Grave Descend Read online

She was classic island stock: high cheekbones, fine features, large soft eyes, hard athletic body.

  “Fido isn’t feeling well. He hasn’t for days. He’s been acting up.”

  Fido growled again at this slur on his behavior. Close up, the cat looked even larger, yellow with dark spots on his fur.

  “You hunting for a large mouse?”

  “No.” She smiled. “Fido is an ocelot”

  “Oh,” he said;

  She paused. “Listen, could you do me a favor?”

  He knew it was coming, and hesitated.

  “I’m trying to get Fido home. My car isn’t working … Could you give us a lift?”

  McGregor looked again at Fido. Fido looked back and gave another lazy but distinctly unfriendly yawn. From Fido he looked down at his two-passenger sports car, which seemed smaller all the time.

  “You needn’t worry,” she said, going around and opening the passenger door. “He’s housebroken.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “In, Fido!” She held the door open.

  Fido jumped in. She pushed him into the small space behind the jump seats. He stood breathing hotly down McGregor’s neck.

  “Listen, are you sure—”

  “We don’t live far away,” she said. “I appreciate this very much.”

  She got into the passenger seat, and crossed her legs, which were brown and very nice.

  “He’s breathing down my neck,” McGregor said.

  “That’s all right. He does that to everyone. It’s his way of being friendly.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m Elaine Marchant,” she said, holding out her hand.

  “Jim McGregor.”

  “I appreciate this,” she said again. “Just turn around and go back up the road. It’s only a few miles.”

  McGregor did as she said. She lit a cigarette, and seemed perfectly comfortable. But that was understandable; the cat wasn’t breathing down her neck.

  “Actually,” she said, as he started to drive once more, “Fido is new. I had to get him, because of Fiona.”

  “Fiona?”

  “The mate. You can’t have just one ocelot. Fiona is the lady. Not such a lady: she did a job on Ralph.”

  “Ralph?”

  “Ralph was Fido’s predecessor. He was a darling, an absolute darling.” Elaine Marchant sighed.

  “What happened to Him?”

  “He made passionate love to Fiona.”

  “And?”

  “Well, you couldn’t expect her to do anything else. After all, it’s instinct, that reaction.”

  “What reaction?”

  “Fiona bit off his balls,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “That’s what females do after intercourse with males.”

  “Oh.”

  “In the ocelot species.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you live around here?”

  “Kingston,” he said.

  “What brings you to the Gold Coast?”

  “Business.”

  “You don’t look like a businessman,” she said.

  “I’m not much of one,” he said. He was watching the road. “How much further?”

  “Just a couple of miles.”

  They passed the Plantation Inn on the left. They were going east.

  Fido gave a deep-throated growl.

  “He just loves to travel,” Elaine said. “The wind tickles his fur.”

  “That’s nice.”

  She shifted in the seat, getting comfortable. Her dress was made of some kind of metal, woven or knitted, like chain mail. It made a sound when she moved.

  “Do you work around here?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Her tone ended the conversation abruptly. He said nothing for several minutes. They went three or four miles down the coast

  “Much further?” he asked.

  “No. We’re almost there.” And then she said, “Ocelots are an unusual pet.”

  “Very unusual.”

  “I got started with them four years ago. I only had Ralph, at first. He was a dear. So affectionate, so playful. But he began to go crazy.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I didn’t know what was the matter with him, so I went back to the pet store and asked. They said he was lonely. Ocelots go crazy without sex.”

  “Oh.”

  “So I had to get Fiona. I never liked her much.”

  She stretched casually, and flicked her cigarette out into the night air.

  “Why is that?”

  “She’s bitchy. You know how female cats can be bitchy?”

  “Ummm.”

  “And then, when she did that to poor Ralph, I was furious.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I mean, Ralph was expensive. A good ocelot costs four hundred dollars.”

  McGregor wondered who supported her little hobby.

