The Golden Reef (1969) (10 page)

He let the wrist drop and drew away from Bristow, withdrawing to the far end of the boat. And there he stayed for the rest of the night, waiting for Bristow to get up, yet knowing in his heart that he would never do so.

In the early light of morning Bristow lay across the thwart with the dried blood and matted hair visible on the back of his head. When Keeton, mastering his reluctance to go near, touched the body he found that it had already stiffened.

‘I didn’t mean to do it, Johnnie,’ he muttered. ‘You made me mad, but I didn’t mean to kill you, believe me, I didn’t. It was an accident.’

Yet even in this moment of remorse the thought crept into his mind that now there was no one with whom he had to share the gold. The treasure of the
Valparaiso
was his now, all his. If he could get it.

But Bristow had to be lifted out of the boat; he could not be left where he was to rot, for that would be the ultimate horror.

Keeton put his arms round the body and tried to lift it, but could not do so. He sat down, trembling from the exertion. He could not believe that Bristow, even at his fattest, had ever been as heavy as that; it was as though death had turned the flesh to lead, defying him to lift it. It did not occur to him at first that it was not Bristow who had grown heavier but he who had become weaker; he no longer possessed the strength that he had once had; he was a sick man now, sick from privation. And yet somehow Bristow must go.

‘If he stays,’ Keeton muttered, ‘I shall have to go. There’s not room for the two of us now.’

He got to his feet and put his hands under Bristow’s armpits and dragged him to the side. By exerting all his efforts he managed to lift Bristow’s head and shoulders on to the gunwale. He rested then, gasping for breath, his mouth dry and salty. Bristow, face downward on the gunwale, looked as though he were praying. With a muttered curse Keeton bent down and seized the dead man’s legs; he lifted them and with a final heave toppled the body over the side.

There was surprisingly little splash. Keeton looked over the gunwale and saw the shark. It must have been there all the time, waiting, as if it had known that Bristow would be coming to it.

Keeton closed his eyes, but he could not shut out the sound of that sudden flurry in the water. After a while the sound died away. He opened his eyes and saw the stains on the thwart like dry paint.

Keeton was alone in the boat now. The days slipped by and the boat drifted, without purpose, without aim, a piece of flotsam moved by the wind and the current. As time passed Keeton became weaker; he no longer made any attempt to bail out the water in the bottom of the boat, but after reaching a certain level it stopped rising, perhaps because the leak had sealed itself. Sometimes a kind of madness seized him; he made croaking shouts of defiance, daring the sea to come and take him, shaking his bony fists at the sky. In one of these fits he picked up the sextant and flung it away; it fell with a momentary glitter of reflected sunlight and was lost beneath the enigmatic surface of the ocean. The charts followed it, fluttering down like autumn leaves and floating for a time before, sodden and limp, they lost their buoyancy and succumbed to the irresistible pull of gravity.

He lost track of time. He knew that the days burned away under the harsh glare of the sun, that the nights were haunted by dreams of Bristow and the shark beneath the keel; but he kept no record of their passing. He felt an overpowering lassitude; his bones ached, but the pain of hunger scarcely troubled him any more; he had become used to it, or maybe it had withered away
inside him like a dried-up flower.

He could hardly believe that he was only twenty years of age. He seemed to have grown old and weary. He had had only this small portion of life and now it was almost gone.

One morning he was too weak to crawl out from the shelter of the awning in the bows. He lay on the mattress, not moving. He lay there all day and all night with his eyes closed. He did not know when the next day dawned.

Keeton could see a line of rivets above his head. He tried to puzzle out how they came to be there. There were surely no rivets in the awning. He was still worrying over this problem when he heard the voices.

I should be dead, he thought; but instead I am still alive and imagining things. Or perhaps, after all, I died in the boat and have come to another life, that life the preachers always talked about – the hereafter.

But he did not really believe that this was so. He believed that this was merely a kind of hallucination – the rivets, the white-painted iron above him, the men’s voices. He believed that he was still in the boat and that soon he would feel the water lapping at his feet and hear the creaking of the mast.

