3. The Finding
After a morning flight down from Atlanta, Mike Gabrieli spent the middle part of his day in Miami Beach, talking fruitlessly to police and to people at the hotel where Tom had been registered when he disappeared, leaving a suitcase, some clothes, and an unpaid bill. Then Mike got on the late-afternoon flight from Miami to Key West.
He had never been south of Miami before, and found the look of the Keys pleasantly surprising. Unwalled by hotels, and stitched by the slender thread of US1, an immensity of blue-green water embraced near-tropic islands. Near the end of the brief flight he tried to catch a glimpse of Cuba, which was now closer than Miami, but he could see only August clouds massed on the south horizon.
From the air, Key West looked more built up than he had expected. Still, the airport was far from busy. Actually it seemed almost deserted. The next flight back to Miami-there were apparently no scheduled flights at all to anywhere else-might be planned for next month instead of tomorrow morning.
One cab was still waiting after his few fellow passengers had vanished into the sullen heat. Mike got into it without hurrying, sport shirt already sticking to his ribs, and dropped his little traveling bag at his feet. He gave the driver the address of Aunt Tessie's house, and hoped silently that the air conditioners there were working as well as the cab's was.
The cab left him on a corner in what might have been a lowermiddle-class suburb, except that at least two of Aunt Tessie's neighbors were building large boats in their backyards. A dog barked someplace, and another answered. The vegetation looked tropical, all of it different from what was common anywhere north of Florida.
Feeling in his pocket for the key, Mike hefted his little bag and strode down the narrow walk toward the little white stucco house. Palms in the front yard, and in the back what looked like a tall banana tree. He had seen family snapshots of the place; a number of relatives had stayed here at one time or another. Tessie also let the house out frequently through a temporary rental service, so the utilities were kept turned on. He had heard there were two bedrooms.
Looking into a screened-in front porch, he saw some heavy wooden lawn chairs, stained redwood not long ago. He walked on. His key was for the side door, which he entered from the carport.
The carport was empty-completely empty-and Mike stood there for a moment making a teeth-baring grimace. The Humphrey Bogart look, Tom used to say. It was no doubt the dumb little bastard's own fault, whatever had happened to him. Mike could only pray that he was still in one piece, somewhere . . .
A four-inch green lizard sat on a boundary wall of open-work masonry and looked impassively back at Mike. Tom had lived in this house for a while when he first came down to the Keys, a year and a half ago, to work as a diver for the treasure hunters and to try to get his head together, as he had put it. Then came the Great Pot Party, infamous in the annals of the Gabrieli family. Police cars right here in Aunt Tessie's driveway, and all hell broken loose with the old folks. Although the cops had never convicted him formally of anything, Tom had been firmly requested to move out. Now, since his disappearance, Tessie seemed to be having guilt feelings, as if her eviction notice had contributed to some ultimate downfall.
Mike unlocked the side door and went in, to find all serene. Inside was no hotter than outside-it was evidently impossible to close the louvered doors and windows tightly. After he got the three window air-conditioners going, Mike looked around.
Inside the doors of kitchen cabinets were notes, informing all tenants where the household goods and fuses could be found, when they could pick the two kinds of limes from the trees in the backyard, how to obtain good plumbers, electricians, babysitters. Tessie had renting down to a science. She admonished tenants to keep their foodstuffs tightly sealed against tropical insects and to bring all lawn furniture indoors if they left during hurricane season, August through November.
The phone, like everything else, was working. But the first time Mike tried the number that he had brought along, there was no answer. After ten rings, he hung up and went to inspect the refrigerator. Two cans of beer and a bottle and a half of pop. He again consulted the kitchen-cabinet notes, then found the key to the tool shed just where it was supposed to be, on a small brass hook just inside the door leading to the carport. He went outside.
The grass was only a couple of inches long; somebody must be mowing it regularly. The tool shed was a small metal structure set against the back wall of the house. When he took off the padlock and swung the creaking door, he was observed by a solemn frog who looked up blinking like a long-term prisoner, but made no break for freedom. Maybe he could squeeze in and out under the loose door. Maybe enough bugs came in to keep him happy
As Aunt Tessie had said, there was a bicycle in the shed, amid a miscellany of tools and junk. He dragged the power mower aside and got it out.
After a quick trip to a nearby grocery, Mike popped open a soft-drink can and tried Sally Zimmerman's number again.
"Hello?" The tone of the girl's voice answering told him nothing.
"Sally?"
"Yes, who's this?"
"I'm Mike Gabrieli. Tom's brother." He let silence grow for a few seconds before he went on. "I'm in town right now, and I'd like very much to talk to you."
