five

DEAD MEN’S FINGERS

North from Kyros, I came awake from a deep, dreamless sleep and lay on the bunk staring at the bulkhead, wondering who I was—a bad sign. Then things clicked into place and I yawned and swung my legs to the floor.

It was warm in the saloon, even with the air conditioning plant in full cry, but when I went up the companionway, the heat almost brought me to a dead halt. I took a deep breath and moved out.

It was a day to thank God for, a blue sky without a cloud in it reaching to nowhere, the Cyclades fading north into the heat haze, the great bulk of Crete far, far away to the south-west. We floated, motionless in a flat, copper sea, every line of the boat reflected as truly as in a mirror.

Morgan had rigged an awning in the stern and sprawled beneath it, snoring steadily. I kicked his feet, then dropped a bucket over the side on a line, sluiced myself and gave some thought to the afternoon.

We had several dozen sponges strung on a line to dry. They didn’t look too good to me. Sponge divers are a dying breed and not only because synthetics have cornered most of the market these days. The youngsters don’t want any part of it. They’ve seen too many men old before their time, crippled by the bends. But for some men, it’s a way of life—the only way, and you still get plenty of boats working the Aegean and the waters off the south-west coast of Turkey.

So, there was still a living to be had if you knew what you were doing, but only just. I’d had three weeks of it, working out of Kyros and just managing to keep my head above water. Eating money, fuel for the boat and not much left after that.

Morgan was having to manage on local wine which came cheap at around a couple of shillings a litre and the old lady who ran the taverna where he bought it always seemed to give him a little over the odds, so he was happy enough.

It was a strange kind of existence. A sort of limbo between old endings and new beginnings. We had a boat, enough to eat, the sun was warm. No word from Yanni Kytros which surprised me, but we managed.

He owned an old taverna on the waterfront at Kyros which he’d tarted up for the tourist trade. Yanni’s, he called it. It was the sort of place that looked like something out of an old Bogart movie. Fishermen and sponge divers were encouraged to use it, preferably unshaven and with knives at their belts, to give the tourists a thrill, but it was mainly a big act and the local boys were strictly on their best behaviour and got their drinks cheap. The occasional fight added a little spice and even Yanni didn’t mind that as long as it didn’t go too far.

It was run for him by a fat, amiable Athenian named Alexias Papas who liked the quiet life and saw that things stayed that way by providing the local police sergeant with what amounted to free board and lodging and, as far as I could see, that seemed to include assuaging a pretty deep thirst.

As I said, there was no news from Kytros or perhaps Alexias was simply putting me off, so I gave up enquiring and concentrated on earning a living for a while.

We’d not had much luck earlier in the day and I had decided to try the area on the north side of a tiny island called Hios on the chance recommendation of an old Turk, crippled by the bends, who’d conned a couple of drinks out of me at Yanni’s the previous evening.

Morgan got to his feet, yawning and scratching his face as I buckled on an aqualung. “Hope you do better than we done this morning, Jack. That lot we got drying ain’t hardly worth taking in.”

“You worry too much,” I said and vaulted over the rail.

What he had said was true enough, but it wasn’t exactly constructive. Sponges are funny things. The good and the bad often look exactly the same, nice and black and shiny. There’s a definite art in being able to tell the difference and the plain truth is that I was only fair at it.

I paused to adjust my air supply and went down in a long sweeping curve. The water was crystal-clear and I could see so far and with such definition that it was like looking at things through the wrong end of a telescope.

I hovered for a while to get my bearings, aware with a kind of conscious pleasure that I was enjoying this. There were fish everywhere, dentex and black bream and just below me, a group of silver and gold giltheads. I jack-knifed and went down fast, scattering them just for the hell of it, and found myself part of an enormous shoal of tiny rainbow-hued fish. They exploded outwards leaving me alone, suspended in the blue vault.

For a brief moment I seemed to become a part of it all and it was a part of me, fused together into something special. Man’s oldest dream, free flight, was achieved and all things were possible. I experienced again the same incredible wonder I had known on the very first occasion I had gone down in a self-contained rig.

It had been a long time since I’d felt like that. Too long. I tried to hang on to the moment, to hold it tight. Perhaps because of that fact it simply drained out of me, leaving me wary and tense again and vaguely apprehensive.