Instead he heard the men’s voices, murmuring in low tones, and the measured thumping of the ship’s engines; and after a while he came to the conclusion that this was indeed no dream but reality. He had been picked up. A ship must have come at last and he had been lifted out of the boat, lifted back into life.

He sighed.

A man’s head appeared above him. A voice said: ‘So you’re awake then.’

Keeton was aware of thirst. ‘Water!’ He could scarcely hear his own voice; it was a croaking whisper. ‘Give me water.’

He felt a hand under his shoulders raising him. A cup was pressed against his lips and he drank. The liquid tasted sweet; it
could have been a mixture of water and condensed milk.

The voice that had spoken before said warningly: ‘Not too much, Bates. Mustn’t overdo it to start with. Might do more harm than good.’

‘Very good, sir.’

The cup was taken away from Keeton’s lips and he was lowered again to the pillow.

But he was still consumed by thirst. ‘More,’ he whispered. ‘More.’ He felt that he could have drunk a gallon, ten gallons; that all he wanted in the world was to drink and drink and go on drinking.

But the man who was giving the orders was firm. He leaned over the bunk again and Keeton saw a round, rosy-cheeked face and two pale blue eyes.

‘My name’s Rogerson – Captain Rogerson. You are on board the steamship
Southern
Queen.
We picked you up from a lifeboat. Do you want to talk?’

‘Water,’ Keeton said.

‘Very well, Bates,’ Rogerson said. ‘Give him a little more.’

Again when Keeton had drunk Rogerson asked: ‘Do you want to talk?’

Keeton closed his eyes. ‘I want to sleep.’

‘As you wish. We’ll talk some other time. There’s no hurry.’

Keeton heard them go away; he heard the door close. He lay with his eyes shut, not asleep but thinking. By a miracle he had been saved from death, had been plucked out of the grasp of the sea and was going to live. He knew that he would not die; he was weak but he would recover. And one thought hammered in his brain – the treasure. No one but he knew about the
Valparaiso;
he alone held the secret of the gold, and it was a secret that he had to keep. To have endured so much and then to lose the reward would be senseless. His initial plan had failed because he had been unable to reach Fiji, but already in his mind the seed of another one was germinating, one that would avoid the necessity for telling any story.

‘And you mean to say you can’t remember anything?’ Rogerson asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Your name is Keeton; that was on the discs. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Doesn’t it bring back some memory?’

‘No.’

Keeton was glad that he had kept the identity discs; the fact that they knew his name made things easier. They would be able to tell him certain details about himself and this would narrow the field in which he had to profess ignorance. But the one thing they must never know about was the fate of the
Valparaiso.

Rogerson was speaking again, probing his brain, trying to strike some chord of memory.

‘Have you heard of a ship called the
Valparaiso
?’

Keeton controlled himself; he must show no reaction. He kept his voice dull and expressionless. ‘I cannot remember.’

‘We found you in number one lifeboat of the S.S.
Valparaiso.
You can tell me nothing of how you came to be in it? How you got away from the ship?’

‘No. It is just a blank.’

Rogerson believed him; there was no hint of suspicion on his face. But there would be others who might be more difficult to convince.

‘Memory’s a funny thing,’ Rogerson said. ‘Maybe it’ll come back. I shouldn’t be surprised if it did when you’ve had a good rest. Don’t worry.’

Keeton could almost feel the strength flowing back into his body like a liquid being poured into it. He lay in the bunk and listened to the throbbing of the ship’s engines; he ate; he slept. The steward had shaved his beard, trimmed his hair, cut his nails.

‘Now you’re a new man,’ the steward said. Keeton thought there might be more truth in that than he realized.

Rogerson came and talked. He talked about all manner of things; he was like a swordsman probing for a weak spot in his opponent’s defence. Now and then he would let fall some remark that might seem casual but which Keeton guessed had a purpose behind it. Rogerson was far less guileless than he appeared to be.

