Friday Harbor, page 20
He stepped into the main passenger cabin to find Floyd, white-knuckled once again, sitting slumped in a chair that faced an interior wall. He seemed to be staring at the base of the wall, which offered nothing more interesting to look at than glossy white marine paint over riveted sheet metal.
"Hey, you doing alright?" he asked Floyd.
Floyd exhaled loudly. "Never better."
"Keep an eye on that wall. Make sure nobody tries to paint any Bolshevik slogans on it."
"Ha."
"Can I bring you a cup of coffee from the galley?"
"No. No thanks," Floyd said, shutting his eyes tight. "It defies logic. I fully understand the scientific principles of buoyancy. And yet . . ." His eyes still squeezed shut, he shook his head.
"Hang in there."
"Uh-huh."
*****
It was late morning by the time the Bangor passed the West Point Lighthouse and entered Elliot Bay—where the ever-growing skyline and bustling waterfront of Seattle at last came into view. Suddenly, there were vessels everywhere—some under way, some tied up at piers, some at anchor out in the bay. Ships bound for or arriving from heaven only knew what ports around the Pacific Rim and beyond. Large ocean liners. Cargo ships—most of them built of steel, some still built of wood and rigged for sailing. Stubby tugboats, their funnels churning out columns of black coal smoke. And numerous small passenger steamers of the so-called Mosquito Fleet, motoring between Seattle and various islands and hamlets all over Puget Sound. In fact, it was to the very epicenter of Mosquito Fleet activity that the Bangor was headed: the always busy Galbraith Pier, at the foot of Spring Street.
It took another twenty minutes for the crew to maneuver the ship into its berth, tie up, and secure the gangplank. Floyd was the first passenger to disembark, practically running down the ramp with relief, the color returning to his face. He and Miles waited for a porter to hand their bags through the vessel's cargo door, then made their way to the terminal exit leading out onto Railroad Avenue. There, Miles happened to make momentary eye contact with a man who was leaning against a utility pole on the sidewalk, holding an open Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper that flapped violently in the wind. It struck Miles as an odd place for the man to be trying to read given that the entryway to the Mosquito Fleet terminal offered ample shelter from the stiff breeze blowing down the waterfront. The man's eyes quickly dropped to his flapping newspaper. Respecting a gut feeling, Miles watched him for a moment. He was a big man. Not quite as big as Miles, but big enough to intimidate most people. He wore a diamond pinky ring and a striped suit Miles thought was just ostentatious enough to suggest the man might be a gangster.
Calm down, he thought. You're being paranoid again.
Then, as Miles was just about to ask Floyd where they should go first, the man's eyes lifted and locked on Miles once again. This time it was Miles who averted his gaze, not wanting to appear rude, worried the man would realize he'd been staring at him.
They set off to find Miles a decent but cheap hotel room, with Miles looking over his shoulder more than once to make sure the big man with the newspaper wasn't following them. A few blocks down the waterfront, they came across a five-story brick establishment called, quite simply, the O.K. Hotel. It was an unpretentious workmen's hostel fronting Railroad Avenue, adjacent to the waterfront and a new elevated trolley trestle. They got Miles checked in and dumped both of their bags in his Spartan third-floor room. Floyd took the opportunity to splash water on his face in the sink, hoping to shake off his jitters from their voyage south. Then, intending to go straight to Seattle Police Department Headquarters to gather information on where the King of Rumrunners, Otto Stenersen, might be found, they stepped back out the front door where, to their happy surprise, they spotted a large sign for the Deepwater Salvage Company attached to the front of a cargo pier directly across the street. It was the company that owned the Deepwater Doubloon—the professional salvage vessel spotted loitering near D'Arcy Island the evening before the Lucky Lena was spotted adrift. Since it was the middle of the business day, and since they'd intended to eventually stop in anyway, they went there first.
