The Basingstoke Chronicles Page 2

  As Sam and Ethel checked us in at the main desk, I observed a poker game a few tables away. The handsome Cuban protagonist was a very familiar face indeed.

  Rapt in the tense, medium stakes, he failed to notice me as I positioned myself at a discreet distance. The light-grey plumes of cigarette smoke afforded me a perfect cover to watch from over the shoulder of a heavy-set player. The Cuban, under the close scrutiny of his three fellow players, maintained an impenetrable poker face. His alert eyes switched direction to follow each speaker in turn as he peered over the tattered cards he held up to his face.

  "Rodrigo can taste his defeat; his eyeballs are ready to pop," claimed a sweaty fellow wearing a red Bermuda shirt.

  "That's not fear--look closer. A red glint like that means we should call his bluff before he explodes," said a man to my left. His rolled-up sleeves were soaked with perspiration.

  The first man replied, "Don't worry, Juan. Senor Rodrigo is a crafty cat. If he stares at you long enough you can see one eye lying to the other."

  The player under scrutiny did not make a single move. His focus would quite rightly have disquieted any punter.

  "Yes. Now that you mention it, I'd like to put an honest bullet between them... there's a low-down, no good, back-stabbing mug behind that stare," added the man to my left.

  Still no reaction. The third player--a small, wiry man with his long black hair tied to a knot--was seated between the other two. It was his turn to speak up. "Well, he knows what clocks your game. Look at you--wound up like a damn Seiko!"

  For that, he received a sharp jab on his arm by the man in the white shirt.

  "Mierda! I...I really meant that for Eduardo!"

  The heavy-set man now punched his other arm. " You putas touch me again and see what happens!"

  The show of temper provoked a predictable response. Both men grinned and hit the little fellow simultaneously. His war cry sparked a playful kerfuffle in which one of them had only death on his mind and the other two were dying with laughter. I stood back to avoid becoming an unseen casualty. As I looked up at Rodrigo, I saw he had still managed to maintain his poker glare.

  No wonder he's never lost.

  Suddenly up he sprang, dashing over the circular wooden table to rugby-tackle the man in the Bermuda shirt. A four-way wrestling bout ensued. I laughed as I watched the desk clerk fumble to telephone for assistance. And as soon as Rodrigo's far heavier opponent pinned him to the carpet, I sank to my knees in front of him and counted the bastard out. He burst into laughter.

  "Who do we pay to get a decent referee around here?" he quipped, shaking my hand from his defeated position.

  "How about them?" I replied, pointing toward two police officers as they tore past the window.

  "Good to see you again, Baz!" he said. "Let me introduce you to my three new cell-mates for the evening--Juan, Eduardo and brave little Carlos."

  "Will you be all right?"

  He gathered his deck of cards. "Of course. Just a change of venue, that's all."

  Rodrigo managed to convince the authorities of the innocence of the fracas. His three friends sidled off after a brief reprimand. Leaving his details for the hotel to charge him for the damage, he shook the hands of the two officers and threw a mock salute to their backs as they left.

  "Now to real business, Englishman," he said, pulling my white neck-scarf tight around my neck. "What're you doing here in Cienfuegos?"

  In a way, I had to feel sorry for him. He was a good friend of mine. We had first met six years earlier on the Greek island of Zakynthos, where we had both learned to scuba dive. But I had scarcely provided enough information to warrant him dropping everything so suddenly. Rodrigo was a Yale graduate in English Language, but his mother had also persuaded him to minor in Latin American Languages as a way of preserving their ancient Bolivian heritage. While not fluent, he had a reasonable grasp of Quechua, Aymara and Mayan dialect origins. As I had not seen him for almost two years, he had the right to refuse my request in any language he chose.

  "We're here to solve a riddle." It was the best I could do without including the phrase 'needle in a flaming haystack.'

  "I despise riddles!"

  "How about sunken treasure?"

  "Hmm...percentage?"

  "Excuse me?" I replied. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "What percentage of certainty have you that the treasure exists, and what percentage of it is mine if we find it?"