I touched bottom at eight fathoms. It was suddenly gloomier. For one thing, there were a lot of rocks around which reduced visibility considerably and they reared up out of a great carpet of marine grass that stirred uneasily.

I went over a spur of rock and found my first sponges, but these were worse than useless. Bloated and horrible, they were mainly black in colour and a tinge of green gave them a suggestion of putrescence. Of some living thing gone bad. No wonder the Turks called them dead men’s fingers.

I had been down perhaps ten minutes and had worked my way round the western tip of the island. I went over a great ledge of rock and got the shock of my life. Beneath me, the chasm drifted into infinity. Across the gulf on a large sandy plateau, a diver was working amongst as good a crop of sponges as I had ever seen. He was wearing a regulation diving suit, his air and lifelines snaking up to the surface like an umbilical cord. He saw me at once and paused in his work.

I had an idea who it might be, swam across the chasm quickly and moved in close enough to peer through the front window of his helmet. He was called Ciasim Divalni and he was a Turk from Hilas in the Gulf of Kerma.

Now that the Cyprus troubles were really fading into the past, Turkish sponge boats were beginning to be seen in the Aegean again. I’d found Ciasim and his two sons on the waterfront at Kyros a week or two earlier wrestling with a faulty compressor. A serious business for poor men, for without it they could not dive. It was a simple enough fault if you knew what you were doing and Morgan had a positive genius for that kind of thing.

We were accepted from then on which was quite something where Turks were concerned and when Morgan spent a day overhauling the old diesel engine on their boat, the Seytan, our stock rose even higher which was good for his ego.

Ciasim reached out in slow motion, touched the empty net hanging from my belt, then gestured to the sponges scattered around the plateau, inviting me to join in. I didn’t need asking again. They were definitely the best I’d seen and I filled my net very quickly.

He was ready to go himself, pointed upwards then gave the regulation four pulls on his line which was divers” language for Haul me up.

I ascended a lot faster than he did. There was no need for me to decompress for I hadn’t been down long enough at that depth. It would probably be different for Ciasim. Not that I believed for a moment that he would decompress properly even if it were necessary. Most sponge divers treated the whole paraphernalia of modern diving tables and decompression rates with the same good-humoured contempt they reserved for all those who used self-contained diving rigs. Their own remedy for the bends and any minor physical aches and pains experienced after diving, was to bury the sufferer up to his neck in soft sand or get him to smoke a couple of cigarettes. The nicotine was supposed to have a beneficial effect, being absorbed straight into the bloodstream, which explains why every Turkish diver I’ve ever met is a heavy smoker.

I surfaced beside the Seytan which was a trenchadiri, one of those strange double-ended boats made from time immemorial in exactly the same way. It carried a large, patched, ochre-coloured sail and the diesel engine Morgan had overhauled gave it a top speed of four knots.

Ciasim’s eldest son, Yassi, a tall, handsome youth of nineteen kept a careful eye on the vessel’s speed. It was necessary to stay on the move, not only to combat the effects of tide and current, but to keep pace with the diver down there on the bottom. It was also essential to keep the vessel in such a position that the engine exhaust was always to leeward of the compressor. More than one diver had died from carbon monoxide poisoning when someone had made a mistake over that one.

The compressor was banging away and Ciasim’s second son, Abu, a bright, cheerful fourteen-year-old rogue, was acting as diver’s tender, the most important task on board. I’ve known tenders who were so expert that they could work out what was happening below just by the feel of the lifeline. A bad one could be the death of you. Abu was a natural which was hardly surprising.

Yassi reached over the side with a big grin and gave me a hand up. I pulled off my face mask and held up my bulging net. We used Greek, for only their father spoke English and I had but a smattering of Turkish. He had a look at the sponges, picked one or two out and shook his head. They looked all right to me, but over the side they went.

“How can you tell?” I demanded.

“Easy,” he grunted. “It’s the size of the holes.”

As his father rose, Abu was calling off the depth in kulacs, the Turkish equivalent of the fathom, roughly five feet. I unstrapped my aqualung, went and helped myself to water from a huge earthenware jar roped to the mast. It was Greek or Roman and a couple of thousand years old. Most of the sponge boats used the same. They were to be had with ease from the bottom of the sea in those parts from the many wrecks.

