“Por supuesto,” Cazar echoed. He declined to ask any further after grandfathers and missing art. He found he was more amused than angry at the use of the Atalaya, his one completely legal business venture, for such dubious purposes.
Smiling slightly, he turned his attention from the senora and her boy to the reef ahead. The water blended from turquoise to aquamarine to the color of tan-veined jade beads. That was the reef, two feet underwater at most. The high tide ran over it smoothly, not breaking or otherwise announcing the presence of the rocks. Cazar dropped the mainsail using the crank at the helm, while Victoria marshaled her crew to reef the foresail and the young Brazilian rushed forward to take care of the jib, abandoning his mother.
Meanwhile, Cazar raised the keel and let them glide gently. He dropped the fore and aft anchors at a depth of about five feet, leaving the Atalaya safe behind the limestone reef. He locked the helm, raised the red and white dive flag, and crossed the deck to watch Victoria outfitting the ciegos with their snorkeling gear.
“You’re not going out?” he asked the senora, when she made no move to join the swimmers.
She sniffed, that was all, as if it should be obvious that she wanted no part of such an undignified activity.
“But how will you find it, if you don’t get in the water and look?” Cazar persisted.
“I am not looking for anything,” she said. “This is nowhere close to the right place, anyhow.”
“Did your grandfather give you latitude and longitude, then?”
She turned to look at him, frowning. “Must you have the whole story before you’ll leave me alone with my silly folly?”
“Whole is always better than half,” Cazar said mildly. “I’m not going swimming, either. The captain must stay with the boat. So I have nothing better to do than listen. But first, Senora, I must beg the pleasure of your name.”
She looked at him sideways, but eventually relented and shook his hand and introduced herself as Estrella Enriqueta Dominquez Margolis. The last was the name of her grandfather on her mother’s side, she explained. A wealthy German fleeing World War II, he had settled originally in Argentina with his family, his fortune, and his collection of Old World art. All had dispersed over time; the last of the art had been inherited by Estrella’s aunt, who had taken it with her to Cuba, and from Cuba to Miami. Or that had been the plan… but the seas had been rough, fuel had been running low, and the captain of the aunt’s little boat had not hesitated to lighten his load by pitching the large crate overboard within sight of Key West.
“Ah,” Cazar said, “Si. But surely, you did not expect to find it simply by taking a day-cruise out to the reef. And even if you did… a very expensive proposition, to salvage it and bring it back to Brazil.”
“A worthwhile investment,” Senora Estrella said.
“It’s that valuable.”
“Si.”
Cazar shrugged, standing up and tossing back the last of his lukewarm cup of water. He watched Victoria and the ciegos swimming near the port rail. Estrella’s son was not with them. He had left the group and was heading out along the edge of the reef in a purposeful breaststroke, looking… but not in the right place, the place that specifically called to el perception.
That location — on the far side of the barrier reef and a bit to the north — was something Cazar would have to check out for himself. And what better time than the present? The snorkeling tour would last another hour, too long to wait on the boat with that sense of overlooked potential rowing stronger by the minute.
Crossing the deck, he rummaged through the plastic bins that housed the snorkeling equipment. He found a mask that fit, and a pair of fins, but bypassed the absurd snorkel tube. He had a professional diver’s lungs — necessary for the trade.
By now Senora Dominguez was getting alarmed. “I thought the captain has to stay with the ship,” she ventured.
“You will be captain until I get back,” Cazar told her, unbuttoning his linen shirt and hanging it on a peg next to the helm. He dove over the stern, not bothering with the ladder amidships. The water closed around him like a new skin, like a medium through which he could feel and sense and touch. Sunlight danced on the shallow bottom, where mud and turtle grass gave way to the first boulders of coral. On the other side of the reef the Atlantic seethed and signed, pushing cold fingers of water of water through the rocks, trying to find a way in.
That was where el perception urged him to go, out into the farther, deeper waters, where the coral boulders had been into jagged teeth by the force of the waves, where something heavy might find itself lodged, unable to sink down to the bottom and be covered by sand and silt.
Undoubtedly, some of the items had drifted down through the years and layers of sediment, and would require specialized equipment to free. He would come back for those. What he needed today… was out there somewhere. He gave no thought to exactly where he was heading, concentrating instead on the sharp coral boulders and the hints of icy water weaving through them like wind through a forest. Gradually, he crossed the reef until he could look down the plunging slope of coral into the blue depths of the Atlantic.
He drifted on the afternoon tide, face-down, wrists clasped in the small of his back, turning his head every thirty seconds or so to take a breath, watching the world underneath. Fish, of course. Thousands of fish, everything from damselfish to barracuda, living and dying in and around the coral. The coral itself was as beautiful as its denizens, fans and fingers and castles — all of it alive. The very water teemed with microorganisms, everything with its own tiny heartbeat or twitching electrical current.
In this literal sea of life it was easier for el perception to locate things that weren’t alive; amid all the vibrancy the things that were dull and stationary stood out like debris in the middle of a fast highway. Something caught at the edge of Cazar’s vision, and, careful not to lose the sense of where it lay under the waves, he raised his head and drew several long, deep breaths.
Then he swan down to it, and searched briefly amid the overhanging ridges of limestone. The shape, the object, was an outstrethed hand, about a quarter the size of Cazar’s own, bronze fingers reaching. He grasped the tarnished metal and gently worked it free of the nook in which it had been lodged. There were a few nails stuck in the coral nearby, and a splintered plank of wood, waterlogged and decaying to the touch.
The figure, when it came loose, did not actually seem dead and inanimate. She was garbed in flowing bronze robes, arms outstretched like she could not wait to return to the air. If the rest of the bronzes were like this, Cazar thought, Senora Dominguez was right to call the retrieval costs a worthwhile investment.
Cradling the statue, he labored upward, and once on the surface, he filled his lungs with a grateful breath but did not linger. There was, after all, a schedule. He had a salvage operation to plan, a dinner appointment at the Conch House and, not to be forgotten, a boatload of ciegos to return safely to Cayo Hueso. On the way back, he would refrain from spilling their drinks. He might even have one himself.
About Lake McCullough
