Pressure Drop (31 page)

The airport—a wind sock, a fifteen-hundred-foot dirt strip and a one-room hut with a ticket counter and a baggage scale—was four miles away. Matthias put the pedal to the floor and kept it there the whole way. He skidded to a stop in front of the hut and beside his other Jeep at 12:33. He hurried inside.

There were two people in the hut, Moxie and the Bahamasair agent. They were kissing across the top of the ticket counter.

“Where's Brock?” Matthias said.

“Oh,” said the ticket agent, stepping back in embarrassment.

“Where is Brock?”

The agent raised her finger to the sky. Matthias went out on the runway just in time to see the Hawker-Siddeley 748 vanishing into the rain clouds. 12:34. He did not see any other planes around, no rich island-hopping Americans, no charters in for the day, no one to take him to Nassau. He walked back inside. The ticket agent was alone now, straightening piles of forms behind the counter.

“I've got twelve thirty-five,” Matthias said.

The agent frowned at her watch. “We took off a little bit early today, Mr. Matthias. Just a little teeny bit early.”

It wasn't unusual. Sometimes the pilot got tired of waiting, sometimes he got hungry for a hot meal in Nassau, sometimes the agent told him she didn't think anyone else was coming. Sometimes the plane didn't arrive at all.

Matthias went outside. Moxie was standing by the van, kicking pebbles. “Where's his job interview?” Matthias asked.

“Florida,” Moxie replied, looking at the dirt.

“That's it? Florida?”

“Florida, that's what he say.”

“Did he say anything else?”

Moxie shook his head. “He was down on the boat, then he come up and say, ‘Carry me to the airport, Mox.'”

“What boat?”

“
Two Drink
.”

Matthias thought: It's the only boat with a radiophone. “Did you go right to the airport?”

“No, mahn. We stop first by the fish camp for his things.”

“What things?”

“Suitcase,” said Moxie. “Stuff.” He kicked at a pebble, then another.

“What is it, Mox?”

Moxie looked up and briefly met Matthias's gaze. In a low voice, perhaps in case the agent might hear, he said, “Brock say we all better be looking for a job now.”

“Brock's wrong,” Matthias told him. He got into the van and drove away. He regretted slamming the door almost at once.

Matthias drove north, back toward Blufftown. After three miles, he turned onto a rutted track and drove through woods of scrub pine that gave way to sea-grapes and ended at a rocky outcrop: Turtle Point, the southern tip of Zombie Bay. Four wooden cabins stood on the point, sheltered by a few small palms bent backwards by the prevailing wind. This was the fish camp, owned by the club, but much older than the rest of it. People said that long ago Hemingway had stayed at the fish camp, but no one recalled actually seeing him themselves. Neither did anyone know who had painted the signs, now badly faded, over the doors of each cabin: Nick Adams, Lady Brett, Robert Jordan, The Old Man. All were unoccupied now, except The Old Man. Brock lived there; it was the biggest, and the only one with running water.

The door to The Old Man was ajar. Matthias pushed it open with his foot and went inside. There were two rooms: a bedroom, with a bed, a chest of drawers, a poster of Ayer's Rock taped to the wall, a regulator hanging on a nail; and a bathroom, the size of a closet, with a toilet and a sink. The shower was outside.

Matthias pulled out all the drawers and dumped them on the floor. He found five T-shirts, three Speedos, five pairs of cotton shorts, a sweater, a rain jacket, a pair of jeans, a wet suit top. He looked under the unmade bed, saw nothing. Then he stripped off the sheets, gritty with sand, just like his. He lifted the mattress and toppled it onto the floor. Beneath it lay rusty springs on a rusty bed frame. A piece of paper was caught in the springs.

It was a bill from the Plaza Hotel in New York, marked “Paid.” Someone named B. Muller had stayed there on the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth and thirtieth of July of last year, spending $1366.02 including laundry, room service and tax. Matthias put in in his pocket.

He went into the bathroom. A damp towel with the ZB logo lay on the floor. He picked it up; there was nothing underneath. A can of shaving cream was set on the edge of the sink. Matthias pressed the button, releasing a hiss of aerosol. He saw a broken comb, a small cake of soap dissolving in its dish, a few long blond hairs in the sink and speckles of toothpaste on the mirror. The face in it was dark and brutal.

