I’d already removed a calcareous shell that covered an insignia of similar size, this one of forged bronze. It was an eagle that held part of a circular wreath in its talons. Most of the wreath had corroded away.
Tomlinson had come along out of curiosity. He’d seen the thing. Jeth had not.
Because of the death’s-head, I felt more certain that Tomlinson had correctly identified the bronze eagle. Anyone who’s read a little history could have made a good guess. It was an icon of the Third Reich, a German eagle, square-winged, industrial looking, as if designed by an architect who worked only with cement. The missing wreath had probably encircled a swastika.
Tomlinson had reached his finger toward the insignia reluctantly, as if it might be hot. “I don’t want to hold the thing,” he’d said. “Just a quick impression to confirm it’s the real deal. As you know, only crystals preserve human vibrations better than metal does.”
No. I didn’t know, and I doubted that it was true. But I’d stood patiently as he touched an index finger to the beak of the eagle, then pulled his hand away.
“God Aw’mighty,” he said. “I can’t be around that for more than a few minutes at a time. I’ll be wrestling with demons all night.”
It was authentic, he told me. It had a history. Then he jogged away.
Crystals and metal. Diamonds and silver. Tomlinson would have been even more unsettled by this death’s-head.
Two artifacts of similar derivation, each suggesting the authenticity of the other.
A pattern was emerging…and there were several more clumps of objects attached to the cable. It had looked like a tangle of garbage when they’d first dumped it at my feet, and that’s the way Jeth’s partners had treated it until I’d told him to hurry and get me a bucket of salt water before it all disintegrated. The two men had suddenly become interested because I was interested.
It was a mistake on my part. It’s not uncommon for me to make mistakes, but this particular screwup had spawned an argument about who owned the salvage if the salvage turned out to be marketable.
Salvage law. Augie talked as if he were an expert, which was unlikely. I’m familiar enough with the subject to know that admiralty law is ancient and complicated. It’s impossible to live near a Florida marina without meeting a random cast of treasure hunters and similar dreamers who believe the myth that anything lost at sea instantly becomes the property of the next person to come along and find it.
“Salvage” is a word, but it’s also a precise legal term, and people around Indian Harbor Marina were misusing it like a weapon.
Heller was no attorney, and he was certainly no expert. So it had been dumb of me to be so obvious when they’d first dumped the clutter of cable at my feet.
We’d argued. They’d threatened. Jeth has the size and hands of a country-boy fullback, I am not a small man, and probably look less bookish than usual because of stitches in my forehead, so finally they’d stomped off to get help.
Yes, it had been dumb, and disturbing, too. Since the storm, I’d felt upbeat, full of energy. I’d felt a letting-go sensation; freedom from all circumstances impossible to control.
Falling from high altitude—a suitable metaphor for much of life.
The headaches were still with me, though. I’d noticed that my balance and timing were off, and that my coordination—never great—was shaky.
Lately, I’d been making more mistakes than normal.
4
“A skull with diamonds. Weird.” Jeth had moved to get a look at the death’s-head. He stood in his fishing shorts, heavy legs apart, tattered boat shoes on a man raised barefoot. “Motorcycle gangs wear those sorts of badges, don’t they?”
“Um-huh,” I replied. “The gang that made this, though, preferred tanks and planes.”
“Tanks? Oh…Real Nazis. Are you sure?”
“No. But I don’t have another explanation.”
“It’s gotta be worth some money.”
“You’d think. How much, a collector could tell you. Maybe a lot. The rest of this stuff will take a few days to clean, so we’ll see.” I gestured to the five-gallon bucket at my feet. It contained a soup of salt water, cable, and more encrusted artifacts. “I’m wondering what kind of wreck you found. A German war medal this close to Sanibel?”
Jeth pursed his lips, an idea forming. “You’ve heard the rumors there’s a sunken German submarine out there. That it’s filled with mercury, so it floats around underwater. Or that it’s booby-trapped, and that’s why divers who found it won’t tell where it was.”
Yes, I’d heard the rumors, and didn’t believe them. Not after doing some research. U-boat activity in the Gulf of Mexico was brisk during World War II. German subs sank merchant ships, and they came close enough to Florida’s shore to deliver, and probably pick up, Nazi spies. But there was only one recorded sinking of a U-boat in the Gulf—off New Orleans.
It wasn’t impossible that a second U-boat was out there, but it was improbable. The Germans kept exacting records.
I told Jeth what I knew, adding, “Let’s assume it’s not a sub. Then what’s down there? The silver’s well preserved—why? Considering where you found it, and how long it was down there, it’s in good shape. After fifty, sixty years underwater—I’m guessing metal this delicate would have crumbled. Maybe the wreck was buried, then uncovered by the storm.”
“Meaning, it was protected. Kinda insulated?”
“Yeah. You know what the bottom’s like off Sanibel, it’s all sand. Hurricane wind—what’d we have, gusts of over a hundred and seventy miles an hour? Underwater currents had to be pumping like fire hoses. They eroded the sand away.”
Jeth was picturing it, nodding. “Makes sense, or we’d of found the wreck a long time ago. Two-forty heading off Lighthouse Point. I’ve been over that bottom a hundred times, never saw a thing, but last week I was running along, watching my fish-finder, when those GPS numbers popped up on the Viking. I slowed—I knew there wasn’t no structure in the area but figured, what the hell.”
Fish-finder—a common term for a device that pings sound waves off the sea bottom and produces a digital likeness of what lies beneath.
Jeth said he’d begun to do a search pattern watching the screen of his fish-finder. He was about to give up when there it was—something on the bottom.
“The wreck was sticking up where nothin’ had ever been before,” Jeth said. “The fish-finder marked it sharp as looking at TV, so I figured it was a new wreck. The storm caught a boat out there and sunk her. But then I reeled up this old stuff.”
I said, “Makes me wonder what else is there. What’d it look like on your sonar screen?”
“There’s a main structure, fifteen, twenty feet long, then a bunch of scattered junk. Comes up three, maybe four feet off the bottom.”
“That’s all?”
“At the most, maybe five feet.”
“If it’s a boat, and the hull’s intact, then the rest of it’s still buried. Or…it could be a plane.”
“Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. There used to be a military air base around here during the second war. Fighters and bombers, all prop planes. They used Captiva Island, and some of the other islands, for target practice. But why would an American plane have a German war medal aboard?”
I said, “Maybe one of the instructors brought it back from Europe as a trophy. Or twenty years later, some private collector packed it aboard a Cessna that had to ditch in the Gulf. No telling until you take a look for yourself.”
“You mean we take a look?”
“It’s your wreck. Your call.”
“We need to dive it, Doc.”