The Deep Read online

  The elderly clerk at the front desk was dressed in a morning coat, and he seemed more concerned about Gail’s lack of clothing than about her alarm. All he said was “Yes.”

  “The elevator’s stuck! My husband’s—”

  “Yes,” the clerk said again. He picked up a telephone and dialed one digit.

  “Well, do something!” Gail said.

  “I am, madam.” He spoke into the phone. “Clarence? It’s happened again,” he said, with a teasing I-told-you-so tone. He hung up and said to Gail, “Help will be along presently.”

  “What do you mean, ‘presently’?”

  “Madam,” the clerk said stiffly, “if you’d care to wait on the veranda . . .” He cast a disapproving eye on Gail’s bare midriff.

  As soon as Gail was outside, she started to run, and then she saw Sanders, waiting for her at the top of the cliff, a grin on his face. Gail ran to him, put her arms around him, and kissed him.

  “I was so worried . . . ,” she said. “How did you make it work?”

  “Make what work? I shinnied up the pole.”

  “You did what?”

  “Shinnied. You know . . . shinnied.”

  Unbelieving, Gail looked over the edge of the cliff. The elevator was where it had been, their diving gear still inside. “Why?”

  “I’d never done it before.”

  She looked at him and felt a sudden rush of anger. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

  “Don’t be silly. It was a calculated risk. I thought I could do it, and I did.”

  “What if you’d been wrong?”

  “Yeah, well, those are the chances you take.” He noticed the fury in her face. “C’mon, everything’s . . .” He saw her hand coming at him, and he ducked. Her fist grazed the top of his head. “For Christ sake!” he said, raising his arm to ward off the second blow. He grabbed her, pinned her arms to her sides, and brought her to him. “Hey . . . nobody got hurt.”

  She struggled briefly, then stood still and let him hold her. “Who are you trying to impress?” she said.

  As he started to answer, Sanders heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see an old black man carrying a ring of keys. The man was muttering.

  “What went wrong?” Sanders asked.

  “Temp’amental like a baby.” The man searched for the key to open the metal box.

  “Does this happen often?”

  The man didn’t answer. He opened the box, reached inside, and flicked a switch. Immediately, the pitch of the motor dropped back to normal. The man pushed something else, and, after a couple of clicks, wheels began to ten. Within seconds, the elevator was at the top of the cliff. The man shut the door, turned the key in the lock, and started away.

  “Hey,” Sanders said. “What happened?”

  “Never know. Maybe too hot, maybe too cold.”

  “It’s not going to fall off the pole, is it?”

  “Never happen. If something ain’t just right, there’s clamps that suck right down on that pole like a old octopus. No, all that ever happen is she get stuck. If people just be patient, they be okay.”

  When the man had left, Sanders unloaded the diving gear. “Give me a hand with this?” he said to Gail.

  She didn’t move. She looked at him and said flatly, “Don’t you ever do something like that again.”

  C H A P T E R

  I I

  Sanders stepped out of the shower, dried himself, and stood before the bathroom mirror. He tightened his pectoral and stomach muscles and was pleased to see the muscle fibers showing through the skin. He patted his stomach and smiled.

  The bathroom door opened behind him, and he felt a cool breeze that carried the aroma of Gail.

  Gently, Gail pinched the insignificant flesh that sat above his hipbones. “Don’t exercise too much,” she said. “I’d hate it if you lost your love handles.”

  “Never.” Sanders turned and kissed her.

  They dressed for dinner, and as they left the cottage, Sanders slammed the door, turned the key in the lock, and jiggled the doorknob to make sure the lock was fast.

  “Who’s going to steal anything?” Gail asked.

  “Anybody. Cameras, diving gear—it’s expensive stuff. No point in making it easy to get at.”

  “Well, locking the door won’t do any good. The maid has a key.”

