Nasty breaks, p.1
Nasty Breaks, page 1
part #3 of Lee Ofsted Series
Prologue
April 19, 1971
Up through the dark waters he rose, trailing bubbles, like some black, buoyant monster from the depths. Seen from the deck of the Virginia II he was like a great marine flower growing and foaming and blossoming before them as he neared the gray, rain-pocked surface of the sea.
His face was turned up, the two men under the awning on the deck could see that through the water, turned up and joyful, and even before he broke through he had torn off his face mask and mouthpiece, so that he was laughing and choking and trying to talk all at once as he groped for the ladder on the side of the boat. The two men above looked down at him and laughed too, although they weren’t sure what they were laughing at yet. Whatever it was, Andy had come up with good news, and they were more than ready to laugh about that.
Once he had hooked one arm over a rung, he held up a squat, thick, greenish drinking glass in his other hand. “Stu, Benny— Look!”
The two men on the boat whooped. Benny Trotter, at forty- five the oldest of the three, leaned over the side, snatched the tumbler out of Andy Gottlieb’s hand, held it to his own unshaven, grizzled face for a sloppy kiss, and brandished it over his head like a man who’d just gotten his first Oscar. And when Andy clambered over the side, clumsy in his wet suit and huge flippers, the three of them embraced and did a crazy little jig around the cluttered deck while the rain came down on them.
They had plenty of reason to celebrate. The last time a human hand had touched that glass, Thomas Jefferson had been in the White House. Since then, for nearly two centuries, it had lain undiscovered on the seabed below, a mere one hundred yards off Block Island’s isolated Black Rock Point. The glass had been manufactured in the year 1807 in Boston. On March 2, 1808, it had been loaded aboard the bark Good Hope in Newport under the supervision of Captain Elijah Todd for its two-year voyage to the other side of the world. In addition to ninety-four crates and thirty barrels of glassware, the hold of the Good Hope had been richly stocked with shovels, spades, flour, tobacco, beer, and cutlery, all bound for Canton.
But on its first evening out of Newport, driven off course by a sudden, violent nor’easter, the Good Hope had broken up and gone down in the ancient ship’s graveyard off Block Island’s rocky southwest coast, where the emptying waters of Block Island Sound collided with the endlessly seething North Atlantic.
All this the three men already knew. They had pored through the Good Hope’s bill of lading in the marine museum at Mystic, Connecticut. They had read newspaper accounts of the disaster in the Boston Gazette. And now, after two years of on-again, off- again attempts to locate it, they had finally found the wreck itself. It was, they knew, potentially the richest find of their four-year association, the Big One, the one that would finally let them buy a decent new boat and some up-to-date equipment: sonar, an underwater magnetometer, a reliable underwater camera, maybe even a submersible—or, as long as they were dreaming, make that a video-equipped submersible. Who knew what this might be worth?
But there had been other “Big Ones” before, only none of them had panned out. Through the years they had managed more or less to cover their costs and earn enough besides to stay ahead of their debtors, but little more. The Good Hope was their ticket out of the minor leagues of treasure-hunting dilettantes; it would put them on the map as serious, reputable salvage divers.
If a substantial amount of the Colonial glassware and cutlery was still whole and recoverable.
That was what Andy had been down there trying to determine. They had spotted the wreck four days before—or not the wreck itself, but a fifty-foot-long, roughly rectangular area of scattered stones and jumbled cannon that they excitedly recognized as ballast from a nineteenth-century ship. Near it was a long, ill-defined mound on the seafloor, eight feet high in places. In a single day’s work, taking turns below, they broke into the mound to discover the ship itself, or what was left of it, lying on its side, entombed in a thick concretion of mud, sand, and petrified sea life. Since then, working from dawn to dark each day, they had been engaged in the hard, dangerous task of trying to find their way to the cargo hold through an unstable mass of collapsed and collapsing timbers buried under tons of mud.
