The Deep

by Peter Benchley

  “Maybe, around the turn of the century.” Treece shook his head, as if to dismiss the government from his mind. “So,” he said, “now that you’ve a half interest in what may turn out to be nothing, what are you going to do?”

  “Stay,” Gail said, “we don’t really have a choice.”

  “You’ve figured your risks?”

  Sanders said, “We have.”

  “All right. A few ground rules, then. From this moment on, you’re to do what I tell you. You can question all you want, when there’s time. But when there’s not, you jump first and ask questions later.”

  Gail looked at David. “Leader of the pack.”

  “What’s that?” Treece said.

  “Nothing, really. When we were diving, David got annoyed at me for not obeying him.”

  “And rightly, too. We could get through without a bruise, but there’ll be times when getting through at all may depend on how quick you respond. Any time you’re tempted to buck me, know this: I’ll kick your ass out of here in a trice. I’ll not have you getting killed on my account.”

  “We’re not out to fight you,” Sanders said.

  “Fine. Now”—Treece smiled—“bad-ass decision number one: Go back to Orange Grove and turn in your mobilettes. Pack your gear, check out, and call a cab to bring you out here.”

  “What?”

  “See? You’re bucking me already. If we’re going to get into this mess, I want you where I can keep an eye on you, and where Cloche’s people can’t. Back there, Christ knows who-all will have you in their sights.”

  “But . . . ,” Gail protested. “This is your—”

  “It may not have all the amenities of your hundred-dollar-a-day bungalow, but it’ll do. And you won’t have to worry about some tomcat planting voodoo dolls in your bed.”

  C H A P T E R

  V I I I

  When the taxi had departed, leaving the Sanderses and their luggage-outside Treece’s house, Gail said, “You think we’ll sleep in the kitchen?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s the only room in the house we’ve ever seen. 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.”

  “But . . .”

  “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 nun.”

  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.

  “Where did he come from?” Sanders asked.

  “The reef, I imagine.”

  “No, I mean how did he get here? I’ve never heard of a fish that rolls itself in newspaper and deposits itself on your doorstep.” Sanders chuckled at his little joke.

  “Somebody brought him. They do that. A person catches a few fish, has more than he needs, he’ll drop one by.”

  Gail said, “Is this what you mentioned before? Looking after the keeper of the light?”

  “Not really.” Treece flipped the barracuda over and scaled the other side. “We take care of our own. Kids’ mother gets sick, neighbors’ll feed ’em and look after ’em. Ever since . . .” He seemed to hesitate. “They know I don’t have time to go fishing and have to cook for myself, so they leave a little something.” With two sharp strokes, Treece severed the head and tail. He tossed the tail in the garbage. “You want the head?”

  David and Gail shook their heads, looking—with undisguised revulsion—at the fish head impaled through the eye by the point of Treece’s knife.

  “It’s not bad, if you don’t have anything else,” Treece said, flipping the head into the garbage. “But this fellow has a generous carcass.” He slit the barracuda’s belly from tail to throat and scooped out the innards. Then he turned the fish around and made a slit along its backbone. The whole side of meat came free.

  “You might heat me up some oil,” he said to Gail.

  “What kind?”

  “Olive oil. It’s over there by the burner. Dump half a bottle in a pan and fire her up.”

  Treece sliced the two fillets in half and dropped them in the pan of hot oil, where they bubbled and spat and quickly turned from gray-white to golden.

  Gail made a simple salad—Bermuda onions and lettuce—and asked Treece where the dressing was.

  “Here,” he said, handing her an unlabeled bottle.

  “What is it?”

  “Wine, they say. I don’t know what’s in it, but it goes in most everything—salads, cooking, your stomach. Don’t want to drink too much of it, though. Give you a fearsome head.”

  Gail poured an inch of the liquid in a glass and drank it. It tasted bitter, like vermouth.

  The sun had dropped below the horizon when they sat down to eat, and rays of pink, reflected off the clouds, streamed in the window and washed the kitchen with a warm, soft glow.

  Treece saw Gail toying with her fish, reluctant to eat it. “I’ll risk my mortal bones,” he said, smiling. “If he’s ciguatoxic, you’ll know it in a few seconds. One fellow was lugged off to the hospital with the poisonous morsel still in his craw.”

  He didn’t use a fork, but broke off a big piece of barracuda with his fingers and put it in his mouth. He cocked his head, feigning dread at the possible onset of crippling cramps. “Nope,” he said. “Clean as a Sunday shirt.”

  The Sanderses ate the fish. It was delicious, moist and flaky with a crisp coating of fried oil.

  At 9:30, Treece yawned and announced, “Time to put it away. We’ll want to be up early. Have to fuel the compressor on the boat and show you how the air lift works. Ever used a Desco?”