He got a machete from the van, sliced open the mattress and poked through the stuffing inside, yanked it out, dropped it all around him. The stuffing felt slightly moist and smelled of mildew, but concealed nothing.

Matthias stood motionless in the middle of the cabin for a while. Then he wheeled around and ripped the poster of Ayer's Rock off the wall. There was nothing behind it but the cheap pine boards, crudely finished, carelessly painted.

Matthias returned to the van and came back with a crowbar. He began prying up the floorboards. He was working quickly now, and roughly. The boards cracked and splintered; sweat dripped off his face and onto the two-by-fours of the foundation.

He went into the bathroom, jerked the sink off the wall, kicked the toilet to pieces, smashed the mirror with the crowbar. He broke up the chest of drawers, dismantled the bed frame, drove one of the iron bars at the walls like a battering ram, bashing holes in several places. The rain came in.

But he found nothing.

Matthias walked outside. The rain washed away his sweat and cooled him down. He became aware of the iron bar in his hand, and dropped it. Then he searched the other cabins. This time he didn't wreck anything, hardly touched anything, and found nothing.

He went outside, down to the end of Turtle Point, and sat on a rise overlooking the rocks below. The tide was ebbing, leaving behind strings of green and brown seaweed, a few slowly pulsing jellyfish, a bald truck tire, and exposing glossy black sea urchins in tidal pools. And, in a crevice at the edge of the receding wave, something else, something black and square; a shingle, maybe, or a boat cushion. Or a book.

Matthias scrambled down the rise and ran across the mossy rocks. He squatted beside the crevice. What lay in it wasn't a shingle or a boat cushion. It was a book, a black leather-bound book, like the one he'd seen at Hew's, except that the leather was soaked, salt-stained, scratched. He picked it up and opened it to the first page.

A small snapshot of the young Hew posing beside a Greek column was stuck loosely to the black paper. Matthias didn't remember seeing it in the scrapbook Hew had shown him, but he hadn't looked at it for more than a few seconds before the wind blew it away, leaving a dark rectangle on the page. There were other rectangles like it. Matthias turned the page. It came apart in his hands.

He closed the book and carried it up the rise to the van. Sitting on the front seat, out of the wind and rain, he re-opened the book and examined it, separating the pages slowly and carefully. On most of them he found only the dark rectangles, or bumpy spots of hardened glue. But in the middle pages, where the sea had done the least damage, there were a few pictures of Hew, all new to him: Hew on a horse, Hew and a mustached man playing backgammon, Hew wearing a carabinieri helmet. He also found yellowed newspaper clippings, cut from society pages of long ago and describing the fun times of people he had never heard of.

There was one exception: a picture taken from the
Nassau Tribune
, March 18, 1936. The photograph showed a man and a woman standing at the foot of a gangplank. The focus hadn't been sharp in the first place and was further blurred by the sea; Matthias might not have been able to identify the man or the woman without the help of the caption: “Dr. Hiram Standish returned from his studies in Europe last week with his new bride Inge, daughter of Herr Dr. and the late Frau Dr. Wilhelm von Trautschke of Heidelberg.”

Matthias remembered Dr. von Trautschke from the 1934 photograph in Hew's other scrapbook. He was the tall aristocrat in the middle. Standish had stood on one side, and a heavy-set man on the other. Dr. Miller?

Dr. Müller.

Matthias switched on the overhead light and stared at the watery faces of the young couple. They both wore hats. Inge's fair hair touched her shoulders. Standish seemed to be smiling. Inge didn't. Was it his imagination or did this old and damaged picture of her somehow still project an image of beauty? Matthias peered more closely, until all he saw was the newsprint on the other side of her face.

He closed the scrapbook and laid it on the seat beside him. Then he started the van and drove up the rutted track to the road to Zombie Bay.

An hour later, Matthias stood at the edge of the blue hole in the woods behind the club. It was one of many blue holes on Andros and in the sandy shallows just offshore. In the ice age, when the sea level was much lower, they formed as caves in the porous limestone; as the ice melted, the sea rose and filled them. Some of the island fishermen believed, or said they believed, that tentacled monsters called luscas lurked in the holes, waiting to grab them. Matthias didn't believe in luscas, but he didn't like diving in the blue holes either. Blue hole diving meant equipment: tanks, gauges, regulators, lights, buoyancy compensators, weights—and safety lines, if you wanted to do it right. And he didn't like diving with all that strapped to his body. In fact, he didn't like scuba diving. The difference between scuba diving and free diving was the difference between a tourist and a traveler.

