Benchley, Peter by The Deep [txt] Read Free Book Online

its muzzle grizzled, and it snarled at Sanders.
    Treece said, “It’s all right, Charlotte, you dumb bitch.”
    The dog’s eyes did not move from Sanders. She growled again.
    “I said it’s all right!” Treece grabbed the glass from Gail and flung the water in the dog’s face. The dog wagged her tail and licked the water from her whiskers. “You be nice. They’re not tourists. At least, not now.”
    The dog jumped down from the window sill and sniffed around Sanders’ pants.
    “She’s feeling pissy because you got in here without her seeing you,” Treece said. “She likes to get her licks in first.”
    “Does she really bite?” Gail asked, as the dog’s cold nose explored Sanders’ ankle.
    “I guess so! She’s purebred tourist hound.”
    Treece leaned against the wall and said, “What do you know about
    Goliath?”
    “Nothing, really,” Gail said.
    “Maybe one thing,” said Sanders. “The lifeguard on the beach said he had heard she was carrying ammunition.”
    “Aye,” said Treece. “That, too.
    Goliath
    was a cargo vessel, a wooden sailing ship carrying supplies to Europe during World War II. There was a sound purpose to using wooden ships, slow as they were. The hull wouldn’t attract magnetic mines, and, under sail, she made no screw noise for U-boats to home on.
    Goliath
    was loaded. Her manifest listed a boodle of munitions and medical supplies. She went down in the fall of 1943, broke her back on the rocks, and dumped her guts all over the place.
    For weeks, folks gathered every Christ kind of crap you ever saw off the beach. I went down on her two-three times in the fifties and hauled a ton of brass off her-depth charges and artillery shells.
    There were radios all over the bottom. You never saw anything like it. But nobody ever found those medical supplies.”
    “What were they supposed to be?” asked Gail.
    “Nobody knows for sure. The manifest said medical supplies, period. It could have been anything-sulfa, bandages, iodine,
    chloroform-anything. A couple of years after the war, though, forty-seven I think it was, a bloody great hurricane beat it all to rubble.
    Most people forgot about
    Goliath
    after that, but some didn’t.”
    Sanders said, “The bell captain told us there was a survivor.”
    “Aye, one. He was damn near in worse shape than the wreck, but he lived. For a time after he got out of hospital he sold scraps from Goliath,
    and for drinks he’d tell tales of the wreck. One night, he was in his cups and he spun a web about a fortune in drugs aboard
    Goliath.
    Thousands and thousands of ampules of morphine and opium, he said, carried in cigar boxes. He claimed to have been personally responsible for them, said he knew where they were but he’d tell no man. A day later he was waylaid and thrashed by people wanting to know more about the drugs. He swore he’d forgotten what he’d said, claimed he didn’t know anything about any drugs. He never told that story again. But once was enough. Rumor spread, and before long the rumor was that there were ten million dollars in drugs down there. People looked-Jesus, they did a bloody autopsy on the wreck with everything save tweezers-but they never found a single ampule. Not till now.”
    “Why would one turn up now?” Sanders asked.
    “The bottom of the sea is a living creature.
    She’s whimsical, the sea, a tease. She loves to fool you. She changes all the time. A storm can alter her face; a change in current can cause her to heave her insides out. You can dive on a wreck one day and find nothing. The wind blows that night, and the next day, in the same spot, you find a carpet of gold coins. That’s happened. And we’ve had four juicy blowups in the past six weeks.”
    Gail said, “David thought this ampule could have come from the sick bay.”
    “Goliath
    didn’t have a sick bay. They likely carried some medicine for the crew, and if this were any other ship, I’d write the ampule off as from the medicine