They had Ciasim over the rail a few moments later and I went to give them a hand. A diver in regulation dress is a clumsy creature out of water. The shoes weighed seventeen and a half pounds each and he had eighty pounds in lead weights strapped around his waist. And the great copper and brass helmet weighed over fifty pounds.

I unscrewed his face plate and he grinned. “Jack, my dear friend, how goes it?”

He was about forty-five, dark and handsome with a great sweep of black moustache. He should have looked older considering the way he lived, but he didn’t.

“How long were you down there, idiot?” I demanded.

Abu had the helmet off by then and Ciasim grinned. “Don’t start with your compression tables again. Just hand me a smoke. When I die, I die.”

I gave him a cigarette from a little sandalwood box Yassi handed me. Ciasim inhaled deeply. “Wonderful. Where’s your boat, Jack? Why not bring her round to join us? We’ll go to the island and eat on the beach. I have been wanting to talk to you anyway. A business matter.”

“Okay, I’ll leave the sponges till later,” I said and reached for my aqualung.

Yassi and young Abu helped me into it and I went back over the side. They accepted me because I was a dalguc like Ciasim—a diver. With him, it was something more for he had served with the Turkish infantry contingent sent to join the United Nations Force in Korea in 1950.

I had been there myself which was a bond between us. Had seen them arrive at the front, strange fierce-looking men in ankle-length greatcoats who carried rather old-fashioned rifles with sword bayonets. They were just like something out of the First World War, but fight…Everything I’d heard about Johnny Turk was true.

Ciasim had been a prisoner in Chinese hands for nearly two years, subjected to the same brainwashing techniques as other Allied prisoners. With the Turks it had failed completely and the Chinese had finally given up in some desperation and had placed them in an enclave of their own.

They were like rocks on which the sea breaks with no effect. Hardy, utterly indomitable men. The best friends in the world…the worst enemies.

 

They lit a fire on the beach and Yassi and young Abu busied themselves with the cooking while Morgan, whose Greek was about as broken as it could be, contented himself with watching while perched on a rock, a jug of wine between his knees.

Ciasim and I went off some little way and sat by the water’s edge with a bottle of arak and a box of halva, that unique Turkish sweetmeat made out of honey and nuts, something to which he was particularly partial.

It was hotter than ever and very beautiful and on the horizon a congoa, the kind of boat that trawled for sponges instead of using a diver, drifted by.

“Look at that,” Ciasim said angrily. “They’re ruining the business, those butchers. They tear up the sea bed and everything that lives.”

“Soon be impossible to make a living in the islands at all,” I said. “What with those things and synthetics.”

I rolled a mouthful of arak around my teeth. It always tended to make me feel about eight years old and sucking aniseed balls again.

“I wouldn’t be too sure, Jack,” Ciasim said carefully. “Plenty of ways a good diver can make a living around here.”

So now we were coming to it. “Such as?”

“Wrecks, for instance. Every kind of wreck from ancient times up to ships that were torpedoed in the last war.”

I shook my head. “If it’s antiques you’re after, you are wasting your time. Most wrecks of that kind aren’t visible. They’re usually under a tumulus of sand and you’ve got to be an expert to recognise them. Even if you do, undersea excavation is one of the most highly technical games there is. You need specialists, lots of money and all the time in the world. On top of that, the Greek or Turkish governments, whichever it happens to be, will have their say in disposing of anything you bring up.”

“No, it was something else I had in mind. I found a ship last week, Jack, over towards Sinos in the Middle Passage.”

“Sinos?” I was surprised. “I didn’t know they were letting anyone work that area.”

The island of Sinos was a relic of the war. Only a couple of miles long and half that distance wide, it had enormous strategic importance during the war because of its position at the mouth of the Kasos Strait and the Germans had developed the old Turkish fortifications tremendously. It had recently acquired a rather more sinister reputation as a prison for political offenders from the Greek mainland.

“You know how it is these days?” Ciasim grinned. “Greece and Turkey are co-operating again, at least as far as things go at the official level, so all of a sudden, everyone is being friendly. A Greek Navy M.T.B. turned up to say we shouldn’t be there, but they were nice and helpful when I explained about the wreck. Said I should apply through police headquarters at Kyros for a permit to work on her.”

