There was no need to worry.
*
It was nevertheless one highly nervous Injun that flopped backward off the side of the boat into the Pearl River Delta and descended with the others into the murky water in search of Jesse’s lost cargo.
In any event, I needn’t have been so worried. From the forty-meter mark, I spent the entire dive in a state of complete hilarity.
I chortled. I laughed. I giggled. I found the fish in my vicinity a source of mirth and tried to point out the more amusing aspects of their anatomy to my fellow divers. Eventually I became so helpless with laughter that Laszlo, wearing an expression of even greater disgust than was normal for him, grabbed me by one of the shoulder straps of my buoyancy compensator, or B.C., and simply hauled me around like a package.
I had become prey to nitrogen narcosis, more colorfully known as “rapture of the deep.”
When we got within sight of the muddy bottom, it was clear that the Goldfish Fairy was not to be seen. The captain appeared to be a little off on his calculations. So, still a good fifteen or so meters off the bottom, Laszlo checked his compass and we began searching the bottom, so many kicks in one direction followed by a ninety-degree turn and so many kicks in the next, the whole creating a kind of squarish, outwardly expanding spiral.
We found the Goldfish Fairy within moments, the bow section looming suddenly out of the murk like that of the Titanic in, well, the film Titanic. Bibbling with laughter, I tried to point out this similarity to Laszlo, who simply jerked me in the direction of the sunken ship and yanked me over the bows to begin his inspection of the vessel.
The bow section was a little crumpled, having struck first, but the rest of the little ship was more or less intact. The hatches were still secure. These would present very little trouble, but the fly in the ointment was the ship’s mast, which had fallen over both hatches and which presented a nasty snarl of wire designed as if on purpose to entangle divers.
Laszlo grimly dragged me around the ship as he made his survey, and I spat my air supply from my mouth and tried to explain to a school of nearby fish the finer points of playing the charango, which is the little ten-string guitar with its body made from the shell of an armadillo. Eventually Laszlo had to look at me very severely and wrote a message on the underwater slate he kept clipped to his B.C.
I think you should breathe now, I read, and I flashed him the okay sign and returned the regulator to my mouth.
Our survey complete, Laszlo tied a buoy to the stern rail of the ship so that we could find it again, inflated the buoy from his air supply, and then led us in stages to the surface, breathing during our decompression stops from the cylinders we’d attached to the anchor line. As soon as we passed the forty-meter mark, I became cold sober. The transition was instantaneous, and I wanted to dive down a bit and see if I could trigger the narcosis once more- just as an experiment- but Laszlo wasn’t about to permit this, so we continued to rise until we saw from below the remaining members of the water ballet practicing their moves. The women were wearing their mermaid tails, the better to convince any prying eyes that their reasons for being here had nothing to do with any hypothetical wrecks lying on the bottom sixty meters below, while the men swam in formation and flexed their muscles in synchrony.
“Just sit in the boat and don’t do anything,” Laszlo hissed to me after we were back in the launch and had got our gear off. “And don’t say anything either,” he added as he saw me about to speak, even though I had only opened my mouth to apologize.
A pair of Apollos went down next, breathing the gas mixtures that would enable them to stay longer at depth. They were to enter the hold through one of the crew passages that led down through the deck, and in order to find their way back, carried a reel with a long line on it, one end of which they attached to the launch and the rest of which, like Theseus in the Labyrinth, they paid out behind them as they swam.
“That approach won’t work, I’m afraid,” Laszlo explained to Jesse later. “When the ship hit the bottom, it threw everything in the hold forward against the bulkhead. We can’t shift it from down there, so we’ll have to open the hold and go in that way.”
“It should be an easy enough job.” We were sipping drinks in Jesse’s palatial Tang Dynasty lodgings. He had, of course, acquired a suite, complete with a little Taoist shrine all in scarlet and gold. The Taoist god, with pendulous earlobes the size of fists, gazed at us with a benign smile from his niche as we plotted our retrieval.
“Clearing the wire is going to be the most dangerous part of it,” Laszlo continued. “Afterward we’ll have to use jacks to get the mast off the cargo hatch. Actually opening the hatch and retrieving the target will be the easiest part of all.”
“Do you have all the gear you need?” Jesse asked.
“We’ll have it flown to Macau to meet us,” Laszlo said. “It’s just a matter of your giving us your credit card number.”
“There isn’t a cheaper or quicker way to do this?” Jesse asked.
“Total. Artistic. Control,” said Laszlo, which settled it as far as he was concerned.
*
As for myself, I planted some sandalwood incense in Jesse’s shrine and set it alight along with a prayer for success and safety. It seemed only sensible to try to get the local numina on my side.
Happy with a drink in my hand and my feet up on a cushion, I was inclined to loiter in Jesse’s sumptuous suite as long as I could. The passengers lived in a Forbidden City of pleasures and delights, but the crew and entertainers were stuck in little bare cabins below the water line, with no natural light, precious little ventilation, and with adjacent compressors, generators, and maneuvering thrusters screaming out in the small hours of the night.
Eventually, though, Jesse grew weary of our company, and I wandered out to the Peaches of Heaven Buffet for a snack. I got some dumplings and a bottle of beer, and whom should I encounter but folk music fan Tobe Oharu, fresh from bargain-hunting at the Stanley Market, who plunked down opposite me with some ox-tendon soup and a bottle of beer.
“I got some pashmina shawls for my mother,” he said with great enthusiasm, “and some silk scarves and ties for presents, and some more ties and some cashmere sweaters for myself.”
“Very nice,” I said.
“How did you spend your day?”
“I went out for a swim,” I said, “but I didn’t have a good time.” I was still embarrassed that I had so completely flaked out at the forty-meter mark.
“That’s a shame,” Oharu said. “Was the beach too crowded?”
“The company did leave something to be desired,” I said, after which he opened what proved to be a highly informed discussion of Andean music.
The audiences for our shows that night were modest, because most of the passengers were still enjoying the fleshpots of Hong Kong, but Oharu was there, right in front as before, wearing his poncho and derby and leading the audience in applause. We tried “Twist and Shout” as an encore number, and it was a hit, getting us a second encore, which meant that the band took Oharu to the bar for several rounds of thank-you drinks.
After the second show, I stuck around for the entire Hopping Vampire Show and had a splendid time watching Chinese demons chomp ingenues while combating a Taoist magician, who repelled them with glutinous rice, which enabled him to dodge attack long enough to control the vampires with yellow-paper magic, in which a sutra or spell was written on yellow paper with vermilion ink, then stuck on the vampire’s forehead like a spiritual Post-It note.