Peter Benchley - The Deep

Sanders flipped the medallion. The back was clear, except for the letters “E.f.”

“Those same initials!”

“Aye. This morning I wasn’t able to find any officer or noble or captain with those initials, and I’ve looked through mounds of papers.”

Sanders returned the medallion to Treece.

“Maybe it was a present for somebody.”

“Not bloody likely. Nobody gave stuff like this away.” Treece dropped the medallion and the coin into his wet suit, turned off the overhead light, and started the engine. He sent Sanders forward to raise the anchor, and when he heard the clank of iron on the deck, he swung the wheel hard left and headed seaward.

Sanders returned to the cockpit and said, “What do we do now?”

“We stay away from this place for a couple of days while I try to figure out what the hell’s underneath Goliath .”

“Cloche…”

“I know. Now he knows I’m interested, he’s bound to raise a ruckus before long. Best thing for you two might be to pack up and go home. Take the risk he’ll leave you be.”

Sanders didn’t reply; Treece was probably right. Maybe he should try to take Gail home on the first plane out in the morning. But if he left, it would mean he had been lying to himself all his life. His dreams and ambitions-of working with Cousteau, of journeying around the world for the Geographic —would be stamped as the idle fancies of an armchair buccaneer. Here was a chance to do something he had never done before, a chance to live on the edge rather than slip through existence as an observer. The risks involved were genuine, not gratuitous or self-imposed, and that made them seem somehow more worthwhile.

He looked at Treece, then at the deck, trying to phrase a question. Finally, he said, “What if there is a lot of gold down there?”

“We’ll have a royal rumpus getting it up, around those explosives.”

“No… I mean, what if we do get it up?”

“Why, then…” Treece stopped. He grinned at Sanders. “I see the wheels a—whirrin’ in the brain. Okay. I’m tempted to lie to you, to convince you to leave, but that’s not my way. I figure, if a man wants to put his ass on the line, it’s not my place to stop him. So here it is: We go to the Receiver of Wrecks and apply for a license.”

“You need a license?”

“Aye, to dive on any wreck. The license is good for a year. We could say we’re working Goliath , which is an open wreck, and not bother with a license. But I’ll apply, to keep things tidy. They’ve never turned me down yet. The license’s list you and me as equal partners. Normally, the boat counts as a person.”

“What’s that mean?”

“The boat counts as a shareholder, to take care of wear and tear and depreciation and expense. All that. But we won’t worry about that this time. We’ll make some arrangement for expenses. So you and your wife will split half, or however you settle it with her. Whatever we find belongs to Bermuda, technically, but unless they think we’re brigands, they’ll be reasonable. The stuff the Bermuda Historical Wrecks Authority wants, it’ll make us an offer on. If there’s something they’re really hot to get, we’ll have to accept their offer, which is figured out by an arbitrator appointed by—who bloody else?—the government. Whatever they don’t want to pay for they’ll return to us, and we can do as we damn please with it.”

“Sell it?”

“Perhaps.” Treece pause. “But I’ll tell you now, even though we’re daydreaming, that’s where we may come to blows.”

Sanders was startled. “About selling it?”

“Aye. We’ve our differences. I don’t need money; I imagine you do. I care about preserving finds intact. You don’t know enough about wrecks to care.”

The remark stung. “I’ll learn.”

“Maybe.” Treece smiled. “Anyway, the way the market is, we probably couldn’t sell it. Buggers.”

“Who?”

“Back in the late fifties and early sixties, people found a lot of goodies. That’s when I found my first, and Wagner found the eight 1715 ships. Everybody wanted Spanish gold, so a few sonsofbitches got cute and started dummying it. It’s easy to do and hard to detect. You can’t carbon-date gold, and with the technology what it is, a crook can make a right—perfect Spanish coin.”

“Can’t you spot a phony?”

“Sometimes, but it’s hard. Last year, I got a call from the Forrester Museum. A Professor Peabody wanted me to come look at some stuff. He didn’t tell me why, but I figured he smelled a rat or he wouldn’t be paying me to go all the way to Delaware. I looked at the coins, and I was goddamned if I could find anything wrong. But I knew there had to be soijiething . I sat in a room staring at the bloody things for a week. They were perfect! I started talking to myself, arguing with myself about every mark on every coin. I argued right into the answer. The coins all carried a “P.” It was the mint mark, meaning that they were minted at the Potosi mint in Peru. It’s Bolivia now. Then I looked at the date on one of the coins: 1627. There it was.”

“There what was?”

“The Potosi mint didn’t put out any gold coins until the late 1650’s. We had the bastard cold. It turned out he’d spent thousands of dollars buying gold in Europe and having coins made.”

“What for?”

“Some folks do it for the premium on authentic Spanish gold. You used to be able to get five thousand dollars for a good royal doubloon. I have a bar with only forty-eight ounces of gold on it—even at two hundred an ounce that’s less than ten thousand-and I’ve been offered forty thousand for it. But this lad had a grander scheme. He dummied the coins to convince people he had found a wreck he’d been looking for: the San Diego , went down in the 1580’s. He did convince a few, too, and suckered them into investing money in his corporation. He called it Doubloons, Inc. I believe they got him on some fraud charge.”

“Did his coins get into circulation?”

“That’s the bitch of it. Nobody can be sure. But even if his didn’t, someone else will come up with even better coins. You can’t hope to sell a coin or a gold bar these days unless you’ve got papers on it from the Smithsonian and every Christ agency in the world.

I’ve seen coins up for auction that couldn’t have cost more than fifteen dollars. Made in the Philippines. Squeeze ’em too hard, you’ll rub the date off. It’s gotten so bad that some blokes-upright, honest chaps who’ve got the real thing-are being forced to sell Spanish coins to dentists, who melt them down for fillings. Coins three and four hundred years old, rich with the stink of history. And they’re goin’ into a hole in some old lady’s mouth.”

“What can we do with what we find?”

Treece laughed.

“ If ,” he said. “God knows. One good thing, though: It does look like there’s more than coins on this one.

Jewelry, too, at least some. There hasn’t been too much faking of jewelry yet.” He took the medallion from his wet suit and held it in the dim light from the binnacle. “The Indians used to say, “Gold is the god of the Spaniards.”

It buggered up the Indians, buggered up the Spaniards, and it looks like it’s going to keep buggering up people till the end of time.”

It was after eleven when Treece throttled back and turned Corsair into the cove beneath St. David’s light. By the glow of the descending moon, Sanders could see that the rickety pier was deserted. Treece’s two other boats, a dory and a Boston Whaler, hung limply at their moorings.

They made fast Corsair ’s lines, put their diving gear away, and walked to the end of the pier. The first few yards of the dirt path leading up the hill were visible in the moonlight. Then the path turned left and vanished in the dark underbrush.