'You found it but it's not in the same place now?' he said.
'You're a wealthy man, Hippo. You want the sub or not?'
'Hey, you think that's right?' he asked. 'I tell you where it's at, you find it and up the fee on me? That's like you?'
'Maybe you can get somebody cheaper. You know some guys who want to go down in the dark on a lot of iron and twisted cables?'
'Put my schlong in a vise, why don't you?'
'I've got to run. What do you say?'
'Fifteen.'
'Nope.'
'Hey, New Orleans is recessed. I'm bleeding here. You know what it cost me to get rid of-when he was about to be our next governor? Now my friends are running a Roto-Rooter up my hole.'
(Hippo had spent a fortune destroying the political career of an ex-Klansman who had run for both the governor's office and the U.S. Senate. My favorite quote of Hippo's had appeared in
'I won't charge expenses,' I said.
'I'm dying here. Hemorrhaging on the floor. I'm serious. Nobody believes me. Dave, you take food stamps?'
Hippo, you're a jewel, I thought.
Batist and I picked up my boat and left the dock at three the next morning. The breeze was up, peppered with light rain, and you could smell the salt spray breaking over the bow. The water was as dark as burgundy, the chop on the edge of the swells electric with moonlight, the wetlands to the north green and gray and metamorphic with mist. To the southeast I could see gas flares burning on some offshore rigs; then the wind dropped and the sky turned the color of bone and I could see a red glow spreading out of the water into the clouds.
It was completely light when I cut the engine and drifted above the spot where I had dove down into darkness and the sounds of grinding metal three days earlier. Batist stood on the bow, feeding the anchor rope out through his palms, until it hit bottom and went slack; then he tied it off on a cleat.
The water was smoky green, the swells full of skittering bait fish, the air hazy with humidity. I had fashioned a viewer box from reinforced window glass inset in a waterproofed wood crate, and I lowered it over the side by the handles and pressed it beneath the surface. Pockets of air swam across the glass, then flattened and disappeared, and suddenly in the yellow-green light I could see schools of small speckled trout, like darting silver ribbons, drumfish, as round and flat as skillets, a half dozen stingrays, their wings undulating as smoothly as if they were gliding on currents of warm air, and down below, where the light seemed to be gathered into a vortex of silt, the torpedo shapes of sand sharks, who bolted and twisted in erratic circles for no apparent reason.
Batist peered downward through the viewer box over my shoulder. Then I felt his eyes studying me while I strapped on my tanks and weight belt.
'This don't make me feel good, Dave,' he said.
'Don't worry about it, partner.'
'I don't want to see you lunch for them sharks, no.'
'Those are sand sharks, Batist. They're harmless.'
'Tell me that out yonder's harmless.' He pointed past the cabin to the southwest.
It was a water spout that had dropped out of a thunderhead and was moving like an enormous spinning cone of light and water toward the coast. If it made landfall, which it probably would not, it would fill suddenly with mud, rotted vegetation, and uprooted trees, and become as black as a midwestern tornado coursing through a freshly plowed field.
'Keep your eye on it and kick the engine over if it turns,' I said.
'Just look up from down there, you see gasoline and life jackets and a bunch of bo'rds floatin' round, see me swimmin' toward Grand Isle, that means it ain't bothered to tell me it was fixin' to turn.'
I went over the side, swam to the anchor rope, and began pulling myself downward hand over hand. I felt myself sliding through three different layers of temperature, each one cooler than the last; then just as a school of sea perch swept past me, almost clattering against my mask, I could feel a uniform level of coldness penetrate my body from the crown of my head down to the soles of my feet. Clouds of gray silt seemed to be blowing along the gulf's floor as they would in a windstorm. The pressure against my eardrums began to grow in intensity; it made a faint tremolo sound, like wire stretching before it breaks. Then I heard iron ring against iron, and a groan like a great weight shifting against impacted sand.
I held the anchor rope with one hand and floated motionlessly in the current. Then I saw it. For just a moment.
It was pointed at an upward angle on a slope, buried in a sand-bar almost to its decks, molded softly with silt. But there was no mistaking the long, rounded, sharklike shape. It was a submarine, and I could make out the battered steel flanges that protruded above the captain's bridge on the conning tower, and I knew that if I scraped the moss and layers of mud and shellfish from the tower's plates I would see the vestiges of the swastika that I had seen on the same conning tower over three decades ago.
Then I saw it tilt slightly to one side, saw dirty strings of oil or silt or engine fuel rise near the forward torpedo tubes, and I realized that years ago air must have been trapped somewhere in a compartment, perhaps where a group of terrified sailors spun a wheel on a hatch and pretended to themselves that their friends outside, whose skulls were being snapped like eggshell, would have chosen the same alternative.
I felt a heavy surge in the current from out in the dark, beyond the continental shelf. The water clouded and the submarine disappeared. I thought I heard thunder booming, then the anchor rope vibrated in my palm, and when I looked up I could see the exhaust pipes on my boat boiling the waterline at the stern.
When I came to the surface the chop smacked hard against my mask, and the swells were dented with rain circles. Batist came outside the cabin and pointed toward the southeast. I pushed my mask up on my head and looked behind me; three more water spouts had dropped out of the sky and were churning across the surface of the water, and farther to the south you could see thunderclouds as thick as oil smoke on the horizon.
I climbed up the ladder, pulled off my gear, tied the end of a spool of clothesline through a chunk of pig iron that had once been a window sash, and fed the line over the gunwale until the weight bit into the bottom. Then I sawed off the line at the spool and strung it through the handles of three sealed Clorox bottles that I used as float markers. The rain was cold and dancing in a green haze on the swells now, the air heavy with the smell of ozone and nests of dead bait fish in the waves. Just as I started to fling the Clorox bottles overboard, I heard the blades of a helicopter thropping low over the water behind me.
It passed us, flattening and wrinkling the water below the downdraft, and I saw the solitary passenger, a blond man in pilot's sunglasses, turn in his seat and stare back at me. Then the helicopter circled and hovered no more than forty yards to the south of us.
'What they doin'?' Batist said.
'I don't know.'
'Let's get goin', Dave. We don't need to be stayin' out here no longer with them spouts.'
'You got it, partner,' I said.
Then the helicopter gained altitude, perhaps to five hundred feet directly above us, high enough for them to see the coastline and to take a good fix on our position.
I left the Clorox marker bottles on the deck and pulled the sash weight back up from the bottom. We could return to this same area and probably find the sub again with my sonar, or 'fish finder,' which was an electronic marvel that could outline any protrusion on the gulfs floor. But the sky in the south was completely black now, with veins of lightning trembling on the horizon, and I had a feeling that the Nazi silent service down below was about to set sail again.
chapter four
