The Lucifer Gospel (27 page)

A fire, a hurricane, and nearly half a century underwater had taken their toll. In the old photographs Finn had seen an image of what had passed for sophistication in the early 1960s: modern-looking tufted vinyl chairs arranged around a glass-topped circular plastic table and a thin, Mondrian-patterned carpet in vivid colors, king-sized bed with a padded vinyl headboard, long, low Swedish Modern bureaus with long, low matching mirrors, wood-veneer wall covering in burled walnut that was actually printed fiberglass, and a row of four portholes, square rather than round, for no other reason than being different.

The publicity shots showed women wearing yellow cocktail dresses, drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes in holders while their men stood by with smiles on their square-jawed faces, usually holding a modern straight-stemmed pipe in one hand and a cut-glass tumbler of some amber liquid in the other.

Things had changed.

There were no men in tuxedos or women in cocktail dresses; they’d fled the burning vessel a long time ago. Coat hangers, the waterlogged ruins of an old suitcase, and some kind of curtain material hung on a row of plastic hooks in the little foyer inside the entrance. The floor was thick with muck and sediment. Farther in, the room was almost impassable and the visibility virtually nonexistent. Their lights passed over floating pieces of what might have been the old padded headboard; the office-style easy chairs around the table had disintegrated into the thick layer of dark silt on the deck where the Mondrian carpet had rested, and the fiberglass wall paneling had peeled away from the hull plating, heated red-hot in places according to the survivors. Aside from the remnant of the vinyl suitcase, there was no sign that anyone had ever occupied the cabin.

Finn pushed against the inner door frame of the foyer and glided across to the low chest of drawers. She tried to pull open one of the compartments and the entire piece of furniture silently came apart in her hands. There didn’t seem to be any surface not covered with a layer of algae or slime. There was nothing in the drawer except more silt.

“There’s nothing here,” said Hilts, swinging the light around. “If there had been it would have disappeared a long time ago.”

Finn checked her dive computer. They’d been down for more than an hour. It was time to go. “We have to get out of here,” she said. “We should still see if we can get to Devereaux’s cabin at least.”

“Okay,” said Hilts. He swung around, his fins sending up a blur of silt from the floor. The beam from his light glinted on something beneath him.

“Wait,” said Finn. She reached blindly down into the haze of newly disturbed muck, hoping that there wasn’t another eel lurking in the dense ooze. Her fingers touched something hard. She grabbed it, pulling upward. Hilts tilted the light onto the object.

“I’ll be damned,” said Hilts’s voice in her ear. “A big gold crucifix.”

“Better than that,” said Finn. “It’s a bishop’s Pectoral Cross. The question is, where’s the bishop?”

“Maybe he left it behind.”

“If I remember correctly, they’re not supposed to take them off.”

“Let’s try Devereaux’s cabin.”

“All right.”

Finn stuffed the six-inch-long gold cross into her dive belt and swam after Hilts, following him out of the submerged cabin. Hilts gathered up the Dive Rite reel and they began retracing their route, moving silently back through the gloomy corridor, rewinding the line as they went in a ritual that dated back to ancient Crete and the silken thread that saved Theseus from being lost in the Labyrinth. Even though their fins had kicked up the ooze to almost zero visibility on their way in, they made their way back to the central staircase and the Main Deck foyer without any difficulty.

Hilts waited, suspended above the stairwell, moving languidly, waiting until Finn rejoined him. They dropped down the tilted stairs, keeping just away from the silt-and-algae covered walls. The farther down they got the worse the visibility became. Somewhere between the time of the fire and the present a whole section of the A Deck area below the Main Deck had collapsed, pushing tons of debris along the canted corridor like garbage down a chute. They reached the A Deck foyer and could go no farther; the stairwell was completely jammed with sections of wall paneling, tangles of pipe, and enormous amounts of unidentifiable debris, all of it made even more dangerous by the choking weed and silt. Even if it had been physically possible to tunnel through the barrier of junk, there was no telling what had taken up residence in the deadly barricade over the years.