  “But there was nothing to do,” she said. “All alone by herself, Fiona was impossible. She even scratched me here”—she pulled up the short skirt to show reddish lines on her upper thigh—“and that was the last straw. I had to get Fido.”

  “I see.”

  “And he’s been working out well. He’s very good-natured.”

  McGregor felt the hot, damp panting at his neck. He certainly hoped he was good-natured. “And well fed?”

  “Yes.” She laughed. “He really makes you nervous, doesn’t he?”

  “Just … concerned.”

  “Fido doesn’t attack people,” she said. “He’s quite reluctant to attack people. Robert was disappointed …” She let her voice trail off. “You see, we’re trying to train him now.”

  “For what?”

  “For a “watch-cat. He’ll be very good at it, soon,” Then she said, “Wait! Right here, pull over.”

  He pulled off the road, and Elaine got out, tugging Fido after her. She thanked him, waved gaily, and crossed the road, walking through heavy gates, up a driveway toward a house that was hidden behind shrubbery and trees.

  McGregor noticed the name on the bars of the gate, and frowned.

  SILVERSTONE.

  The Big Bamboo was noisy, raucous, and blatant. He went up to the bar and got the attention of the bartender.

  “Waldo here?”

  “Who?”

  “Waldo.”

  “Waldo who?” the bartender said, giving him a funny look.

  “Just Waldo.”

  “Who’re you?”

  “McGregor.”

  The bartender jerked his thumb. “Back room.”

  McGregor walked through the cluster of little tables, toward the back. On the stage, a girl was doing a fire dance. All over the Caribbean little girls with no other talents were employed to do fire dances for the tourists. The girls wore bikinis and pranced around a tray of gasoline, dipping their toes in it, squatting over it, being suggestive with it. McGregor had long since come to the conclusion that Americans had passed a law: no tourist allowed back from the Caribbean without seeing a fire dance.

  The rear room was near the restrooms; there was no sign on the door. He knocked, opened it, and went in.

  It was dark. Completely pitch-black. He ran his hand along the wall, feeling for a light switch.

  “Don’t,” said a voice.

  He stopped.

  “Just stand very still. What is your name?”

  McGregor squinted, trying to see where the voice was coming from. The darkness was impenetrable.

  “McGregor.”

  “Good. I’m glad you came, McGregor. We must have a little talk.”

  The voice was deep, and wholly unfamiliar.

  “I could talk better,” McGregor said, “with the lights on.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  There was a pause. McGregor waited. “All right,” he said, “let’s talk.”

  “You are a diver,” the voice said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tomorrow you dive off the Grave Descend.”
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  “That’s right.”

  “Are you concerned about the dive?”

  “I’m always concerned about dives.”

  The voice gave a heavy sigh. “McGregor, there is no time for sparring. You should be very concerned. Things are not as they seem.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not in the least,” the voice said.

  “How are they, really?”

  “You are being conned,” the voice said.

  “That’s interesting.”

  “I advise you to get out of it now. Get out altogether.”

  “And leave the diving to us?” McGregor said.

  The voice laughed. It was an unpleasant sound. “McGregor, they plan to kill you. Do you realize that?”

  “No.”

  “They plan to kill you,” the voice repeated. “When they are finished with you.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Do,” the voice said. “Do.”

  There was a long pause.

  “You may go now,” the voice said.

  McGregor left.

  Outside, his first thought was to call Harry. Harry was an inspector of police in Kingston, and a moderately good friend. It would be very simple to drop it all in Harry’s lap and forget about it. If he had any sense, that was what he would do.

  He sighed.

  He had no sense.

  He drove the car up the road, and parked it out of sight from the club. Then he walked back to the Big Bamboo and hid in the bushes across the street from the entrance. He sat down to wait, and to think, but he did not think much. He was tired; he was diving tomorrow; more than anything else, he wanted to sleep.

  He waited.

  A half hour passed, and then an hour. He watched the people leaving the club, but saw nobody he knew.

  And then, finally, a White Anglia drove up, with a native driver behind the wheel. It honked once.