“And did you?”

“I saw Sergeant Stavrou that same night. He filled in a form for me and sent it off to Athens. He seemed to think I stood a good chance of getting permission.”

“How much did it cost you?” I commented sourly.

“A drink, Jack, that’s all. At Yanni’s. One of those cold German beers Stavrou likes so much. He was fine.” He shook his head and sighed. “Jack, whatever happened to you? You’ve got to start trusting people again.”

“That’ll be the day. Tell me some more about this wreck.”

“An old three-thousand-ton coaster the Germans used to run supplies between the islands. Sunk by bombing in 1945 just before the end of the war. I made a few enquiries around the bars in Kyros and found someone who was in the crew. An old man called Constantinos. Has a farm on the south side of the island. He said they were on their way to the mainland from Sinos just after the Germans had evacuated. They even had the Commander on board. Some S.S. general or other. Think of it, Jack.” He prodded me in the chest with his forefinger gravely as the arak began to take effect. “Think of the loot. You know what the Nazis were like? There could be anything down there.”

“Or nothing. How deep is she?”

“Twenty-six kulacs. I made an accurate recording.”

A hundred and thirty feet. I shook my head. “You need good equipment for that kind of deal, Ciasim. At least two divers for a start.”

“Exactly what I thought.”

He grinned, dropping into the American English he’d picked up in that prison camp. “You and me, baby, we’ll make a fortune.”

But I wasn’t so sure. Oh, there was a chance of sorts, a good chance, but there was more money to be made out of the wreck than out of sponging in the same period, which wasn’t saying much. There had been a time when I wouldn’t have thought twice about joining such a venture, but I wasn’t at my best around wrecks these days. How could I tell a man who’s never had a nerve in his body in the first place that I’d lost mine?

“This afternoon, Jack. I take you there this afternoon. We go down together. You’ll see.” He lifted the bottle to his mouth and swallowed deep, arak spilling across his face. “Now we eat.”

He pulled me to my feet and lurched across the sand towards the fire. There was corba to start with, probably the finest fish soup in the world, lobsters fried whole on the white-hot stones, fish steaks. You couldn’t have done better at the Athens Hilton. Why, then, had I lost my appetite?

 

When I focused the binoculars, the cliffs of Sinos jumped into view. They were two to three hundred feet high at that point and great concrete gun emplacements, relics of the German occupation, were clearly visible at every strategic point. Bare rock and grass and not much else.

“A hell of a place to die in,” I said.

Ciasim shrugged. “Politics is for the insane, Jack. I just don’t want to know.”

Which expressed my own sentiments exactly. The Seytan was anchored about half a mile off-shore, the Gentle Jane was up alongside in a spot which he assured me was the correct one in spite of the absence of any marker buoy. I leaned against the mast and watched Yassi and Abu get him ready.

Diving dress is made of india-rubber between layers of heavy twill which together makes for something pretty durable, but the gear Ciasim was wearing had definitely seen better days.

You can forget about moray eels and octopuses, sting rays and other terrors of the deep. Diving is a lot like flying. The danger comes from the very fact that you are doing something so completely against nature.

The pressure increases at up to fifteen tons for every thirty-seven feet you descend and air isn’t just necessary to breathe. It has to be fed down to you at something like fifty pounds more than the pressure at the depth at which you are working. Once the air supply is cut off, the pressure of the water can collapse the suit and the diver is quite simply compressed. I’ve heard old timers say they’ve seen blood and flesh squeezed out of the end of the air hose up top. A nice way to die…

The only decent item of equipment Ciasim had was a massive copper and brass helmet which like most of the modern variety had a check valve which closed automatically when the air supply was cut off. The exhaust valve did the same, leaving the diver with the air in his suit, but it didn’t leave him long to get to the surface.

It was crazy to take up this kind of work with the sort of gear Ciasim had. He was a good diver—none better, but he only had guts to go along with that and it wasn’t enough.

“See you down there, Jack,” he said as the helmet went over his head and they screwed the wing nuts on his breastplate tight.