  I paused for a moment in disbelief. I hadn't remembered him being so testy or abrasive. What's happened in the intervening years?

  "Um...you'll get half, Rodrigo, like always."

  "And the riches... What odds are you offering?"

  "You're right, amigo. To be honest, there's a very good chance we won't even find enough pesos to buy us a drink."

  "Say no more!" he replied, with a strange, almost thespian elocution and poise. "One who would brave the ocean for a beer cannot fail to find the treasure he truly seeks."

  My laughter spluttered like a geyser across his face. How the hell he remained deadpan after that corker I will never know. He simply wiped his face and arched his eyebrows as if he were utterly ignorant of the jest. That was the sense of humor I remembered.

  After a few moments he relented and threw his arms around me.

  The shadows of a few clouds streaked by outside, painting the bleached walls and buildings in heavy shade, a Zebra Crossing over the roof of the town. I suddenly found myself glad to be in Cuba.

  "Y'know me, Baz," he said, letting go, "any excuse for a dive."

  I explained to him in detail everything I knew about the body and its whereabouts at the time it had been recovered. He vaguely recalled having heard of it and agreed it was worth investigating, if only to find the vessel in question.

  "Well, everything's ready for tomorrow. We're moored just past Faro Luna, so I'll drive us there early in the morning, before the tourists invade with their sickly complexions. No offence."

  "None taken," I retorted. "We can't all be swarthy communists."

  "Hey, watch it, English. I know El Comandante personally. One phone call from me and you'll be going fifty-fifty with a tiger shark. That's half of you now and half for later. Adios. See you at five."

  I waved goodbye and collected my room key from the main desk. Sam and Ethel were nowhere to be seen; they must have collapsed onto their bed with jetlag fatigue. As for myself, traipsing up the two floors of grey-carpeted stairs was a challenge not worthy of one so exhausted already, and the last thing I recall from that afternoon was the miracle feel of a soft, double pillow.

  * * * *

  A wistful, exotic sea breeze stroked us as we left the town centre the following morning. Rodrigo's open top, white Cadillac had seen better days, yet he was a sure driver. Sam and Ethel, cuddled together in the back, hardly said a word until we approached Jagua Bay. At least their even tans from their time spent in Egypt afforded them a modicum of camouflage in Cuba; I was as white as our car should have been, and therefore stood out like a polar bear on a barbecue grill.

  It had been over four years since my last visit to Cuba, yet much I still recalled of the beautiful region we passed through. Cienfuegos, or Pearl of the South, is located on the southern coast of the island, two-hundred and fifty kilometers east of the capital Havana. One of its natural treasures, Jagua Bay, is a former site of Indian settlements and was once a stalking ground for pirates and corsairs. One of the chief seaports of Cuba, Cienfuegos is also the capital of its own picturesque and fertile province in which sugar and coffee are grown in abundance.

  Rodrigo had introduced me, on my last trip, to Castillo de Jagua, a sizeable fortress erected in the mid-eighteenth century for protection against Caribbean pirates. Our sand-swept tarmac road wound against the edge of a shallow cliff. Not far from the Bahia de Cienfuegos, Ethel gave her husband an enthusiastic tap on his chest. After admiring the fort for a few seconds, they both turned toward me and nodded. Sam leaned forward. Against t
he hurtling wind, he shouted, "If we don't find anything in the sea, let's take a closer look at that!"

  "Whatever you say!" I replied.

  Rodrigo stole a sly glimpse at our female companion in his skewed rear-view mirror. Her custom-made sunglasses suited her perfectly, a modern twist to her old-fashioned glamour. He saw that I, too, had seen and looked across at me. We couldn't help but grin as we used to in the old days--the difference being that the girl in the back was taken.

  As it turned out to be the last drive we would take together, I look back on it now as a wonderful moment; my three greatest friends accompanying me on an impromptu Caribbean adventure, without a care in the world. While we slowed to exit the coastal road, my eyes eased shut to savor the pungent balm of a saline breeze.

  After a few hundred yards from the pocked beach, the sapphire ocean darkened into a choppy brew. We left the vehicle to haul our wetsuits and change of dry clothes across the beach, when a small boy approached us from the Faro Luna hotel, wearing not a stitch of clothing.