  Holding hands, they walked along the path to the main building of the Orange Grove Club. It was like walking through a tropical nursery. Oleander, hibiscus, bougainvillaea, poinciana, and poinsettia, in a fusion of colors, crowded the sides of the path. Oranges and lemons dropped from trees in small well-tended groves. They passed a cluster of cottages similar to their own. The limestone buildings were painted orange—all but the roofs, which shone soft white in the evening sunlight.

  Gail said, “Have you ever seen cleaner roofs?”

  “They’d better be clean. That’s what you drink off of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no well water on Bermuda, no underground streams, no rivers, no nothing. All the water comes from rain. It runs off the roofs into cisterns.”

  “I thought you said it never rains here.”

  “What I said was, there’s never been a year with less than three hundred and forty days of some sunshine. It rains a fair amount, even in summer. But the storms are sudden and squally, and they don’t last long.”

  “For someone who’s never been here, you’re full of groovy facts.”

  “National Geographic training,” Sanders said. “Life is nothing but the pursuit and capture of the elusive fact.”

  “Why did you quit the Geographic? Writing for them sounds like it’d be fun.”

  “Writing might have been.” Sanders smiled. “Doing anything might have been. I didn’t do, and I didn’t write. I only made up captions. Legends, they call them. I went there because I wanted to live with wild apes, fight with crocodiles, and dive for wrecks no man had ever seen. Instead, I spent my days thinking up lines like, ‘Calcutta: In-Spot for India’s Teeming Millions.’ I never did anything. I was paid to abbreviate what other people did.”

  As they neared the club’s main building, another couple, younger, appeared on the path, walking toward them. Their gaits were awkward, for they had their arms around each other’s waists, and since the man was much taller than his bride, he had to shorten his steps into a mincing trot so she could keep up with him. As soon as he saw the young couple, Sanders dropped Gail’s hand.

  When the couple had passed, Gail said, “Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Drop my hand.”

  Sanders blushed. “Honeymooners make me nervous.”

  She took his arm and touched his shoulder with her head. “You’re one, too, you know.”

  “Yeah. But I’ve already had one honeymoon.”

  “It’s my first, though,” Gail said. “Let me enjoy it.”

  They passed through the lobby—large, sedate, paneled in gleaming, close-grained cedar—and walked by the billiard room, game room, card room, reading room, and bar on their way to the outdoor patio overlooking the ocean. They were shown to a table at the edge of the patio. The sun, setting behind them, lit the clouds on the horizon and made them glow bright pink.

  A waiter came to take their drink order. He was young, black, and there was a name on the tag on his breast pocket. He spoke in monosyllables and addressed them both—not disrespectfully—as “man.”

  As the waiter turned and left, Gail glanced after him and said quietly, “That must be a lousy job.”

  “Why?”

  “What’s he have to look forward to? Maybe, if he’s really good, he’ll become a headwaiter.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” said Sanders. “It’s better than being out of work.”

  “Did you notice his name? Slake. That doesn’t sound Bermudian.”

  “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a Bermudian-sounding anything. There are black people with names
like Bascomb who speak Saville Row British, and there are white folks who sound like they came out of a ghetto in Jamaica. I remember checking a Geographic caption with a guy, a fisherman, who was quoted as saying, ‘Holiday tomorrow. There’s going to be a tempest.’ I thought, nobody says ‘tempest’ any more. But by God, the man really talked that way. Ethnically, this place is a mess.”

  When their drinks came, they sat in silence, listening to the waves below them, looking out at the few patches of reef visible on the windless evening.

  Sanders reached into his pocket and took out the ampule he had found.

  “In the morning, let’s see if anyone around here can analyze this for us. I’ll bet you a dime it’s penicillin—from the sick bay. All ships carry that kind of stuff.”

  “I don’t think penicillin was that common till after the war. It looks more like a vaccine. Anyway, you’re on for a dime.”

  He started to hand the ampule to Gail to put in her purse when a voice behind them said, “Where did you get that?”

  They turned and saw the waiter. Slake had menus in his hand. “I beg your pardon?” Gail said.

