Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  Then he saw the opening, a little farther up. He swam into it and kicked hard. His mind began to clear. What was ahead? The end of the reel, the rubble pile, the cave with the boot. It didn’t matter. Once he reached the line he was home, if his air lasted. He glanced at the gauge: 950.

  Ahead the tunnel narrowed, as he remembered. Then it divided. He didn’t remember that at all. The tunnel divided, but at a sharp angle; the division had been at his back on the way in and he had missed it. Matthias stopped, flashed his light in both entrances. They looked the same. But one led back to the blue hole and the other led nowhere. Air pressure: 600. He had to be right the first time. He forced himself to be still, hoping to feel a current entering either tunnel. He felt nothing. Shouldn’t the tide be flowing by now? Perhaps there was some other phenomenon at work in the cave. Was that it, or had he already made his mistake and entered the wrong tunnel coming out of the domed chamber?

  Decide. Matthias shone his light into the two tunnels again, hoping to see anything that might differentiate them. There was nothing. He closed his eyes, trying to will the right answer into his consciousness. Because of that, he almost missed the baby nurse shark swimming out of the right-hand tunnel. Matthias turned into it and swam as fast as he could.

  He went past the reel without noticing it, so wasn’t sure he was right until his light picked out the line running along the right-hand wall. Was it his imagination or was his air just beginning to pull hard? He didn’t check the gauge because there was no time and he didn’t want to know. The suitcase slowed him down, but he wouldn’t let it go. He dragged it over the rubble pile, passed the cave where he had found the boot, reached the second tie-off. He started skip breathing, sucking at his regulator, receiving a grudging breath of air and holding it in. Skip breathing meant risking death by embolism, if the tunnel was going up. Not skip breathing meant running out of air.

  Matthias breathed out, breathed in, kicked. He went by the first tie-off. Ahead lay the manhole-sized opening. He shoved the suitcase through, squeezed past after it, swam up through the sloping cave entrance, letting out his breath, and into the blue hole.

  Matthias stopped kicking and rose very slowly. Plenty of air left: three or four lungfuls. No sweat, commander. He went up through the red layer and into the light.

  His spare tanks lay where he had left them, in the niche at 50 feet. He laid the suitcase on the ledge, doffed his backpack and put it beside the suitcase, opened the valve on the spare tanks and donned them. Then he stuck the regulator in his mouth, breathed out the last breath from the old tanks, sucked in the first one from the new. Air flowed smoothly through the regulator. Perfect. Plan your dive, as every beginner was told, and dive your plan.

  Matthias hovered beside the ledge, breathing. For a while that was all he did. Later he looked up at the blue glow above. He breathed and gazed at the blue. That was nice.

  Matthias took the decompression tables out of the pocket in his BC. He studied them for a few minutes but they weren’t much help: they stopped at 300 feet. He tried to recall the deepest reading on the gauge. 320? 340? Then he recalled that he hadn’t checked the gauge at the deepest point. Matthias dropped down to 70 feet. He decompressed there in the darkness for ten minutes, then moved up to 60 for ten more. After that, he returned to 50, and fifteen minutes later rose to 40. Then 30, then 20, then 10. His air began pulling harder. He wished he had brought another spare. But he hadn’t, and all he could do was breathe the tank empty and go up.

  A few minutes later, he sucked the last mouthful of air out of the tank and finned slowly toward the surface, breathing out all the way. His body didn’t twist and bend, he didn’t lose control of his legs, nothing stabbed his spine, his shoulders or his hips, his fingertips didn’t prickle, his eyelids didn’t itch. That meant no nitrogen bubbles were fizzing through his bloodstream: he wasn’t bent. A lucky man.

