“Cloche may come and finish the job, Adam, if we don’t get the stuff up and out of there fast. How many were there?”
Coffin finished his glass of rum, reached for the bottle, and refilled his glass. “They were in cigar boxes. Forty-eight to a box, separated by cardboard grids. The manifest said there were ten thousand boxes, and I believe it. I stacked every one of the bloody things by hand.”
“Did the manifest say what was in the glass?”
“No, but we knew. Morphine, mostly. Some raw opium, a bit of Adrenalin. But almost all morphine.”
“No heroin?” Sanders asked.
“No. At least—”
Gail interrupted. “It’s the same thing.”
“What do you mean?” Sanders said.
“It is. I edited a book about drugs once.
All heroin is, is morphine heated with acetic acid. As soon as it gets into the body, it’s reconverted into morphine.”
“Then why don’t junkies take morphine?”
“It’s not up to them. They take what the pushers push, and the pushers push what the smugglers smuggle.
The smugglers smuggle heroin because they make more money from it: a pound of pure morphine converts into more than a pound of heroin, and you don’t have to take as much heroin because it’s stronger than straight morphine-something to do with the way it gets to the brain.
Anyway, if you figure that from that cargo you could make half a million doses of heroin, street value somewhere between ten and twenty dollars a dose, you’re talking about a total value of five to ten million dollars. Lord!”
Treece said, “Where was it carried, Adam?”
“Number three hold. The lot of it. Amidships. I had it bagged about with flour.”
“Was there anything beneath it?”
“Aye, the ordnance. We chucked our ballast and put the cases of shells down there. It was a dicey sail, I tell you. One of the mates went in irons for three days for sneaking a cigarette. And that was topside.”
“She didn’t roll over when she went down, did she?”
“Not so far’s I know. But I didn’t linger to see how she fell.”
“So if her guts were ripped out clean, it’s likely that the shells went down first and farthest. The cigar boxes would be atop them.”
“Those boxes were wood, remember, and flimsy. They’d be nothing now.”
Treece nodded. “Still, they’d not have been crushed by the cases of shells. And the ampules’ mass in water is almost nothing, so they’d not have sunk deep in the sand.”
“If you ask me, the storms has busted ’em all up by now.”
“I’d have thought so, too.” Treece fingered one of the ampules. “Until these turned up.”
“But they were in a hole, you say, protected. The others is gone, I’ll wager.”
“Like as not. But we’re having a look tonight.”
Coffin drained his glass and banged it on the table.
“Damn fine. I’ll be ready.”
Treece smiled. “No. We’ll go. If we find some more, then we’ll need you.”
“But it’s my ship!” Coffin hammered his chest with a fist. “You think I’m not fit, is that it?”
His eyes were bright, his face flushed from the rum.
“I’m fit as a bloody stallion! How old do you think I am?”
Treece said calmly, “I know how old you are, Adam.”
“You, then,” Coffin said, glaring at Sanders. “How old do you think I am?”
Sanders looked at him, quickly matching dates in his mind. Coffin had to be at least seventy. “I’d say… sixty.”
“See that, Treece?” Coffin laughed.
“Sixty!” He turned back to Sanders. “I’m seventy-bloody-two, my boy! Fit as a stallion!”
“Adam,” Treece said, touching Coffin’s arm, “no one said you weren’t fit. But I don’t want anyone to see you diving on the wreck. You’re too well known.”
Treece warmed to his lie. “You’re a bloody celebrity! If people knew you were diving on that wreck, they’d right away spot something was up.”
Coffin leaned back in his chair, mollified by the flattery. “There’s sense in what you’re saying. Wouldn’t want to give anything away.” He eyed his empty glass. “I say let’s drink on it.”
“No,” Treece said, standing up. “I’ve got work to do.”
Coffin followed Treece and the Sanderses down the path to the road. Treece opened the door of the Hillman and-like an octopus insinuating itself tentacle by tentacle into a crevice in a reef-slowly fit one long limb after another into the driver’s compartment.
Coffin said, “Don’t breathe too deep, or you’ll blow the horn with your chest.”
Treece said to Sanders, “You want to follow, or can you find your way?”
“We’ll find it. You go ahead.”
Treece looked at Gail. He paused, apparently considering his words. “You’ll stay at the hotel tonight?”
“I guess so,” she said. “Why?”
“D. And keep your door locked. I don’t want to scare you, but Cloche is sure to know you’re there.”
Gail remembered the sight of the motorbikes that morning. “I know.”
Treece started the car, waited for a taxicab to pass, then made a U-turn on the narrow road and chugged off toward St. David’s.
After the car had disappeared from view, Coffin stared down the empty road. The Sanderses mounted their motorbikes and put on their helmets.
“Good-by, Mr. Coffin,” Gail said.
Coffin did not respond. “I knew him when he was a boy,” he said. “A fine lad.”
Gail and David looked at each other. “I’m sure,” she said. “He seems to be a fine man.”
“Aye. Straight as God Himself. He deserves better.”
“Better than what?”
“Loneliness. Sadness. It’s one thing for old croaks like me. We’re supposed to be lonely. But a young fella like him-it ain’t right. He should have sons to pass along what he knows.”
Sanders said, “Maybe he likes living alone.”
Coffin looked at Sanders. His eyes were cicatrices in his bony head. “Likes it, huh?” he said sharply. “Likes it, does he? A lot you know.” He turned away.
David and Gail watched Coffin walk up the hill into his house.
Sanders said, “What did I say?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it was wasn’t the right thing.”
Sanders looked at his watch. “Let’s go. I’ve got to get all the way back to St. David’s before dark.”
VI
The moon had risen well above the horizon, casting an avenue of gold across the still water.
Treece’s boat was forty-three feet long, a wooden craft with the name
There were winches on both sides of the cabin, racks for scuba tanks along the gunwales, and, where a fighting chair would be bolted to the deck, an air compressor. An aluminum tube, perhaps twelve feet long and four inches in diameter, was lashed to the starboard gunwale. The lamp in the binnacle threw a faint yellow glow on
