beating.”
“Once we have the drugs,” Gail said, “what will you do with them? Destroy them?”
“Aye, but not till we’ve got every last ampule.
If we were to destroy the ampules bit by bit, as we recover them, and Cloche were to find that’s what we’re doing, we’d be finished. There’d be no reason for him not to have us killed on the spot. Same if we started turning them over to the government lot by lot. Cloche’d see his whole plan going up in smithereens, and he’d kill us just to keep his options open. But if we accumulate them… The best way for us to stay healthy is to keep Cloche hoping, let him think we’re doing all his work for him, gathering them up and saving them-and when we’ve got the lot he’ll try to pirate them from us.”
Sanders noticed that Gail was eying him quizzically.
At first he didn’t know why; then he realized that he had been smiling as Treece spoke-an unconscious grin that betrayed the strange excitement Sanders felt. He had felt it before: he had a particularly vivid recollection of the sensation as he was about to parachute for the first time. It was a potpourri of feelings-fear made his arms and fingers tingle and his neck and ears flush hot; excitement made his breath come too fast, bringing on lightheadedness; and anticipation (probably at the thrill of being able to say he had actually jumped out of an airplane) made him smile. The fact that he proceeded to sprain his ankle during the jump in no way diminished his glee, nor the fact that he had never jumped again.
Gail frowned at him, and he forced himself to stop smiling.
They heard a muffled thump outside the kitchen door. Treece stood and said, “That’ll be supper.” He opened the door and retrieved a newspaper-wrapped package from the stoop.
“Supper?” Gail said.
“Aye.” Treece set the package on the counter and unwrapped it. Within, still wet and glistening, was a two- foot-long barracuda. “It’s a beauty,” he said.
Gail looked at the fish, and remembering the barracuda that patrolled the reef and stared at her with vacant menace, her stomach churned.
“You
“Why not?” Sanders said, “I thought they were poisonous.”
“You mean ciguatera?”
“I don’t know. What’s that?”
“A neurotoxin, a nasty bastard. Nobody knows much about it, except that it can make you sick as hell and, now and again, put you under.”
“Barracudas have it?”
“Some, but so do about three hundred other kinds of fish. In the Bahamas they throw a silver coin in the pot when they boil a barracuda. They say if the coin turns black, the fish is poisonous. But here in civilization we have a much more scientific test.” Treece picked up the fish, held out his right arm, and measured the fish against it. “We say, ‘If it’s longer than your arm, it’ll do you harm.”
I got a full hand on this one, so it’s obviously safe.”
“That’s a comfort,” Gail said.
“It’s not as stupid as it sounds. Ciguatoxin is more common in bigger fish, and the bigger the fish, the more of the stuff he’s bound to absorb. We figure that in a little brute like this one, even if he is ciguatoxic, chances are pretty good of getting away with nothing more than a bellyache.” Treece reached in a drawer and found a filleting knife and a sharpening stone. “Don’t be put off,” he said. He spat on the stone and rubbed the slim blade in tight circles in the pool of saliva. “I’ve been eating beasts like that for the better part of forty years, and I’ve never been stabbed yet.” With quick, sure sweeps, he began to scale the fish. The silvery scales flew from the knife blade and floated to the floor.
“Where did he come from?” Sanders asked.
“The reef, I imagine.”
“No, I mean how did he get here? I’ve never heard of a fish that rolls itself in newspaper and deposits itself on your doorstep.” Sanders chuckled at his little joke.
“Somebody brought him. They do that. A person catches a few fish, has more than he needs, he’ll drop one
Gail said, “Is this what you mentioned before?
Looking after the keeper of the light?”
“Not really.” Treece flipped the barracuda over and scaled the other side. “We take care of our own. Kids’ mother gets sick, neighbors’ll feed ’em and look after ’em. Ever since…” He seemed to hesitate. “They know I don’t have time to go fishing and have to cook for myself, so they leave a little something.” With two sharp strokes, Treece severed the head and tail. He tossed the tail in the garbage.
“You want the head?”
David and Gail shook their heads, looking-with undisguised revulsion-at the fish head impaled through the eye by the point of Treece’s knife.
“It’s not bad, if you don’t have anything else,”
Treece said, flipping the head into the garbage. “But this fellow has a generous carcass.” He slit the barracuda’s belly from tail to throat and scooped out the innards. Then he turned the fish around and made a slit along its backbone. The whole side of meat came free.
“You might heat me up some oil,” he said to Gail.
“What kind?”
“Olive oil. It’s over there by the burner. Dump half a bottle in a pan and fire her up.”
Treece sliced the two fillets in half and dropped them in the pan of hot oil, where they bubbled and spat and quickly turned from gray-white to golden.
Gail made a simple salad-Bermuda onions and lettuce-and asked Treece where the dressing was.
“Here,” he said, handing her an unlabeled bottle.
“What is it?”
“Wine, they say. I don’t know what’s in it, but it goes in most everything-salads, cooking, your stomach. Don’t want to drink too much of it, though. Give you a fearsome head.”
Gail poured an inch of the liquid in a glass and drank it. It tasted bitter, like vermouth.
The sun had dropped below the horizon when they sat down to eat, and rays of pink, reflected off the clouds, streamed in the window and washed the kitchen with a warm, soft glow.
Treece saw Gail toying with her fish, reluctant to eat it. “I’ll risk my mortal bones,” he said, smiling. “If he’s
He didn’t use a fork, but broke off a big piece of barracuda with his fingers and put it in his mouth. He cocked his head, feigning dread at the possible onset of crippling cramps. “Nope,” he said. “Clean as a Sunday shirt.”
The Sanderses ate the fish. It was delicious, moist and flaky with a crisp coating of fried oil.
At 9:30, Treece yawned and announced, “Time to put it away. We’ll want to be up early. Have to fuel the compressor on the boat and show you how the air lift works. Ever used a Desco?”
“No,” Sanders said.
“Have to give you practice, then. There’s no trick to it, once you learn how to watch your air line. If it fouls on something, or kinks, you’ll think the beast from twenty thousand fathoms has grabbed you by the throat.”
“We won’t dive with tanks?” Gail said.
“We’ll take some, just in case. That’s another thing: WV11 have to fill them in the morning. That compressor out back makes a God-awful din. But you should try to use a Desco. You never run out of air, unless the compressor on the boat runs out of gas. You use a tank for five hours and you’ll think you’ve been kissing prickly pears. The mouthpiece begins to smart after a while.”
“There’s no mouthpiece on a Desco?”
“No. It’s a full-face mask. You can talk to yourself all you likesing, make a speech, give yourself a royal cussing. You can talk back and forth, too, if you read lips worth a damn.”
They were in bed by ten. The wind whistled outside, swooping up from the sea and over the cliff. As Sanders leaned over to turn off the bedside light, he saw the dog standing, tentatively, in the doorway.
“Hi,” Sanders said.
