Caribbean Rim

by Randy Wayne White

  At a certain age, bitterness is buffered by amusement. “Which mess? Colombia dropped the charges two years ago, but that story didn’t make the headlines, of course. The government still won’t release my damn boat—the Chris Commander I rebuilt with twin Cats and blowers. And the Bahamas, after all the plata I put on the deck off Nassau, they flagged my goddamn passport. That’s where I was, at the consulate in Miami, and they, this guy with a smirk and a pressed suit, he laughed in my face. I’m a marked man in every country a Spanish galleon made landfall. Florida’s the worst, no surprise there, which is why . . .” He reached for the briefcase, then decided, “I’ll get to that in a bit.”

  Tomlinson nudged him along. “Most pissed off wives go to an attorney. I still don’t understand why she called you.”

  “Probably because she spent twenty years trying to change Leonard and suddenly he wasn’t the man she’d married. Why does it always surprise them? Becca, that’s her name. She blames me for her husband screwing around with a college girl, I guess, then the two of them bugging out. Like I’d planned the whole shebang.”

  “His wife should know better. There would be no such thing as adjunct professors if it wasn’t for the perks,” Tomlinson said. “It happens all the time. Gotta tell you, amigo, so far Prof. Nickelby doesn’t sound like the straight arrow you described.”

  “No shit. For years he was an officious jerk to anyone, kids, old retired farts, it didn’t matter if they owned metal detectors. Treasure hunters, especially the few old pros around, we despised the guy. Called him Nick the Prick. Then all of a sudden”—Fitzpatrick shrugged—“he went middle-aged crazy, I guess. Or woke up one morning, saw his wife, and packed his shit. It was a day or so after he vamoosed that I realized I’d been robbed.”

  Tomlinson said, “Do you know anything about the girl?”

  “Just that she was his student for a while. Only found one old photo—Lydia Johnson, a skinny, mousy little thing. She’s about as interesting as a paper bag. Which makes sense, at least. Nickelby—I’d describe the little dweeb as about the same. That bastard chased me off more wrecks than bad weather.”

  “His wife has to have something against you. Or on you. Let’s have it, Fitz. Offering a government suit a bribe would’ve been just plain damn stupid, so it can’t be that.”

  “Hell, I would’ve had I thought it might have . . . But, no, he approached me back around Christmas. Called me on my cell and asked if we could meet privately. That was surprise number one. Then hinted around like he might be willing to cut a deal if we could just speak confidentially.”

  “Geezus, you didn’t fall for a rookie gambit like that.” Tomlinson chewed at a strand of hair, readying himself for the worst.

  “Pissed me off, is what it did. Sure, I figured it was some kind of sting, but he kept after me, so we took a boat ride. Then another and another. That’s how he finally convinced me. Money problems, sick of being paid jack shit for years of work, and he’d lost a promotion to a younger guy who’s now his asshole boss. Oh, and his car. He bitched about driving the same shitty Volvo while us treasure hunters were out getting rich. That part cracked me up, it really did.”

  Fitzpatrick moved his briefcase from the floor to his lap. “Anyway, I finally listened to his offer. Nickelby said he’d fix the papers while I dove a couple of off-limits spots. In return, I’d teach him the treasure diving business—open up my files, so to speak. That, plus half of whatever we recovered.”

  “And you fell for it.”

  “Goddamn, give me some credit. I did a couple of test runs first. Let him find a few trash coins I’d seeded, then some pot shards and one of my best ale bottles. You’ve seen them—black glass, torpedo-shaped. Fairly rare. They’re mostly from the sixteen hundreds. That’s what sealed it. You know that look an amateur gets? A kind of greedy-assed glow. Man, I could tell the hook was set. After that, we hit a couple of real spots and split the profits from a nice little bronze cannon and a couple of Dutch coins. The deal seemed to be working out okay—until he took a powder. Among other things.”

  “Another government suit run amok.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Small people with power, man, never trust them. Now Nickelby will either narc you to the feds if he ends up in court or sell your GPS numbers to the competition. Or . . . Wait, is he any good? Could be he’ll dive the spots himself.”

