"Cradle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C., Lee Gentry)

4

IT was almost always impossible to find a parking place in the middle of the working day near Amanda Winchester’s house in Key West. The Hemingway Marina had revitalized the old part of the city where she lived, but as usual everyone had underestimated the need for parking. All the repainted and renovated nineteenth-century mansions along Eaton and Caroline streets had signs on the street saying such things as DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE IF YOU’RE NOT A RESIDENT, but it was no use. People who worked in the retail shops around the marina parked where it was convenient for them and avoided the heavy parking fee at the marina lot.

After searching fruitlessly for a parking place for fifteen minutes, Nick Williams decided to park outside of a convenience store and walk the block or so to Amanda’s house. He was strangely anxious. Part of his nervousness was due to his excitement, but he was also feeling a little guilty. Amanda had been the major sponsor of the original Santa Rosa expedition and Nick had spent considerable time with her after they had found the treasure. Amanda and Nick and Jake Lewis had all three believed that Homer Ashford and his menage a` trois had somehow hidden part of the treasure and then cheated them out of their proper shares. Nick and Amanda worked together trying to find evidence that Homer had stolen from them, but they were never able to prove anything conclusively.

During this period Amanda and Nick had become quite close. They had seen each other virtually every week and for a while he had thought of her as an aunt or grandmother. But after a year or so, Nick had stopped going by to visit her. He hadn’t understood it at the time, but the real reason he began to avoid her was that Amanda was too intense for him. And she was always too personal. She asked him too many hard questions about what he was doing with his life.

On this particular morning he had no real options. Amanda was widely recognized as the expert on sunken treasure in the Keys. There were two components in her life, treasure and the theater, and her knowledge of each was encyclopedic. Nick had not called first because he didn’t want to discuss the trident unless she was willing to see him. So it was with some trepidation that he rang the doorbell on the front porch of her magnificent home.

A young woman in her early twenties came to the door and opened it just a bit. “Yes?” she said, her face wedging into the crack, her expression wary.

“My name’s Nick Williams,” he said. “I would like to see Mrs. Winchester if possible. Is she in?” There was a pause. “I’m an old—”

“My grandmother is very busy this morning,” the girl curtly interrupted him. “Perhaps you can call and make an appointment.” She started to close the door and leave Nick standing on the porch next to his exercise bag. Then Nick heard another voice, a muffled exchange, and the door swung open.

“Well, for goodness sake,” Amanda said with her arms outstretched, “I have a young gentleman caller. Come here, Nikki, and give me a kiss.” Nick was embarrassed. He walked forward and gave the elderly woman a perfunctory hug.

As he withdrew from the embrace, he started to apologize. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by to see you. I mean to, but somehow my schedule—”

“It’s all right, Nikki, I understand.” Amanda interrupted him pleasantly. Her eyes were so sharp they belied her age. “Come in and tell me what you’ve been up to. I haven’t seen you since, goodness, has it been a couple of years already since we shared that cognac after Streetcar?” She led him into a combination study and living room and sat him down next to her on the couch. “You know, Nikki, I thought your comments about the actress playing Blanche DuBois were the most observant ones I heard during the entire run. You were right about her. She couldn’t have played Blanche except as a total mental case. The woman simply had no concept of a feminine sexual appetite.”

Nick looked around him. The room had hardly changed in the eight years since he had last visited it. The ceiling was very high, maybe fifteen feet. The walls were lined with bookcases whose full shelves extended all the way to the ceiling. Opposite the door a huge canvas painting of Amanda and her husband standing outside their home on Cape Cod dominated the room. A new 1955 Ford was partially visible in the background of the painting. She was radiantly beautiful in the picture, in her early thirties, dressed in a white evening gown with daring red trim both around the wrists and along the collar of the neck. Her husband was in a black tux. He was mostly bald, with short blond hair graying at the temples. His eyes were warm and kindly.

Amanda asked Nick if he wanted tea and he nodded. The granddaughter Jennifer disappeared into the hallway. Amanda turned and took Nick’s hands in hers. “I am glad you came, Nikki, I have missed you. From time to time I hear a snippet here or there about you or your boat, but often second-hand information is altogether wrong. What have you been doing? Still reading all the time? Do you have a girlfriend?”

Nick laughed. Amanda had not changed. She had never been one for small talk. “No girlfriend,” Nick said, “same problem as always. The ones that are intelligent turn out to be either arrogant or emotionally inept or both; the ones that are sensitive and affectionate have never read a book. “For some reason Carol Dawson jumped into Nick’s mind and he almost said, without thinking, “except for, maybe,” but he stopped himself. “What I need,” he said instead, “is someone like you.”

