Howard Engel - The Cooperman Variation

When I got the chance, I wondered out loud about their presence on the lake. “Isn’t there a need for both of you to be elsewhere? Aren’t the boardrooms and the sound stages crying out ‘Where are they?’”

“Let ’em holler,” said Peggy, and Hamp grinned his endorsement. “We both worked flat out this winter, Benny. I did two movies, back to back, no rest in between. And Hamp has been trying to step back and let his organization run things. What’s the use of setting up a big structure if you don’t stand back and see whether it works or not? Oh, I’ve brought up a few scripts with me, but, to be honest, I haven’t read one of them. Hamp sometimes reaches for one of his boxes, but he knows better than to do it when I’m around.”

“You see the tyranny I live under, Mr. Cooperman. Not a minute to call my own.”

“But you have had time to do some scuba diving, I understand.”

“Not this year. Last year’s experience rather spoiled it for me. Oh, I’ve made a few small dives, just enough to keep the McCordick brothers happy. I get my diving gear from them over in Bala. But last spring, at the end of April, I dived a wreck here on the lake.”

“The only wreck I know about is the S.S. Waome , which sank coming out of Port Carling in the mid-1930s.”

“That’s the one! She sank in a freak squall in the fall of 1934. It was like a water spout. Came out of nowhere. Waome heeled over to port, water rushed in through the mooring chocks. She lies in eighty feet of water. I’ve seen her. By the end of the summer, I expect there will be few serious divers who haven’t seen her.”

“Why all the interest?” I wondered out loud.

“I expect it has to do with Dermot Keogh’s death. There are morbid sensation hunters even among skilled scuba divers, Ben.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“She looked a lot like the Segwin that still plies the lake. But Waome was built with big glass windows and large freight doors close to the waterline. When the squall heeled her over, the water rushed in faster than I can tell it. Three were lost, the captain suffered a heart attack, the rest of the crew swam to a nearby island. In the summer, the steamship would have had twenty, maybe fifty passengers, but this was early October, so there was only one. One of the ship’s officers, a man named Thompson, tried to rescue him from the saloon, but the door was closed on them by the water and both were trapped. The company called on divers from Prescott, on the St. Lawrence, to get the bodies. When I saw her, she was still in one piece, lying right side up. Hadn’t let the cold, dark waters break her up.”

“Was Dermot Keogh on that dive?”

“It was his idea. We planned the dive summer before last when Peggy and I were staying with him, while we were looking for a place last summer.”

“It was horrible,” said Peggy. “I get goosebumps just thinking about it. We had to go to a hotel in Bracebridge, just to get away from the media. Some holiday.”

“Were you in the water with him when it happened?” I watched Hamp Fisher look straight at me, as though he was trying to figure out how much of this I wanted to hear. Then he looked away in the direction of the funnel and sipped his Perrier.

“Dermot was a good diver for an amateur,” he said. “He had been checked out on all of the equipment we took with us. The McCordick brothers know their equipment and are careful who they rent it to. I hadn’t leased Wanda III yet, so we were using a Sea Ray 200 with two inflatable rafts. There were six of us: two to stay topside and four divers. Dermot and I were teamed up, and Jeff Hetherington and Penny Freeman were buddies.”

“She’s about five seven,” contributed Peggy, “with short brown hair. She still has traces of an English accent after thirty years in Canada.” I nodded to show that I was appreciative of the details.

“Hetherington is a young fellow we met that summer,” Hamp said. “He’s a student, or was one, in Niagara Falls. We met him at the marina when I was renting the Sea Ray. He had learned scuba diving on a holiday in Belize, but hadn’t tried Lake Muskoka yet.”

“I met Penny just about where I met you this afternoon, Benny. My shopping bag split and I had apples and lemons rolling all over the asphalt. She repacked her things and gave me one of her plastic bags and helped me load up the car. I brought her back for drinks. She learned her scuba diving in Alberta of all places.” Peggy was smiling at the memory.

“So, the four of you were pretty experienced?”

“I don’t know whether Penny or Jeff had ever worked at that depth or had to carry their own lights before. The waters near the reefs off Belize are very clear, Ben. You can see for miles. But here. Ha! It’s black as deep outer space down there.”

“How did you know where to dive?”

“The wreck’s had a buoy marking the spot for years now. Once we’d tied the boat and the rafts together, we lowered a long anchor line as well. We used the rope attached to the marker as our guide rope. Again, I can’t emphasize the blackness of this water once you get down a few feet.”

“And Dermot Keogh was okay all this while? No problems?”

Hamp Fisher laced his long fingers together around a knee as he picked his words. “We’d been down nearly twenty minutes before he started having trouble. We’d found Waome on her bottom, still in one piece, as I said. We did a survey from stem to stern. We located one of the open freight doors, and taking turns in pairs, we went inside. Jeff and Penny went first. When it was our turn, I followed Dermot into the ship. We went down through the freight door and through the lower saloon to the companionway leading to the main saloon. It was hard getting through the stairs, so again, I followed Dermot. When I got there, that is, in the upper saloon, I found Dermot had spit out his mouthpiece.”

“You mean there was trapped air inside?”

“No, Ben, we were both under water and at about eighty feet. You understand, for an experienced diver, the sight of your buddy with his mouthpiece out isn’t as immediately frightening as it might seem. We learn to make adjustments and to hold our breath while doing them. The air supply is always ready and waiting. But that wasn’t what Dermot was trying to do. He was trying to unhook his tank, his weights, everything. I went over to him, caught up his mouthpiece and tried to help. That’s when he lunged at me. I say lunged, it was more like fending me off, a warning to keep my distance. I swam around behind him. Again, I found his breathing tube and held it in place. This time, he couldn’t reach me with his hands, but he was wilder now, more frantic. Somehow, he pushed me away again and the diving mask came free. And he’d unhooked the main belt. Thinking there might be something wrong with his air supply, I took off my own and tried to fit it over his mouth. He beat me off again. That’s the part I never could understand. His brain must have been confused. That’s when I started to panic myself. You see, we were swimming free. Apart from the buoy line and the anchor rope, there was no contact with the diving raft. Dermot was smaller than I, but I wasn’t able to fix the mouthpiece in place again, and he was breathing out what air he still held. I couldn’t think of what to do. The other pair were at least a minute and a half away from me, if they were still hanging around the freight door. I tried again to approach him. I shouldn’t have come at him from the front. He got an arm around my neck even before I could find his air supply. Once he got me around the neck, I dropped the light I was carrying and it left us in relative darkness. Using my feet, I was able to free myself. I rescued the lamp and kept on swimming until I reached the outside of the hull. I indicated that Dermot was in trouble, gave the danger signal, and we swam back inside. By that time, Dermot had passed out. He was floating under the ceiling of the saloon. He’d jettisoned his tank and weights. At least we didn’t have to fight him any more. We got his air going again and strapped the tank back on his back. As quickly as we could, we evacuated him, got him out of Waome and back up to the raft. It could have been as much as three minutes in all. As soon as we got him on the raft, Jeff started the usual resuscitation routine. We took turns. Meanwhile, the boat crew called through to Bracebridge for an ambulance. We kept up the artificial respiration until the paramedic team relieved us. By then, we were back in harbour at Port Carling.” After saying this, Hamp was still. His eyes scanned the far side of the lake.