I still remember the day that he finally left us. My mother had looked in on him perhaps ten minutes earlier, surprised that he wasn’t already up and about, and had told him to hurry up if he wanted any breakfast. He didn’t bother to answer, which was normal for Uncle Max. He usually only replied if he thought that it was necessary. Uncle Max couldn’t abide wasted effort.
When he still hadn’t come down, with the mug of tea growing cold, she sent me in to tell him to get a move on.
Uncle Max lay on the bed; the sheet drawn up to his chin; his arthritic fingers hooked over the linen; a look on that creased face resting on the soft pillow more peaceful than it had ever been in life, his lips and cheeks relaxed as though in sleep – which in a way I suppose he was.
Poor old Uncle Max. He wasn’t going anywhere any more, at least not in that old stooped body. He had gone the way he had always wanted to: in his sleep. I can’t say that I was shocked as I touched the coolness of his cheek, a little stunned perhaps, for he’d had that Teutonic strength of character that seemed as though it could go on forever; but it hadn’t. I was glad in a way that he had died at our house. I wouldn’t have wanted him to die alone in that small flat of his where he lived those three weeks out of four without even the company of dog or cat.
******
“Uncle who?” Henry asked, bringing me back to the present.
“Andy’s Uncle Max,” Rick interrupted. “The one who left him the money that paid for his share in the Sally May.” He looked at Rod and winked. “We’ve all heard about Uncle Max.”
“Well, not really an uncle,” I said to Henry. “More like a Dutch grandfather than anything else.”
“What’s he got to do with von Luckner?” he asked.
“He sailed on board the Seeadler. He was with von Luckner when they were captured off Wakaya in the Fiji Islands in 1917.”
“Christ!” Henry exclaimed.
I looked at Rick and then at Rod, and they both looked at me; none of us any the wiser at Henry’s sudden outburst.
Judy entered the conversation, twirling her glass around on the deck, trying to attract somebody’s attention to its emptiness. “What’s so amazing about Andy’s uncle sailing around during the First World War?” she asked.
Henry turned to her, looked at the empty glass, ignored it, and said: “The Seeadler was a German raider. She sank Allied ships.”
“Oh!” she said, and gave me a look that indicated that she wasn’t certain whether jumping into the cot with me during those first six months might be construed as fraternizing with the enemy.
“Good God, Jude!” I burst out. It was a bloody long time ago! Over fifty years. Fifty-five if you want to be precise. 1917 to 1972. We’re in the seventies now, remember?”
“Oh,” she said again.
She wasn’t too bright, but bright enough to know what her best assets were, and bright enough to be able to twist Rod around her little finger.
All this time Henry had been looking at me with a strange gleam in his eye, and a far-away look on his face. Rick saw the direction of my glance and then looked at Henry, seeing something that he didn’t understand; but I knew what had stirred up the dreaming thoughts in his mind; and smiled quietly to myself.
“Okay, you two,” Rick said, and then raised the stubbie to his lips. “What gives?”
“The treasure,” I replied, and was pleased at the result the two words brought, and then laughed as Rick half-choked on the beer trickling down his throat. Judy dropped the twirling glass with a clunk, the shatterproof plastic refusing to splinter.
Henry took a quick look around, as though expecting someone to be lurking in the shadows, as though wishing I hadn’t said the words out loud. Rod was the only one, apart from myself, not to react. He calmly finished off the rest of his beer, punched the empty stubbie into the centre of the circle and asked: “What treasure?” and then burped.
“Henry seems to know all about it,” I smirked. “Ask him.”
Two
If I had taken the extra ten or twenty seconds needed to pull the tops off those three stubbies, instead of putting them aside on the table and going back out and up to the bow to ask Judy if she wanted another drink, I might never have heard Henry mention von Luckner’s name; and if I hadn’t heard his name the later conversation might never have happened; and my life would have gone off on another tangent altogether. In that ten or twenty seconds Rick, or Rod, or even Henry himself might have changed the subject and moved on to another topic. But I hadn’t paused for those few seconds, and I had heard von Luckner’s name, and that mere mention of his name changed my life entirely.