“Now what?” said Finn. In front of them were the smashed double doors leading into the main dining salon. On the other side of the foyer it looked as though there had been some large mosaic made of colored tiles, most of which had fallen out over time. On either side of the mosaic were the brass doors of the two elevators serving the amidships section of the ship. Hilts swung the beam of the light into the dining salon. In the pictures, the original Princess Oriana Dining Room, named for the opera, was a lavish, two-story, domed monstrosity complete with an eight-piece orchestra and yellow tufted leather ceiling. There was seating for five hundred at a time, and somewhere with a series of hidden escalators for the stewards to retrieve orders from the kitchens below. Now it was a murky waterlogged cavern, the carpeted floors rotted to soggy, crab-infested destruction, the leather ceilings long decomposed, the remains hanging in long organic strings like the putrid entrails of some massive sea creature’s innards. The tables, all bolted to the floors, were still there, their linen cloths long gone, the padding of the chairs no more than muck. The orchestra balcony hung like an empty eye socket over everything. No ladies in yellow dresses, no officers in dress-white uniforms solicitously lighting politically incorrect cigarettes; the tomb of a vanished era of elegance.

“This place is really starting to give me the creeps,” said Hilts.

Finnlifted her computer and stared through her mask. “We’re running out of time. We can check out Devereaux’s cabin, but we’d better be quick about it.” Both of them could feel the distinct tug of the tidal surge as it swept through the giant wreck. It was much stronger than it had been when they first approached the ship.

“How long?” asked Hilts.

“Fifteen minutes in, ten on-site, fifteen back, no more,” Finn answered.

“Gotcha.”

“How do we go in?”

“The elevator shaft, like we agreed.”

“Can you get the doors open?”

“I can try.” Hilts took the lightweight Dutch Guard titanium diver’s pry bar off his belt and pushed across the lobby, skimming lightly toward the ornate brass doors, now deeply pitted with corrosion and dark with oxidization and plankton slime. Finn followed close behind.

They paused in front of the doors, Finn using her hand light this time, throwing a patch of illumination on the tarnished barrier before them. Hilts used his hand to wipe a small patch clean in the center and fitted the hook end of the bar into the crack. He pulled but the effort simply swung him around in the water, raising a cloud of silt.

“Need to get some kind of purchase,” he muttered, and tried again, this time lifting one leg, slipping off the big Dacor flipper and putting his bare foot against the frame of the doorway. He heaved again and the door separated, a dark split appearing. Finn swam forward, hooking the light back on her buoyancy vest, and helped him pull the doors fully open. She unhooked her light and Hilts switched his on as well, leaning into the shaft and throwing the beams downward. The light showed an empty shaft, thick with floating plankton that seemed almost to have a breathing movement as it rode the invisible surges and currents in the water.

“Looks clear,” said Hilts.

“Don’t forget the reel; that stuff in there looks as thick as soup.”

Hilts nodded, put his flipper back on and retied the safety line to a jutting beam on the side of the elevator shaft. He swam into the shaft proper, reached up, and then adjusted his vest compensator.

“Going down,” he said, grinning through the mask. He sank slowly into the shaft as the deflated vest reduced his buoyancy. Finn waited until he was clear of the doorway, then followed him into the shaft. She hit the yellow punch button on her vest, heard the gargling, bubbling hiss of escaping air, and then began to drop even deeper into the sunken hull of the old wreck.

The A Deck elevator doors slid open with no difficulty, and Hilts and Finn swam easily out into the foyer. This was the first full accommodation deck with no shops or dining facilities. Toward the bow were two corridors, port and starboard, with inside cabins down the center. Devereaux had been down on the passenger list as occupying cabin 305 along the left corridor, which now stood directly in front of them.

They pointed their lights down the dark tunnel and saw nothing but a few weeds and a thin layer of sediment and silt over everything. There was no sign of fire or damage, which made sense since the origin of the disaster lay far astern in the after-boiler area. Trailing the safety line behind him as it spun off the reel on his belt, Hilts eased himself across the lobby and down the dark passage, careful to disturb as little of the silt on the deck as possible. A narrower side passage to the left led to cabins 319, 323, 320, and 324. The doors were all open, the cabins beyond dark and forbidding, cluttered with the ruin of their rotted interiors. Next came three singles in a row, 315, 313, and 309, with matching inside cabins on the other side of the hall. Once again the doorways to all of these were open.