  "Are you pirates?" he asked, wide-eyed.

  "Yes," replied Ethel. "We forgot to fetch our cargo, that's all."

  "Sshh! Don't tell him about the gold, woman!" added Sam.

  Perhaps doubting, perhaps in awe, the lad simply stared at us as we walked away. Another dreamer in a woken age, desperate for something extraordinary to happen.

  Chapter 3

  Sam and Ethel boarded their hired vessel Aquitaine from the neighboring jetty in fine spirits. Rodrigo yelled one last piece of advice as they cleared the boat's moorings: "Just remember, there's only one female you can trust at sea, so make sure she doesn't sink."

  I saw Ethel purse her lips and clip her husband's ear for his chauvinistic salute, and I knew the two of them were going to have a whale of a time that day. As for me, it was as if the years spent away from my companion were little more than grains of sand underfoot as we approached his beautiful yacht, the Moncado.

  She had not changed in the least: thirty feet of pristine, white luxury as sleek as a glistening dolphin against the early morning sun. As she was fully rigged--our scuba gear awaited us below deck--Rodrigo wasted no time in letting her engines first purr and then roar as we chased across the rising waves for our first eager hunt before noon.

  The shallow coral reefs of Cienfuegos are celebrated for their impressive variety of marine life and excellent visibility for diving. Rodrigo assured me that farther out to sea, beyond the tourist haunts and well into the island's fishing lanes, the underwater realm was even more vast and spectacular. Boats and ships of every classification lay sunk upon its ancient bed. Entombed in these could be relics and artifacts more valuable than anything above the surface, at one time coveted by pirates and princes alike, now whispered of amongst only those deeply deceased.

  I have always maintained that the ocean is man's last great romantic conquest. Outer space, to many, is where our attentions should lie, but I still regard that as a dream for the distant future. The oceans, covering fully two thirds of our fair planet, are as much an alien frontier as anything in or beyond our solar system. Undersea topography, in terms of sheer scale, can dwarf the Himalayas without much effort. Species of marine life unlike anything yet recorded in evolution must wander the depths in a state of harmony we have yet to imagine, oblivious to our fratricidal reign above.

  The undersea environment, too, quickly becomes our worst nightmare--pounds per square inch piling upon our fragile tolerance like a coffin of anvils and vices, squeezing life from us with horrible, mechanical pressure. And then there's the oxygen, ironically surrounding us while remaining elusive to our human respiration, forcing us to use an artificial supply. For all these reasons and more, I regard scuba divers as the astronauts of the sea.

  Rodrigo navigated us to the precise coordinates provided, through Dumitrescu, by the fishermen that had discovered the body three weeks before. The Aquitaine stopped a few hundred yards away.

  I sensed something distracting Rodrigo. Usually talkative to the point of boorishness, his words now seemed forced between bites of his lower lip. I never did find out what superstition pricked his intuition so.

  "Good thinking," he said, referring to the distance between our two boats. "This way we won't be treading on each other's toes...flippers."

  "Or they just want some private time."

  "Could be."

  He gave me a careful look as we prepared our oxygen gear and must have noticed how sluggish I was, also. "Some things don't change, I see."

  "What?" I replied.

  "The Englishman who can't abide summer. What's that saying? 'Mad dogs and...?'"

  "Mad dog Cubans, you mean. How can you stand this blasted sun?"

  "I think you'll be all right, Baz, if that's all you're worried about." He threw me my mask. "I hear it's a bit cooler down there."

  The deepening blues pressed in increments about us as we started our descent. My eyes quickly adjusted. After about a hundred feet, Rodrigo struck an orange flare and let it spiral to the deep. As it fell, the entire gamut of blues and greens awoke a sprawling undersea landscape beneath us.

  Not as deep as all that.

  Abrupt variations in the height of the sea floor were worthy of note. The rim of a giant ocean vent had crumbled away to leave only its incisor-shaped remains. A curious trail of jagged impressions atop the nearest rock tooth--each one adjoined at an almost perpendicular angle to the last--stretched a good forty feet across the ocean floor. Too erratic to be man-made, too conspicuous to forget, they constituted a zigzag phenomenon that had me puzzled.