“No, Nikki,” Amanda replied, suddenly serious. She folded her hands in her lap and stared momentarily across the room. “No,” she repeated softly, her voice then gathering intensity as she turned back to look at him, “even I am not perfect enough for you. I remember well all your fantasy visions of gracious young goddesses. Somehow you had mixed the best parts of all the women in your favorite novels together with your teenage dreams. It always seemed to me that you had put women up on a pedestal; they had to be queens or princesses. But in the girls you actually dated, you looked for weaknesses, signs of ordinariness, and indications of common behavior. It was almost as if you were hoping to find them imperfect, to detect chinks in their armor so that you could justify your lack of interest.”

Jennifer arrived with the tea. Nick was uncomfortable. He had forgotten what it was like to talk to Amanda. Her emotional probing and her unsolicited observations were both extremely disquieting to him this morning. Nick had not come to see her to dissect his attitude toward women. He changed the subject.

“Speaking of treasure,” he said, bending down to pick up his bag, “I found something very interesting yesterday while I was out diving. I thought maybe you might have seen something like it before.” He pulled the trident out and handed it to Amanda. She almost dropped it because she was not prepared for its weight.

“Goodness,” she said, her skinny arm trembling under the strain of holding the golden trident out in front of her. “What could it possibly be made from? It’s too heavy to be gold!”

Nick leaned forward and took the object. He held it for her as she ran her fingers over its exceptionally smooth exterior. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Nikki. I don’t need to get out all the books and the photographs for comparison. The smoothness of the finish is inconsistent with the processing techniques in Europe during or after the galleon days. This must be modern. But I can’t tell you anything else. Where in the world did you find it?”

He told her just the outline of the story, careful as always not to give away key bits of information. It was not just the agreement he had made with Carol and Troy; treasure hunters never really trust anybody. But he did share with Amanda his idea that perhaps someone had cached this particular piece, as well as some others, for later retrieval. Nick insisted that this idea of his was a perfectly plausible explanation for the tracks on the ocean floor.

“Your scenario seems very unlikely to me,” Amanda said, “although I must admit that I am baffled and have no better explanation. Maybe Miss Dawson has some sources that can shed some light on the origin of this thing. But there is almost no chance that I am mistaken. I have personally seen or viewed close-up photographs of every significant piece of treasure recovered from the Keys in the past century. You could show me a new piece today and I could probably tell you in what European country it was made and in what decade. If this object comes from a sunken ship, it is a modern ship, almost certainly after World War II. Beyond that I can’t help you.”

Nick put the trident back in the bag and started to leave. “Wait just a minute before you go, Nikki,” Amanda said as he stood up. “Come over here for a minute.” She took him by the arm and led him over to a spot just in front of the large painting. “You would have liked Walter, Nikki. He was a dreamer also. He loved to look for treasure. Every year we would spend a week or two in the Caribbean on a yacht, ostensibly looking for treasure but just generally sharing each other’s dreams. From time to time we would find objects on the bottom of the ocean that we couldn’t understand and we would create fanciful conjectures to explain them. Almost always there was some prosaic explanation that was inferior to our fantasies.”

Nick was standing beside her with his bag in his right hand. Amanda turned to him and put her hand softly on his left forearm. “But it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter that most of the years we came up empty-handed altogether. For we always found the real treasure, our love for each other. We always returned home renewed and laughing and thankful that life had allowed us to share another week or ten days in which we had imagined and fantasized and hunted for treasure together.”

Her eyes were soft and loving. Her voice was low but full of passion. “I do not know when or if you will come again, Nikki, but there are some things that I have been wanting to say to you for some time. If you like, you can dismiss them as the ravings of a sententious old woman, but I may never have a chance to tell you these things again. You have all the attributes I loved in Walter, intelligence, imagination, sensitivity. But something is wrong. You are alone. By choice. Your dreams of treasure, your zest for life—you do not share these things. It is very sad for me to see this.” She stopped for a second and looked back at the painting. Then she completed her thought, almost as if she were talking to herself. “For when you are seventy years old and look back at what your life has meant, you will not focus on your solo activities. What you will remember are the incidents of touching, those times when your life was enriched by a moment of sharing with a friend or loved one. It is our mutual awareness of this miracle called life that allows us to accept our mortality.”

