Peter Benchley - The Deep

“What are we going to do about the drugs?” Gail said.

“I’ve thought about it. There’s not a chance of our getting the lot up, not before Cloche makes his move. You know the numbers. What do you figure the value of the ampules we’ve got now is?”

“I don’t know for sure how many ampules we have, but take a round figure-say we get a hundred thousand altogether. That’s over a million dollars, maybe two million.”

“That leaves a bloody heap of glass out there for him. But of course, he doesn’t know that, does he?” Treece was talking more to himself than to them. “He doesn’t know what we’ve got and what’s still there.”

“So?”

“So we’ll go for the jewels; they’re much more important. Let him think we’re digging for glass.”

“We can’t just leave the rest of the drugs for him.”

“No, we won’t, but you have to weigh your risks.

There’s one thing certain: Cloche will try to get us out of the way, more’n likely by killing us.” Treece paused, letting silence give emphasis to his words. “If he kills us, you might say who gives a damn what he gets; it’s not our worry. But I care. I don’t want him to get those drugs, and I really don’t want him to get any of the jewels; dizzy bastard’d melt ’em down and sell the bloody gold, destroy ’em forever. That treasure is unique. It’d be criminal to let it fall into the hands of someone who doesn’t understand what it represents. If we work the glass until he tries something, we’ll lose the jewels. Even if he doesn’t kill us, he can keep us off the wreck-blow it up out of sheer perversity if he wanted to. But if we get the jewels, then we can take whatever time we’ve got left to work the glass. We can blow ’em up if we want to; Christ, I’d relish the chance.” There was no objection from David or Gail. “Let’s go down cellar.” He stood up and opened a drawer.

“You’ve got a cellar?” Sanders said.

“After a fashion.” Treece took a strip of maroon velvet from the drawer and wrapped the cameo, the medallion, the crucifix, the chain, and the pine cone. “Have to have something to anchor this shack in a breeze; else, she’d tumble off the cliff.”

He led them into the living room and moved a chair.

Under the chair, a small brass ring was countersunk into the floor. Treece pulled on the ring, and a four-by-four-foot section of cedar boards separated from the floor. He set the trap door aside and took a flashlight from the mantelpiece, then sat on the floor and let his legs dangle into the hole. “It’s about a five-foot drop, not much more than crawl space, so mind your heads.” He dropped into the hole and ducked down.

The cellar was a packed-dirt square as large as the living room above, walled with heavy stones held together by mortar.

The Sanderses followed Treece’s crouched figure to a far corner of the cellar.

“Count three stones up from the floor,” Treece said, shining his light in the corner.

Sanders touched the third stone above the floor.

“Now move four to the right.”

Sanders ran his fingers along the wall until they came to rest on a cantaloupe-size rock.

“This?”

“Aye. Pull.”

Sanders could barely get his hand around the stone, but once he had a good grip, the stone slid easily from the wall.

There were two pieces of paper in the hole; behind them, another stone. “My birth certificate,” Treece said, reaching in and removing the papers.

Gail wondered what the other piece of paper was, and in the reflected glow of the flashlight she could make out a last name—Stoneham—and three letters of a first name:

Ha. Priscilla, she thought: his wife’s birth certificate.

“What’s that?” Sanders said, pointing to something small and shiny in the hole.

Quickly, Treece shifted the light away from the hole and put his hand inside. “Nothing.” He removed the object.

Gail thought, his wedding ring.

“Now reach in and pull that other rock.”

Sanders did as he was told. His arm went in the hole almost up to the elbow.

When the other stone was free, Treece placed the velvet-wrapped jewels in the back of the hole.

“Okay, put it back.”

Sanders replaced the rear stone, Treece returned the papers and the shiny object and set the front stone back into the wall.

Treece said, “All you have to remember is, three up, four over.”

“I don’t want to remember it,” said Gail.

“It’s none of our—”

“Just a precaution. I might take a wrong turn and walk off a cliff. Any of us might. Better we all know where things are.”

They went up into the house. “Might’s well have a bite to eat,” Treece said as he pushed the chair over the brass ring in the floor. “This is going to be a long day.”

They reached the reef at eleven o’clock in the morning.

It was a clear, calm day, with an offshore breeze barely strong enough to keep the boat off the rocks.

They could see twenty or thirty people, in twos and threes, on the Orange Grove beach, and a mother playing with her child in the wave wash.

While Treece set the anchor, Sanders found a pair of binoculars and focused them on the patch of sand where he had found Coffin’s body. “They’ve raked it clean; you can see marks.”

“Aye. Don’t want to leave anything that might upset the tourists. Hundred a day doesn’t include a corpse on the beach.”

Gail grimaced at the coarse, matter-of-fact dismissal of Coffin. She started to speak, but Treece, anticipating her, cut her off.

“A man dies, girl, he isn’t any more, least not down here. Respect and all that crap doesn’t serve the dead; it just makes the living feel better. The dead one, maybe he is somewhere else—maybe all he needs to be somewhere else is to believe he will be somewhere else. I won’t deny a man his belief, and I don’t know any more’n you about souls and all that stuff. But I know this: Speaking good or bad about something that isn’t any more is a bloody waste of time. I can’t feature Saint Peter sitting up there saying; ‘Hey, Adam, there’s folks bad-mouthing you down there. What’d you do to merit that?’” his Gail did not respond. She waited a moment, then said, “I can dive today.”

“No. Stay here. There won’t be much lugging. If we get all’s down there, it won’t be more’n a bag or two. And I want someone on the boat, today specially.”

“Why?”

“Because I think we might have a little excitement today.”

Treece checked the shotgun. “Just be sure you remember how to use this and how to shut off the compressor. If nothing happens, the least you’ll get is a royal fine suntan.” He started the compressor.

Treece and Sanders returned to the cove in the reef where they had found the pine cone. The tide carried the sand from the air lift away to the right, so they had a clear view of the bottom.

For the first few minutes, they found nothing but single ampules, ten in all. Sanders reached to take them from the hole, but Treece waved him off and let the ampules rattle up the aluminum tube. One shattered, and a small billow of pale liquid puffed from the end of the tube. Treece dug deeper, inching closer to the reef.

There was a change in the way the sand moved under the air lift’s suction. Instead of coming away smoothly in an unbroken pattern, now it moved in a rough V, as if it were surrounding something. Treece cupped his left hand over the mouth of the tube, cutting off its suction, and gestured with his hand for Sanders to dig in the hole.

Sanders rubbed the center of the V with his fingers and felt something hard. He brushed sand away and saw gold.

It was a rose, about three inches high and three inches wide, and each of its golden petals had been finely etched with a jeweler’s tool.