  “You haven’t heard the worst. The idiot took his laptop but left behind a hard drive with enough evidence to put us both in jail. All the details and numbers in a row, plus pictures—X-rated, I guess—of his new girlfriend.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Yep, his wife found it.” Fitz rubbed his forehead. “That’s how she knew we’d worked out a secret deal. It must’ve taken her a week to figure out the password, and that’s what she’s threatening to do—put us both in jail if I don’t . . . Well, I’m sick to death worrying about it. Take a look at these before you hear the rest.”

  He opened the briefcase and placed several coins on the lab table. They were in plastic sleeves, clumps of three or four fused together by centuries of black oxidation. This indicated the metal was silver, not gold.

  Tomlinson fetched a magnifying glass. A light brought a single coin into focus. It was heavy, round but imperfect, the die hand-struck, a king’s head in profile. Date, 178-something, the last digit indecipherable.

  “You and Nickelby found these?”

  “Just me, almost a year ago. I didn’t get a reply from Seville that confirmed the source until a few days after Nickelby split. Thank god, or all the details would’ve been in my logbook. These coins could have changed American history, and that’s no bull.”

  They’d been commissioned in 1782 by King Charles the Third, he explained, to fund Spain’s holdings in the Americas. About thirty million dollars’ worth out of the Mexico City mint.

  “That’s by today’s bullion prices. Most believe the manifest left Vera Cruz on a single ship, the El Cazador, which sank in the winter of 1784. If she’d made New Orleans, Spain wouldn’t have gone broke and ceded Louisiana back to France. Think about how that would’ve changed everything.”

  Tomlinson’s brain raced ahead. There would have been no Lewis and Clark Expedition, no Louisiana Purchase, no Hollywood, no Bogart-and-Bacall classics, or even a decent cup of Starbucks coffee. In his mind, the domino effect erased seventeen U.S. states and a lot of good times. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, an entire generational hoedown from Berkeley to Boulder, a golden era of hopeful discord that in recent years had withered like a flower, the movement poisoned by a self-righteous myopia that had once infected only the enemy.

  “There would’ve had to have been a bright side,” he mused.

  “Huh?”

  “Had that ship not sunk. For instance, Texas shit-kickers would need a visa if they wanted to breed with human beings. But, yeah, changed history. For sure.”

  Fitz ignored that by producing another sleeve of coins. “Check out the die marks on the one you’re holding. These and a bunch more could be yours if you help dig me out of this mess.”

  On the coin’s obverse side was a Spanish coat of arms braced by pillars. Or cannon. “How deep?”

  “The El Cazador? Too deep for nitrox, about three hundred feet, but don’t worry. That wreck’s already been picked clean. A few years back, a Louisiana shrimper snagged his nets and winched up a few hundred of these. All black as tar, of course—I’m not making this up. Nets full of what they figured were seashells and junk. The captain ’bout had a heart attack when he realized what he had.”

  The captain had played it straight and sort of smart, Fitz added, but not smart enough. He’d hired a crack maritime attorney before contacting the feds—and lost more than half of what he finally dredged up for being so damn honest.

  “What the pinheads don’t realize is, pros like me have discovered more important wrec
ks than all the archaeologists combined. And we’d keep sharing information if they’d just cut us a fair deal.” Fitz had a whole speech on the subject. Lots of bitterness based on personal experience. It went on for a while.

  Tomlinson returned the coins to their sleeves before interrupting. “But these didn’t come from . . . where?”

  The man’s eyes sharpened. “The Cazador’s sister ship, and the letter I mentioned confirmed it. The so-called experts didn’t believe she existed because they were too lazy to do their own research—that’s always been the difference between us. I spent most of a decade in Seville learning to read and write archaic Spanish. The sister ship, I call her La Escaponda because that’s what she was doing, I think—‘running for her life.’”

  “The Runaway,” Tomlinson said, a loose translation of the name.

  “Your Spanish is pretty good. What I think happened is . . .”

  Fitzpatrick had a theory. The captain of the sister ship had seen the El Cazador go down in a hurricane. By the time he’d saved his own ship it was too late to help, but not too late to change course and steal the manifest.