Nick had not been prepared for an emotional encounter with Amanda. He had thought that he would stop by to see her for a few moments, ask her about the trident, and then depart. In retrospect he realized that he had treated Amanda very callously over the years. She had offered genuine friendship and he had spurned it, taking her out of his life altogether when their interaction no longer suited him. He winced as he recognized how selfish he had been.

As he walked slowly down the street, idly looking at the gracious old houses built over a hundred years ago, Nick took a deep breath. He had experienced too many emotions for one morning. First Monique, then Amanda. And it looks as if the trident is not going to solve all my problems. Funny how things always come in groups.

He found himself musing that maybe there had been a lot of truth in what Amanda had said. He acknowledged that he had been feeling lonely lately. And he wondered if the vague loneliness was indeed coupled to a creeping awareness of his own mortality, to the passage of that phase of life enshrined by Thomas Wolfe with the phrase, “For we were young, and we knew that we could never die.” Nick was feeling very tired when he came to the end of the sidewalk and turned onto the pavement of the convenience store parking lot.

He saw her before she saw him. She was standing next to the driver’s side of her brand-new red Mercedes sports coupe. She had a small brown paper hag in her arm and was looking in the window of the car next to hers, Nick’s 1990 Pontiac Nick felt a quick rush of adrenaline followed by anger and distrust. She finally saw him just as he started to speak. “Why, Greta, what a surprise! I guess we just happened to be in this part of Key West today at exactly the same time.”

“Ya, Nick, I thought it was your car. How are you?” Greta put the paper bag on the hood of her car and approached him in a friendly manner. She had either missed or was ignoring the sarcasm in his greeting. She was wearing a sleeveless yellow tank top and a pair of tight blue shorts. Her blonde hair was pulled back in two short pigtails.

“Don’t play innocent with me, Fraulein,” Nick overreacted. “I know you didn’t come here to shop.” He was nearly shouting. He used his free arm to accentuate his comments and block Greta’s approach. “This is not one of the stops on your circuit. You came here to find me. Now what do you want?” Nick dropped his arm. A couple of passersby had stopped to watch the exchange.

Greta stared at him for a moment with those crystal-clear eyes. She was wearing no makeup. She looked like a little girl except for the wrinkles on her face. “Are you still so angry, Nick? After all these years?” She came up next to him and smiled knowingly into his eyes. “I remember one night, almost five years ago,” she said playfully, “when you were not so angry. You were glad to see me. You asked me if I would have you for one night, no questions asked, and I agreed. You were great.”

In a momentary flash Nick remembered the rainy night when he had stopped Greta just as she was leaving the pier. He recalled also how desperately he had needed to touch someone, anyone, on that particular night. “That was the day after my father’s funeral,” he said roughly, “and didn’t mean shit anyway.” He looked away. He did not want to return her piercing gaze.

“That wasn’t the impression I had,” Greta continued in the same playful but otherwise emotionless tone. “I felt you inside me, I tasted your kisses. You can’t tell me—”

“Look,” interrupted Nick, clearly irritated. “What do you want? I don’t want to stand here all morning arguing with you about some stupid night five years ago. Now I know that you’re here for a reason. What is it?”

Greta backed off a step and her face hardened. “You are a very difficult man, Nick. It could be such fun doing business together if you weren’t such a, how do you say, pain in the ass.” She stopped for a moment. “I have come from Homer. He has a proposition for you. He wants to see what you found yesterday in the ocean and maybe discuss a partnership.”

Nick laughed triumphantly. “So I was right all along. You were sent to find me. And now that bastard wants to discuss a partnership. Hah. Not a fucking chance. You won’t steal from me again. Tell your employer or lover or whatever he is to cram his proposition up his ass. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

He started to walk around Greta and open his car door. Her strong hand grabbed his forearm. “You’re making a mistake, Nick.” Her eyes bored into his again. “A big mistake. You can’t afford to do it on your own. What you found is probably worthless. If it is, let him spend the money.” Her chameleon eyes shifted one more time. “And it would be such fun to work together again.”

Nick climbed into his car and turned on the engine. “No dice, Greta. You’re wasting your time. Now I’ve got to go.” He backed out of the parking place and then drove into the narrow street. The treasure was front and center in his mind again. He had been momentarily depressed by what Amanda had told him about the trident, but the fact that Homer wanted to see it gave Nick a feeling of power. But, he asked himself, how does he know already? Who talked? Or could someone have seen us?