It took a few moments before she said, "All right. Is there any word yet on Tom?"
"No, that's why I'm down here. Listen, it's six o'clock. Have you made any arrangements for dinner? If not, I'll take you out somewhere-your choice, I don't know my way around."
"All right-thank you, that would be fine." Yet something in her voice was holding back. "Where are you staying?"
They traded information. Sally volunteered to borrow her roommate's car and pick him up. It sounded as if she hadn't been to the house before.
By dusk, the two of them were seated in a cool restaurant, looking out through a wide, sealed window at sunset gulls, and a moored rank of what Mike supposed were commercial fishing boats.
" . . . so when your father called me, I felt so sorry. I wished I could do something to help him. He sounded like such a nice old man."
"He is." Mike considered. "See, he and Mom are both getting up there. Tom's being what they call a little bit wild has just gotten to them more and more of late. He was arrested last year in some marijuana-smoking deal down here. Probably you heard about that."
Her tanned fingers broke a dinner roll and started to butter it. She was wearing a pink top that left her midriff bare, and it wasn't hard to see why Tom had kept a more-or-less steady thing going with her. She said, "I heard about that incident from Tom-I wasn't there. I gather it was at your aunt's house."
"Yeah. So. I want to ask if you have some clue to what's happened to him. Maybe there's something you didn't want to worry nice old Dad Gabrieli with, but you wouldn't mind telling me."
"Like I say, I wish I could." Sal took a neat but good-sized bite of roll. "The police were asking, too. But I couldn't help them out."
"He told you he was going up to Miami Beach?"
"Yes, but not why. You and he look quite a bit alike." She studied his face almost impersonally. "He used to say you were a little bigger and meaner. Enough alike so I have no doubt you're really his brother."
"Why should you have any doubt about that? I mean, why would I say so if I wasn't?"
It looked as if she hadn't heard the question. Very much in control right now, this girl.
Mike asked, "Excuse me if I get personal. Tom talked as if you and he were-very close. Is that the way it was?"
She gave him a harder look than any yet. "If you mean did we live in the same room and fight over closet space, no. Neither of us wanted that. If you mean did we spend a lot of time in bed together, yes."
"So he just said, I'm going up to Miami Beach and never gave you a reason, and you never asked him why."
"That's right. Well, here comes the real food at last." But when the red snapper was put in front of her, she didn't really attack it seriously.
Mike let her nibble a little before he said, "You know, Tom phoned me in Atlanta, a couple of nights before he went up to Miami Beach."
"Your father said."
"But there's a thing or two my father doesn't know because I've never told him. Things Tom told me on the phone. I was the only one at home that night he called." He took a mouthful of his own fish and chewed it stolidly. Delicious. Well, he thought, here goes. "About the whereabouts of a certain object."
He had been wondering if she might drop her fork, but it just stayed there in her hand. She looked across at Mike, then down at her plate, then out the window. She put the fork down finally, picked up a roll and looked at that, and settled at last for a cigarette, which she took from a metal case like one a soldier might carry.
"Oh, damn it," she said. Her voice sounded softer and younger than before. "Just damn it all anyway."
"Now, I ‘m going to have to dig into that, Sally. Maybe I'll have to get the cops to help me. See, I don't care one way or the other about this package itself, or who else might get into trouble or might not. All I care about is finding Tom-finding what's happened to him."
She fidgeted with the metal case. "You smoke?"
"No. Not even tobacco."
"He wasn't into the-drug thing, anymore, if he ever was. I told you, that famous pot-smoking party was a couple of months before I knew him."
"Good." Mike waited.
Sal glared at him awhile and finally had to speak. "Is this-thing-wherever he said it would be?"
"It's supposed to be somewhere around Aunt Tessie's house. I figure Tom kept a key to the place even after she officially threw him out . . . as soon as we finish dinner, I'm going back and do a thorough search. You want to be there when I find it?"
A violent headshake. "I want nothing whatever to do with it."
"If you're so sure as all that, you must know exactly what it is."
She wouldn't answer. Puffed out smoke. Wished with all her power (he was certain) that the airplane that brought him down had crashed on landing, killing all aboard.
"Things are getting awfully goddamned serious, Sally." His voice was low and slow. "My brother might be dead. If you're really his friend, I want what's good for you as well as him. If not . . . " She closed her eyes. "I'll drive you over there."
Night had come down fast. The Datsun's headlights pulling into the carport lit up the red metal cabinet like a warning barricade. It sat right at the carport's rear, just next to where the backyard's grass began, where nothing had been before. Sally parked a yard from the cabinet, and Mike got out of the car and stood there looking down at it. Its doors were hooked closed with a small, unlocked padlock. The cabinet was about a foot deep, two feet wide, three high.
