron was. Snorkelers came out from Elbow Beach and poked around the wreck and got caught in the waves that broke over it, and sometimes they were slammed up against the sharp shards of iron. They’d be cut and bleeding and forced to swim hundreds of yards back to shore, through the calm, murky shallows that were the hunting grounds of reef sharks— or, rather, had been.

  At five hundred feet, Sharp made a slow circle over the snorkelers, reassuring himself that no dark shadows were lurking nearby, and then he banked off to the west.

  Whip had said a friend of a friend had been poring through the Archives of the Indies in Seville, looking for details of a Spanish fleet that had sunk off Dominica in 1567, when he had seen a reference—almost a parenthesis—about one of the ships being separated from the others early in the voyage and running up on the south side of Bermuda.

  Looking for that lost lamb was a shot in the dark, but what the hell … he had nothing better to do.

  Sharp’s copilot, a lieutenant junior grade named Forester, finished the copy of People he’d been reading and said, “I gotta take a fearsome leak.”

  “Almost home,” Sharp said.

  He was about to give up, to gain altitude and turn back to the northeast, when his radio came alive.

  “Huey One … Kindley …”

  “Go ahead, Kindley… .”

  “Feel like a little flake patrol, Lieutenant?”

  “If it doesn’t take more’n ten minutes. Otherwise Forester busts a gut and we all swim home. What’s up?”

  “A woman called the cops, said she saw a boat go to pieces a mile south of Sou’west Breaker.”

  “Go to pieces? What did she mean, blow up?”

  “No, that’s the strange part. She said she was looking through her telescope for humpback whales—sometimes she can see ‘em from her house—and she saw this fishing boat, thirty-five or forty feet she says, just… go to pieces. No flame, no smoke, no nothing. It came apart.”

  “Sure … fat chance. Okay, I’ll have a look,” Sharp said. “It’s on the way home anyway.”

  He pressed his stick to the left, and the helicopter banked off to the south.

  Forester said, “Make it fast, or I’m gonna pee in my pants.”

  “Grab it and strangle it,” Sharp said. “That’s an order.”

  Sharp left Southwest Breaker to his right, so that the sun was almost directly overhead and slightly behind him, and there was no glare on the water. He could see perfectly.

  But there was nothing to see.

  He flew south for two minutes, then turned southeast. Nothing. Nothing floated, nothing bobbed, nothing broke the endless roll of the blue swells.

  “Kindley … Huey One …” Sharp said into his radio. “I gotta break off. Nothing down there.”

  “Come on home, Huey One. Probably nothing to it.”

  Sharp turned east.

  “Hey!” Forester said, and he tapped the Plexiglas beside him and pointed downward.

  Sharp banked to the left and looked. He saw two white rubber fenders, then some planks, then, half-submerged, looking like a white blanket covered with blue haze, the entire roof of a boat’s cabin.

  “Can’t stop now,” Sharp said, “or we’ll be down there with it.” He set his course at 040, straight for the base.

  He had crossed the reef line and was about to be over land when he looked to his right and saw the Privateer chugging slowly westward along the shore.

  Go home, he told himself, don’t do this. You don’t need to give Wallingford an excuse to chew your ass a second time.

  Then he thought, Screw Wallingford. Sharp had been chewed out by some of the greats, and Wallingford was decidedly junior varsity. What else could they do to him, bring him up for a Captain’s Mast? So what? He was formulating new priorities, and the navy was slipping down the list fast.

  He pressed the “talk” button on his microphone and said, “Privateer … Privateer … Privateer … This is Huey One… .”

  *

  Darling was in the wheelhouse, drinking a cup of tea and wondering how much he could get if he sold his Masonic bottle—it was a good bottle, rare, 170 years old—when the call came over Channel 16.

  He picked up the microphone from its hook. “Privateer … go to twenty-seven, Marcus.”

  “Going to twenty-seven …”

  “More bullshit?” Mike said.

  “Wasn’t his fault about the raft,” said Darling. “He tried to do us a good turn.”

  “Privateer … Huey One …” said Sharp. “Whip, there’s a boat wrecked about two miles dead ahead of you, call it two-three-zero from where you are. Mile and a half off the beach.”

  “Wrecked how?”

  “Don’t know. There’s wreckage on and under the surface. I haven’t got fuel left to look for survivors. Police boat’s probably on the way, but you’re closest.”

  “Roger that, Marcus. I’ll go check it out.” Darling started to hang up, but then a kindness occurred to him, and he pushed the button again and said, “Hey, Marcus … probably be going out this weekend, if you’re interested.”

  There was relief in Sharp’s voice as he replied, “I’ll say … that is, if they don’t have me swabbing latrines.”