I nodded and went over the rail to the Gentle Jane where Morgan was checking the aqualung. He glanced up, a worried look on his face as I stripped off my sweater and pants. Underneath I was wearing a full Neoprene wet suit in black. It was going to be cold down there and I shivered involuntarily.

“How do you feel, Jack?” he asked in a low voice as I slipped my arms through the straps of the aqualung.

“Bloody awful,” I told him and instantly regretted it. His face sagged and I put a hand on his shoulder quickly. “Nothing to do with the diving. Never bothers me these days. It’s just that I don’t fancy the idea of hooking up with Ciasim on a thing like this. We don’t have the right kind of gear. An old blue-belly like you knows that better than anyone.”

But he didn’t believe me—not for a single minute.

 

I gave Ciasim three or four minutes’ start before going over and following his lines down through the clear water. It wasn’t so bad at first and then I entered the neutral zone from fifty feet on where all colours faded and things started to move in on me. Visibility was nothing like as good and for some reason, there didn’t seem to be many fish about. It was all rather sinister.

I checked my depth gauge and moved on. No reefs, no undersea chasms—nothing. A mysterious green void leading nowhere. I was sliding headlong into eternity.

A ship’s stern moved out of the gloom with startling suddenness and I straightened out and hovered, adjusting my air flow.

She was tilted ever so slightly to one side, but otherwise in a remarkable state of preservation. The anti-aircraft gun on the fore-deck was still in place on its mounting, barrel tilted towards the surface. Ciasim stood beside it. He raised a hand and beckoned. I went closer.

Black mussels grew on her rails and ventilators and some of her surfaces were covered with vicious dog’s teeth, a razor-edged clam, which not only slice like a razor as the name implies, but also carry enough poison to put you on your back for a week.

The compass and wheel were encrusted with barnacles when I peered inside the wheelhouse. Barnacles grew on the winch. I went down through an open hatchway. The interior of the hold at that point was like being inside the nave of a church, light filtering down through ragged holes in the deck, mainly cannon shells from the look of them. She’d been strafed from the air before sinking, that was for sure.

I moved into the gloom, looking for a way into the main cargo area and ran into trouble at once. This was where the bomb had landed, the direct hit which had caused all the trouble. There was a jumble of twisted girders and buckled deck plates, the whole encrusted with strange, submarine growths.

I moved closer, reached out to a metal spar only to hold myself in place. God in heaven, but it moved. Not only that, but everything in sight seemed to tremble with a kind of gentle sigh that seemed to echo through the water.

My very bowels twisted, the fear running through me like a living thing. I went up through the hatch and kept on going, leaving Ciasim to his own devices, going up just as fast as I was able. There was no need to decompress. I hadn’t been down long enough and I came up into the clear light of day a few seconds later and kicked for the ladder. Yassi gave me a hand up. I wrenched off my mask and spat out the rubber mouthpiece.

“What about my father?” he demanded.

“Still down there. He’ll be up soon, I suppose.”

Morgan was with them and I don’t think I’d ever seen his face greyer. I ignored him, stepped over the rail of the Gentle Jane and went below. By the time I heard his foot on the companionway, I had a bottle of Jameson out from under my bunk where I still had a secret hoard, and was on my second glass.

He stood there watching me and I shoved the bottle along the saloon table. “Okay, so I’ve been holding out on you. Go on, help yourself.”

“Was it bad, Jack?”

“Christmas and New Year rolled into one.”

I unzipped my wet-suit, towelled myself down and pulled on trousers and a sweater, ignoring his troubled gaze, then I filled my glass again and went on deck. Ciasim was back on board the Seytan, helmet off and in the act of lighting a cigarette from the match Yassi held out to him.

He waved. “Heh, Jack, come aboard. Let’s talk.”

I smiled bravely and muttered in a low voice to Morgan who had followed me up the companionway, “Make ready to move out. I’ve just about had it.”

I stepped over the rail to the Seytan’s deck and leaned against the mast.

“You see, Jack?” Ciasim said. “You see what I mean? You come in with me?”

I shook my head. “I’d think again if I were you. I thought the whole damned lot was going to come in on me down there.”

He frowned. “I didn’t notice anything to worry about.”