  What's left of an ancient fissure?

  Jittery shoals of tiny fish approached and then darted away with spectacular unanimity as Rodrigo lit his flares. Pastel colors seeped across obscure vegetation clusters as the flame passed by. All the while, we observed keenly the unpredictable sea bed. A stray piece of timber here, an uncoiled length of rope there, a twisted knot of metal: anything we might have construed as potential boat wreckage of recent origin we had to dismiss at first glance. All were either embedded in years' worth of sand or were simply too isolated or haphazard to suggest anything.

  Though my capacity for undersea exploration far exceeds the time afforded by any gas cylinder, a diver, above all else, has to be a vigilant timekeeper. Just over an hour had elapsed in our search. Two-thirds of my oxygen supply was exhausted. Our circular reconnaissance route neared completion.

  Savoring the few remaining minutes, I observed the spectacular local fish. I decided to follow one unusual fellow on his downward route. Striped with silver and black, bisected by a horizontal black line, he measured a good arm's length from mouth to tail but was extremely narrow. From the side, in my torch beam, he resembled an oversized grin with alternate gap teeth. I wondered what jest of evolution could possibly have inspired this ridiculous creature.

  As we swam by the upended bow of a rowing boat, I remembered seeing its vee shape during our first pass. A few feet behind, however, a small ivory pendant rested on the sandy bed, and seemed exempt from the grim assimilations of age and the sea. It did not belong.

  I ran my fingertips over the chain of beads. My first impulse told me it had been carefully crafted. The texture was smooth, yet not artificial. Into every alternate bead was carved the same pattern displayed on the Enigman's mysterious garment. The slender, rectangular pendant showcased an array of indented dots, seemingly without correlation. I was intrigued.

  As I turned to rise and signal Rodrigo, I shuddered from a sharp, excruciating pain. My right knee felt as though it had cracked against a brick wall. Contorting myself to both nurse the wound and unleash a torrent of curses on the offending rock ledge, I soon floated there, in the deep, truly dumbfounded. I could not reconcile what I saw, or rather, what I could not see. Where there should have been rock, there was only water--nothing but water. My knee had hit nothing.

  Then what had hit me?

  I kicked out to continue to the surface. My right fl
ipper again clashed with something solid. And again there was nothing to account.

  What the hell?

  It was as though I were a bubble of oxygen anchored to the sea bed, unable to escape. Panic took hold, so I let myself drift back down to the bottom. Breathe in, breathe out...slowly. It is impossible to describe how vulnerable I felt, so far from safety. Eyes shut tight, I reached out for help. My imagination un-spooled amid sickening revolutions. When I was almost on the point of blacking out, my outstretched hands touched something secure, smooth, something metallic. Breathing in easier, shallow cycles, I concentrated on the sound of air bubbling from my apparatus--a soothing, effervescent rumble. After a few moments, I opened my eyes.

  There was still nothing to see. The object was invisible to the human eye. As the moment drew on, awe and unnatural excitement made me shudder. The brief panic had lifted the sluice for my adrenaline.

  Regaining my composure, I began to explore its dimensions.

  I traced the smooth surface, and soon concluded the object was cylindrical in shape and large, roughly fifteen feet high, with a diameter no more than half that. Atop the shape, a peculiar configuration of curved metallic extensions stretched upward, almost meeting at the uppermost point. Not actually being able to see any of this, my imagination volunteered its own schematic, one I'm afraid to say amounted to a giant culinary whisk. Though for what dish I was at a loss to say.

  Five smooth, sturdy legs supported the object's base. They splayed outward to raise the cylinder a few feet from the sea bed. It was here that I gained my first view of the phenomenon. Reaching as far as I could across the underside for another physical clue or possible entry point, my eyes opened wide. I saw seamless silver. Not a scratch, dent or marking of any kind was visible. At that depth below the surface, considering the attentions of marine biology and chemical alteration, that something so foreign could remain in such a pristine state I found incredible.