  “No,” Sanders said.

  “Have to give you practice, then. There’s no trick to it, once you learn how to watch your air line. If it fouls on something, or kinks, you’ll think the beast from twenty thousand fathoms has grabbed you by the throat.”

  “We won’t dive with tanks?” Gail said.

  “We’ll take some, just in case. That’s another thing: We’ll have to fill them in the morning. That compressor out back makes a God-awful din. But you should try to use a Desco. You never run out of air, unless the compressor on the boat runs out of gas. You use a tank for five hours and you’ll think you’ve been kissing prickly pears. The mouthpiece begins to smart after a while.”

  “There’s no mouthpiece on a Desco?”

  “No. It’s a full-face mask. You can talk to yourself all you like—sing, make a speech, give yourself a royal cussing. You can talk back and forth, too, if you read lips worth a damn.”

  They were in bed by ten. The wind whistled outside, swooping up from the sea and over the cliff. As Sanders leaned over to turn off the bedside light, he saw the dog standing, tentatively, in the doorway.

  “Hi,” Sanders said.

  The dog wagged her tail and leaped onto the bed. She curled up and lay between Gail and David.

  “Shoo her off,” said Gail.

  “Not me. I need all my fingers.”

  They heard Treece call, “Charlotte!” and the dog’s ears stiffened. Treece appeared in the doorway. “Forgive her. That’s her rightful place. It’ll take her a day or two.” He said to the dog, “Come along,” and the dog raised her head, stretched, and went to Treece, who said, “Sleep well,” and shut the door.

  The first bark seemed to be part of Sanders’ dream. The second, loud and prolonged, woke him. He looked at the radium dial on his watch: It was 12:10. A faint yellow light seeped around the edges of the closed window shade and flickered on the walls. The dog barked again. Gail stirred, and Sanders shook her awake.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” He heard Treece walking in the hall. “It might be a fire.”

  “What? In here?”

  “No, outside.” He rolled off the bed and pulled on his boxer shorts. “Stay here.” He walked toward the door. “If there’s trouble . . .”

  “If there’s trouble, what?” Gail reached for her bathrobe. “Hide under the bed?”

  Sanders opened the bedroom door and saw Treece standing at the front door, naked except for a brief bathing suit. The dog stood beside him. Though Treece filled the doorway, beyond him Sanders could see a glow of firelight and some dark forms.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  Treece turned at the sound. “Not sure. Nobody’s said anything.”

  Sanders approached Treece and stood beside him, slightly to the side. By the gate there were two men, dressed in black and holding oil torches that sent streams of thick black smoke into the night air.

  “Well?” Treece said aloud. He put his left hand on the doorjamb and shifted his weig
ht. Sanders saw that the apparently casual change of position put Treece’s hand within easy reach of a sawed-off shotgun that stood in the corner behind the door.

  The two torchbearers stepped apart, and between them, walking slowly toward the gate, was Cloche. He was dressed entirely in white, against which his black skin shone like graphite. The firelight sparkled on the gold feather at his neck and on the round panes in his spectacles.

  Sanders heard Gail’s barefoot steps on the wooden floor and smelled her hair as she came next to him.

  “What do you want?” Treece said, his tone a blend of anger and disdain. “If you’ve business here, state it. Else, be on your way. I’m in no mood for silly games in the middle of the night.”

  “Game?” Cloche raised his right hand to his waist and dipped the index finger.

  Sanders heard a buzz. Instinctively, he ducked, and there was a thunk against the wooden door frame. A featherless arrow quivered in the wood, six inches from Treece’s head.

  Treece had not flinched. He pulled the arrow from the wood and tossed it on the ground. “A crossbow?” he said. “Put feathers on it; it’ll fly truer.”

  “Your . . . friends . . . are not very prudent,” Cloche said. “They paid a visit to the government. I told them not to. Now the police are asking about me.”

  “And?”

  “You know what I want. I know they’re down there—ten thousand boxes of them.”

  “That’s myth.”

  “Your friends do not think so. They seemed quite convinced when they spoke to Mason Hall.”

  Still looking at Cloche, Treece whispered to Sanders, “Go ’round back and make sure nobody’s there.”

  As Sanders padded down the hall, he heard Treece say, “You know tourists. They hear stories . . .”

  The kitchen was dark, and the door and windows were closed. Sanders found the handle of a drawer, opened it, and fumbled with his fingers for a knife. He found a long heavy blade of carbon steel and slipped it into the waistband of his shorts. The cold metal against his thigh made him feel secure, though he knew it was a delusion: he didn’t know how to fight with a knife. But he was quick and strong, and he knew the house. In the dark, against a man unfamiliar with the house, he thought he would be able to handle himself.