  Darling replaced the microphone on its hook, dialed the radio back to Channel 16 and said to Mike, “See? Do a good turn for a friend and they give you a reaming. Hell of a note.” He pushed his
throttle forward and watched the tachometer needle rise from 1,500 rpms to 2,000.

  “Why’d the navy get on Marcus’s case?” asked Mike.

  “Why d’you think? ‘Cause the earl of fucking St. John got on theirs.”

  Darling was finding himself so angry so often these days that he was beginning to wonder about himself. He’d have to be careful not to let himself slip over the edge into paranoia.

  He and Mike had returned the damaged gear to the aquarium and had explained what little they knew about what had happened to it. Darling had begun to outline how he thought new gear might be improved, when the deputy director—a slight, nervous black man whose Vandyke beard, Darling had always believed, was a disguise for his mousy personality—had said, “I’m afraid not.”

  “Afraid not what?”

  “We’ll be … ah … terminating our agreement with you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, this was … ah …” He wouldn’t look at Darling. “Expensive equipment … after all.”

  “Sharks are big animals … after all… . Jesus, Milton, if you want me to hang the gear at ten feet, sure, nothing’ll touch it. But you want me to hang it down where the action is, maybe actually catch something interesting, there are risks. That’s the whole point.”

  “Yes, but … I’m afraid that’s that.”

  “Who’s gonna catch your critters for you?”

  “Well … that’s yet to be decided.”

  Darling had taken a deep breath and closed his eyes, trying to suppress the rage—and the fear, he had to admit—at the thought of eight hundred dollars a month vanishing into the ether.

  “It’s St. John, isn’t it? …”

  Milton had looked away, at the telephone, as if praying for it to ring. “I don’t—”

  “Wildlife management. He’s decided wildlife management takes in the aquarium, too … right?”

  “You’re jumping to—”

  “He’s gonna take my eight hundred a month and go out with a dip net and a case of Budweiser, and when he doesn’t come back with shit, he can blame it on the oil spills off California.” Darling was right, he knew it.

  Milton was sweating; his eyes darted from side to side. “For heaven’s sake, Whip …”

  “You’re right, Milton, I’m overreacting.” He had walked to the door and opened it. He could see Mike outside, talking to a tortoise so old it was said to have been a gift to Bermuda from Queen Victoria. “But you know what? I feel sorrier for you. I may not make much of a living, but at least I don’t have to earn my pay by kissing the ass of that Irish lizard.”

  Darling was convinced that St. John saw him as a threat to his power, a rebel against the construction of his little empire. St. John was determined to bring Darling to heel … or to destroy him.

  And what rankled Darling, what ate away at his guts, was the fact—more evident day by day—that St. John was succeeding. He had all the weapons.

  “There,” said Mike, pointing to some floating wood. It was about three by five feet, with a patch of indoor-outdoor carpeting nailed to it and two short lengths of chain dangling from it.

  “Swim step,” Darling said. “Bring it aboard.”

  Mike went outside, grabbed the boat hook and went aft, while Darling climbed the ladder to the flying bridge.

  From up here, twelve feet above the surface, he could see debris everywhere, some a foot underwater, some bobbing on the surface. There were fenders, planks, cushions, life jackets.

  The water was patched with rainbow slicks: oil that had leaked from the engine as the boat sank.

  “Sling it all aboard,” he called down to Mike.

  For an hour he cruised among the debris, as Mike grabbed piece after piece of flotsam and tossed it into the cockpit.

  “Want that too?” Mike said, pointing to a white wooden rectangle, twelve feet wide by fifteen feet long, that hung a foot or two beneath the surface.

  “No, that’s his roof,” Darling said from the flying bridge. Then something came to him, and he said, “Hang on,” and he put the boat in neutral, letting it drift, and went down the ladder. He picked up a four-pronged grapnel attached to twenty feet of rope, and he tossed the hook at the wood. He let it drop till it caught the far edge, then he hauled back on it, dragging the corner of the roof out of water. He had a glimpse of pea-soup green on the underside of the roof.

  “It’s Lucas Coven’s boat,” he said, letting the wood fall back, coiling the rope as he brought the hook aboard.

  “How d’you know that?”

  “I saw him painting the boat last spring. He was doing the whole inside of the house in baby-shit green. Said he’d got the paint on sale.”

  “What the hell was he doing out here?”

  “You know Lucas,” Darling said. “Probably had some half-ass scheme to make two dollars in a hurry.”