And now Andy had done it. Peering by the light of his lamp between two rotting timbers, he had glimpsed a seabed strewn with neat clumps of glassware, as if the crates had rotted around them and the glasses had simply settled gently to the ocean floor, right where they were, and never moved in the hundred and ninety years since. He had picked up the first undamaged piece he’d found, this sturdy, humble drinking glass, as whole and perfect as if it had come from the factory the day before, and hurried up to show them.
“They’re just sitting there,” he told the others, still trying to catch his breath. “It’s fantastic, wait’ll you see!” He tinkered with his face mask and straddled the gunwale, preparatory to letting himself back into the sea. “I’m going back down; we need to shore up some stuff.”
Benny Trotter, still clutching the glass to his chest, beamed happily at the leaden sky, lost in fuzzy dreams of wealth and fame. “Doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo,” he crooned.
“Bad idea,” Stuart Chappell said to Andy. The thirty-two-year-old Stuart, youngest of the three, was in many ways the most mature. Andy tended to be a little impulsive and devil- may-care. Benny could be unfocused and rambling, and had a way of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. But Stuart was serious, analytical, and persuasive, and it was he who had emerged as the natural leader, insofar as there was any leader at all. “It’s been a long day, Andy, let’s not push it. Tomorrow’s another day, buddy. We’ll rig up the sling, and we’ll work hard, and we’ll all get rich.”
“Yeah, sure,” Andy said, “but—”
“And anyway, the weather’s getting downright nasty,” Stuart said.
“That’s true,” Benny said, reluctantly coming back to reality. “The storm’s really brewing up now.”
As if to make his point for him, the boat juddered as a five- foot wave slapped against the hull, sending a surge of water onto the deck. There were whitecaps and flecks of foam all around now, and the Virginia II had begun to toss and wallow. They were perilously close to the offshore rocks, some of which were visible, but most of which lay unseen a foot or so beneath the surface, and they knew that if the storm really got going and the anchors didn’t hold, which was a distinct possibility, the Virginia II, a twenty-seven-foot, third-hand, converted lobster trawler, could be flung against those jagged rocks in seconds and dashed to pieces. Stuart and Benny exchanged a glance that said it all: if it could happen to the Good Hope, it sure as hell could happen to them. On the rocky beach, in fact, lay the shattered, inverted body of another vessel, a fishing trawler that had been caught on the rocks a few years before, its splintered frame naked to the darkening skies.
But Andy was hardly one to look on the dark side. “Hell, I’m afraid it’s going to cave in down there if we let it go till tomorrow. It could take us days to dig it out again. And what would happen to those glasses? Look, if I can’t get it done in an hour, I’ll come up. Okay?”
Stuart started to speak, hesitated, and sighed. “You’ll come up the second we tug on your lifeline?”
“Absotively.” Andy grinned, pulled his mask down, and adjusted it. “Pozzolutely.” Into his mouth went the mouthpiece to the “hookah,” the air hose connected to the on-deck compressor. He climbed a few steps down the ladder, waggled his fingers in a cheery goodbye, and dropped with a velvety splash into the darkening water.
“Ah, hell,” Benny said, doing his best to work up a reassuring smile, “don’t worry about Andy, Andy knows what he’s doing.” He was still holding the glass, absentmindedly now, rotating it in his fingers. “He’s only thirty-five feet down, Stu. Everything’ll be just fine.”
***
Everything wasn’t fine.
Twenty minutes after Andy went down, the storm closed in with a vengeance. Icy gusts of rain whipped the awning aside and pelted the men. The boat rose and fell, sometimes with a foot-jarring splat, on steep salty swells. Long, mottled combers boomed against the nearby rocks, erupting into twenty-foot explosions of water and foam.
In another five minutes there was a new motion in the deck beneath them, a halting, grinding vibration that made both of them freeze and stand stock-still, their heads alertly tilted, listening, waiting. The tremor came again. The Virginia II’s anchors were dragging. They were being sucked toward the rocks.
“Get him up,” Stuart said shortly, starting for the wheelhouse. “I’ll get us cranked up.”
