Лесли Чартерис - Salvage for the Saint

With a few lazy kicks of his flippers, he sent himself gliding down towards the sea bed. At a depth of about fifteen feet, he stopped to look back at the sea’s surface. It was like a vast ceiling of liquid glass, wrinkling and rolling in long undulations, with the underside of the dinghy projecting down through it and partaking in its rhythmical movement.

The Saint went down into the deepening green. A school of hundreds upon hundreds of tiny silver-and-yellow fish flicked noiselessly past him, and some of their bigger cousins peered pop-eyed through the glass of his mask as they followed him curiously down. Then a spur of jagged rock rose to meet him out of the olive twilight; some fronds of slimy weed brushed at his legs for a moment; and then he was within arm’s length of the bottom.

He gazed arcund at the glaucous world of weeds and fishes. The sea bed was mostly sandy there, but it was far from flat, and there were little forests of marine growths at intervals for as far as his eyes could see in the soft gloom. He turned and surveyed the sea bed in the opposite direction. The same irregular landscape, if it can be called a landscape, met his probing eyes.

And then he saw it. It was perhaps twenty yards away, and it could only have been the remains of a boat.

At first glance he had taken it for another patch of the almost fluorescently tinted seaweed; but on longer inspection the shape of a largish cabin cruiser was unmistakable. Simon swam towards it, and as he came closer he could easily understand how he had almost been deceived on that first glance; for the sunken boat was almost overgrown by variegated algae. The Saint had, as a matter of fact, had a lucky line of sight, from which it was the sharp point of her bows that had caught his eyes. If he had been looking from any other angle, he might never have seen anything but the splodge of weed... And perhaps, he thought as he swam the last few yards towards the sunken hull, that was a good omen.

The first thing he noticed was the big jagged hole in her transom. He examined the hole closely for a moment; he had seen enough shellfire damage before to be sure that he was looking at an example of it now. This must be the boat in which Schwarzkopf-Tatenor had made his run for it; and therefore Simon Templar knew that he was surely approaching the moment when his theory — for it had little right to be called anything more — would be put to the final test. He was well aware of the many “ifs” and “buts” he had glossed over, perhaps too slickly, in the speculations which he had shared with Arabella the previous night in a corner of that bright blue world forty feet above him. He looked up again at the high liquid ceiling. It was dimmed from this depth, but he could still make out the underside of the dinghy, now well to the edge of his field of view.

Yes, he knew his hypothesis was just that, on any objective view. That Charles Tatenor had kept his gold eleven years ago, rather than finding some immediate way of turning it into cash; that he had continued to keep it during those years since; that he had paced his “spending” of his hoard so that a good proportion of the original amount might still remain; and finally that he had kept that hoard, not in a series of safe deposit boxes around the world, not buried in a cave on dry land, nor in any of a hundred other good and possible hiding places, but just exactly where it had sunk — in forty feet of water, in the locker of Davy Jones.

That was the postulate: and the Saint knew that at any step in the reasoning, Charles Tatenor might not have acted in the way which that reasoning assumed. But the Saint’s thinking was characterised by those occasional intuitive leaps of great boldness, which had usually proved justified when they had been trusted in the past. And that was why — supported now by the evidence of the chart and its annotations, which certainly suggested something of interest down there — he expected to find gold in the sunken cabin cruiser he had discovered in the silent depths of the sea.

Slowly he finned his way along the length of the boat and back along the other side, the silence broken only by the regular suck of his own breath drawn in from the compressed-air tanks on his back, and the gurgle of the escaping bubbles that trailed upwards as he exhaled. He saw weird and garish fish flitting at their leisure between the rusting railings that had long been incorporated into their submarine world. He saw the slow sure accretions of eleven years, the barnacles and sea urchins which had colonised the superstructure. He saw the wheelhouse that was now an eerie undersea cave where a school of small translucent squid were pumping themselves sporadically along beneath the sodden and rotting remains of the helm. And he saw the big hatchway set in the after-deck, its fastenings still gleaming with a faint metallic sheen and still relatively free from the encroaching weeds... as if it had seen some use over the years.

He examined the hatchway cover. It looked massive, and the fastenings seemed to be of tarnished brass. They included a big solid pair of hinges, two spring latches, and a large heavy brass ring.

The Saint released the latches without difficulty. He grasped the ring and twisted it first one way and then the other. He felt the fastening mechanism yield reluctantly. He braced himself against the railings with his feet, and heaved up on the ring with both hands.

Slowly, against the treacle-like resistance of the water, the hatchway cover opened. The Saint let it come to rest on the deck in the open position, and then he undipped the compact but powerful underwater torch from his weight-belt.

He switched it on and directed the beam into the open space below.

It was deep — perhaps six feet or so. And the bottom seemed to be completely filled with what looked like lumpy sand.

Simon Templar swam head-first into the cabin below; and he would have been the first to admit that the hands with which he began to scrape at the sand had lost some of their accustomed steadiness.

Almost as soon as his fingers began to burrow, they came up against something more solid. He pushed some of the sand aside, and shone the light full on the area he had partially cleared.

And between the grains of sands he saw the fabulous glistening gleam of gold.

He scraped some more sand away; and almost in a dream he saw them. Brick upon brick, or bar upon bar — the terminology was the least important thing at that moment — they were piled up inside the sunken launch, under that mere sprinkling of sand.

And even though the Saint had been at least half expecting it, still the actual discovery of all that gold was a wonder and a marvel now that it lay there before him in tangible reality. Its permanent brightness had always been the prime attraction of that malleable yellow metal upon which the fates of nations had risen and fallen. Too soft to share many practical uses with humbler metals, it had become sought after not only for its rarity but also for that very chemical inertness which had preserved the hoard under his hands from the normally corrosive sea.

No naturally occurring substance will make so much as a chemical dent in gold: that is why, almost alone among metals, it is found in the free state as gleaming nuggets or dust of the pure element. Only aqua regia, a mixture of concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acids in the “royal” proportions, can attack it. And that is why gold has been so prized by almost every civilisation and pre-civilised society that ever was.

In every country where it has been found, people had made religious artefacts from it. They had fashioned art and jewellery of it; craftsmen had given their lives to working with it; armies had been raised for it, wars started for it and stopped for it. Loves were traditionally sealed with it; it was the bedrock of currencies and economies; generations of men and women had schemed and lied and cheated and stolen and killed for it.