  “Picture the poor bastard and his crew, barely alive, eating wormy salt beef but carrying a ton of newly minted coins. How his mind might view the situation, you understand. If neither boat arrived in New Orleans, the big shots in Madrid might figure they both sank in the storm. Risky, but the chance of a lifetime, right? So he and his crew said screw it and headed for the islands to live like rich men.”

  A few hundred miles later, the sister ship sank, too. Damage from the first storm or another hurricane came along—or it was captured by privateers, not uncommon in those days.

  “I know where she is,” Fitz said. “La Escaponda.”

  “The Bahamas,” Tomlinson said in a flat tone.

  The treasure hunter tried not to react. “I’ve got forty years of hard work recorded in that logbook. Trips all over the Caribbean where I dragged magnetometers, and marked wrecks that I didn’t have time to dive. Or didn’t have the money. Or the weather went to shit. Wrecks, some of them, I matched up later with the archives in Seville. You wouldn’t believe the potential dollar amount if I told you.”

  “I’d believe it but don’t care. Will Nickelby know what he’s reading?”

  Maybe not. Fitz had his own system when it came to writing GPS numbers. All salvage pros did, just like fishermen. Add or subtract a linchpin number in case someone peeks over your shoulder.

  “The coordinates will confuse him unless he figures it out. He might. Nickelby’s smart. And he’s dealt with enough archaic Spanish to understand some of my notes. It’s my sketches he’ll focus on first: the way reefs lie, the trees and the towers, the anchorages—you know how triangulation works. The less important sites, I didn’t bother writing everything in code. That’s where I think we’ll find him.”

  Tomlinson was running out of patience. “Where exactly? Are you talking about the whole damn Caribbean Sea?”

  “Yeah . . . no . . . a couple of places. Islands, shallow-water areas with promising spots not far from shore. He’ll try those first. Don’t worry, I’ll stay in touch by phone.”

  That did it. “The hell you will. The cell towers down there suck. It’s text messages only, unless you’re close to Nassau. And that’s on a good day. Doc’s already poking around Andros because that’s what you suggested, and I’m supposed to fly out tomorrow. If I fly out. Damn it, Fitz, I’m not dumb. You want to use us like chess pieces to block Nickelby from finding something. The question is, what?”

  Fitzpatrick evaded by repeating a tired old maxim—The first rule of treasure hunting is to trust no one—then withdrew into himself while Tomlinson’s hollow, haunted blue eyes probed the man’s cranial bone.

  Truth is multilayered. It is tangled in roots and often caged in lies. Patterns of thought formed in Tomlinson’s brain as a topo map. There were contours of varying intensity.

  “You’re worried about Nickelby,” he said gently. “Worried that someone might kill him to get your logbook. No . . . to get their hands on something else. Talk to me, Fitz.”

  The older man stared at the floor. “Him and the girl, if they’re still together, they might start around the Elutheras, but probably Andros, the southern tip, like I said on the phone. There’re a couple of promising wreck sites there. Not great, but okay. That much of what I told you is true. Hopefully, Nickelby stops there. But I doubt it.”

  Tomlinson pictured white sand and ballast rock, a remote expanse of turquoise water. “Before the Bahamas flagged your passport, you were onto something really big, weren’t you?”

  The treasure hunter in Fitzpatrick sidestepped that, too, saying, “There’s more I left out. Don’t get pissed. Along with my logbook, he stole something else—three primo Spanish coins. Very, very valuable. So, in a way, you’re right.”

  “Right about what you found?”

  “I’m talking about the coins. Nick the Prick stole a gold doubloon that could get them both killed.”

  4

  Tamara’s boat was an Abaco dory, 18 feet of lapstreak with a heart-shaped transom and enough sail to haul sponge divers offshore. That’s what the boats had been built to do before the hurricane of ’29 wiped out the sponges and most of the local fleet.

  “Gas is expensive,” Tamara remarked, sculling away from the dock. The sun had just topped the trees. “I like sailing better anyway. And if what you’re researching is true ’bout the sound of boat engines and sharks, probably safer, you think?” She watched Ford nod, then continued, “I’ve kept this ’un in fine shape since my gran’daddy passed along. If you’re hungry, there’s sliced mangoes, water, beer, and such in the cooler. Mullet jerky, too. Made it myself.”