******
It changed all our lives.
We sat silent as Henry told the story in his quiet voice, or as much of it as he thought he knew. He didn’t know a lot about the treasure; but then I don’t suppose many people do. I reckoned I knew more than most, and that wasn’t much. Rod sniggered as Henry guessed at what might have been hidden, and muttered something about pieces of eight and Long John Silver and the black spot; but I knew better.
Von Luckner’s story would fill volumes in itself; but there had been nothing written about the treasure. I had tried to research it six or seven years previously and had run up against a brick wall. I had read two books written by the Sea Devil, as von Luckner had become known, and one by somebody else; but there had been no mention of the treasure in the South Pacific. Von Luckner had gone chasing one in the Cocos Islands, but that was several thousand miles away from where rumours placed his own. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Max I would have treated it as a myth, like all the others had done.
“It’s a load of garbage,” Rod laughed. “God almighty! How many fortunes and lives have been lost chasing after rumours of buried treasure?”
******
We should have listened to him then.
“Who said it’s just a rumour?” I asked. “And who said that it’s buried?”
Uncle Max had been certain that it existed, and he should have known. The stories he told me as a boy were full of the Seeadler and the merchant ships she had taken. He had told me of the storms at sea, and of the tricks the Sea Devil had played on those unsuspecting steamer and schooner captains. I had believed the stories then; doubting them in my late teens; but believing them again after I read the books written about von Luckner’s exploits. Uncle Max hadn’t embroidered the tales. If anything he had played them down.
They had sailed from Hamburg four days before Christmas 1916, the Seeadler disguised as a Norwegian ship bearing the name Maletta. Uncle Max, at the age of twenty-four, had attained the rank of Hochbootsmann – the German equivalent of bosun. Von Luckner was then thirty-four. Uncle Max couldn’t remember how many ships they captured and sank over the next seven months, first in the Atlantic and then, by late April 1917, up into the Pacific; but he remembered the boxes that were sometimes carried back in the ship’s long-boat and stowed in von Luckner’s cabin; and yet he could only guess at what they might contain, for Uncle Max was a member of the Imperial German Navy, and discipline and unquestioning obedience came second only to one’s belief in God. No-one had ever asked what the small iron and wooden boxes had contained. It was only years later, when he heard the rumours of treasure left at the island of Wakaya in the Fiji Group, that he began to wonder.
“Well, if it’s not just a rumour,” Rod muttered. “How much truth is there in the bloody story?”
I told them what Uncle Max had told me, of how they had finally landed on the small atoll of Mopelia in the Society Islands, west of Tahiti, early in August 1917, the first landfall since leaving Germany. I told them of how a small tidal wave had hit the Seeadler while most of the crew were still on shore; how it had picked her up and smashed her down on the reef. They had salvaged what they could from the wreck and set the rest on fire in case the smashed hulk might bring investigation by a passing ship. Von Luckner then set off in one of the Seeadler’s motor-boats, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, taking with
him Leutnant Kircheiss and four of the crew, one of the four being Uncle Max. Leutnant Kling was put in charge of those left behind at Mopelia.
I didn’t bother to bore them with the tale of his epic journey across the South Pacific, even though it had been far from boring. They were only interested in hearing about the treasure.
The motor-boat had been fitted out with sails and loaded down with provisions, guns, and a rectangular iron chest – the lid of which von Luckner had ordered to be sealed with a heavy layer of tar. Uncle Max had seen the chest, and had seen the large brass lock. He hadn’t wondered about the lock at the time, why it was needed, or what it might guard.
After managing to pick up food in the Cook Islands, by posing as Dutch-American sailors crossing the Pacific as part of a wager, they headed off again, bound for the Fiji Islands, still hoping to capture a schooner and return to Mopelia to pick up the rest of the crew.