  He seemed embarrassed by the abruptness of his question. “I’m sorry. I saw the little glass, and I wondered where you found it.” Slake spoke in a musical accent that sounded Jamaican.

  Sanders said, “On the wreck right off there.”

  “Goliath?”

  “Yes.” Gail held up the ampule so Slake could see it more clearly. “Do you know what it is?”

  Slake took the ampule and held it between his finger tips. A gas lamp burned behind him, and he twirled the ampule before the light. He gave it back to Gail and said, “I have no idea.”

  Sanders said, “Then why are you so interested?”

  “I am interested in glass. It looked old. It is pretty. Excuse me.” Slake put the menus on the table and walked toward the kitchen.

  After dinner, the Sanderses walked, hand in hand, along the path back to their cottage. A quarter moon had risen, casting golden light on the leaves and flowers. The bushes were alive with the croaking of frogs.

  Sanders unlocked the door to the cottage and said, “Let’s have a brandy on the porch.”

  “We’ll be eaten alive.”

  “I don’t think so.” He pointed to a yellow light above the door. “These things are supposed to keep the bugs away.”

  He poured brandy into the two bathroom glasses and carried them out to the porch. Gail was sitting in one of the two rattan chairs that flanked a small table.

  “It’s nice,” she said, sniffing the air. “There are a thousand different smells.”

  For several minutes, they sat and gazed at the sky and listened to the rustle of the breeze in the trees.

  “Are you ready for another thrilling fact from the files of the Geographic?” Sanders said.

  “Sure.”

  “Back in the seventeenth century, this place was known as the Isle of Devils.”

  “Why?”

  “How would I know? My contract only calls for me to give you the ‘whats.’ Someone else is paid to find out the ‘whys.’ ”

  Gail said, “I’m going to yawn now.”

  “Feel free.”

  “It will be the most sensual and suggestive yawn you have ever heard. It will promise wild, unimagined pleasures that will make me forget that you are a suicidal maniac. In short, it will be a real turn-on.”

  “Do it,” said Sanders. He closed his eyes and listened. He heard her embark on a low, moaning, feline yawn. It stopped—as suddenly as if someone had jammed a cork in her throat. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Swallow your tongue?” He opened his eyes and saw her staring out into the darkness. “What?”

  “Someone’s out there.”

  “It’s the wind.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Sanders walked to the edge of the patio. The path was empty. He turned back to Gail and said, “Nobody.”

  “Look.” Gail was pointing to something behind him.

  When Sanders looked again, he saw a man stepping out of the bushes onto the path. He walked toward them, stopped a few yards from the porch, and said, “Excuse me.” He was a black man, dressed in a black suit. All Sanders could see were his eyes and a patch of white shirt.

  “How long have you been there?” Sanders said.

  “Sir? I arrived this very moment.”

  “From the bushes?”

  The man smiled. “That is the shortest way. The path Is very roundabout.” His accent was crisp, establishment British.

  “What can we do for you?”

  “I would like a word with you, if I may.”

  “Okay. But come up into the light.”

  The man, who looked about fifty, stepped onto the porch. His blue-black skin was wrinkled, and there were flecks of gray in his black hair. “My name is Tupper. Basil Tupper. I am the manager of a jewelry store in Hamilton. Drake’s. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. No matter. My hobby is antique glass.”

  Sanders looked at Gail. “Lot of glass freaks in Bermuda.”

  Tupper said, “I understand you recently acquired a small item of glass from the wreck of the Goliath. I would like very much to see it.”

  “Why?”

  “What’s all the curiosity about?” Gail said, reaching for the purse beside her chair. “It’s just a medicine bottle.”

  “No curiosity, really,” said Tupper, “except to those of us interested in fine glass. A chap named Reinhardt worked with glass in Norfolk in the mid-1940s. His work is relatively scarce. It’s not worth much in the open market, but in our small circle it’s quite a coup to have a piece of Reinhardt glass.”