  Matthias broke the surface and took a deep breath. He felt the sun and the breeze and reveled in the feeling. Then he shoved the suitcase up on the bank of the blue hole and climbed out after it. He sat on dry land. The warmth of the sun was his; as a bonus, he had a whole skyful of air to breathe. All of a sudden he was a lucky man. A lucky, witty caveman. That thought reminded him of the wish he’d had while narced in the domed chamber, the wish for a woman waiting when he came up. His brain was a domed chamber too. He had penetrated it and found that some part of him hadn’t given up on … what? Say it: love.

  Matthias turned to the suitcase.

  34

  It was a small leather suitcase fitted with brass corners and two brass snap locks. The brass had turned green; the leather was coated with algae and felt no stronger than wet cardboard. A plasticized luggage tag hung from the grip. The writing on the tag was blurred, but Matthias could still read it:

  NAME: Goldschmidt

  ADDRESS: 216 East 33rd St. Apt. 234. New York N. Y.

  PHONE: (212) 555–6127

  Matthias pushed sideways on the buttons to unsnap the locks, but they broke off and the locks remained shut. He took his dive knife out of the sheath on his arm and sliced the suitcase open. Inside he found two pairs of pants, three shirts, underwear and socks, all decomposing; a plastic shaving kit containing a disposable razor, an exploded can of shaving foam, a toothbrush and a comb; the remains of a book, an airplane ticket, what might have been a passport and some other papers, all of which came apart in his hands and were unreadable.

  At the back of the suitcase was a zippered pocket, rusted shut. Matthias tugged at it and the pocket tore open. Two plastic cards fell out. One looked like a Visa card, except it said: “Carte Bleu. Banque National de Paris.” The other said: “Fédération Française des Sports Aquatiques.” The holder of both cards was named Goldschmidt. Felix Goldschmidt. But what kind of kike got a name like Felix, right?

  Matthias sat by the blue hole, tapping the cards together. Implications began taking shape in his mind, but none appeared clearly other than this: he would have to dive the blue hole one more time. Matthias pictured the ledge where he had found the suitcase and the black tunnel entrance looming behind it. No one had ever found a blue hole with two openings, but no one had ever explored all the blue holes. Caves with two openings existed. Blue holes were caves. And the baby nurse shark had come from somewhere. Therefore. But not today. No repetitive dive table had ever calculated the decompression stops required if he went back down now.

  Something flashed between the pines. Moxie appeared, wearing his Boston Bruins tuque with its gold pompom. “All finish,” he said.

  “Finish?”

  “Scrubbin’ down.”

  Matthias imagined a cross-section with Moxie at the dock scrubbing the boats, ten or fifteen feet of ocean beneath him, then the sandy seabed, and below it the limestone core of the island, and himself tunneling through the rock. A lucky man.

  Moxie’s eyes roamed over the equipment scattered around the blue hole, came to rest on the suitcase. “What you got?”

  “Felix Goldschmidt’s suitcase.”

  “Felix Goldschmidt?”

  “The man who went diving with Hiram Standish, Junior.”

  Moxie squatted beside the suitcase, ran his fingers lightly over one of the brass corners; his gaze moved to the blue hole. “You find it in there?” he said.

  “Sort of. Ever been in the blue hole, Moxie?”

  “No.”

  “Or any blue hole?”

  “No, mahn.”

  “You’re not curious?”

  Moxie shook his head.

  “You don’t believe in luscas, do you?”

  Moxie smiled shyly. “Nottage he say they be down there.”

  “There are no monsters in the blue holes,” Matthias said. Not in the sense Moxie meant. But there must have been monsters of some kind; Matthias thought of the skulls in the domed chamber. He flipped Felix Goldschmidt’s dive card to Moxie. “Seen that before?”

  “The French one,” Moxie said. “I took it down to Brock.”


  “And then what happened?”

  “I tell you so many times, mahn. I tell the police, the judge, everybody.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “Brock say, ‘Fill the tanks.’”

  “Did he have any other reaction? Did he seem excited, or upset?”

  “No.”

  “Did you show him the other card?”

  “Other card?”

  “Hiram Standish’s card.”

  “The PADI card? No. I know PADI is okay.”

