“Sure.” He lit two, and handed her one. She inhaled gratefully as, with a swirl of water, Captain Tod Tolliver broke the surface beside the anchored boat. Sandra Ames rushed to the tail. Tolliver kicked himself to the ladder hanging over the side and pulled himself up, looking grotesque in his face plate with the tank of oxygen on his back and the floppy green flippers on his feet.
The girl caught his hand and helped him aboard. The wiry, leathery little man carried a canvas bag that looped over his wrist, and a fish spear for a weapon. The canvas sack bulged awkwardly.
Tod Tolliver slid out of his skin-diving gear and the detective took it and put it down for him. Sandra handed him a waiting towel and a robe. Tolliver rubbed himself dry, then put the robe on over the red trunks he wore.
“Mite chilly,” he said, grinning at them. “Been waiting long?”
“Don’t tease us, Captain,” Sandra said. “Did you find the submarine? Is it down there?”
“Here.” The captain swung her the wet canvas sack. “Open this up, gal, and see what you see.”
With a sharp intake of breath, Sandra Ames grabbed the sack and wrenched at the drawstrings to open it. The wet canvas resisted, but presently the bag gaped open and she tumbled out a rectangular metal box onto the deck. It was a discolored gray, but did not look corroded.
“Pure aluminum,” Tod Tolliver said laconically. “Keep the water out for a long time to come yet. I rigged up a tool to open it easy.”
He rummaged in a long chest bolted to the deck near the companionway, and brought out something like an oversized can opener.
“I’ll open it,” Shayne said, and took the metal box from Sandra Ames. He turned it over and studied it for a moment. Stamped into the top were German letters and numerals.
“Just jab her in and go around the edges,” Tolliver said. “She’ll open like a can of sardines that way.”
He jabbed the point of the opener into the metal at a corner. The aluminum cut without difficulty. In less than a minute he had cut around three sides and bent back the loose flap of metal. Inside were tightly packed bundles of green. He spilled these out onto the deck and Sandra, hovering over him, scooped one up and ripped off the paper band that encircled it.
“Ten-dollar bills,” she whispered. “Look at them, Mike! And down underneath us there’s a million dollars’ worth of them. Maybe more!” She jumped to her feet and looked inquiringly at Tolliver. “The K-Three Forty-One is down beneath us?”
The captain nodded. “’Bout a hundred yards off our bow,” he said. “Seventy foot of water. That’s the bow, it’s on a coral reef. Stern is in a hundred twenty feet. Lying on her side. Big hole amidships. Looks like she either took a direct hit from a torpedo underwater or was bumped by a free floating mine. Went down fast.”
“I’m going down to see!” Sandra cried. “I’ve got to make sure.”
She ran down the companionway to the cabin. In hardly a minute she came out, wearing a brief bathing suit and lugging a skin-diving outfit, almost new. She slid into it with practiced speed, and Tolliver helped her get the air tanks adjusted on her back.
“Don’t try going inside,” he warned. “There’s some moray eels made a home in that submarine. You got to know just where to go or you might get trapped.”
The girl nodded impatiently. “I’ll take your spear,” she said. “I’m a good skin-diver.”
She went down the ladder at the stern, waved, then pushed off. For an instant she floated, then threw her legs in the air and dived straight down. A moment later she was gone.
“That girl’s got it bad,” the captain said. “Treasure fever.” He cocked a blue eye beneath a bushy brow. “Sorry about lying to you, Mike. But Mollison wanted to stick to the Spanish treasure story until we actually got everything signed, sealed and delivered. If it leaked out, or if you said no, it wouldn’t be took too serious. Somebody’s always looking for Spanish treasure.”
“No hard feelings, Captain,” Shayne said easily. “I’d have played it cagy too.”
“You want to dive down too?” Tolliver asked. “You can use my outfit. Plenty of air left in the tanks.”
Shayne shook his head. “I’ve never tried skin-diving,” he said. “But I know it isn’t something you can pick up in five minutes. Anyway, I don’t need to see it if both you and Sandra say it’s down there.”
“It’s down there, all right,” Captain Tolliver chuckled. He stripped off his trunks and began to pull on faded khaki trousers and a khaki shirt. “One day right after the war ended I was anchored off here trying to fix a bent propeller blade. Had to get in the water and take it off the shaft and like a ninny let it drop. I sounded and found it was only seventy feet. Had a skin-diving rig on board because I used to try diving to find some of these Spanish wrecks that really are in these waters. So I went down and there was my propeller right beside this submarine.
“She lay there like a dead whale, slanting down from the coral reef, and she hadn’t been there long — seaweed and barnacles had hardly started in on her. I swam around and found the hole in her side, and was just crazy enough to go in. Almost the first thing I found was a whole mess of these aluminum boxes, spilled all over — like they’d been stored right where she was blowed open.
“Further in, there were dead men lying around, and they didn’t look nice — water and the fish had been working on them. Now they’re just bones, of course. But that’s gruesome enough.
“I backed out and just took one of them aluminum boxes along for curiosity. When I finally got around to opening it, my eyes damn near popped out of my head. I went down for a couple more, but I didn’t want to take too many, because right away I could see what would happen if I started showing around too much money.
“Fact, I stowed the stuff under my shack and decided to forget about it. No use asking for trouble, and I had enough to get by on. But a spell later”—Tod Tolliver looked sheepish—“a young fellow I knew and his wife were drowned and their kids had to go to the St. Francis Foundling Home. I went to see them and I found this Home needed money bad.
“So then I got the idea I could help ’em out. Even if this cash I’d found wasn’t any good to me, it would be a godsend to the Home. So I passed around the story of coming into an inheritance from a dead brother back up north, and I went to New York and I banked ten thousand under a phony name, and I sent the St. Francis Home the cash anonymously.
“Every year since then I’ve made a trip north, saying it’s to collect my annual inheritance. Every year I dive down to pick up just ten thousand, and that’s what I deposit in New York. I figger any more might cause questions — maybe the Treasury would get on my trail or something. I had all the trouble I wanted in my life, Mike.”
Michael Shayne nodded. “Then Sandra and Hugo turned up, telling you they knew what you were up to.”
Tolliver passed a leathery hand over his chin. “That’s right,” he said. “It was right upsetting. They made me a proposition. I knew there wasn’t any more peace for me unless I took it; they’d be watching me all the time to find where the sub lay. I figger to pass on to the St. Francis Home most of what I get and keep my mouth shut. ’Bout all I can do, under the circumstances.”
He shook his head in perplexity. “Still can’t figure how they got on my track,” he muttered. “Well, I guess it don’t matter how. They just did, that’s all.”
“Did you ever do much exploring inside the submarine, Captain?” Shayne asked. “Find any papers, anything interesting?”
“Never tried to go too far in,” Tod Tolliver said. “Lot of the compartment doors are shut and I wasn’t going to fool around trying to open them and maybe get caught on the wrong side of one, if it swung shut. Of course, if it had still been war, I’d have let the Navy know where she lay, but bein’ the war was over, I just figured it was my private secret. Say, what about some grub? I’m hungry, and you probably are too.”