  Gail found the ampule and handed it to Tupper. He held it to the light. “A nice piece,” he said. “Not outstanding, but a nice piece.”

  “It’s an ampule,” said Sanders. “You see them all over the place.”

  “True, but there is a tiny bubble at one end of the glass. That was Reinhardt’s signature.”

  “What’s in it?” Gail asked.

  “I have no idea. It could be anything. That’s not my concern.”

  Gail smiled. “For someone who doesn’t care what’s inside, you’re studying it awfully carefully.”

  “I am studying the container, not the contents. The liquid looks yellow, but it might be quite clear. Reinhardt glass often imparts its own hue to liquids.” Tupper returned the ampule to Gail. “Very nice. I’m prepared to offer you twenty dollars for it.”

  “Twenty dollars!” said Sanders. “But it’s—”

  “I know, that sounds like a lot. But as I said, in our little coterie there is a certain rivalry. I’d like very much to be the first to have a piece of Reinhardt’s work. Frankly, the piece isn’t worth more than ten dollars, but by offering you twenty I know I’m offering more than most of the others could pay. Someone like your acquaintance, Slake, couldn’t possibly go higher than ten dollars. I am making what could be called a preemptive bid.”

  “Would you mind if we draw off some of the liquid?” Gail said. “We’re interested in knowing what’s inside, even if you’re not.”

  “No,” Tupper said. “That’s quite impossible. To draw off the liquid, you would have to break an end of the piece. That would ruin its value.”

  “Then I’m afraid there’s no sale,” Sanders said.

  “Thirty dollars,” Tupper said, abandoning his deferential charm.

  “No,” said Sanders. “Not even for fifty.”

  “You’re making a mistake, you know. No one else will offer you anywhere near that much.”

  “Then I guess we’ll just have to keep the piece ourselves,” Sanders said. “After all, you said yourself that it’s quite a coup to have a piece of Reinhardt glass.”

  Tupper glared at him, then nodded to Gail, said good night and backed off the porch. A few yards down the path he parted some bushes, stepped into the underbrush, and was gone.

  “What the hell do you make of that?” Sanders said.
<
br />   Gail stood up. “Let’s go inside. If he could hang around in the bushes without our hearing him, God knows what else is creeping around out there.”

  They went into the cottage, and Sanders locked the door. “You believe him?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Who knows from Reinhardt glass?”

  “If there’s such competition between glass nuts,” Gail said, “why would Slake have told him about the ampule? He’d have offered to buy it himself. No. I bet he isn’t interested in the glass. He’s after what’s inside.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t say so.”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s pretty hard to pass yourself off as a liquid-collector.”

  “Have you got the rest of the stuff we found?”

  “Sure,” Gail said. “Why?”

  “Tomorrow, let’s see if we can find someone who knows something about the wreck. Maybe there’s an old manifest; at least that’d tell us what Goliath was carrying.”

  C H A P T E R

  I I I

  “There were no survivors?” Gail said.

  “One,” replied the bell captain, a corpulent, middle-aged Briton, “but he’s about gone by these days.”

  “Gone by?”

  The bell captain touched his head. “Dotty. He’d tell you volumes, but two thirds of it would be fancy. There is one man who might be able to help you, Romer Treece. He’s been on every wreck off Bermuda; found half of them himself. If anyone knows these waters, he does.”

  “Is he in the phone book?” Sanders asked.

  “He has no telephone. The only way to contact him is to go out to his home, on St. David’s Island.”

  “Okay. I saw some motorbikes out front. Are they for rent?”

  “The little ones—the mobilettes—yes.” The bell captain paused. “Mr. Sanders . . . do you know about St. David’s?”

  “What’s to know? I’ve seen it on the map.”

  “They’re not exactly . . . hospitable . . . out there. They don’t consider themselves Bermudians; they’re St. David’s Islanders. There’s a bridge, the Severn Bridge, connecting the island to the rest of Bermuda. They’d as soon it fell down and was never rebuilt.”