Which I didn’t like because of the implication, but I took a deep breath and tried sweet reason. “You were right about one thing. It’s a hundred and thirty feet deep. Now that means that for every forty-five minutes worked in a helmet suit, you’ll have to decompress four minutes at thirty-five feet, twenty-six minutes at twenty-feet and twenty-six minutes at ten feet. A decompression time of fifty-six minutes for every forty-five worked and you can only get away with going down twice a day.”

He was scowling now. “Why must you always talk in this way like a woman who fears every shadow? Always this decompression nonsense. Always these diving tables of yours.”

“Ciasim, you’ll kill yourself, it’s as certain as that,” I told him. “You need a team of divers down there. Half-a-dozen at the very least to get anything worthwhile and at that, it could well be a waste of time.”

He was good and angry by now, eyes touched with fire. “Talk, my friend, lots of talk and clever language, but when it comes down to it, I think you are afraid. Yes, you are afraid to go down there again.”

He didn’t mean it, not for a moment and when I cracked, I gave him the shock of his life. “Afraid?” I laughed wildly. “I’m scared to bloody death. I couldn’t even hold my bowels down there. How’s that for a laugh.”

His eyes went wide and calm and very, very dark. It was as if in one single moment of revelation he saw everything. Really understood.

“Jack.” He reached out to me quickly. “I’m sorry—truly sorry.”

I went over the rail fast. Morgan was already casting off as I ran into the wheelhouse and pressed the self-starter. Those magnificent Penta engines roared into life instantly and I swung the wheel hard over and took the Gentle Jane away in a great sweeping curve.

I ran her hard for a couple of miles before slowing down. When I glanced over my shoulder, Morgan stood in the doorway.

“Feel any better?”

“Some,” I said.

“Well don’t get too happy. You left those sponges, the good ones, on board the Seytan.”

 

We came into Kyros in the late afternoon. It was a spectacular little island, six or seven miles long by three across, and a single double-peaked mountain towered three thousand feet high into the sky at its centre.

A single-masted caicque, sails bellying, slipped out through the narrow harbour entrance and turned towards Crete, passing so close that I could see the eyes painted on each side of the prow. The man at the tiller waved. I waved back and took the Gentle Jane into harbour.

There was one new arrival since the morning, a ninety-foot diesel motor yacht with gleaming white hull and scarlet trim. The kind of craft that must have set someone back all of fifty thousand pounds. She was anchored a hundred yards out from the main jetty and carried the Greek flag.

I passed her well to the other side of the harbour and made for my usual mooring beside the old stone jetty where there were no dues. Brightly painted caicques were beached on the white curve of sand and fishermen sat beside them mending their nets while children ran through the shallows, their voices clear over the water.

I killed the engines, we drifted in and Morgan jumped for the jetty and tied up. I stepped over the rail and joined him.

“You going someplace, Jack?” he asked.

“I’ll buy a few tins of something or other,” I said. “I feel like stretching my legs anyway.”

He didn’t try to argue and I walked away quickly in case he did. There was more to it than that, of course. Much more. I had some thinking to do. The business down there in that old wartime wreck had really brought things home to me in a big way. I was finished.

To try with my kind of problem to earn a living as a diver could only lead to one certain end. A quick and messy death.

I came to that conclusion in a small taverna at the other end of the waterfront after my third glass of retsina. So be it. No more diving. But what was I going to do instead? That was the question. The only other thing I seemed to be much good at these days was drinking.

I walked back along the waterfront in a world of my own for a while as I considered every angle. It was one hell of a situation, that was for certain. I turned along the jetty and went towards the boat. There was no sign of Morgan, but when I went over the rail to the deck I could smell coffee.

For some reason, I felt better and went down the companionway briskly. “That’s the ticket, Morg,” I called as I entered the saloon and tossed my cap on the table.

Lady Sara Hamilton moved out of the galley and stood there, a coffee pot in one hand, a tin of cream in the other. She was wearing light blue linen slacks, a white shirt knotted at the waist and looked about as beautiful as any woman could ever usefully hope to.

And the face? God help me, that dear, dear face, the wide generous mouth lifting a little in scorn, but not at me, I knew that now. And the calm, grey eyes.

“Hello, Savage,” she said crisply. “Pleased to see me?”

When she smiled, it was as if a lamp had clicked on inside, touching everything in sight.