"Somebody ought to wake him up," I said, "before he gets a lungful of Atlantic Ocean."
"How pale he looks!" said Denise. "With all the sun he has been getting, one would think—"
She stopped with a terrible shriek. I had glanced away towards a couple of kids flying kites. When I looked back, Maniu's head was rolling gently down the slope of his mound.
The head had been set, like a macabre grave marker, on the mound, which covered the decapitated rest of him. A wave of the incoming tide had lapped up to it and set it rolling.
Just how this happened was never established. The police rounded up the motorcycle gang. The tracks of their vehicles were found on the beach, and there were other bits of circumstantial evidence, but not enough for conviction.
I did not see al-Lajashi for several days. When he paid another visit, I did not wait for him to ask for the ring. I tore it off and tossed it to him before he could speak.
"Take it away," I said, "and yourself with it."
"Oh, thank you, sir! Kattar khayrak! You are my liberator! In the name of the Prophet, on whom be peace, I love you! I—"
"I'm flattered and all that. But if you really want to express your gratitude, Habib, you will scram. I want nothing more to do with the jann."
Then I really woke up. There was no jinn; only my darling in the other bed. The ring, however, had gone.
I drew a long breath. Denise stirred. Well, I thought, this is as good a time as any to prove my manhood again. At my age, one should not pass up a chance.
Dead Man's Chest
After I got rid of Habib the jinn, our boy Stephen, who had a summer job, arrived at Ocean Bay to spend a week end with his old folks. Stevie was full of a plan that he and his friend Hank had dreamed up, to hunt for pirate treasure with a World War II mine detector on an island off the Jersey coast. A local tradition claimed that Captain Charles Vane had once put in there to bury his hoard.
Stephen told me about it while we labored through a round of miniature golf, into which he had coaxed me. Tennis is my game, although as a banker I have to play golf in the way of business. But Stephen is too slow and dreamy ever to make a tennis player.
The miniature course had fancy decorations. There were models of space rockets, grotesque animals like dinosaurs, and mythical monsters, such as a life-sized statue of a fish-man like those my pulp-writing friend in Providence used to write about. It had fins running down its back and webbed hands and feet like those of a duck. It stood on a revolving turntable. I asked the ticket taker about it.
"I dunno," said this man. "It's one of them things that crazy artist who designed this place put in. Said he'd seen one alive once, but it was probably a case of the DTs. He's dead now."
We finished our round as Stephen wound up his account of their treasure-hunting plan. He looked at me apprehensively.
"I suppose," he said, "you'll tell me it couldn't possibly work, for some reason we never thought of."
"I don't want to spoil your fun," I said. "If you'd prefer, I won't say a word."
"No, go ahead, Dad. I'd rather have the bad news now than later, after we'd wasted our time."
"Okay," I said. "As I understand it, the routine on a pirate ship was, as soon as possible after taking a prize, to hold the share-out. This was done, not by the captain, but by the quartermaster, normally a pirate too old for pike-and-cutlass work but trusted by the crew. The division was equal, except that the captain might get a double share and the other ship's officers—the doctor, the gunner, and so on— might get one and a half shares, according to the ship's articles. Anyone who held back loot was liable to be hanged or at least keelhauled.
"You see, the captain didn't get all that rich from a capture. When the ship got back to its base, the pirates spent their shares in one grand bust. Rarely did enough loot accumulate in the hands of any one man to be worth burying. Moreover, I thought the pirate Vane stuck pretty close to the Caribbean."
Poor Stevie's mouth turned down, as it always did when I shot down one of his wild ideas. The year before, he and Hank had talked of going to the Galapagos Islands to grow copra. Somehow that sounded glamorous. I had to explain that, first, those islands did not produce copra; second, that copra was nothing but dried coconut meat, which stank in the process of drying and was eventually turned into shampoo oil or fed to the hogs in Iowa.
As things turned out, Stephen had a chance both to see the Galapagos Islands and to hunt for treasure much sooner than either of us expected.
The following summer, my boss, Esau Drexel, took off in his yacht for one of his expeditions in marine biology. Before he left, he said:
"Willy, I can't take you on the whole cruise, because somebody has to run the trust company. But we're going to the Galapagos. Why don't you take Denise and the kids, fly to Guayaquil and Baltra, and meet me there? We can make a tour of the islands. It'll be a great experience, and you can be back in ten or twelve days. McGill can handle the business while you're gone."
It did not take much persuasion. Of my family, only Héloise, our undergraduate daughter, balked. She said her summer job was too important, she had promised her employers, and so on. I suspected that she did not want to go too far from the young man she was in love with. Stephen, who had just graduated from high school, was enthusiastic.
An airplane put Mr. and Mrs. Wilson Newbury, with son Stephen and daughter Priscille, down on the island of Baltra, where Drexel's Amphitrite was moored to the pier. The two little ships that took tourists around the islands were both out, so the Amphitrite had plenty of room.
Drexel, looking very pukka sahib in shorts and bush jacket, with his white mustache and sunburned nose, greeted us with his usual roar. With him he had his wife, a little gray-haired woman who seldom got a chance to say much. There was another man, small, tanned, and white-haired, whom I had not met.
"This is Ronald Tudor," said Drexel. "Ronnie, meet Denise and Willy Newbury. Willy's the one who keeps the Harrison Trust from going broke while I'm away from the helm. Willy, Ronnie's the man who recovered the loot from the Santa Catalina, off Melbourne."
"Melbourne, Australia?" I asked.
"No, stupid; Melbourne, Florida. She was one of the treasure fleet wrecked there in 1715."
"Oh," I said, "Is that your regular business, Mr. Tudor?"
"Wouldn't ever call that kind of business regular," said the little oldster with a sly grin. He had a quick, explosive way of speaking. "I do work at it off and on. Right now—but better wait till we shove off."
"You mean," said Priscille, "you're going to find some treasure in these islands, Mr. Tudor?"
"You'll see, young lady. Since we're not sailing till tomorrow morning, how about a swim?"
We swam from the nearby beach, where the hulk of a World War II landing craft lay upside down and rusting to pieces. The children had fun chasing ghost crabs. These, when cut off from their burrows, scuttled into the water and buried themselves out of sight.
Back at the Amphitrite, we met the Ecuadorian pilot, Flavio Ortega, as he came aboard. Flavio was a short, broad, copper-colored man with flat Mongoloid features. While he must have been at least three-quarters Indian, he had the Hispanic bonhommie. When I tried my stumbling Castillian on him, he cried:
"But, your accent is better than mine! Usted habla como un caballero espanol!"
He was a flatterer, of course; but one of life's lessons is that flattery will get you everywhere.