‘By the way, did I tell you the war is over?’

‘What war?’ Keeton asked.

He left the
Southern
Queen
in Vancouver. The ship had called at Honolulu and there Keeton had been interviewed by United States naval officers and the inevitable newspapermen.

‘You’re a celebrity now,’ Rogerson told him. ‘A survivor from the
Valparaiso
is news. You know what she had on board?’

‘You told me. Gold.’

‘A fortune. Too bad it all had to go to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. No hope of salvage at that depth even if anybody knew where to look.’

‘Yes,’ Keeton said. ‘Too bad.’

There had been some talk of putting him ashore in Hawaii so that he could go into hospital, but finally it had been decided to send him on in the
Southern
Queen.
Doctors had checked his physical condition and had reported that he was fit to travel.

‘The Royal Navy are pretty keen to get their hands on you,’ Rogerson explained. ‘After all, you are one of their boys, aren’t you?’

‘So I’ve been told.’

Rogerson stroked his chin; it was smooth from shaving and had a shine on it as though it had been polished. ‘You know you’re not the only survivor from the
Valparaiso
?’

‘No. You didn’t tell me that.’

‘It must have slipped my mind. There were two others – the mate, Rains I think his name was, and a steward called Smith. Mean anything to you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘They were pretty far gone when they were picked up. There had been others in the boat but they’d died. There’d been another boat too – not yours – but that was never found.’

Rogerson began to fill his pipe, not looking at Keeton. ‘So there we are – three survivors, and a fortune in gold bars down at the bottom of the Pacific. You three ought to find it interesting to compare notes. That is, it would be interesting if you could remember anything.’

‘Yes,’ Keeton said. ‘It would, wouldn’t it?’

They interrogated him again in Vancouver. He was getting used to the questions by this time; he could see them coming and be on his guard. He needed to be; some of these men were sharp; they saw a mystery here and it was only human to wish to get to the bottom of it. Besides which, there was the gold. The treasure of the
Valparaiso
was very much in people’s minds.

One Canadian doctor talked to Keeton for hours, thrusting in the questions here and there like rapier strokes.

‘Who else was with you in the boat?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Did the ship sink quickly?’

‘I can’t remember the ship.’

And then after a deal of talk about Keeton’s future came the remark, dropped in so casually, so guilelessly: ‘No doubt the food was bad on board the
Valparaiso
?’

Keeton was too experienced to be caught like that. ‘How can I tell you about the food if I can’t remember anything?’

They did not readily accept the fact that a man had really lost his memory.

He travelled across Canada by train and was taken on board a troopship in Halifax for the voyage to England. Three months later he had been discharged from the Navy with a gratuity, all his back pay, and the story of his loss of memory officially, even if reluctantly, accepted.

He took the money, saluted for the last time, and went away to begin his preparations for a return to the Pacific. He was as much alone in the world now as he had been in the boat after the death of Bristow, for no one could be allowed to share the secrets of his mind. All he did now was directed to the achievement of one object only – the salving for himself of the treasure of the
Valparaiso.

The men were waiting for him when he came up from the boatyard. They stood in the roadway, motionless, looking at him with hard, calculating eyes. He would have passed them, but the taller one spoke suddenly.

‘Well, Keeton, well.’

He was a heavy man, thick-necked, and his voice had a gravelly quality. He was dressed in a shiny blue suit; he was bareheaded and his hair was turning grey.

‘Know me?’

Keeton knew him, even though time had coarsened him, made him flabbier as well as older. Mr Rains was still unmistakably Mr Rains.

‘I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know,’ Keeton said. He started to walk past but Rains stretched out a hand and stopped him.

‘That’s no way to speak to a fellow survivor, is it now?’ He glanced at the other man for confirmation. ‘What do you say, Smithie?’

The steward had not changed appreciably. He was neat and dapper, his black hair sleeked down as always, his sharp nose thrust forward as though sniffing out anything that might be to his advantage.

