Peter Benchley - The Deep

He’s never even let us in the front door.”

The screen door flew open, and the dog bounded down the path toward them. She stood inside the gate, wagging her tail and whining.

Treece appeared in the doorway. “It’s okay, Charlotte.” The dog backed away a few feet and sat down. “Need any help?”

“We can manage.” Sanders opened the gate, hefted the two large suitcases, and, with Gail following him, walked along the path to the door. Gail had an air tank slung over each shoulder.

“You have meat on you,” Treece told her. “Those aren’t light.”

He held the screen door for them and ushered them into the house. The doorway opened onto a narrow hall. The floor was bare-wide, polished cedar boards. An old Spanish map of Bermuda, the parchment cracked and yellow-brown, hung in a frame on the wall. Beneath the map was a mahogany case with glass doors, full of antique bottles, musket balls, silver coins, and shoe buckles.

“In there,” Treece said, pointing to a door at the end of the hall. “Here, give me those bottles.

Are they empty or full?”

“Empty,” Gail said.

“I’ll set ’em out by the compressor.”

Sanders said, “You have your own compressor?”

“Sure. Can’t dash into Hamilton every time I need a tank of breeze.”

David and Gail went into the bedroom. It was small, nearly filled by a chest of drawers and an oversize double bed. The bed was at least seven feet square, and obviously handmade: cedar boards pegged together and rubbed with an oil that gave them a deep, rich shine.

“This is his room,” Gail whispered.

“Looks like it. What do you think that was?” Sanders pointed to a spot on the wall above the bed.

A painting or photograph had hung there until recently: a rectangle of

clean white was clearly visible against the aged white of the wall. They heard Treece’s footsteps in the hall. Sanders dropped their suitcases on the bed.

“We can’t take your room,” Gail said to Treece, who stood in the doorway. “Where will you sleep?”

“In there,” Treece said, cocking his head toward the living room. “I made a couch big enough for monsters like me.”

“B…”

“It’s better I sleep there. I’m a fitful sleeper. Besides, I was told I snore like a grizzly bear.” He led them toward the kitchen.

As they passed through the living room, Gail decided that a woman had lived in the house and had decorated it, though how recently she couldn’t tell. Most of the decor reflected Treece: gimbaled lanterns from a ship, brass shell casings, old weapons, maps, and stacks of books. But there were feminine touches, such as a needlepoint rug and a gay, flower-pattern fabric on the couch and chairs.

The paintings on the walls were mostly sea scenes.

There were two empty spots, from which pictures had been removed.

In the kitchen, Treece said, “I might’s well show you where things are.” He looked out the window.

“It’s that time of day.” He opened a cabinet filled with liquor bottles. “Make yourself a charge if you like. I’ll have a spot of rum.”

Sanders made drinks, while Treece guided Gail through the other cabinets.

“Can’t we contribute something?” Gail said.

“By and by. Food’s not much of a burden.” Treece smiled. “Feel you’ve been asked to a house party?”

“Sort of. Show me what you want to have for dinner, and I’ll get to work.”

“Supper’ll be along. I’ll take care of it.”

Treece took a glass of rum from Sanders.

“We’ll start tomorrow; pick Adam up on the beach.”

“Coffin?” Sanders said. “He’s going to dive?”

“Aye. I tried to put him off, but he wouldn’t have it. He still thinks it’s his ship, and he’s hot to stick it to Cloche.”

“Is he good?”

“Good enough. He’s a pair of hands, and we’ll need all the hands we can get. We’ll have to work like bloody lightning, ‘cause Cloche will get on to what we’re doing fast, and then it’ll be dicey as hell. Another thing about Adam: He has a zipper on his mouth. Once he shuts it, nobody’ll open it. He learned a lesson from that beating.”

“Once we have the drugs,” Gail said, “what will you do with them? Destroy them?”

“Aye, but not till we’ve got every last ampule.

If we were to destroy the ampules bit by bit, as we recover them, and Cloche were to find that’s what we’re doing, we’d be finished. There’d be no reason for him not to have us killed on the spot. Same if we started turning them over to the government lot by lot. Cloche’d see his whole plan going up in smithereens, and he’d kill us just to keep his options open. But if we accumulate them… The best way for us to stay healthy is to keep Cloche hoping, let him think we’re doing all his work for him, gathering them up and saving them-and when we’ve got the lot he’ll try to pirate them from us.”

Sanders noticed that Gail was eying him quizzically.

At first he didn’t know why; then he realized that he had been smiling as Treece spoke-an unconscious grin that betrayed the strange excitement Sanders felt. He had felt it before: he had a particularly vivid recollection of the sensation as he was about to parachute for the first time. It was a potpourri of feelings-fear made his arms and fingers tingle and his neck and ears flush hot; excitement made his breath come too fast, bringing on lightheadedness; and anticipation (probably at the thrill of being able to say he had actually jumped out of an airplane) made him smile. The fact that he proceeded to sprain his ankle during the jump in no way diminished his glee, nor the fact that he had never jumped again.

Gail frowned at him, and he forced himself to stop smiling.

They heard a muffled thump outside the kitchen door. Treece stood and said, “That’ll be supper.” He opened the door and retrieved a newspaper-wrapped package from the stoop.

“Supper?” Gail said.

“Aye.” Treece set the package on the counter and unwrapped it. Within, still wet and glistening, was a two-foot-long barracuda. “It’s a beauty,” he said.

Gail looked at the fish, and remembering the barracuda that patrolled the reef and stared at her with vacant menace, her stomach churned.

“You eat those things?”

“Why not?” Sanders said, “I thought they were poisonous.”

“You mean ciguatera?”

“I don’t know. What’s that?”

“A neurotoxin, a nasty bastard. Nobody knows much about it, except that it can make you sick as hell and, now and again, put you under.”

“Barracudas have it?”

“Some, but so do about three hundred other kinds of fish. In the Bahamas they throw a silver coin in the pot when they boil a barracuda. They say if the coin turns black, the fish is poisonous. But here in civilization we have a much more scientific test.” Treece picked up the fish, held out his right arm, and measured the fish against it. “We say, ‘If it’s longer than your arm, it’ll do you harm.”

I got a full hand on this one, so it’s obviously safe.”

“That’s a comfort,” Gail said.

“It’s not as stupid as it sounds. Ciguatoxin is more common in bigger fish, and the bigger the fish, the more of the stuff he’s bound to absorb. We figure that in a little brute like this one, even if he is ciguatoxic, chances are pretty good of getting away with nothing more than a bellyache.” Treece reached in a drawer and found a filleting knife and a sharpening stone. “Don’t be put off,” he said. He spat on the stone and rubbed the slim blade in tight circles in the pool of saliva. “I’ve been eating beasts like that for the better part of forty years, and I’ve never been stabbed yet.” With quick, sure sweeps, he began to scale the fish. The silvery scales flew from the knife blade and floated to the floor.