  And Arthur Wayne, still wearing his three-piece suit, came out of the club, got into the Anglia, and drove off.

  McGregor watched the red taillights receding. Damned peculiar, he thought.

  He went back to the hotel to sleep.

  8

  AT EIGHT IN THE MORNING, they pulled away from the dock and headed out to sea. It was a calm, perfect day; the sky was cloudless, the sun already warm; the sea was placid with the mirrorlike quality it often had in the early morning. Later, the offshore wind would stir up the surface, but now the water was crystalline and smooth.

  McGregor checked out the equipment with Roger Yeoman while the others watched. They had four twin-tanks, ninety-four-cubic-feet capacity; they screwed on the pressure gauges and checked the fill, then hooked up the regulators, sucked on them briefly, hearing the hissing of gas and the click of the valves. Satisfied, they turned to the guns.

  McGregor used Mantos guns with a midshaft handle. The carbon-dioxide bottles were slung beneath the shaft; a squeeze of the trigger released a burst of gas which fired the spear with a velocity that could not be matched by rubber-powered guns. The spearheads were bulky affairs, which screwed onto the shafts after taking the .357 Magnum cartridges. On impact, the Magnums would explode, driving the shaft deeper and springing out the prongs. A perfect hit, right behind the gills and slightly above, would sever the spinal cord and kill even a large shark rapidly. But McGregor knew from experience that perfect hits were rare. He carried the guns because they made him feel better, not because he seriously expected to kill a shark with ease.

  The shark was one of the most successful products of evolution. Like another very successful animal, the clam, it had existed for four hundred million years without much change. It had no bones, only cartilage; it had a thick abrasive skin as sharp as its many rows of teeth; and what it lacked in eyesight it more than made up for with smell. Studies showed that sharks could be attracted by blood from a distance of half a mile. The marine biologists knew this, but didn’t understand it. It was possible to draw sharks by putting into the water a very small quantity of blood—so small that by the time it had diffused over a half mile, individual molecules of blood were widely dispersed indeed.

  And besides, the sharks arrived before the molecules had dispersed.

  Nobody understood that.

  Nobody understood, either, why the shark should continue to function after enormous injury. There was talk of a diffuse nervous system; certainly the brain and cord could be badly damaged—to a degree that would kill a man instantly—without stopping a shark from cheerfully eating you in very large chunks.

  He knew they did not die easily.

  He also knew that hammerheads were tougher than most. And the Grave Descend was sunk in hammerhead country.

  As he checked the explosive heads, screwing the shells onto the shaft, Monica said, “Is that really necessary?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Arthur Wayne was watching from one side, drinking a beer. In keeping with a day on the water, he had forsaken his suit for bathing trunks and a bright plaid sportshirt.

  “You wouldn’t advise swimming around on the surface while you dive?” he asked.

  “I certainly wouldn’t,” McGregor said.

  Sylvie was setting out the rubber suits, fins, and masks. She came up to McGregor and nodded slightly toward Monica.

  “I don’t like her,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” McGregor said.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “You should.”

  It took an hour to reach the promontory; they went further east, passing beyond the far reef, and McGregor climbed to the bridge. They had the Polaroid pictures to help them, but the best way to find a wreck was still to get high on the bridge and look down.

  He ordered the boat to slow, and peered over the side. The water was clear today; there had not been a storm for a week; looking down, he could see the shelf of the reef, with waving vegetation, and then the drop-off, sinking into deep blue.

  Keeping an eye on the promontory for orientation, it took them half an hour of circling before they found it. The stern, in shallower water, was quite clear. The bow was deeper, lost in blue.

  “That’s it,” McGregor said. The boy on the bow dropped anchor, counting the stripes on the line as it went over the side.

  “How deep?”

  “Seventy.”

  McGregor looked back at Yeoman, who was bent over the stern, peering down with a glass-bottomed tube. He looked back.

  “That’s it, man.”