‘That’s so, partner. That’s so indeed.’

‘So you don’t recognize us?’ Rains said.

‘No.’

‘That’ll be on account of the loss of memory. We heard about that.’ He gave a laugh and his chin quivered. Smith chuckled too, a sudden cackling sound. The idea of Keeton’s loss of memory seemed to strike some nerve in them, causing this reaction of laughter.

‘You heard about us though? We were the only other survivors from the
Valparaiso.
They told you about us?’

‘Yes; they told me about you. You were in another boat.’

Rains nodded, and his flabby chin bulged out and retreated again in time with the nodding. ‘That’s right. In another boat. There were more of us at the start, but the rest of them couldn’t stick it out. They weren’t as tough as me and Smithie. We didn’t fancy dying. How many others in your boat, Keeton?’

‘I was alone when I was picked up.’

‘Yes, but at the start, Keeton. How many were with you at the start?’

‘If you know I lost my memory, you know I can’t tell you that.’

‘Right there,’ Rains said. ‘Right in one. No slip of the tongue, hey, boy?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Keeton made a move to walk on, but Rains stopped him again.

‘How about the three of us having a nice cosy little talk? Three old shipmates like us; there’s a lot to discuss.’

‘I’ve got nothing to discuss with you.’

‘No?’ Rains’s thick eyebrows went up like brushes.

‘But we’ve got a lot to discuss with you. Isn’t that so, Smithie?’

‘My word, yes,’ Smith agreed. ‘We’re the boys that like a nice chat about old times.’

‘But don’t let’s stand around here,’ Rains said. ‘Let’s go somewhere comfortable. I vote we have a drink together. How’s that?’

His hand was on Keeton’s arm; his mottled, beefy face was so close that Keeton could smell the stale odour of his breath. He had an impulse to knock Rains’s hand away, to refuse to talk to him; but he realized that this might be unwise. Besides, he was more than a little curious to learn what the other two wanted to discuss. He did not believe for a moment that they had sought him out merely for the pleasure of comparing notes. He had
never had much to do with either of them on board the
Valparaiso,
so why should they have gone to the trouble of tracking him down to this little Devonshire fishing port? Not just for the sake of a talk; of that he was certain.

‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Let’s have that drink.’

Rains slapped him on the shoulder. ‘That’s the boy.’

Smith glanced at his watch. ‘You work late, Charles. It’s nearly ten past seven.’

‘Yes,’ Keeton said. ‘I work late.’

‘Overtime. Raking in the shekels. Nice for you.’

They climbed a steep, narrow street and came to a public house, an ancient hostelry built of weathered stone and wedged between other houses of the same material.

‘This’ll do,’ Rains said. ‘Suit you, Keeton?’

‘It’s your party,’ Keeton said.

They went inside. ‘What’s it to be then?’ Rains asked.

‘Bitter for me.’

Rains laughed hollowly. ‘I hope that’s not the way you feel – bitter. We’re all pals here.’

Smith’s nose prodded agreement like a woodpecker’s beak. ‘Pals. That’s the word.’

There was a fire burning in an old-fashioned iron grate opposite the bar. They took their drinks to a table near the fire; it was chilly for April.

‘There’ll be a frost,’ the landlord said. He polished a glass and looked with interest at Keeton’s companions. He knew Keeton but the other men were strangers.

‘It won’t worry me,’ Rains said and turned his back on the bar.

Keeton was impatient. ‘Well? What did you want to talk to me about?’

‘Old times.’

‘I know nothing about old times.’

‘Sure. We know. The memory that got mislaid. Funny thing – memory. To look at you, anybody would say you were normal.’

‘I am normal.’

‘But you just can’t remember anything further back than a certain day in the year 1945. Is that it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a pity.’ Rains swallowed beer and stared at Keeton over the rim of the mug. He had lowered his voice so that the other people in the room should not hear what he was saying. Nobody was listening anyway. The landlord had lost interest.