  “Did Brock meet Hiram Standish?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you see them together?”

  “No.”

  “So Brock might not even have heard the name ‘Standish’?”

  “Maybe not.” Moxie picked at the raised letters on the dive card with his fingernail. “How come it be in the blue hole?”

  “That’s the question.” Matthias drew a picture in the dirt: the blue hole, the tunnel, the domed chamber, the ledge, the tunnel in the east wall. He made an X on the ledge. “The suitcase was here.”

  Moxie stared at the X for a few moments. “All that be under-neat’?”

  “Underground and under Zombie Bay. It’s at least seven hundred feet from here to here, maybe more. But from here to about here is five hundred. That’s where I ran out of line.”

  “Under Zombie Bay?” Moxie said quietly. He touched the X. “How deep under?”

  “Where I found it?”

  Moxie nodded.

  “Three-twenty.”

  Moxie looked closely at Matthias. “You bullshitting me?” But he saw something in Matthias’s expression that answered his question, and he looked away. Then he started to laugh. “You drop to three-twenty, mahn? Three-hundred-and-twenty feet?”

  “More.”

  “More? Then why you alive, mahn? Why you still breathin’?”

  “Luck.”

  “Luck?” Moxie laughed again, a harsh sound quite unlike his normal laugh. “You crazy, mahn. You want to die?”

  “I want to find out who killed Felix Goldschmidt, who put Happy Standish in a coma, and why,” Matthias said. Moxie stopped laughing.

  “Killed?” he said.

  “And tried to make it look like an accident,” Matthias said. And thought: An accident blamed on me. He stood up. For an instant, he felt lightheaded and almost stumbled. His eyelids itched; his fingertips prickled. Skin bends.

  “You okay?” Moxie said.

  “I’m fine,” Matthias replied, and began packing up. Moxie helped him. They carried everything to the Jeep and drove back to the club, Moxie at the wheel. Matthias glanced back once at the blue glow in the trees.

  They sat in the bar. Matthias breathed pure oxygen from the tank he kept on the barge; the skin bends went away. “Beer?” Moxie said when Matthias laid the tank aside.

  “Armagnac,” Matthias replied, and sent Moxie up to the house for a bottle. It wasn’t so much that he wanted Armagnac, but his body had started to shake a little and he didn’t want Moxie there. He poured himself a glass of water, drank it down, then another and another. The shaking stopped. Chick said: “Mojo workin’, mojo workin’.”

  Matthias carried Felix Goldschmidt’s suitcase to the office. He placed the suitcase on the desk, beside the telephone. It was so quiet that he wondered whether he had damaged his ears. Then he heard the sea rustling against the shore, and Chick saying something in the bar. He picked up the phone and read the number on the luggage tag to the operator. He heard a clicking sound, like an electronic throat-clearing, followed by a long silence. He waited to hear that the number had been changed, or was no longer in service. Then it began to ring.

  A woman answered. “Yes?” she said; one word, but enough for Matthias to know that she was old and that English was not her mother tongue.

  He considered several openings.

  “Hello?” said the woman. “Hello?”

  Afraid she might hang up, Matthias settled on one arbitrarily. “Do you know Felix Goldschmidt?” he asked.

  “Felix? Felix? Have you news of Felix?” All at once the woman sounded very near, as though her emotions had the power to shrink the distance between them.

  “Not exactly. I found his suitcase. Your number was on it.”

  “Suitcase?”

  “A small leather one.”

  “With brass corners?”

  “Yes. You’ve seen it before?”

  “It’s mine. I lent it to him when … But you say you have no news of him?”

  “I’m not sure. Are you a friend of his?”

  “I am his mother, sir. And who are you? May I ask.”

  Matthias imagined her, hunched over the phone, cradling it with both hands. “My name’s Matthias. I own a hotel in the Bahamas.”

  “The suitcase was at your hotel?”

  “Nearby. I found it today. But …”

  “But what, Mr. Matthias?”