  The sculling oar required both hands. She lifted, tilted the blade, and took another long stroke, before saying, “The beer—I brought two bottles, which I’ll have to charge extra for. That’s up to you.”

  Tamara’s attitude was aloof but congenial. She possessed a lifetime of local knowledge and navigated with languid confidence. Even so, Ford paid attention to landmarks as they sailed, asking the names of coral banks and channels to fix them in memory while, overhead, frigate birds soared.

  Wind-sheared mangroves flattened aft. The sky settled around them blending into a horizon of saline air and heat, a jade desert without quadrants.

  He slid closer to the helm and watched the compass. Questions about the Cuban-sounding man who’d asked about Nickelby could wait until he had Tamara’s full confidence.

  It’s the way his mind worked. No matter where, or who you’re traveling with, always, always be prepared to find your way back alone. If someone was tailing the archaeologist, he—or they—might first try to derail any competitors. Unlikely, but possible, depending on the value, real or imagined, of Fitzpatrick’s logbook.

  Which is why Ford had to wonder who else she had told about a biologist with papers from the Bahamian government?

  * * *

  —

  Miles offshore, still inside the reef, Tamara swung into the wind, saying, “I’ll use the oar from here.”

  “We’re close to where you saw the dinosaur bones?” He had put on his picnic persona, easygoing, having fun with a claim he knew couldn’t be true.

  “I hear that smile in your tone,” she replied. “Give me a few minutes, Mister Scientist, then maybe you can explain what it is I saw.”

  They had talked on the long sail out. She was a certified dive master thanks to a government program that had fast-tracked her and a dozen other Bahamian women. In a nation where seventy percent of females never learn to swim, they were newbies in a business dominated by men. A grant had financed her little dive shop, but finding good spots to dive had been left to her.

  Tamara was determined to excel. That’s what she’d been doing, out in her boat alone, drifting, using a glass bucket as a lens
, when she spotted a pile of rubble where there shouldn’t have been rubble. Among the litter was a long, curved object that resembled a photo she’d seen in National Geographic. A mastodon or woolly mammoth tusk, possibly—animals that, like dinosaurs, had not inhabited Andros, or any other island in the Bahamas. It had been too late in the day to risk a dive, so she’d been waiting for the right client and the right weather to return.

  That was three weeks ago.

  The sail came down. As a range marker, she fixated on an expanse of rock where seawort and a single battered palm grew. A twelve-foot paddle sculled them closer while the woman’s eyes darted from the tree to coral heads below. Whitecaps outside the reef provided a triangulation point.

  “This is it,” she said after a while. “Hang on, sir, while I set the anchor. Wouldn’t leave my boat untended most charters, but you seem to know what you’re about.”

  Twice they had stopped at near-shore coral banks. Checkout dives. Ford had done just enough to prove he was competent, but not too much. He’d also taken a few samples from brain corals that showed symptoms of thermal bleaching disease.

  She went over the side cradling the flukes of a Danforth. A trip buoy tracked her progress across the bottom until she reappeared. “It’s shallow enough, have a look around first. After that, we’ll use tanks if you don’t think I was dreaming what I saw.”

  Ford tumbled backward into water. It was salt-dense, blueberry-tinted, clear, and twenty feet deep. Coral flamed with lavender fans and clouds of iridescent fish. A basin of white stood apart. Sand was thatched with the outline of what might be timbers beneath. Nature abhors straight lines. Scattered ballast rock confirmed the unexpected.

  Impressive. No sonar gear, or GPS, yet the woman had put them directly over a remnant of shipwreck. He no longer doubted she’d seen something that resembled a prehistoric bone.

  Back on the surface, he got his bearings. They were five miles from the southern tip of Andros Island. It was a barren archipelago that constituted land—a long swim if something went wrong. The silhouette of a vessel in the distance mitigated the sense of isolation. The vessel exited Jack Fish Channel and turned, possibly toward them. A plume of black smoke suggested heavy diesel engines. His attention shifted and zeroed in on the rubble scattered beneath his fins.