“Almost there,” said Hilts quietly. They swam a little farther. The door to Devereaux’s cabin—305—was firmly closed.

“Strange,” said Finn. “According to all the reports the crew went from cabin to cabin making sure no one was left behind.”

“Which is why all the doors are still open,” commented Hilts.

Finn swam forward and grasped the door handle. She pulled it down but it remained in place.

“Jammed?” said Hilts.

“Feels like it’s locked,” Finn responded. She tried again. Still nothing.

“Let me,” said Hilts. He moved in beside her and tried for himself. “You’re right.”

“Use the bar,” Finn suggested.

Hilts nodded. He took the titanium pry bar off his belt and jammed it into the seal of the door just at the level of the handle. He pulled hard and there was a soggy crunch. With his free hand he tried the handle. It moved downward. He pushed and the door opened, swinging inward.

“Who locks his door when the ship is on fire?” asked Finn, hovering behind him.

“Let’s find out,” Hilts said. “Give me a time check first.”

Finn consulted her dive computer. “Ten minutes starting—” she hit the elapsed time button—“now.”

Hilts put the pry bar back on his belt, switched on his hand light and moved into the cabin, pulling himself in on the doorframe. In the old brochure for the ship Finn had seen at Mills’s home on Hollaback Cay, the A Deck cabins were quite a bit different than the larger room occupied by Bishop Principe. As well as the simple size difference, Devereaux’s cabin was the mirror of Principe’s, with the little vestibule on the left rather than the right. Beyond the coat rack and suitcase storage area was a second door that led into the cabin proper. Beyond that was a pleasant bedroom/sitting room area with a large wood-paneled wardrobe against the aft bulkhead and a dressing table and mirror against the forward wall. The bed itself was located under a pair of small, square portholes looking out onto the sea, or in the present case looking out over the abyss of the reef edge down to the distant ocean floor. Hanging from an overhead track was a nylon privacy curtain much like the ones around a hospital bed.

Directly opposite this was the entrance to the bathroom and the second bed. In between the two beds was a sitting area occupied by a pair of vinyl-covered armchairs and a small, round, plastic-topped coffee table with an image of a compass rose laminated under the surface—the logo of the Acosta Line, seen everywhere from bar coasters and menu covers to the carpeting on the floor of the dining rooms.

“Dear God,” whispered Hilts, his light sweeping around the room. The room was almost exactly as it had been half a century before. The locked door had kept out most of the marine life visible in the rest of the ship, and unlike an older vessel like the
Titanic,
most of the fabrics and materials used in the
Acosta Star
were synthetic and not as prone to decay. The result of this was that the only sign of the passage of time was a fine layer of silt and sediment over everything, rather like a layer of sheeting over the furniture in an empty house. The only obvious symbols of decay were the human remains on the bed.

The cartilage and the tendons holding the bones together had long since been eaten away and the skeleton had fallen apart, but enough shape remained to show the curled-up fetal position of the body. The long bones of the leg were bent, the ribs had fallen into a yellowing pile, and the arms were brought up almost as if the man had been in prayer at the time of his passing.

“Who is it?” Finn said, floating closer to the pile of bones scattered on the sagging bed. Above her the remnants of the nylon privacy curtain waved in the currents like old shrouds.

“Devereaux, presumably,” said Hilts. “Someone locked him in his cabin by the looks of it. Either that or he committed suicide. Looks like cause of death was asphyxia. He didn’t burn to death or drown.” The photographer moved lightly above the bed and checked the portholes. “They’re dogged shut; he couldn’t have opened them without a pipe wrench.”

“He was a Catholic. I doubt if it was suicide,” Finn said, turning her light and shining it across the room to the far wall.

“I guess we’re fifty years too late to find out whatever his secret was,” said Hilts.

“Maybe not,” Finn said quietly, her light falling across the little round table. “What’s that?”

The surface of the table had a skin of silt and sediment, but there was obviously something underneath. Finn waved her hand back and forth just above the tabletop, unsettling the thin layer and dispersing it.