‘If you were so keen to have a talk,’ Keeton said, ‘I wonder you took such a time coming for it. It’s been years.’

‘That was force of circumstances,’ Smith put in.

‘What circumstances?’

‘Look,’ Rains said. ‘Suppose we put you in the picture?’

‘Go ahead. I’m listening.’

‘Smithie and I don’t work in ships any more. We’ve left that game. We’re partners now.’

‘Partners?’

‘That’s right,’ Smith said. ‘Seemed like the logical thing after what we’d been through together.’

‘Partners in what?’ Keeton asked.

Rains grinned, but the grin was shifty. Keeton would not have trusted Rains further than he could see him.

‘All sorts of things. Any venture that brings in the dough is for us – if the dough is heavy and the work is light. Lately we’ve been in South America; in fact we’ve been there quite a while. That’s how we missed your homecoming. We didn’t hear a word about you until we got back to England last month. Even then we had quite a job running you down.’

‘How did you hear about me?’ Keeton asked. The more he saw of these two men the less he was inclined to believe that they simply wished to talk. They had some purpose in seeking him out, and he waited to hear what that purpose might be.

Rains said: ‘A friend of Smithie’s kept the paper he read about it in. He thought Smithie might be interested. You were in the news for a time, Keeton. A proper nine days’ wonder.’

‘The nine days were finished long ago,’ Keeton said.

‘So they were. You slipped out of the limelight. Maybe you wanted it that way.’

‘Maybe I did.’

‘But you wouldn’t want to be hiding away from your old pals, would you?’

‘You’re not my old pals,’ Keeton said.

Rains glanced at him sharply, and Smith’s bright, bird-like eyes were staring too. He saw the blunder even as he made it, but it was too late to stop the words.

Rains spoke softly. ‘So we’re not old pals, eh? Now how would you know that? You with no memory.’

Keeton hurried to cover up the slip. ‘I was a gunner. You were the mate and Smith was a steward. How could I be a friend of yours?’

‘Stranger things have happened. But we’ll let it pass.’

‘If it comes to that,’ Smith said, ‘you might think a ship’s officer wouldn’t team up with the likes of me. But he has. Now we’re like that.’ He crossed two fingers and gave a wink. ‘Brothers.’

‘What do you want?’ Keeton asked.

Rains allowed the last of his beer to drain away down his throat; then he put down the empty mug and said to Smith: ‘Get some more.’

Smith got up and walked to the bar.

‘I asked what you wanted,’ Keeton said.

Rains gave his shifty grin, but his eyes were stony. ‘You don’t believe things easy, do you, pal?’

‘I don’t believe a pair like you and Smith would come down here simply for the pleasure of seeing my face.’

‘And you’re right, pal. We wouldn’t. Not that it isn’t a presentable enough face. But it wouldn’t bring us all this way, no.’

‘What, then?’

Smith came back with the replenished mugs and sat down.

‘We want information,’ Rains said.

‘What sort of information?’

‘About the
Valparaiso,
for instance.’

‘I can’t tell you anything about the
Valparaiso
you don’t already know.’

‘Because of the lost memory? Well, that’s just too bad. But, you know, me and Smithie, we’re a proper pair of doubting Thomases, and we’re not altogether convinced about that business. We think you may be putting on an act.’

‘Presackly,’ Smith said. He closed one eye and slowly opened it again.

Keeton said coldly: ‘I don’t give a damn what you think.’

Rains ignored the remark. ‘You see, Keeton, I happen to know something that nobody else knows – barring Smithie here and yourself. I know that number one lifeboat of the steamship
Valparaiso
wasn’t in any condition to float two yards when the ship was abandoned. Yet, what happens? Nine months later a man is picked up from that very life boat and the said lifeboat has been patched up.’

‘So?’

‘So I ask myself: how did that happen? Who was it who patched the boat up and when was it done? The answer to the first question is pretty obvious. The man who patched the boat must surely have been the man who was found in it; none other than Mr Charles Keeton. The answer to the second question is pretty easy too when you come to think about it. If the boat couldn’t float until it was patched up, then it must have been patched up before it left the ship. You follow me thus far, Mr Keeton?’

