Peter Benchley - The Deep

Treece smiled mischievously. “Wait till David gets here.”

Gail looked at his face, at his red eyes and the pouches beneath them. “Have you had any sleep?”

“No. Been reading.”

Then she knew. “You found E.f.!”

In the bedroom Sanders stepped into a pair of bathing trunks. A polo shirt hung over the back of a chair. He reached for it, then stopped and thought: The hell with it; I’ll just be taking it off in an hour.

He looked at himself in the mirror and, pleased, slapped his flat stomach. He was brown and lean, and he felt good. Even his feet felt good, tough and callous; he couldn’t remember when he had last worn shoes. He went into the kitchen.

Gail and Treece were sitting at the table, cradling cups. As he walked toward the stove to pour some coffee, Sanders said, “Morning.” They didn’t answer him, and passing the table, he saw them exchange a glance. Annoyed, he thought: Now what ?

He sat at the table and said, “Well?”

“Feeling rich?” Treece said.

“What?”

Gail could not contain herself. “He found E.f.!”

Now Sanders understood, and he smiled. “Who is he?”

“She,” Treece said. “You remember, a while back, when you found the medallion, you said, ‘Maybe it was a present for somebody.””

“Sure. And you said, Not a chance.”

“Aye, but then other things didn’t make any sense. A man might have worn the medallion, but he wouldn’t have worn the cameo you found; that was a lady’s piece. And certainly the pine cone was. Perhaps it was being carted home to a wife or lady friend; what you said made me think of that. I went through all the papers again, and I came up dry; there’s not a bloody E.f. among them. A captain of one of the naos , a cargo ship, was a Fernandez, but he went down off Florida.”

“So who was it?”

Treece ignored the question, sipped his tea.

“The pine cone got me thinking, that and the crucifix. It wasn’t possible for goodies like that to go unrecorded-the man who made ’em, the man who sent ’em, the man who commissioned ’em, somebody would have made a note of them. I figured I was nosing around the wrong alley, so I put all the New World papers aside for a while and went back to the history books. That’s where I found the first hint.”

“What?” Gail said. “The name?”

“Aye, and a shopping list. If I’m right”—Treece looked at Sanders—“and by now I know I’m right, what’s down there—flush up against enough live explosives to make angels out of half the human race—is a treasure the likes of which no man has ever seen. It’s beyond price. Men have been looking for it for two hundred and sixty years; people have been hung over it; and a King of Spain stayed randy all his life for lack of it.”

Sanders said, “Is it El Grifon ?”

“Aye. It has to be. Listen. In 1714 King Philip the Fifth’s wife died. She wasn’t half stiff before Philip took a fancy to the duchess of Parma. He’d probably fancied her for quite a while, but now that his wife was gone he could bring the good duchess out of the closet. He asked her to marry him. She agreed, but she wouldn’t sleep with him until he had decked her out with jewels-quote-unique in the world. Philip must have had a fearsome lust, because he snapped off a letter to his man in Havana. The chap copied it in his diary, which was included in the appendix of a ratty old book about the decline of Spain in the New World in the eighteenth century. Anyway, Philip’s letter was a shopping list of jewels to be made in the New World and shipped back to Spain.

Below the copy of the letter, the fellow listed what he had assembled.” Treece recited from memory.

“Item: two ropes of gold with thirty-eight pearls on each. Item: a gold cross with five emeralds. And so on and so on. It spills over to the next page of the book, which some idiot tore out a hundred years ago.”

“No pine cone?”

“No, and no crucifix like ours, at least not on the page that’s still there. But there is a reference to a three-lock box.”

Sanders said, “That isn’t conclusive, is it? You said yourself that they used those boxes all the time.”

“For real high-priority goods. But you’re right; it isn’t special to El Grifon . So it was back to the papers.” He sipped his tea.

“The usual way for the King’s treasure to be transported was in a chest in a strong room near the captain’s cabin aboard the capitana . For some reason, Philip didn’t trust Ubilla, the commander. The King’s letter to Havana said that the jewels were to be shipped with the most trustworthy of all the fleet’s captains, and no one else comno one-was to be aware of their existence. Philip didn’t realize it at the time, but that last provision was a bad mistake.”

“Why?” Gail asked.

“Think, girl. It’s what we were talking about before, about Grifon . Up comes a storm; most of the ships go down. Only two people in the world know who had the jewels, the captain who had them and the man in Havana who assigned them to him. The captain survives, makes a deal with the man in Havana, who writes the King that he assigned the jewels to one of the captains who went down and was—poor chap—killed. Then he and the captain split the goodies. The captain waits awhile, rechristens his wreck of a ship, loads it with a relatively worthless cargo, and sets sail for home. If he makes it, he’ll never have to sail again. He’ll have enough to keep himself and his family and two or three small countries afloat. I don’t have even half the list of jewels, but the bit I do have lists more than fifty pieces. The only flaw in the plan was that the ship didn’t make it home. Got caught in a blow and seized up on the Bermuda rocks. Nobody knew there was anything on board worth worrying about.”

Sanders said, “Did the man in Havana admit this?”

“Hell, no! He makes all manner of lugubrious references to the sinking of the fleet and the loss of the King’s jewels. That put me off for a while.”

“I think you’re reaching: he might have done this, he could have done that. It’s all supposition.”

Treece nodded. “I thought so, too, until about four o’clock this morning.” He paused, enjoying the game. “What was the King of Spain’s name?”

“Come on,” Sanders said, feeling manipulated.

“Philip.”

“Aye. And what was his new wife’s name?”

Sanders sighed. “The duchess of Parma.”

“No!” Treece smiled. “Not her title, her name.” He waited, but they had no answer.

“Her name was… Elisabetta Farnese.”

It took a second for the initials to register.

Gail’s mouth dropped open. Sanders was stunned.

Treece grinned. “There’s still one unanswered question.”

Sanders thought for a few seconds, then laughed and said, “I know.”

“What?” The grin lit up Treece’s face.

“The question is, Did King Philip ever get laid?”

“Right! And about that, you contentious bastard,” he said, slapping Sanders” shoulder, “I would not presume to make a guess.”

Sanders tried to share Treece’s joviality, but his mind was crowded with conflicting images: jewels and drugs and explosives, the sight of Coffin’s twisted body, the tattered linen doll, the leer on Slake’s face. “How much is it worth?” he said.

“No telling. Depends what’s still down there, what we can get at, how much was lost, and how much the man in Havana made off with. What we have now is worth, I’d say, somewhere near a quarter of a million dollars-that is, once we can firm up the provenance. We have to find at least one jewel that’s on the list I’ve got, for the provenance to be perfect.”