Dark Light

After two weeks without wind, the Gulf of Mexico also began to clear. By October 15th, a Saturday, Jeth, Tomlinson, Arlis Futch, and I decided water visibility had sufficiently improved to make our second dive on the wreck Dark Light. Chestra was still funding the project, taking care of legalities through her uncle’s lawyer. She had agreed that we were entitled to the majority of what we salvaged, minus all personal items that may have belonged to Frederick Roth.

In death, with Chestra standing sentinel, Marlissa Dorn remained faithful to her lover—something she’d been unable to manage in life. Penitence, perhaps, for a beautiful woman’s imperfections.

The storm had blown away all but one of our marker buoys, so we began all over. Dropped a half-dozen new buoys to outline the wreck, then followed the same search plan as before, three divers swimming circles, an orderly pattern by use of a rope.

The visibility was poor. I could see only five or six feet before objects disappeared in the murk. But it was markedly better than before.

We found more interesting objects from a classic American era—a time of torch singers, inventors, immigrants, and industrial aristocrats. A time when common people lived heroic lives and battled epic evils.

We found bottles. Part of an Edison phonograph. A brass-handled walking stick.

We also found a couple of objects so valuable that Jeth howled underwater when he saw what I had dug from the sand: two gold bars. Small, about the size of miniature loaves of bread. Heavy.

Gold does not tarnish in salt water, so they looked as freshly made as the day they were struck with their mint ID:

DEUTSCHE REICHSBANK

1 KILO

FEINGOLD 999.9

The bars were also stamped with a square-winged eagle, its talon clutching a swastika.

Later, we would calculate the value of a kilo of gold at current prices. Each bar was worth more than thirty thousand dollars. As historical objects, it was possible they were worth more. It was something to research.

Jeth and his pregnant wife, my dear friend Janet, were both ecstatic.

If, as Tomlinson said, there were dark spirits lingering among Dark Light’s ruins, they did not bump us. However, I did see a canoe-sized bull shark glide by, then vanish in the gloom. It was a male, easily identified because of the claspers near its anal fin. Bull sharks are responsible for more attacks on divers than great whites, so I called an end to the dive just to be on the safe side. Also, I had dealt with a shark of similar size in my past. Very similar. The resemblance frightened me.

Sharks do not track people over months, over years. Like storms, they are not energized by intent. There is cause but no design. My reaction proved I am not untainted by irrational thoughts and superstitions.

“You’re starting to trust your intuition,” Tomlinson said when I mentioned the shark. “You are opening up; beginning a very far-out, creative, reflective period of your life.”

I told him I hoped not. There was too much work to do around the lab.

My reaction was the same when he offered me a lighted joint on the boat trip back to Dinkin’s Bay. I refused, then told him to never bring the stuff aboard a working vessel that I was aboard.

He smiled, and said, “Lighten up, man. I can see you’re undecided.”

A joke, but I wasn’t undecided. It was something I would not try again. The experience was powerfully linked with Mildred Chestra Engle. It had blurred the evening. Even now, I wasn’t certain what was real, what wasn’t. Like the appearance of a familiar shark, there were implications that frightened me.

One unambiguous reality was a note Chestra mailed to the marina, postmarked Manhattan. It arrived five days after she left.

Doc, dear man, I am embarrassed that I left so quickly, and also by my behavior. At my age, my God! I had more than my usual one chartreuse & soda that night, which is the only way I can explain it, plus there was that magnificent storm! I hope you will forgive me.

Fondly, Chessie

P.S. I shouldn’t ask your forgiveness—I forgot your kind reminder: There are only two things women are never forgiven. Everything else, there’s no need to ask. MCE

O n Tuesday, the eighteenth, we were readying the Viking for our third dive on the wreck when we got a phone call from Arlis saying he couldn’t join us.

The previous night, someone had torched Indian Harbor Marina, its docks, fuel depot, and office. “It was one hell of a fire, lots of explosions, but nobody hurt,” Arlis told me. Then added, after a pause, “That’s what I heard, anyway.”

Detectives wanted to question him, he said. He would be busy most of the day.

Indian Harbor had become well known to law enforcement types in the last few weeks. Javier had died there. His killer, a marina employee named Matthew “Moe” Klabundee, had been murdered there. Bernard Heller was in jail without hope of a bond because two more bodies had been found on the property. Women who had been packed in drums, then buried. Investigators had found a lot of damning evidence in Heller’s residence that indicated he might be responsible for other crimes around the country.

A vicious little boy lived behind the man’s blue eyes.

When I read about Heller in the newspaper, I reflected on the night I held the struggling man beneath black water. Another few seconds was all I needed. A few seconds: the difference between perfect and imperfect timing.

We couldn’t find a replacement for Arlis, but we made the dive, anyway.

Two more bars of gold. Same markings.

Frederick Roth, and Dark Light, had not been inexpensive.

Maybe there was more. We hoped. We hunted. There wasn’t.

O ctober 19th, a Wednesday, was too windy to dive—fine with me, because there was a decent collecting tide at 2:27 P.M. and that’s how I spent the afternoon. Wading knee-deep water, searching sandbars, throwing the cast net.

By sunset, I was tired but felt great. Finally, a good working day on an island that was getting back to normal after one of the worst hurricanes in its history.

As I made notes in my log, and marked another day off the lab’s calendar, I realized today was the anniversary of another terrible storm—the autumn storm of 1944. It seemed all the more reason to enjoy small, everyday niceties. So when Tomlinson invited me aboard No Mas for a sunset beer, I accepted.

I had not mentioned Chestra for weeks. Nor had I discussed the scar tissue on her right shoulder. Had he seen it, or touched those small, distinctive marks?

It was not an easy decision. We had an unspoken rule about discussing women with whom we have been intimate. The agreement endorsed a code of chivalry that seems romantic—worse, irrational—to some, but I like it, anyway. I like it enough that it’s become part of my personal scaffolding.

So I did not bring up the subject of the lady’s shoulder. It was a relief to me, in a way. I knew that Tomlinson would insist on debating the tired old topic of good and evil—how could I not believe those two forces existed? Or not believe that a beautiful young woman could be forever scarred by the touch of an evil man named Adolf?

Even to discuss such a thing was absurd. It was as absurd, I had to remind myself, as my cannabis-induced fantasy that I had held Marlissa Dorn naked in my arms.

Instead, Tomlinson and I discussed familiar topics and exchanged local gossip. Inanities are fun, profundities are a pain in the butt.

But when he opened the icebox to roll a joint, I told him I was going for a run on the beach.

I did.

It was a night of wind and distant lightning. A waning moon was already over the Gulf by the time I got to the end of Tarpon Bay Road; surf was pumping, creating a waterfall roar. I jogged to the beach, then turned toward the lighthouse.

I had been working out hard of late, running every night, so my pace was strong, the route familiar. It took me past Southwind—nothing wistful or nostalgic involved, I told myself. It was a favorite route; one I had enjoyed