" ‘Evenin'."
The southern accent came from just beyond the nearby wall of openwork masonry that edged the yard and carport. In the next yard, the lights from the next house filtering through shrubbery behind him, a tallish man, gray-haired but hale, stood leaning on the wall.
"Hello," said Mike.
The neighbor smiled. "Saw y'all were stayin' here now, so I brought the little cabinet back. Miz Gabrieli keeps the gasoline in there for the power mower-I figured you might be wantin' it. Last tenants just left it sittin' out in the carport when they left. Then a couple weeks ago we had a hurricane watch, kinda early for the season. So I took it in. Back in ‘62 when she blew, I got a picnic table from the yard on t' other side right through the wall o' my house. Don't pay t' leave stuff sittin' round the yard if she's gonna blow."
"Thank you," said Mike.
"Hope y'all don't mind my takin' it in. But it's safer when she's gonna blow."
"Quite all right."
Mike unlocked the side door and ushered Sally inside. After turning on a light in the living room, he stationed himself beside a kitchen window where he could look out into the carport and keep an eye on the red cabinet and also on the yard next door. He said, "Whyn't you get us two beers out of the refrigerator? Or if you'd like something else, I think there's bourbon and vodka above the sink."
"You said you were going to search for-something."
He got a beer for himself, tasted it, continued looking out.
"Where's it supposed to be hidden?"
"Right in that little cabinet the kindly neighbor just brought back."
"Tom said he put it there? Do you suppose it's still-?"
"I don't know. I'm waiting for that man to go inside before I go out again to take a look. He's still goofing around in his yard. What is it, Sally? What did Tom hide?"
"You mean he didn't tell you that?"
"The way you say that means he did tell you." Mike sipped his beer again. "Whyn't you tell me about it now?" She was quiet and he shrugged. "I'd mix you a drink, but I don't want to leave my post just now. Why don't you help yourself?"
After a while, she did.
At last a porch light went out, over on the other side of the masonry wall, and a screen door swung and banged. Dogs barked peevishly, as if bored with their own routine. Eventually all was quiet.
"All right," said Mike. On the kitchen floor he spread old newspapers someone had left beneath the sink. Then he went out into the dark carport, picked up the little cabinet-it felt promisingly heavy-and carried it in. He closed the blinds on the kitchen windows. Half an eye on Sally, who was hovering a few feet away, he lifted the padlock from the metal doors and opened them.
Inside was about what he might expect-flammables that good safety practice forbade storing inside a house or even in an attached shed. First a red safety can marked Gasoline, on the cabinet's top shelf. Mike sniffed at it, shook it, and put it aside. No doubt it was mixed with a little motor oil to fuel the mower's tiny engine.
On the bottom shelf were a roachlike thing that scuttled away rapidly into the woodwork, a small can of paint thinner, a mined brush, and a large paint can, its cover pressed down solidly upon a hardened rim of redwood stain that would match the chairs on the front porch. Mike got out a pocketknife and with its stubbiest blade pried up the lid. Paint filled the can nearly to the top.
Sally let out breath almost explosively and relaxed into a chair. Mike sat back on his heels and bared his teeth. "Get me an empty jar," he said. "I think there's a big one in the cabinet under the sink." There shouldn't be so much paint left in the damn can-not with all those drippings down its sides.
Sal hesitated, but in a moment brought the glass jar. He took off its lid, and carefully started pouring paint. With most of the liquid out of the way, he looked into the can, grunted with satisfaction, and used more newspaper as a crude glove to extract from it something heavy and crinkly that occupied most of its remaining space. A plastic bag, bound tight with rubber bands around something irregular and hard. Heavy enough to be a gun, but the shape seemed wrong. He had been half-expecting, fearing, dope, which he visualized as small packets of white powder. But this . . .
Mike worked methodically, getting only a little paint on his fingers. And then, feeling emptied by astonishment, he was holding in his hands the golden face. A little paint had gotten on its chin, and he wiped it off mechanically.
Sally waited in her chair. Her face showed fear, he thought, but no surprise.
"Stolen?" he asked.
She sighed and got out another cigarette. "No. Tom just found it, snorkeling, one day . . . I was along. He was determined he was going to keep it, not tell any authorities. Some crazy tax laws or something they have here-the state winds up owning most of the treasure if you just tell what you've got. Anyway. He wanted to sell it secretly and keep the money for himself. That's all I know."
"So. And he went up to Miami Beach trying to make some kind of deal?"