In September of that year, 1917, they reached the Fijian Island of Wakaya, more than two thousand miles from their starting point at Mopelia. By his time they were in a bad state and von Luckner knew that he had to rest his crew and re-provision the motor-boat. They landed and told those that they met on the island that they were shipwrecked Norwegian sailors.
Perhaps it was some sixth sense that told von Luckner that all was not well, for that night he set off in the motor-boat with only Leutnant Kircheiss and Uncle Max, leaving the other three men on shore. They sailed quietly around the island: von Luckner with a chart spread across one of the thwarts, making penciled marks every now and then. After several hours of following the rocky shoreline in bright moonlight, he called for the sail to be lowered. All three men bent to the oars and rowed the Kronprinzessin Cecilie into a small bay. They dropped the anchor and lowered a weighted line to judge the depth. Von Luckner was satisfied. A rope was doubled through a loop of cord wound round the tar-sealed iron chest and they lowered it to the bottom. One end was then let slip and the rope was hauled to the surface.
“Sehr gut,” Uncle Max heard von Luckner say. “Die Truhe wird unsere Zukunft garantieren” – The chest will guarantee our future.
They were captured the next day by a party of Fijian police, but not before Uncle Max had seen von Luckner tear the chart into pieces and quietly drop the shreds over the side of the motor-boat.
“Did your uncle ever get to see the chart?” Rick asked as I finished, his eyes wide.
“No,” I replied. “But he knew where they had dropped the chest. He didn’t need a chart to remember the shape of the coastline.”
“Does he still remember where the treasure is?” Henry asked, his head turning to the shadows again, making certain that there was no possibility of our being overheard.
“Andy’s uncle is dead,” Rick interrupted before I could open my mouth again. “Where do you think Andy got the money to buy into the Sally May?”
“Shit! Shit! Shit!”
“Don’t panic, Henry,” I said, and straightened my left leg to ease a cramp. “I’ve got a fair idea where it is.” His face lit up again. “If it’s still there, that is,” I added.
The details of the bay where they had lowered the iron chest had stuck in Uncle Max’s mind. Maybe because it was the last thing they had done before they were captured; or maybe it was because von Luckner had only taken the senior members of his small crew with him, lending an air of mystery to the nocturnal voyage. Even forty or so years later he had still been able to remember the shape of the two headlands jutting out into the sea, and the depth of the water into which the chest had been lowered, and the state of the tide; but what he had remembered most vividly was the eerie shape of a pile of rocks that at one time must have crashed down from the cliff above the small rocky beach. The moonlight had glinted down on the jumbled mass of boulders; stones that resembled a dog begging for food. He was certain that it hadn’t just been a trick of the moonlight. The hound was guarding the treasure. Uncle Max believed it had been sent there to do just that: and so did I.
But I didn’t need the treasure; or did I? Three years ago maybe, when I was struggling to pay off my share in the Sally May, but not now.
I told them about Uncle Max’s memories of that night, and the depth of the water, and the two arms of the bay; but I kept silent about the hound. The hound was the key, and the key was mine.
I looked around the circle: at Rod, his face creased and thoughtful, finally believing that there might be some truth in it all: at Judy, with the gleam of gold in her dark brown eyes, and I thought of how her tiny mind would be trying to figure out a way to get her fingers on that gold, but she had made her choice; she was marrying Rod, and it was me that held the key. I looked at Rick and Henry, and saw adventure there, the thrill of the finding, of proving the legend, of being able to say: “We were right!”
“Treasure is for fools,” I said. “It’s for rich men to chase and never find. Rod just told you. There’s been too many fortunes lost and dead men’s bones left rotting on the ocean floor.” I picked up my empty stubbie, reached for Judy’s glass and added: “Who wants another drink?”
******
The days drifted by and we got on with the mundane work of overhauling the two Gardner engines, scraping down the hull and putting on new paint. The boredom got to Judy and she got to Rod, urging him to sell, to accept the final offer Henry had made; and just after the end of the half year the deal was done and Henry became the new owner of that one-third interest in the Sally May. As soon as the cheque was handed over, Judy hauled Rod off to the city, down to Brisbane for the wedding.