  “When was the last time you saw your son?”

  “On the thirtieth of August last year. In this room. Why are you asking me?”

  “Because I think your son drowned in the ocean here a few days later.”

  “It is not possible. Felix could swim—he can swim—like a dolphin.”

  So could Happy Standish—according to his mother, Matthias remembered. He said:

  “I’m afraid it happened anyway, Mrs. Goldschmidt.”

  There was a long pause. “And just now you are finding the suitcase?”

  “It was underwater, Mrs. Goldschmidt. And we had no way to identify your son. He—his body never surfaced.”

  “But then how can you say he is dead? He could be alive.”

  “I don’t think so, Mrs. Goldschmidt. He went diving and never came—”

  In the background a man said, “What is it, Hilda?” She said, “Shh.” And to Matthias: “Sir. Are you there?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry to have to tell you this.”

  “You’re sorry.”

  Matthias said nothing. Tiny voices leaked into the line. Then he heard something that might have been a muffled sob.

  “Mrs. Goldschmidt?”

  Silence.

  “Mrs. Goldschmidt?”

  “What is it?” she replied, her voice quiet now, and toneless.

  “Do you have any idea why your son came here?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What was he looking for?”

  “I know nothing about that. Nothing.”

  “But you said you saw him just before he came down. You gave him the suitcase.”

  “Yes. I said that.”

  “And he didn’t tell you what he was doing?”

  “No.”

  “Why did he have a French dive card? And a French credit card?”

  “He was a citizen of France,” she said, no longer able to fight off the past tense.

  “Have you checked with people there?”

  There was a long pause. The Mrs. Goldschmidt said: “I called the school. He has not returned.”

  “What school?”

  “The University of Aix-en-Provence. Felix taught there.”

  “What did he teach?”

  “History. He specialized in Jewish history.”

  “How did he know Happy Standish?”

  “Begging your pardon?”

  “Hiram Standish, Junior. That’s who he dove with when he—that’s who he came here with.”

  “Hilda,” said the man in the background, “why aren’t—” Something muffled his voice. Then the line cleared. Mrs. Goldschmidt was saying, “Shh.”

  “I asked you about Happy Standish,” Matthias said.

  “The name is not familiar.”

  “Your son knew him. They spent time together in Florida.”

  “I am sorry. I cannot help you.”

  “You can’t help me?”

  “No. I—Thank you for troubling. And now I must go.”

  “Wait, Mrs. Goldschmidt. Don’t you want to find out what happ
ened to Felix?”

  “Haven’t you just told me?”

  “I told you what happened, not why. Don’t you want to find out why?”

  “You said he drowned. I know why people drown, sir. It happens when they breathe water instead of air. Goodbye.”

  Matthias heard a click, then a faint hum. He hung up the phone, looked up and saw Moxie in the doorway, a bottle of Armagnac and two glasses in his hand.

  “That was Felix Goldschmidt’s mother,” Matthias told him. “She doesn’t want to know what happened to him.”

  “She in France?” Moxie said.

  “New York.”

  “New York?” said Moxie, frowning.

  “That’s right. Why?”

  Moxie looked away.

  If you’ve got something to tell me, speak. Matthias kept that thought to himself; saying it out loud would guarantee Moxie’s silence. Matthias waited.

  Moxie backed out of the office, walked a little way across the lawn between it and the bar. He leaned against the flagpole. The flags—Bahamian, dive and Jolly Roger—snapped in the wind. Moxie heard them snapping, looked up, sighed. Matthias could hear the sigh from where he stood in the office.

  Moxie turned to him. “You know Casey?” he asked.

  “Casey?”

  “The ticket girl.”

  Matthias went outside, leaned against the doorjamb. “Yeah.”

  “She have a friend in Nassau.”

  Matthias said nothing.

  “The friend is a ticket girl too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “At American.” Moxie took a deep breath, sighed again. “That’s true you found the suitcase at three-twenty?” he asked.