  They had known Lucas Coven for more than twenty years and always thought of him as suffering from a case of the “almosts”: everything Coven did he could almost make a living at, almost but not quite. He couldn’t afford enough fish traps to cover his boat expenses, and when traps were outlawed he had no other trade. He’d do anything for a few bucks—haul water, paint houses, build docks—but he never stuck with anything long enough to make a steady go of it.

  “How do you make two dollars out here? Nothing here.”

  “No,” Darling agreed. “Nothing but the Durham.”

  “Nobody dives on the Durham … nobody with sense.”

  “Right again. Let’s have a look.” Darling picked up a rubber fender. There were no marks on it, no scratches, no scars, no burns.

  “He had a GM in her, didn’t he?” Mike said.

  “Yeah. Six-seventy-one.”

  “So that didn’t blow him up. Propane stove?”

  “Maybe. But Christ, they’d’ve heard that bang all the way in St. George’s.” Darling picked up a section of planking with a brass screw-cap countersunk in it.

  “So what blew him up? He carry explosives?”

  Darling said, “Nothing blew him up. Look here. No char, no smoke, no disintegration like you’d see in an explosion.” He put his nose to the wood. “No stink. You’d smell it if there’d been heat to it.” He tossed the wood onto the deck. “He was busted up … somehow.”

  “By what? Nothing out here for him to hit.”

  “I don’t know. Killer whales? This was a wooden boat. Killer whales could splinter a wooden boat.”

  “Killer whales!? In hailing distance of the beach?”

  “You come up with something, then.” Darling felt anger welling up again. Mike always wanted answers, and it seemed he had fewer and fewer of those. “What else? UFOs? Martians? The frigging Tooth Fairy?” He dropped the wood onto the deck.

  “Hey, Whip …” Mike said.

  Annoyed now with himself, Darling said, “Shit!” and kicked a life jacket, which rose off the deck and would have gone overboard if Mike hadn’t caught it.

  Mike was about to toss it aside when he noticed something. “What’s this?”

  Darling looked. The orange cloth covering the kapok had been shredded, and the buoyant material beneath was exposed. There were two marks in it, circles, about six inches in diameter. The rim of each circle was ragged, as if it had been cut by a rasp, and in the center was a deep slash.

  “For God’s sake,” Darling said. “Looks like a scuttle.”

  “Sure.” Mike thought Darling was joking. An octopus? “Moby-bleeding-scuttle,” he said. “Besides, you ever seen a scuttle with teeth in its suckers?”

  “No.” Mike was right. The suckers on an octopus’s arms were soft, pliable. A man could unwrap them from around his arm as easily as removing a bandage.

  But what was it, then? It was an animal, for certain. This boat hadn’t blown up, hadn’t hit anything, hadn’t been struck by lightning, hadn’t magically disintegrated. It had come up against something and been destroyed.

  Darling tossed the life jacket onto the d
eck and kicked some pieces of wood aside to clear his way forward. One of the planks struck the steel bulwark, and as it fell back to the deck something dropped out of it and landed with a click.

  It was a claw, like the other one, crescent-shaped, two inches long and sharp as a razor.

  He looked overboard, at the still water. But the water wasn’t really still, it was alive, and, as if to remind Darling, it sent a gentle swell at him that heaved the boat upward.

  As the boat settled again, something floated out from underneath it: rubber, blue with a yellow chevron on either side.

  A wetsuit hood.

  Darling picked up the boat hook and dipped it overboard and scooped up the hood. It came up like a cup, full of water, and in the water were two little black-and-yellow-striped fish: sergeant majors. They were feeding on something.

  Darling held the hood in his hand. A smell rose from it, sharp and acrid. Like ammonia.

  His body was shadowing the hood, so he turned into the sun and let light fall into the dark pocket.

  What the fish were feeding on looked like a big marble.

  Mike came up behind Darling and looked over his shoulder. “What’ve you— Holy sweet Jesus!” Mike gasped. “Is that human?”

  “It is,” said Darling, and he stood aside to let Mike retch into the sea.

  14

  THE WOMAN WATCHED through her telescope until her head ached and her vision began to blur. She had seen the navy helicopter come and go, and seen Whip Darling show up in that ramshackle Privateer. But where were the police? She had done her civic duty by reporting what she saw; the least the police could do was follow up.

  Now it looked as if someone were throwing up over the side. Probably hung over. Fishermen were all the same: fish all day and drink the night away.

  If the police weren’t going to respond, perhaps she should call the newspaper. Sometimes reporters were more diligent than the police. The only reason she hadn’t called the paper earlier was that she was worried that one of her humpbacks might have wrecked the boat—by accident, of course—and an ignorant reporter might be tempted to say bad things about whales. But she had looked and looked, and seen no sign of whales, no spouting, no flukes, so it was probably safe by now to call the paper.