‘I follow you.’

‘All right then. So we’ve established the fact that the boat was patched up while it was still on board the
Valparaiso.
Now, what follows from that?’

‘You tell me,’ Keeton said.

‘You don’t need Sherlock Holmes to work that one out,’ Rains said. ‘The answer is that the
Valparaiso
couldn’t have sunk when we thought she did. She must have stayed afloat some considerable time after we abandoned her. You couldn’t have made that boat seaworthy in just a couple of minutes. I know. I had a look at it before we launched the other two. Quite apart from the fact that it could never have been launched from the starboard side with the ship listing to port like she was.’

Keeton took out a cigarette and lit it. He did not offer the packet to Rains or Smith.

‘So this is your theory?’

‘Unless you have a better one.’

‘It wouldn’t put you in a very good light if it were true, would it? You gave the order to abandon.’

Rains shrugged. ‘I’m not worried about the light. I’m not a ship’s officer any more.’

Smith was getting impatient. ‘Tell him the rest. Let’s have the rest of it for Chrisake.’

‘What is the rest of it?’ Keeton asked.

Rains took a drink and wiped the froth off his lip with the back of his hand. ‘There’s some more to the theory. We believe there’s nothing wrong with your memory. We believe you can remember things just as well as we can. Things like a cargo of gold worth a million sweet and lovely pounds.’

‘A million!’

‘Don’t sound so surprised. Didn’t you know it was worth that much? Didn’t you count it up?’

‘Get on,’ Smith said.

Rains gave a wave of the hand. ‘Plenty of time. Now, Mr Keeton, we come to the last bit of the theory. We’ve got the fact that the
Valparaiso
didn’t sink at once. Now, suppose she didn’t sink at all. Mr Charles Keeton must have been living somewhere during those nine lost months, and it wasn’t in an open boat. So here’s what Smithie and I worked out. Suppose the
Valparaiso
went aground somewhere, on one of those uninhabited islands for example; suppose Mr Keeton repaired the boat and after he’d got fed up with waiting to be rescued he decided to take a chance on his own. Then suppose he said to himself, “there’s a fortune in gold waiting to be picked up and why shouldn’t I be the boy that does the picking”? But then it occurs to Mr Keeton that he’ll have to cook up some story to explain where he’s been all those nine long months, and that story mustn’t give away any information about the
Valparaiso.
And after that he asks himself, “What better story than no story at all? I’ll lose my memory and that’ll fox ’em; I just won’t remember a damned thing further back than the time I’m fished out of the lifeboat”. How’s that?’

Rains sat back and grinned at Keeton, showing a fine set of white teeth that looked genuine. ‘How’s that for a rough outline of the way it happened?’

‘You’re mad,’ Keeton said.

Rains shook his head. ‘Oh, no, I’m not. And I don’t think you’re mad either.’ He leaned across the table and brought his mottled face close to Keeton’s. ‘I’ll tell you something, Keeton; I admire you, and that’s the truth. You’re no miserable little bank
robber. When you think about robbery you think big. I like that.’

Keeton’s face was expressionless, but inside him anger was burning. Until this day he had given Rains and Smith scarcely a thought. He had made his own plans and everything had been going smoothly. But now these two had broken in like thieves. He knew what they wanted, but he would see them in hell before letting them have it. The gold was his, all his.

‘We been making a few inquiries,’ Smith said. ‘We heard you’d bought a boat, a yacht or something. We heard you got it cheap because it was old, and you done it up fine and dandy and fixed an engine and all. We heard you do a lot of sailing on your own. No shipmates; no crew; just yourself like.’

Keeton said in a hard, low-pitched voice: ‘If you go poking your nose into other people’s business, one day you’re going to have it spread all over your face.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘You can take it for one if you like.’

Smith was cool. ‘That’s beside the point. The point is, what’s all this sailing in aid of?’