THIRTY-SIX
The pier in which the offices of the Deepwater Salvage Company were housed was long and broad, jutting well out into Elliott Bay. A rusty tramp steamer with Athens, Greece registry was moored to its south side. Miles and Floyd entered through a barn-style double door off Railroad Avenue that was big enough to drive a truck through. The entire first floor was a high-ceilinged and shadowy warehouse containing stacks of lumber, sacks of grain, coils of thick rope, and wooden barrels of unknown content. The air smelled strongly of timbers treated with creosote, like new utility poles or railroad ties. They found a thick-necked longshoreman leaning against a barrel and taking a smoke break, asked him for directions, then climbed a set of stairs against one of the interior walls. It led up to a long second floor hallway, one side of which was lined with doors to the offices of various businesses. A seafood trading company. A freight forwarder. A purveyor of marine equipment. Finally, they came to the door for Deepwater Salvage and gave it a knock. To their mild surprise, it was answered by a conservatively-dressed, entirely prim-looking secretary with her gray hair tied back in a tight bun.
"May I help you?" she asked.
"We'd like to speak with the owner," Miles said. "Is he in the office today?"
"Mr. Hauer is indeed in. May I ask what this concerns?"
"It's a police matter. One of Mr. Hauer's vessels may have been in the vicinity of an incident we're looking into. We're hoping someone aboard the vessel may have seen something that would be of help to us."
"I see." She showed them to an incredibly comfortable crushed velvet couch in an otherwise undecorated and windowless anteroom, offered them tea—which they declined—then asked them to wait while she went down a short hallway to make the necessary inquiries. Less than a minute later, she was back. "Mr. Hauer would be happy to see you. Right this way, gentlemen."
"Gustav Hauer," said the middle-aged blonde, barrel-chested man who came around the desk and extended a giant, heavily callused hand in greeting. Miles and Floyd introduced themselves. Hauer's desk was no simple pine affair of the sort Miles expected of a waterfront seaman's office, but was instead a large, custom-made work of art. Its edges inlaid with intricate decorative patterns, the whole thing appearing to be built of exotic hardwoods. His walls were decorated with trophies of his trade. A brass propeller. A shadow box of ancient Chinese coins. Another shadow box with a China plate bearing the logo of a lost ocean liner called the SS Valencia. Outside Hauer's wide office window, a curling wisp of coal smoke rose from the stack of the Greek tramp steamer moored alongside the pier.
The man himself was a Scandinavian giant in shirtsleeves, with giant forearms and giant shoulders to match his giant hands. He was impeccably groomed, which struck Miles as odd for someone in such a rough line of work. His only obvious flaws were thick scars on the knuckles of all his fingers, and a left ring finger that was missing half of its original length.
"Thanks for seeing us," Miles said as he and Floyd took the offered seats and Hauer returned to his leather desk chair.
"My pleasure," he said. "Estelle tells me you're here about a police matter. How may I be of assistance?"
"It's our understanding that one of your vessels was operating in Haro Strait last week, near D'Arcy Island."
"The Deepwater Doubloon. My flagship, if you will. Yes, indeed."
"May I ask why?"
"Why it was in Haro Strait? Of course. My firm was hired by the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company to locate the wreck of one of their ocean liners. The RMS Empress of Burma, which, as you probably already know, sank in Haro Straight in 1918 after tearing her hull open on a reef."
"Hired to locate, or to salvage?"
"For now, just to locate. By our estimation, the wreck is in deep water. Very deep. Too deep for mounting any sort of conventional salvage operation."
"So the wreck hasn't been located?"
"No. In addition to being awfully deep, the terrain on the bottom of Haro Strait is discontinuous, meaning that it's very hard for us to drag it for clues."
"Given that the wreck is probably in such deep water, why does Canadian Pacific want you to bother?" Floyd asked.
"They never said. But sometimes the families who lose loved ones in sinkings like this want to know the location of the wreck for memorial reasons. And I suppose there's always a chance—albeit a small one—that it's not that deep after all."
"If that were the case," Floyd asked, "then what would they want you to salvage from the wreck?"
"Usually it's something like the ship's safe. Sometimes a piece of secret military hardware. Sometimes the propeller. If the wreck is shallow enough, we can recover the hull metal to sell for scrap. When a wreck is very shallow, sometimes we can even patch her up and raise the whole ship. But that's a tall order, let me tell you."