Benny nodded tightly. He pulled on Andy’s lifeline, went pale, and pulled again. “Stu!” he shouted over the storm and the steady putt-putt-putt of the compressor. “Stu! My God!”
Stuart hurried back. “What’s wrong?”
For answer, Benny tugged on the lifeline. “It won’t move!”
Stuart grabbed it out of his hands and pulled hard. “It’s caught on something.” He pulled again, with both hands, arching his body backward. Nothing happened. He tried pulling on the air hose too, more gently because if it, too, was hung up on something, pulling too hard on it might kink it and cut off Andy’s air supply.
He shook his head. “No good. They’re both caught.”
The boat jerked again, eight or ten feet this time, toward the rocks.
Benny stared at him and licked his lips. “What do we do?”
“We have to get out of here,” Stuart said.
“But … but …”
It wasn’t necessary to explain the buts. If they pulled up the anchors and headed away from the rocks toward open water, they were almost guaranteeing Andy’s death. He was down there inside the tunnel, not on the open ocean floor. The air hose would snap, or kink, or be pulled from his mouth; the lifeline would crush him against the walls of his cave under the sea and trap him there, or drag him, airless and tumbling, over the sea bottom, or wedge itself deeper into whatever chink it was already caught in and perhaps collapse the tunnel onto him.
Stuart, suddenly raging, cut him off. “What are we supposed to do?” he screamed with the rain soaking his eyebrows and pouring off his face in runnels. “Is it going to save him if we let ourselves get dragged into the rocks? Is it?”
The boat dragged again. Another ten feet toward the rocks. The pounding waves thudded in their ears. Benny looked sick to his stomach. “Stu …”
“We have to cut him loose,” Stuart said. “That way he’ll have a chance. If he makes it to the surface we’ll see him.”
“Cut him loose?” Benny echoed.
But Stuart was finished talking. With quick, concise movements he pulled the end of the lifeline free, then used his diving knife to cut the air hose.
Benny watched, unprotesting and defeated, chewing on the knuckles of one hand. At the whoosh of air from the severed end of the hose he jerked. “God help us,” he whispered.
Stuart scowled at him and ran for the wheelhouse.
***
Andy twisted onto his back and aimed his light upward and to the right, trying to see through the straggling weeds into the hollow that was worrying him. It didn’t look good. All that seemed to be holding up the “roof” on this part of the tunnel was a five-foot-long, square-cut beam about ten inches on a side—a section of the keelson, probably—that was thick enough to do the job but that was spongy to the touch and riddled with teredo burrows besides. Damn, he thought, they were going to have to waste half a day—
A split second before he felt the convulsion in his lungs the steady, reassuring rumble of his exhaust bubbles suddenly ceased. Before he was able to make sense of this, a mallet seemed to smash him in the chest, driving out most of the air he had left. He stopped up his breath and closed his windpipe at once, hauling vigorously on the lifeline to get himself out of there. But the line was snagged in the vertex of two fallen timbers a few feet behind him. Panicky and suffocating, he tugged desperately at it, his body writhing. He never knew that it was his own foot that kicked the section of keelson out from behind him and brought forty tons of mud and timber down on him, crushing out the last few cubic centimeters of air in his lungs.
And if he had known, what difference would it have made?
Chapter 1
The Present
Lee Ofsted leaned both hands on the kitchen counter and addressed her dinner. “Beef tortellini parmigiano,” she told it reproachfully, “is not supposed to be gray.”
It wasn’t her fault, she knew that. She had followed the recipe to the letter. (“Remove plastic lid from Serv-a-Bowl. With fork, perforate foil cover. Microwave on HIGH for four minutes. Remove foil and ENJOY!”) And still the stuff was an unappealing gray. Not grayish or gray-brown, but gray, and a mushy, fibrous gray at that, about as appetizing as wet particleboard.
The picture on the label (“Serving Suggestion”) didn’t look anything like wet particleboard. The chunks of beef were a tawny brown, the pasta a creamy gold, the cheese a delectable ivory with just a hint of toastiness at the edges. The label looked delicious. So much for truth in advertising, she thought grumpily. The label probably tasted better too.
