chap—killed. Then he and the captain split the goodies. The captain waits awhile, rechristens his wreck of a ship, loads it with a relatively worthless cargo, and sets sail for home. If he makes it, he’ll never have to sail again. He’ll have enough to keep himself and his family and two or three small countries afloat. I don’t have even half the list of jewels, but the bit I do have lists more than fifty pieces. The only flaw in the plan was that the ship didn’t make it home. Got caught in a blow and seized up on the Bermuda rocks. Nobody knew there was anything on board worth worrying about.”
Sanders said, “Did the man in Havana admit this?”
“Hell, no! He makes all manner of lugubrious references to the sinking of the fleet and the loss of the King’s jewels. That put me off for a while.”
“I think you’re reaching: he might have done this, he could have done that. It’s all supposition.”
Treece nodded. “I thought so, too, until about four o’clock this morning.” He paused, enjoying the game. “What was the King of Spain’s name?”
“Come on,” Sanders said, feeling manipulated.
“Philip.”
“Aye. And what was his new wife’s name?”
Sanders sighed. “The duchess of Parma.”
“No!” Treece smiled. “Not her title, her name.” He waited, but they had no answer.
“Her name was… Elisabetta Farnese.”
It took a second for the initials to register.
Gail’s mouth dropped open. Sanders was stunned.
Treece grinned. “There’s still one unanswered question.”
Sanders thought for a few seconds, then laughed and said, “I know.”
“What?” The grin lit up Treece’s face.
“The question is, Did King Philip ever get laid?”
“Right! And about that, you contentious bastard,” he said, slapping Sanders” shoulder, “I would not presume to make a guess.”
Sanders tried to share Treece’s joviality, but his mind was crowded with conflicting images: jewels and drugs and explosives, the sight of Coffin’s twisted body, the tattered linen doll, the leer on Slake’s face. “How much is it worth?” he said.
“No telling. Depends what’s still down there, what we can get at, how much was lost, and how much the man in Havana made off with. What we have now is worth, I’d say, somewhere near a quarter of a million dollars- that is, once we can firm up the provenance. We have to find at least one jewel that’s on the list I’ve got, for the provenance to be perfect.”
“What are we going to do about the drugs?” Gail said.
“I’ve thought about it. There’s not a chance of our getting the lot up, not before Cloche makes his move. You know the numbers. What do you figure the value of the ampules we’ve got now is?”
“I don’t know for sure how many ampules we have, but take a round figure-say we get a hundred thousand altogether. That’s over a million dollars, maybe two million.”
“That leaves a bloody heap of glass out there for him. But of course, he doesn’t know that, does he?” Treece was talking more to himself than to them. “He doesn’t know what we’ve got and what’s still there.”
“So?”
“So we’ll go for the jewels; they’re much more important. Let him think we’re digging for glass.”
“We can’t just leave the rest of the drugs for him.”
“No, we won’t, but you have to weigh your risks.
There’s one thing certain: Cloche will try to get us out of the way, more’n likely by killing us.” Treece paused, letting silence give emphasis to his words. “If he kills us, you might say who gives a damn what he gets; it’s not our worry. But I care. I don’t want him to get those drugs, and I
“You’ve got a cellar?” Sanders said.
“After a fashion.” Treece took a strip of maroon velvet from the drawer and wrapped the cameo, the medallion, the crucifix, the chain, and the pine cone. “Have to have something to anchor this shack in a breeze; else, she’d tumble off the cliff.”
He led them into the living room and moved a chair.
Under the chair, a small brass ring was countersunk into the floor. Treece pulled on the ring, and a four-by- four-foot section of cedar boards separated from the floor. He set the trap door aside and took a flashlight from the mantelpiece, then sat on the floor and let his legs dangle into the hole. “It’s about a five-foot drop, not much more than crawl space, so mind your heads.” He dropped into the hole and ducked down.
The cellar was a packed-dirt square as large as the living room above, walled with heavy stones held together by mortar.
The Sanderses followed Treece’s crouched figure to a far corner of the cellar.
“Count three stones up from the floor,” Treece said, shining his light in the corner.
Sanders touched the third stone above the floor.
“Now move four to the right.”
Sanders ran his fingers along the wall until they came to rest on a cantaloupe-size rock.
“This?”
“Aye. Pull.”
Sanders could barely get his hand around the stone, but once he had a good grip, the stone slid easily from the wall.
There were two pieces of paper in the hole; behind them, another stone. “My birth certificate,” Treece said, reaching in and removing the papers.
Gail wondered what the other piece of paper was, and in the reflected glow of the flashlight she could make out a last name—Stoneham—and three letters of a first name:
“What’s that?” Sanders said, pointing to something small and shiny in the hole.
Quickly, Treece shifted the light away from the hole and put his hand inside. “Nothing.” He removed the object.
Gail thought, his wedding ring.
“Now reach in and pull that other rock.”
Sanders did as he was told. His arm went in the hole almost up to the elbow.
When the other stone was free, Treece placed the velvet-wrapped jewels in the back of the hole.
“Okay, put it back.”
Sanders replaced the rear stone, Treece returned the papers and the shiny object and set the front stone back into the wall.
Treece said, “All you have to remember is, three up, four over.”
“I don’t want to remember it,” said Gail.
“It’s none of our—”
“Just a precaution. I might take a wrong turn and walk off a cliff. Any of us might. Better we all know where things are.”
They went up into the house. “Might’s well have a bite to eat,” Treece said as he pushed the chair over the brass ring in the floor. “This is going to be a long day.”
They reached the reef at eleven o’clock in the morning.
It was a clear, calm day, with an offshore breeze barely strong enough to keep the boat off the rocks.
They could see twenty or thirty people, in twos and threes, on the Orange Grove beach, and a mother playing with her child in the wave wash.