I was alone on the trawler the day before they left; Henry and Rod at the solicitors, signing the legal jargon; Rick off chasing some new cable we needed. There was a thump on the deck as somebody jumped down from the short steel ladder attached to one of the pig-pen piles.
“Hi, there,” she said, the blond hair hanging way down past her shoulders, not tied up in its usual pony-tail; make-up applied with a bit more care and attention than usual.
“Hi, Jude,” I replied. “Where’re the guys?”
“Oh, still with the solicitor I expect, writing out the cheque. I’m meeting them in the lounge bar at the Pacific at twelve.”
It was just after ten-thirty.
“Great,” I replied. “You’ll be leaving for Brisbane soon then?”
“Yes, tomorrow.”
“That soon?”
“Yes.”
I felt a tightening in my stomach as I looked across at the trim figure standing in the doorway, bright sunlight filtering through soft hair, and recalled the feel of that tight little body and those firm breasts now covered by only a thin piece of material, and thought back to those first few months. My mouth started to go dry.
“Like a drink?” I asked, coughing to clear my throat.
“Yes,” she said quietly, and I could hear the tremor in her voice as well.
I turned, moving across to the fridge, and bent down to lift out the bottles, and knew that she had come up close behind.
Her hand touched the small of my back. I spun into her body, and through the silky powder-blue dress felt the hardness of those two breasts pressing against my bare chest. Her perfume was faint and yet overpowering. Surges of blood began pulsating through my temples as she ran fingers and palms across my chest, around my nipples; her eyes misty, staring into mine. The soft warm hand moved down across my belly, down to my shorts, feeling the hardness there as her lips came to mine, the tongue darting out and finding my own, the pressure from those fingers shivering through my very being as she squeezed and released and squeezed again; and then came the quickening breath; and then, as her other hand left my chest and groped behind her back for the zipper, I knew it was wrong, all wrong.
“No,” I said quietly, and then again: “No!”
“Oh, God, yes,” she breathed. “Oh, Christ, Andy! Please!”
“No!” I said once more, pushing her away and turning to the sink to hide the hardness straining my shorts. “No,
Jude. It’s not right.”
“Christ, Andy!” she snapped. “Who says it’s not right? Who says?” She took a step forward, hands reaching towards me. “I need you, Andy.” She was pleading. I had never seen her do that before. “I’ve needed you for months. Please, Andy. Just this once. We’re leaving tomorrow. Please!”
“No!” I snapped, now in control of my mind, and my lust. “For Christ’s sake, woman! You’re engaged to Rod! He’s my partner, my friend!”
“So what?” she hissed. “It didn’t stop you getting into my pants before!”
“That’s right,” I said. “Before! Before you and Rod started getting serious.”
“Before you and Rick found out I was screwing all three of you, you mean!” she snapped.
“No!” I said, not really certain what I meant. “Look, Jude. We had some fun, but it’s over. Just leave it, okay? Go down to Brisbane with Rod and forget we ever happened, okay?”
“Please, Andy!” She was trembling, begging, but I walked to the door.
“Come on, Jude. You’d better go.”
The narrow lips grew even thinner as they stretched around gleaming white teeth; her fists tightened up; breasts straining against the tight cotton dress. I had never hit a woman before, but I was getting ready to do so then. I wasn’t going to have those sinewy fingers raking short sharp nails across my face and chest.
“You bastard!” she spat. “You miserable bastard! One day I’ll pay you back, you sexless son-of-a-bitch!”
With that one final outburst of frustrated hate she ran off along the back deck. I watched as she climbed the steel ladder, the pale-coloured dress flying up around brown legs, exposing a flash of snow-white cotton bikini briefs. I stood there and wondered whether I had done the right thing, whether I should call her back, whether I should stroke those tanned thighs just one last time; but it was too late, and somehow I was glad when she ran off along the concrete jetty and slammed the door of Rod’s new Ford, throwing up gravel as she sped away from the trawler berths for the last time.
The Stone Dog Page 2