She crunched a stalk of celery and considered walking to Seventeenth Avenue for a decent sit-down dinner at El Palenque, but that would mean getting into street clothes and eating by herself in a restaurant, neither of which she was in the mood for. It would also mean an unscheduled, unallocated dent in her budget, and she was even less in the mood for that.
These gloomy and unproductive thoughts were interrupted by a chirp from the telephone on the rickety stand in the living room. All things considered, a welcome diversion. Lee picked it up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Lee? I’m glad I got you. This is Peg!”
The identification was unnecessary. Peg Fiske’s friendly, cheerful foghorn of a voice was not the kind you were likely to forget. Lee smiled and held the receiver away from her ear. “Peg, aren’t you supposed to be at golf school? In Connecticut or someplace like that?”
“Rhode Island. Block Island, actually, which is this wonderful island they have off the coast. Look, are you doing anything important right now?”
“Not really. I was cooking my dinner. Or rather, looking at it. Or rather, talking to it, if you really want to know the truth.”
“What?”
“Nothing. What’s up, Peg?”
“Well, first of all, you are between tournaments at the moment, aren’t you?”
That was one way to put it. Lee, starting her third year as a pro in the Women’s Professional Golf League—the WPGL—generally tried to play in every tournament she could get into, as did most of the other young, struggling, not-yet-prime-time players. If you didn’t play you couldn’t earn anything. But this week’s competition was the Myrtle Beach Invitational. And the Myrtle Beach Invitational was what it said it was—an invitational event, not an open one, which meant that there was no Monday qualifying round or any other means through which the younger, less-established pros could compete for entry slots. The Myrtle Beach was restricted to the top forty money-winners of the previous year, period. And that failed to include Lee Ofsted. Unfortunately it wouldn’t have helped her any if it had been the top fifty either. Or the top seventy-five. Now, if they’d been more broad-minded and had just opened it to the top one hundred and fifty…
“Yes,” she said, “I’m between tournaments.”
“Great. You’re not going to believe this. First of all, forget dinner—“
“I wish I could.”
“What?”
“Nothing. What am I not going to believe?”
“Stop mumbling, will you? For heaven’s sake. Now, pay attention. Here’s what’s happened. The program doesn’t even start officially until tomorrow, but one of the instructors already slipped a disk getting a bag down from the luggage rack on his plane and won’t be able to teach, so they need a replacement. And so naturally I told them all about you, and they positively leaped—”
“You want me to teach at a golf school? You’re out of your mind. They wouldn’t want me, believe me.”
“But they do, they do. The minute I mentioned your name, Jackie—he’s the head instructor—said he thought he might have heard of you.”
“Wow,” Lee said, laughing, “am I as famous as all that? Look, I appreciate this, Peg, honestly. I know you’re trying to do me a favor, but it wouldn’t work. A teaching pro and a touring pro are two different animals. Being good at one doesn’t necessarily mean being good at the other. In fact—”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” Peg said impatiently, “I know all that, you told me a hundred times, but this is different.”
“I’m telling you, I’d be lousy. I have a natural swing, remember? I don’t really know how I do it, not when you get right down to it, so how could I teach it to somebody else?”
“I understand, but—”
“And besides that, the last thing I want to do is pick my swing apart to see how it works and maybe mess it up and my whole career along with it—lackluster as it is at the moment.”
“Lee, will you listen, for gosh sakes? That’s the beauty of it. You wouldn’t have to do swing basics. Jackie does that himself. You’d be teaching the short game—chipping and pitching and putting. You’ve told me yourself the short game’s different; nobody’s a natural at it. There are exercises and techniques you can pass along. Am I right?”
“Well …”
“Of course I am. I ought to know. You’ve given me enough help with it. What do you say?”
“I say thanks, but no thanks. Teaching just isn’t my—”
“Graham’s in Paris, isn’t he?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“And you don’t have to leave for your next tournament till after the weekend, do you?”