"I'm sure," Miles said. "Is it odd that a Canadian steamship line would hire an American firm to search for a wreck in Canadian waters?"
"Not at all. We're by far the biggest and best equipped company north of San Francisco. And we arranged all the necessary permissions with the British Columbia provincial government, as well as the involved federal ministry in Ottawa. Plus, given her last known course, she could very well have come to rest on the American side of the border. Nobody knows for sure."
"I see," Miles said. "Well, to get to the point of our visit, we're making inquiries concerning two vessels—one, a semi-converted seiner called the Lucky Lena; the other, a Trafton workboat called the Daisy. Both boats were operating in the vicinity of D'Arcy Island the same evening the Deepwater Doubloon was there. Long story short, the crew of the Lucky Lena has disappeared, while the Daisy has disappeared altogether, along with its captain. Our hope is that your crew might have seen something that would help us in our investigation."
"The good news is that I was captaining the Doubloon that day, and I know exactly the vessels you're talking about."
"Is that right?"
"We observed the Lucky Lena out there at least a dozen times over the past month."
"Doing what?"
"Sometimes loitering very close to D'Arcy Island. Sometimes making a pathetic attempt to look like they were fishing when it was quite clear that they were watching us."
"Watching you?"
"Yes, sir. Observing our work through their binoculars. Tracking our every move."
"What for?"
"It's not unheard of for unscrupulous captains to try to steal the fruits of our labors. Plunderers. Thieves. They watch us until we locate a wreck, and then, when we inevitably have to put in for fuel or supplies, try to steal whatever they can from it."
"How on earth could a couple of fishermen like them reach the wreck of the Empress of Burma?"
"Well, I didn't say their plan made any sense."
"So you think the captain of the Lucky Lena had plunder in mind?"
"Don't know why else he would be spending so much time watching us."
"What about the Daisy?"
"The Daisy watched us too, but only recently. Watched us and the Lucky Lena, both."
"Last Tuesday?"
"Tuesday. Yes. In the late evening. Both vessels were out there. Lucky Lena showed up just before sunset and took up station off D'Arcy Island. The Daisy, not far behind, motored in circles about a mile to our north."
"Did you happen to see the Daisy approach the Lucky Lena?"
"No, sir. We left the area as dirty weather was brewing. But I can tell you that as we departed, both vessels were in roughly the same positions they'd been in since arriving on the scene. That was the last we saw of them."
"I have a question," Floyd said.
"Of course."
"Is the Empress of Burma supposed to contain anything of unusual value?"
"Not according to its manifest."
"What about something not listed on the manifest?"
"Such as?"
"Gold, for example."
"Gold." Hauer smiled and leaned back in his chair. "My favorite word. And as a matter of fact, Mr. Floyd, it just so happens that there is a rather fun if entirely crazy legend out there."
"Concerning gold?"
"A king's fortune in gold. Russian gold. So I suppose I should call it a tsar's fortune."
"Tsar Romanov's gold?" Floyd asked, his eyebrows arched. "What's the legend?"
"Mr. Hauer probably has things to do," Miles said, not wanting to waste time with such nonsense.
"No, no. It's no bother. It isn't a long story. But it's a good one. Yes, Mr. Floyd. The story—the fable, I should say—involves the lost gold of the Russian imperial family. Hundreds of tons, or so they say."
"One of the biggest reserves of gold in the world," Floyd said, sounding fascinated.
"That's right. Now then, as everyone knows, Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children were supposed to have been slaughtered in cold blood by Bolshevik savages in Yekaterinburg in the summer of 1918."
"Supposed to have been?"
"There are persistent rumors that one of the children—possibly Princess Anastasia—escaped."
"Escaped to where?"