"I suppose so. Yes, yes, it was that."
A length of plastic clothesline, which looked as if it would match that strung in the back yard, had been tied into the holes in the mask's flanges.
"Did Tom walk around wearing this? Don't tell me he found it in the ocean with this cord in place."
"No, it had no cords tied on it then. I told him not to wear it-I don't know. It had no cord, the one time that I saw it."
He started to reach for his beer, and then forgot about it. In a way, he could almost wish he had found heroin. That could have been flushed down the toilet, and no one the wiser. No one would know that Tom had been mixed up in such a thing, and there would have been no evidence left to hang a rap on him if he was still alive. But this. You couldn't simply throw away a thing like this.
Mike asked, "You told him not to wear it? Why?"
It was a few seconds before she answered. "I just told him not to get me involved in anything. I didn't want any share. Mike, just keep me out of this. That's all I ask."
He stood up, holding the mask carefully. "Is my brother still alive?"
"How should I know?" Real-sounding anguish in the voice. Ragged draw on the cigarette. "Oh, God, I hope he is . . . Now you know as much as I do about it all."
"Who was he going to see? Who was he talking to, to make this deal?"
"Mike, I'll tell you absolutely the last thing I know about it, and then you can do what you like. I'm finished-I've had it-call in the cops or not."
"All right, all right, what's this last thing?"
Sally choked on smoke, then seemed to pull herself together. "Tom was seeing a man called Esperanza about something, I suppose about the mask. I heard Tom talking to him on the phone one day. Then several times he asked if Esperanza had called for him. One night when I was staying at Tom's place. And then a day or two after that, I saw Tom meeting this old man out on the street, and they ducked in like they were trying to hide. Rather a big old guy-I say old, because his hair was white, you know? But he might have been, what do you call it-platinum blond, except his complexion was darker than Tom's or yours . . . Indian-looking, or maybe Bahamian. You see a lot of people from the Bahamas here in the Keys. And he had kind of a big hooked nose."
The sinister foreigner. It sounded just a little peculiar. Nursing suspicious thoughts about Sally, Mike raised the gold weight in his hands and started to fit his chin into the accommodating hollow-
"Don't!" She rose from her chair, gesticulating.
He jerked his hands down, the thought half-formed that she must have seen some poisonous tropical vermin on the mask. Or there was something about the thing itself . . . "What?"
She stood there awkwardly, as if frightened despite being ashamed to be frightened over something so foolish. She blurted out: "You can see funny things that way."
"Huh?" His vague suspicions of some kind of drugs involved came back. Scowling, he sniffed at the mask, looked at it closely from every angle. Then, while Sally remained silent, he slowly pulled it on, this time all the way, setting the clothesline strap around his head. He would hear Sally if she moved, though now he couldn't see what she was doing. He could see something, though. Just some kind of light-specks, racing in the translucent white stones that made the eyes.
The light that did come through seemed to form patterns, hinting at the familiar. It was probably like holding a seashell to your ear, and hearing patterns-in that case, voices-in the random rushing of the molecules of air.
But he had no time now to play. He pulled the mask off and, holding it in one hand, went to the phone in the living room. He looked up a number in the thin local book and started dialing.
"Mike, please. I don't want the police on me again." Her tone seemed to imply that something could be given in exchange. She stood in the kitchen doorway, smiling hopefully.
He bared his teeth at her briefly and said into the phone, "What time does the next plane for Miami leave? Thank you." He hung up. "Not until morning."
Sally leaned against the wall, relieved.
Now he was sure there were going to be legal complications. The only dependable legal help he felt sure of was back home in Atlanta. Maybe he would be committing some kind of technical crime by taking this thing across a state line, but Tom had left it for him-left it in his trust, though vaguely-and now it looked like something finally had happened to the crazy little bastard.
He should have come down weeks ago, maybe. But he hadn't. You always expected that Tom would stay out of any real trouble, would turn up smiling somehow . . . Thinking dark thoughts, Mike went into the bedroom he had been going to occupy, picked up his still-packed bag, came out, and dropped it on a kitchen chair. He started stuffing paint-smeared newspapers into a plastic garbage bag. "What's chances of driving me up to Miami?" he asked.
A complex of emotions danced across Sal's face. "It's about a hundred and fifty miles. My girlfriend will be wondering about her car."
"See if you can call her, arrange to borrow it."
She hesitated for a moment, then went into the living room, where he could hear her dialing. He kept on cleaning up the mess of paint and papers. The mask was on the table where he could keep an eye on it. Now Sal was talking on the phone; he couldn't quite hear what she was saying, but she seemed to be making no effort to keep her voice low, so he didn't try very hard.
