Peter Benchley - The Deep

“He didn’t say.”

Coffin set the escutcheon plate on the shelf in front of the steering wheel. “It’s just brass.”

Gail paused. “If you won’t tell me,” she said, “I’ll ask him.”

Coffin opened a locker and took out two canvas bags and a coil of three-eighths-inch hemp. “That would be a cruel thing to do.” Coffin fed an end of the rope through the handles of one of the bags and tied a bowline. He paid out twenty or thirty yards of rope, cut it, and tied the cut end to a cleat on the stern. He repeated the procedure with the other bag, securing the rope to a cleat amidships.

When he was finished, he stared at the knife for a moment, thinking. Then he stabbed it into the gunwale and turned to Gail. “All right. I don’t want you asking him. I don’t want you giving him pain. He’s had his fill of that.”

Embarrassed, Gail started to say something, but Coffin cut her off.

“When he was a lad, he raised his share of hell on Bermuda. No more than most boys, I guess, but his hell-raising seemed to have a direction, as if he was trying to say something. He never shoplifted or robbed anything from common folks. Everything he did was against authority-the police or the British. I remember, the British tried to confiscate some common land on St. David’s to build an installation of some kind. The Islanders got all hot about it, claiming the land was theirs by rights. ’Course, the British took it anyway, but they had the devil’s own time building anything. Treece and his cronies tore things down as fast as they were built, sugared the gas tanks of all the construction equipment, things like that.

“Anyway, when he was about twenty-three, he met a British girl, Priscilla. I forget her last name. She was here on holiday, and she met Treece in St. David’s, pretty much by accident. Lordy, she was a gorgeous girl! And nice. A kinder, sweeter lass never drew breath. Treece taught her how to dive, how to look for wrecks-Christ, how to do everything but talk to fish. She taught him how to handle people, how to handle himself. Calmed him down like an oil slick on a wave. She went home to England but came back the next summer and took a job in Hamilton “working with kids. A year after that, Treece and her got married-that must have been about 1958, thereabouts. The proper Brits on Bermuda didn’t take kindly to the marriage. They never did know what to make of St. David’s people. Sometimes they called ’em red niggers; most often they pretended St. David’s didn’t exist. But once Priscilla moved in with Treece on St. David’s—rather than the other way around, bringing him out into civilization where he could embarrass someone-they forgot about it. She kept her job in Hamilton, and he stayed on the island.

“It was like Treece was all of a sudden a new person. There was no more anger in him, no room for it. There was too much happiness.

“For two, maybe three years, everything was fine. They raised wrecks together. To keep the larder full, Treece did salvage work. His father was still alive then, so he didn’t have the job with the light. One spring in the early sixties, Treece found his first treasure wreck, the Trinidad. It didn’t yield much as treasures go—a gold bar, an emerald ring, a few other things—but it was enough to give him a fair poke. Right away, Priscilla got pregnant. Nobody knew it at the time; it didn’t come out till after. But they should’ve known: she had the glow of life about her. She wore that emerald ring so proud, and she was near bursting with love and… well, I guess goodness is about the only word.

“Like I said, she worked with kids, troubled kids, the ones who hadn’t done enough to merit a stay in the brig but who couldn’t quite handle everything society said they should handle. She loved those kids like they was her own.

“This was around the time the drug thing was just getting big in the States. Not here; it’s never amounted to much here. But there was talk about Bermuda being used as a halfway station for smugglers. A ship arriving in Florida or Norfolk with a European cargo raises eyebrows, especially if it’s stopped at, say, Haiti or the other islands on the way. But sailboats on a round trip from the States to Bermuda, or businessmen down here for long weekends-nobody paid them no mind.

“One day, one of Priscilla’s kids got loose-lipped and spilled something about a schooner due from down south with a load of drugs. She thought it was just talk, but she mentioned it to Treece. Treasure-divers are wired into everywhere, every bar and fish market. They have to be, to pick up clues: so-and-so saw a pile of egg-rock ballast here; somebody else spotted a strange timber there; ‘Hey, look at the coin I found off Spanish Rock.’ That kind of thing. So it wasn’t hard for Treece to check the rumor, and it was true. A private yacht was due into St. George’s with ten kilos of heroin. Part of it would be moved aboard a cruise ship in loaves of bread; the rest would be stowed here and taken up north little by little by “businessmen.”

“In those days, Treece still had some trust in the government. Priscilla had taught him that all authority wasn’t necessarily out to get him. So they went to the government, right to the top, and told what they knew. Well, the government didn’t believe them, and, to be fair, there wasn’t much evidence for them to believe-fair, that is, considering that they were pigheaded about Treece from the start. They didn’t have any idea how much he knew. As far as they were concerned, this was all rumor started by a kid.

“That got Treece pretty riled, partly out of pride. Here he had the bloody goods on some people smuggling heroin, and the government wouldn’t take his word. He decided to stop them himself and present the drugs to the government on a platter. He didn’t know what he was getting into, and he did a couple of foolish things, like tell one too many people what he was up to. He was threatened a few times, and that got him still hotter. Priscilla tried to calm him down, but it was hard “cause she agreed with him.

“Not to burden you with all the details, Treece and some chums met the yacht outside St. George’s harbor and tried to board her. There was a bloody great rumpus, and the yacht steamed away.”

“With the drugs?” Gail asked.

“Aye, but their plan was a wreck. Four days later, Priscilla was found dead at her desk in her office. The medical examiner said she had died of an overdose of drugs, and the case was closed. What people figure happened, one of the smugglers’ contacts here—his operation ruined—waited for her in her office one morning and, before anybody else got there, stuck a needle in her. There were track marks on her arms, but they were all fresh, put there to make it look like she was a user.

“Treece near went crazy, with grief and guilt and fury. He half-blamed himself, half-blamed the government.”

“Did he ever find the man who killed her?”

“No one knows… for sure. But about a week after she died, a man was found in St. George’s, high in the top branches of a tree.

Every bone in his body had been broken at the joints.

His fingers were all bent upward, his arms bent backward, same with his knees and his toes. His head was turned full around, like someone had tried to unscrew it. He was a bartender, mostly unemployed but always with ready cash. Nobody was ever prosecuted, and the only reason anybody connects it with Treece is that it had to have been some powerful man who splintered that fellow and hauled him fifty feet off the ground.

“For about a month, Treece stayed drunk, morning, noon, and night, guzzling anything that had a charge to it. He sat in his house, and the only people who dared go near it were the folks delivering booze and food. Then one day he came out and started diving, did all manner of crazy-ass things: dove alone, in foul weather, went too deep and stayed too long. It was like he was trying to purge himself, or kill himself, and he damn near did that: got bent up like a pretzel and had to spend three days in a decompression chamber. A fisherman found him floating on the surface.”