"No one knows. But there are also persistent rumors that as the Russian civil war raged, the White Army—that is, those military units loyal to the tsar—moved the imperial gold out of the capital of St. Petersburg, to a place of safe keeping in Kazan, an ancient trading city on the Trans-Siberian Railway about 500 miles east of Moscow. Needless to say, the war didn't go well for the White Army. Kazan fell to the Bolshevik Red Army in 1918. But when the Bolsheviks took the city, there was no gold to be found. No sign of it. Some believe that Admiral Alexander Kolchak, the doomed supreme commander of the White Army, ordered it shipped to the Siberian city of Irkutsk where it was eventually dumped into Lake Baikal to keep it from falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks. But some say that in the last days before the fall of Kazan, Kolchak sent the gold east on the Trans-Siberian Railway, clear across Asia, to the Russian Pacific Coast port of Vladivostok, along with a small escort of loyal soldiers and an entourage of aristocratic refugees—one of whom was reportedly seen wearing a broach bearing the double-headed eagle of the imperial family's coat of arms."
"Princess Anastasia," Floyd muttered.
"And an elusive fortune in gold. Great story so far, right? That much of it could even be true."
"That much of it?" Miles asked, surprised to find himself engrossed. "What happened next?"
"Heaven knows. But guess what the Empress of Burma's last port of call was before she sank near D'Arcy Island?"
"Vladivostok," Floyd said.
"Indeed. Vladivostok. The very city to which Kolchak allegedly sent the imperial gold and the mysterious entourage of aristocrats. The Empress of Burma stopped in Vladivostok barely a month before Red Forces took control of the city. From there, she sailed for Vancouver. As you know, she didn't quite make it. She probably sits in 700 feet of water at the bottom of Haro Strait."
"And people suspect the Russian gold was aboard."
"It's all conjecture. Hearsay. A friend of a friend of a friend knew some drunk stevedore in Vladivostok who claims to have helped load dozens of extremely heavy crates onto the Empress of Burma. Crates which, according to the actual, official Canadian Pacific cargo manifest, contained nothing more interesting than rife ammunition being shipped out as part of the evacuation of a legion of loyalist mercenaries."
"How do you know all this?" Miles asked.
"Well, for better or for worse, my line of work sometimes involves treasure maps and the chasing down of legends. Every once in a great while, one of them turns out to be legitimate, and you find a great chest of gold coins in the hold of a sunken Chinese cargo ship," Hauer said, pointing to the shadow box of Chinese coins on his wall.
"But you don't believe there's gold aboard the Empress of Burma?" Miles asked.
"No. There just isn't enough reliable information to make it likely. Of course, the fun thing about fables and ghost stories and conspiracy theories is that it's often impossible to disprove them. So they live on and grow like weeds. Are they true? Anything is possible, I suppose. But probably not."
Miles thought for a moment. "So the wreck hasn't been found, and you don't have a salvage contract with Canadian Pacific?"
"No. Not yet."
"Meaning there'd be no reason for you to have a confrontation with the crew of the Lucky Lena? To chase them off, or . . ."
"Or? Or what? Shoot them? Make them disappear? Those are wicked implications, sir. Mind you, we will defend our lawful and rightful claims from the likes of pirates and thieves. But as I mentioned, we have no salvage contract—just an agreement to find the ship—and it's probably too deep to allow for any meaningful recovery anyway. For that matter, even if we had salvage rights, and even if there were a fortune in gold aboard, the Lucky Lena's two-man crew of amateurs wouldn't have posed any threat."
"What if they had a Kretchmar diving apparatus?" Floyd asked, both lawmen watching Hauer's face intently.
To their surprise, Hauer smiled.
"Did they?" He laughed. "A Kretchmar suit?" He turned to gaze out his window, a look of boyish wonder on his face.
"Would it have made a difference?" Floyd asked again.
Hauer, still smiling, shook his head. "I don't know what the limits of that particular suit are. It's German. I've heard little about it and have never seen one myself. Regardless, past 160 feet deep, you need a special gas mixture that is very hard to come by. Less nitrogen and more helium than regular air. Even with that, the deepest I have ever, ever heard of anyone diving is about 50 fathoms—300 feet. And that was an elite U.S. Navy crew using a state-of-the-art Mark V dive suit to recover a submarine off Honolulu. A submarine built by Moran Brothers here in Seattle, as a matter of fact. I digress. I'll just say it again: given that the wreck is probably 700 feet down, the Lucky Lena's amateur crew didn't pose the least threat."