Matthias began donning the gear. He wasn't really doing it right—he had no BC, no weights, no safety lines—but he had been in the blue hole once or twice before and remembered nothing unusual. The rain had stopped and the surface of the water, sheltered by trees from the wind, was smooth, and under the dark sky, black instead of blue. The hole was almost perfectly round, and not very big: Matthias could have skipped a stone across it. He spat in his mask, swished it in the water, strapped it on. Then he stuck the regulator in his mouth and stepped in.

Matthias sank quickly under the surface, feet first, not moving his body at all. The inland blue holes often had a layer of fresh water on top, less dense than the salt water below. It was very clear water. Matthias could see gray limestone walls all around, pocked, eroded, inset with chambers, some as big as prayer chapels in a church. At 50 feet, he reached a layer of brine shrimp; all at once, as though a lighting director had punched some buttons, the water turned red and cloudy. It thickened too, slowing the rate of his sinking, and smelled of sulphur. Matthias somersaulted and kicked down. Two kicks sent him through the red layer. He came out of it into the dense salt water below; it resisted him. He kicked hard and swam down into blackness.

The red layer blocked all light from above. Matthias, holding his wrist up to his face, couldn't read the numbers on his depth gauge, couldn't even see the depth gauge. He switched on his torch: 65 feet. He shone the light around him, saw the gray limestone walls; shone the light straight down, saw nothing. Andros was like a sponge, soaking up the sea on every flowing tide and squeezing it out on every ebb, and the inland blue holes were deep holes in the sponge.

Matthias swam down. He sucked in air, blew it out; the bubbles rose up in the blackness. He descended slowly, pointing his beam of light at the walls. In its yellow circle, he saw nothing but the rock: no fish, no crabs, no eels, no life of any kind.

At 90 feet, a cave appeared in the west wall. He thought he remembered it. The opening was big enough to stand in. Matthias swam into it and found it was as he recalled, just a big hole, ending twenty or thirty feet away in a concave wall. At 105 feet, he came upon a second opening, not as big as the other. This one he didn't remember: he had probably stopped at the first cave on his earlier dives. Matthias shone the light inside: half the size of the first cave, and equally empty. He checked his watch. He'd been down for twelve minutes. He was an efficient breather, but a man his size with a 71.2 cubic-foot capacity tank had enough air for perhaps another fifteen at that depth, less if he went deeper. And he wanted to avoid decompression. He was considering those factors, hanging upside down at 105 feet, when his light illuminated a third cave mouth, not much farther down. He descended to it, checked his gauge: 122 feet.

Matthias stuck his head into the cave and shone his light inside. The cave mouth narrowed quickly, ending like the others in a solid, concave wall. He began to back away, getting ready for his ascent. Then he stopped, and pointed the light once more at the rear of the cave. Had the far wall really been solid?

Not quite. A pile of rock lay on the cave floor in front of the wall. Not a big pile, and Matthias couldn't think of any reason why it shouldn't be there, but he swam into the cave anyway.

The cave floor sloped slightly down and the walls and ceiling closed in until his fins struck rock with every kick. At the end, he was pulling himself along with one hand, shining the torch with the other. He felt his bubbles, squeezed by the narrow space, flowing over his skin.

Matthias reached the pile of rocks and picked one up. It was heaver than he had expected and had an odd, squared-off shape, as though it had broken off a column. Green organic matter covered the rock. He scratched some off with his fingernail and held it under the light. The rock was heavier than he had expected because it was a piece of marble. Pink marble.

Matthias picked up a few more rocks and examined them. They were all the same, squared-off chunks of pink marble. He began clearing them away, sliding them beneath his body, toward the mouth of the cave, careful not to cloud the water. But when he pulled a big one out from the bottom, the whole pile suddenly collapsed, falling toward him in a little avalanche.

Matthias jerked his torch out of the way, quickly backed up to the mouth of the cave. He felt a strong current in his face, and hung on to an outcrop in the wall to keep from being swept away. The water turned murky in the beam of the torch. Something hard struck his faceplate, almost knocking the mask off his head. Then the current slackened, although it didn't stop flowing completely, and the water cleared. Matthias swam back into the cave.