  The engines idled and died. Yeoman began to get into his rubber wet-suit. With Sylvie’s help, he shrugged into the heavy twin-tank back-pack, pulled the regulator hose around, clipped the strap around his neck, and sucked. There was a loud hiss as he breathed.

  McGregor came down from the bridge and pulled on his suit.

  Wayne came over. “One last thing,” he said. He had a deck plan of the ship in his hands. “We are particularly interested in two things down there. The first is a new sculpture that the owner recently bought. It was put aboard in Naples; it’s a modern thing, chrome. He wants it brought up before corrosion sets in. Located here, in the master stateroom.” He pointed to the map.

  McGregor nodded. “I’ll check it.”

  “The other thing is the safe. It’s back here, also in the stateroom. But we can worry about that later.”

  McGregor said, “Is it big?”

  “Not very. Just a little thing.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “I don’t know,” Wayne said. “But my brother wants it back.”

  “If it’s jewels, maybe we can open it and remove the contents—”

  “No, he wants it brought up intact,”

  “All right,” McGregor said. “We’ll worry about that later, this afternoon.”

  Yeoman was already stepping clumsily to the stern, breathing through the regulator in hissing gasps, his flippered feet clomping on the deck.

  McGregor pulled on his tank, feeling the weight on his back, the cutting pres
sure of the straps on his shoulder, even through the wet-suit rubber. He tightened his quick-release buckle straps. The tanks were terribly heavy on the surface; underwater, they were much lighter.

  He sucked a mouthful of cold, dry air, blew it out, and pulled on his mask. He moved to the stern with Yeoman.

  Yeoman nodded, smiled with the regulator between his teeth, put his hand over his mask, and rolled back off the stern. There was a splash. McGregor waited, not looking back, but staring forward at the group on the boat—Sylvie, Monica, and Wayne.

  Sylvie looked over the side. “He’s down.”

  She meant that Yeoman was deep enough that McGregor would not hit him rolling off. A man with a hundred-pound tank, ten pounds of weight, and his own body mass sank a good distance in the water.

  McGregor nodded, winked at Sylvie through his mask, gripped the glass so that it would not be pulled off as he entered the water, and fell back. His tanks broke the water, and he was down, in a silver swirl of bubbles. He took a breath, the sound of the air and the clicking regulator loud in the water.

  He began to descend. Directly facing him was the stern of the boat, riding in the water. Looking forward, he could see the bow and the anchor line. Yeoman came up; he made a signal with his hands, a flexing of his fist, to indicate he was getting the guns. McGregor waited, hanging quietly at twenty feet, while Yeoman broke surface, his body mirrored from beneath, decapitated, his head above.

  McGregor looked down, to the blue beneath him. The Grave Descend was directly below, just outside the wall of the far reef, which plunged sharply down from near the surface to almost a hundred feet. The ship lay partly on its side, just as he had seen from the air. No bubbles trailed up from it now.

  He looked carefully. A small school of barracuda swam past, and there were jacks, majors, and other tiny fish that moved almost immediately into any wreck, but no sharks.

  Not yet.

  Yeoman came back, clutching two guns in his hand. He gave one to McGregor, handling it carefully. He pointed to the handle, to indicate that the safety was on. McGregor nodded, and pointed down at the wreck.

  They upended, and kicked downward. Though the surface water was warm, as they went down it became colder. McGregor was glad for the wet-suit. He gripped the handle of the gun, feeling the balance.

  His depth-gauge showed sixty-two feet as they reached the stern of the Grave Descend. As always, whenever he came upon a wreck underwater, he was struck by the size of it. A boat which appeared only moderately large on the surface was huge underwater, when you could see all of it, and were free to swim around it. Yeoman went around, kicking easily, his arms at his sides. McGregor followed him, and they disappeared into the shadows beneath the curve of the stern. The propellers, five feet across, large bronze and polished, were directly ahead. Yeoman checked the shafts while McGregor checked the undersurface of the stern.