He had finished the hasty clean-up job before she got through with her call. Standing in the kitchen, he heard her quick footsteps coming back. She started to say, "She doesn't-" and then her voice broke off with a quick catch of breath when she saw what he was doing. The small sound seemed to modulate the storm of light-flecks that the mask's translucent eyes were passing on to his.
He started to ask, "Did you ever try this-" He let the question die, with the discovery that he could now see her, the kitchen around, the living room behind her. The eyepieces were growing quite transparent. Did the warmth of the wearer's body somehow-
Through what might have been glass, he beheld Sally standing in the doorway leading to the living room, one hand raised to protest what he was doing, her blue eyes wider than he had seen them yet. And simultaneously and without confusion, he saw something else. The new scene occupied the same space, as if it were superimposed by half-reflection on a glass window. He could see the outside of the front of the house in which he stood. It was dark night out there, yet he could see it clearly. A car was just easing to a stop before the house, its movement and its braking done with the utter soundlessness of silent film.
"The eyes have gone transparent," he reported steadily to Sally, meanwhile watching three dark-haired men in sports shirts get out of the car.
"It works that way," she said unsteadily. She still held one hand up, a warding-off of something. "From the outside they still look white, but you can see-oh, take it off. Oh, I should have thrown it away, the way it warned me that first day."
Two of the phantom men were coming down the front walk with rapid strides, entering the enclosed porch where the redwood chairs were stacked. The third was moving even more quickly to take up a position in the carport. Except, of course, none of them were really there. No screen door, no footsteps could be heard.
"It warned you?"
"To throw it back into the ocean. Why? What are you seeing?"
His point of vision was now abruptly back at his true location. He watched while his image, ghost, something, looking like a line drawing of himself done by computer, separated itself from his body and moved to the front door, as if to answer the knocking that had not sounded. In its right hand, his image swung an image of the mask.
His image turned the knob, and abruptly an image of the door-not the real door, he could be quite sanely sure of that-swung in, so violently that his ghostly double recoiled. The two men who had come down the walk burst in, strange-looking weapons flaring in their hands. Mike's doppelganger fell; one of the two men snatched the image of the mask from his imaged hand. The whole incredible scene was frozen at that point-at the instant at which the telephone began to ring.
Mike took the mask off while it rang again. Sally looked at his face, muttered something frightened, and sat down.
He moved to the phone, while his ears kept listening for the sound of that car coming to a stop outside.
"Mike Gabrieli?" It might be an actor's voice, so resonant and precise.
"Yes."
"This is Esperanza. Quickest way I could get in touch with you was by phone. Tell me what you are going to do with the Mask." Somehow the capitalization seemed audible. There was no doubt about which mask he meant.
Mike held the phone in one hand, Mask in the other, looking back and forth between them. Then he put the receiver to his ear again. "What in hell you talking about?"
A hissing, rapid chuckle. "Tough guy, huh? Good, that'll be needed. Look, I don't want to get it away from you. I'd rather you wore it. If it warns you about something, better pay attention. Your brother wore it some, but not enough to save his skin. But tell me your plans. What do you want?"
"What do you know about my brother?" For a moment, he thought Esperanza had hung up, but then he realized that the phone had gone dead. He hung it up and instinctively raised the gold face to fit his own once more. Sally was saying something that he ignored.
The eyes were still clear, and he could see the same sequence starting over. The car stopped and the same three men got out of it and approached the house, one at the side, two from the front. But this time the brakes and doors and feet were audible. This time the pounding on the door boomed loudly.
"Police officers! Open up!" The voice was vibrant with authority. Again Mike's image separated from himself. But this time it darted across the living room, moved a floor lamp two feet west, a coffee table one foot north, and came back to stand at his side, facing the door, which now an image of Sally moved to open. This time the Mike-image wore its Mask. As Sal's spectral hand touched the doorknob, the scene faded, though the Mask's eyes remained transparent for its wearer.
"Open the door or we're gonna break it down!"
Mike drew a breath, and moved. People said he was lucky, but it was really a lifelong feeling for when to move, when not. He quickly shifted the floor lamp two feet, coffee table one, and came back to where he had been standing. "Sally, get the door."
Her eyes kept marveling at his Masked face. "Hadn't you better take that thing-?" She was puzzled by his shuffling the furniture, and she was scared, though a long way from hysterical; she thought they really were policemen at the door.
"Just open it," he said from inside gold, as he pulled the strap a little tighter above his ears. He knew they had the side door to the carport covered. With metal louvers on all the windows, there was no way of getting out.