Peter Benchley - The Deep

“Who’s he?”

“The Goliath survivor. I imagine he’s still chary about talking about the drugs, but perhaps the sight of a couple of ampules will jar his memory.” Treece put the two ampules in his pocket. “Leave your bikes here. You’ll be coming back later to dive. We can all fit in Kevin’s car.”

“About the diving,” Gail said. “My nose has been bleeding since yesterday.”

“Bad?”

“No.”

“Not to worry. When you haven’t been wet in a while, a day or two of ups and downs will irritate the tissues in your sinuses. Stay out of the water for a bit, and it’ll clear up.”

“What about tonight?”

“I wouldn’t. There’s no sense pushing it. The two of us can manage.” Treece opened the kitchen door for them. “You go ahead on your bikes, then. I’ll come by the hotel, and you can follow me down to Coffin’s.”

The house was tiny—a limestone cottage perched on a neatly tended patch of weeds overlooking Hamilton Harbour. There was no driveway, only a dirt shoulder wide enough to permit one car to pull off the road and stop without risking a rear—end collision with the passing traffic. Treece nosed the Hillman into the brush beside the shoulder, leaving room behind for the two motorbikes. His immense frame looked ridiculous in the car: he was hunched forward so his head wouldn’t jam into the roof, and his legs were so long and so cramped that he could not put them out of the car first. The only way he could get out was to open the door and fall to the right, supporting himself with his hands on the ground, dragging his legs after him.

“Damn fool things,” he said as he wiped his hands on his pants. “Built for bloody midgets.”

“If you ever had an accident in that car,” Sanders said, “they’d have to cut you out with a torch. Why don’t you ride a motorcycle?”

“Suicide machines. Only good thing about them is they keep the black population down.” Treece looked at Gail and smiled. “Forgive me. I’m a relentless bastard.”

They walked up the dirt path to the house. A small man was on his hands and knees, digging in a flower bed beside the front door.

“Adam,” Treece said.

Coffin’s head snapped around. “Treece!” he said, surprised. With a nimble motion he pushed himself backward and rolled to his feet.

He wore nothing but a tattered pair of denim shorts. His body was tan, lean, and sinewy, without a trace of fat. Strands of aged muscle coursed along his arms and chest as visibly as a drawing in an anatomy text. His eyes were fixed in a permanent squint that had cut deep grooves in the dry brown skin on his cheeks and forehead. A shaggy mane of white hair hung down the back of his neck. He smiled at Treece, displaying abused gums spotted here and there with chipped and yellowed teeth. “It’s good to see you; been awhile.”

“Aye, it has.” Treece enveloped Coffin’s bony fingers in his enormous fist and pumped once briskly up and down. “We stopped by to chat you up.” He introduced the Sanderses to Coffin.

“Come in, then,” said Coffin, leading them into the dark house.

The one-room house was divided by furniture into three sections. On the right there was a hammock, suspended catty-corner by two steel rings embedded in the stone wall. Behind a half-open curtain David saw a toilet and a sink. In the middle of the room was a single stuffed chair, facing a i95os-vintage television set. On the left were a sink, a hot plate, a refrigerator, a cabinet, and a card table, around which were two chairs and two stools.

“Sit,” said Coffin. He opened the cabinet and waved at an array of bottles. “Have a charge? I’m on the tack myself. Old guts can’t take the fury of the juniper berries.”

Confused, Sanders looked at Treece and saw that he was grinning at Coffin.

“I’ll have a spot of rum,” Treece said. “How long’ve you been on the tack?”

“A good while now,” Coffin said. “It’s not hard if you have a disciplined soul.” He looked at Sanders. “For you?”

“A gin and tonic would be fine,” Sanders said.

Gail nodded. “The same. Thank you.”

“Comin’ up.” Coffin took four glasses from the cabinet, filled two of them with Bombay gin-no ice, no tonic-and passed them to David and Gail. The other two he filled with dark Barbados rum. He gave one to Treece, took a long swallow from the other, and sat down.

“I thought you were on the tack,” Treece said.

“I am. Haven’t had a drop of gin in months.

Rum isn’t drinking; it’s survival. Without it, your blood doesn’t circulate proper. That’s a fact.”

Sanders took a sip of the warm gin and suppressed a grimace as the harsh liquid burned his throat.

“Tell an old man what brings you by.” Coffin smiled. “Or is this just your day to visit the elderly and infirm?”

Treece reached in his pocket and, without a word, placed the two ampules on the table.

Coffin did not touch them; he simply stared at them and said nothing. He looked up, first at Treece, then at the Sanderses. His face showed no emotion, but there was something different about his eyes, a shininess that Sanders could not diagnose-excitement, perhaps, or fear. Or both.

Coffin jerked his head toward the Sanderses and said to Treece, “How much do they know?”

“All still know. They found the pieces.” Then Treece told Coffin about Cloche’s proposal to the Sanderses.

“Cheeky bastard,” Coffin said when Treece had finished. “He should have come to me with his million dollars. They’re mine.”

“You’re supposed to be a fool, Adam. Keep it that way. It’s safer. Besides, Goliath isn’t registered to you any more. I checked. Now-truth. How many were there?”

Coffin hesitated. “Truth is a pain in the ass,” he said, holding one of the ampules to the light. “I told the truth once, and damn near got killed for my trouble.”

“Cloche may come and finish the job, Adam, if we don’t get the stuff up and out of there fast. How many were there?”

Coffin finished his glass of rum, reached for the bottle, and refilled his glass. “They were in cigar boxes. Forty-eight to a box, separated by cardboard grids. The manifest said there were ten thousand boxes, and I believe it. I stacked every one of the bloody things by hand.”

“Did the manifest say what was in the glass?”

“No, but we knew. Morphine, mostly. Some raw opium, a bit of Adrenalin. But almost all morphine.”

“No heroin?” Sanders asked.

“No. At least—”

Gail interrupted. “It’s the same thing.”

“What do you mean?” Sanders said.

“It is. I edited a book about drugs once.

All heroin is, is morphine heated with acetic acid. As soon as it gets into the body, it’s reconverted into morphine.”

“Then why don’t junkies take morphine?”

“It’s not up to them. They take what the pushers push, and the pushers push what the smugglers smuggle.

The smugglers smuggle heroin because they make more money from it: a pound of pure morphine converts into more than a pound of heroin, and you don’t have to take as much heroin because it’s stronger than straight morphine-something to do with the way it gets to the brain.

Anyway, if you figure that from that cargo you could make half a million doses of heroin, street value somewhere between ten and twenty dollars a dose, you’re talking about a total value of five to ten million dollars. Lord!”

Treece said, “Where was it carried, Adam?”

“Number three hold. The lot of it. Amidships. I had it bagged about with flour.”

“Was there anything beneath it?”

“Aye, the ordnance. We chucked our ballast and put the cases of shells down there. It was a dicey sail, I tell you. One of the mates went in irons for three days for sneaking a cigarette. And that was topside.”