The Deep

that out clear as day.”

Treece climbed aboard, turned off the compressor, told Sanders to haul in the air hoses, and started the engine. He looked back at Sanders, who was coiling the hoses neatly on the deck.

“Don’t bother with that. Just throw it on board.

Soon’s you’re done, take the wheel.”

Treece stepped onto the gunwale and walked forward, impatiently nudging the dog out of the way.

Sanders brought the air lift aboard and hauled on the hose.

“Take the wheel,” Treece called.

“Just a sec.”

“Now, dammit!”

Sanders looked at Gail and handed her the hose.

“Here. You finish it.” He took the wheel.

“Put her in gear,” Treece said, “and give me a bit of throttle. Want to run her up the anchor line.”

Sanders obeyed. Treece hauled the anchor aboard and came aft. As he dropped into the cockpit, Sanders said, “What’s the rush?”

Treece did not reply. He relieved Sanders of the wheel and pushed the throttle full ahead.

There was no conversation on the way back to St.

David’s. Treece stood at the wheel, preoccupied. David and Gail coiled hoses and counted ampules.

Nor did Treece say anything when they reached the house a few minutes before one o’clock. He poured himself

a glass of rum, put the pine cone and chain on the kitchen table, and pulled a box of documents out of a closet. He nodded when the Sanderses said good night.

At four o’clock that morning, Treece identified E.f.

X

He refused to accept the first shred of evidence. He sat at the kitchen table for almost two more hours, cross-checking documents and making notes. When finally he had removed all doubt, he rose, poured himself another glass of rum, and went to wake the Sanderses.

Gail came into the kitchen first, and Treece said, “How you feeling?”

“Okay. No one tried to murder me in my bed.

I’m grateful for that.”

“Feeling rich?”

“What do you mean? Should I?”

Treece smiled mischievously. “Wait till David gets here.”

Gail looked at his face, at his red eyes and the pouches beneath them. “Have you had any sleep?”

“No. Been reading.”

Then she knew. “You found E.f.!”

In the bedroom Sanders stepped into a pair of bathing trunks. A polo shirt hung over the back of a chair. He reached for it, then stopped and thought: The hell with it; I’ll just be taking it off in an hour.

He looked at himself in the mirror and, pleased, slapped his flat stomach. He was brown and lean, and he felt good. Even his feet felt good, tough and callous; he couldn’t remember when he had last worn shoes. He went into the kitchen.

Gail and Treece were sitting at the table, cradling cups. As he walked toward the stove to pour some coffee, Sanders said, “Morning.” They didn’t answer him, and passing the table, he saw them exchange a glance. Annoyed, he thought: Now what?

He sat at the table and said, “Well?”

“Feeling rich?” Treece said.

“What?”

Gail could not contain herself. “He found E.f.!”

Now Sanders understood, and he smiled. “Who is he?”

“She,” Treece said. “You remember, a while back, when you found the medallion, you said, ‘Maybe it was a present for somebody.””

“Sure. And you said, Not a chance.”

“Aye, but then other things didn’t make any sense. A man might have worn the medallion, but he wouldn’t have worn the cameo you found; that was a lady’s piece. And certainly the pine cone was. Perhaps it was being carted home to a wife or lady friend; what you said made me think of that. I went through all the papers again, and I came up dry; there’s not a bloody E.f. among them. A captain of one of the naos, a cargo ship, was a Fernandez, but he went down off Florida.”

“So who was it?”

Treece ignored the question, sipped his tea.

“The pine cone got me thinking, that and the crucifix. It wasn’t possible for goodies like that to go unrecorded-the man who made ’em, the man who sent ’em, the man who commissioned ’em, somebody would have made a note of them. I figured I was nosing around the wrong alley, so I put all the New World papers aside for a while and went back to the history books. That’s where I found the first hint.”

“What?” Gail said. “The name?”

“Aye, and a shopping list. If I’m right”—Treece looked at Sanders—“and by now I know I’m right, what’s down there—flush up against enough live explosives to make angels out of half the human race—is a treasure the likes of which no man has ever seen. It’s beyond price. Men have been looking for it for two hundred and sixty years; people have been hung over it; and a King of Spain stayed randy all his life for lack of it.”

Sanders said, “Is it El Grifon?”

“Aye. It has to be. Listen. In 1714 King Philip the Fifth’s wife died. She wasn’t half stiff before Philip took a fancy to the duchess of Parma. He’d probably fancied her for quite a while, but now that his wife was gone he could bring the good duchess out of the closet. He asked her to marry him. She agreed, but she wouldn’t sleep with him until he had decked her out with jewels-quote-unique in the world. Philip must have had a fearsome lust, because he snapped off a letter to his man in Havana. The chap copied it in his diary, which was included in the appendix of a ratty old book about the decline of Spain in the New World in the eighteenth century. Anyway, Philip’s letter was a shopping list of jewels to be made in the New World and shipped back to Spain.

Below the copy of the letter, the fellow listed what he had assembled.” Treece recited from memory.

“Item: two ropes of gold with thirty-eight pearls on each. Item: a gold cross with five emeralds. And so on and so on. It spills over to the next page of the book, which some idiot tore out a hundred years ago.”

“No pine cone?”

“No, and no crucifix like ours, at least not on the page that’s still there. But there is a reference to a three- lock box.”

Sanders said, “That isn’t conclusive, is it? You said yourself that they used those boxes all the time.”

“For real high-priority goods. But you’re right; it isn’t special to El Grifon. So it was back to the papers.” He sipped his tea.

“The usual way for the King’s treasure to be transported was in a chest in a strong room near the captain’s cabin aboard the capitana. For some reason, Philip didn’t trust Ubilla, the commander. The King’s letter to Havana said that the jewels were to be shipped with the most trustworthy of all the fleet’s captains, and no one else comno one-was to be aware of their existence. Philip didn’t realize it at the time, but that last provision was a bad mistake.”

“Why?” Gail asked.

“Think, girl. It’s what we were talking about before, about Grifon. Up comes a storm; most of the ships go down. Only two people in the world know who had the jewels, the captain who had them and the man in Havana who assigned them to him. The captain survives, makes a deal with the man in Havana, who writes the King that he assigned the jewels to one of the captains who went down and was—poor