I wake up late.
Mark is out cold beside me, the smell of booze thick over us. We forgot to order breakfast or even turn the air-con on before we fell into bed last night.
My head is fuzzy and I’m hungry. It looks like we ordered more room service last night. I roll out of bed carefully and wander over to the abandoned trolley.
Melted ice cream and an upturned champagne bottle in a bucket.
How much did we drink? Jesus. My tongue feels fat and dry in my mouth. And I’m absolutely starving. I make an executive decision and head for the phone.
Halfway across the floor, I feel a sharp pain shoot up through my foot and I lose my balance, crashing down hard onto the stone tiles.
Fucking hell, ow ow ow. Fucking ow.
A bright bulb of blood blossoms on the arch of my foot. Fuck. I see the offending scissors kicked up next to me. The bulb of blood bursts into a dribble and runs down and drips to the floor. My head throbs.
Oh, fuck this. I stand slowly, cautiously, and hobble to the phone. They pick up after two rings.
“Hi there. Can I order some room service please?…Yes, that’s it. Yes. Can I get two full breakfasts…poached, coffee for two, pastry basket….Yes, yes, that one. Orange juice for two. And do you have plasters?…No. Plasters—Band-Aids?…No. Band—? Like a first-aid kit or…Oh, oh yes! Yes, that’s great. Yes, great. Thank you.” I hang up and collapse back into bed, my foot bleeding into the sheets.
Mark stirs next to me. He grunts.
“Twenty minutes,” I mumble, and fall asleep.
I wake as Mark pulls the breakfast trolley through the room and out onto the deck. He’s wrapped in a hotel robe, bright white against his tanned skin. I grab the first-aid kit they brought and limp out to join him. Oversized T-shirt covering my underwear, foot crusted over with dried blood.
We eat in silence, staring dazed into the middle distance. I hobble back in to fetch us painkillers. Then after putting a plaster over my injury, I make the short move across to a sunlounger and promptly fall asleep again.
When I wake I see Mark has pulled the sunshade over me. God, I love him. I test my head with a gentle nod, a gentle shake. Yes, better. Much better. Maybe a shower now. I hobble back into the room past Mark watching Attenborough on cable and into the bathroom. He blows me a kiss as I pass by.
I let the cool water run over my face and hair. I rub the shampoo deep into my scalp; the massage feels heavenly. I think about last night. What did we do once we got back? I don’t remember having ice cream. I remember the scissors, getting the scissors, for the bag. That’s it.
I wrap a fresh towel around myself and wander back in to Mark.
“Did we open it?” I ask. I really hope we didn’t. There’s no way we can hand it in if we’ve ruined it.
He grimaces and hauls the bag up onto the bed.
It’s very clearly got a hole in it. We really didn’t get very far last night. God, drunk people are idiots. I notice Mark’s hand has two of the Band-Aids stuck to it. I guess he was in charge of scissors last night. I sit down on the bed and inspect the bag. The hole is useless. I can’t get a finger in to stretch it wider and I can’t see anything through it. Maximum impact, minimum results.
“Can we still hand it in?” I look up at Mark.
“Yeah, of course. We’ll just say we found it that way. It was in the sea, right?” He doesn’t seem concerned.
“If this hole is passable, would a slightly bigger hole be passable?” I hold his gaze.
He shrugs and chucks me the scissors from his bedside table.
“Knock yourself out,” he says, his attention drifting back to Attenborough.
But I don’t. I’m scared. I don’t know why. It seems wrong to open the bag.
But why? It’s just like finding a wallet, isn’t it? It’s all right to open the wallet and look at the stuff, find out who it belongs to. It’s only not all right if you take the stuff inside it. I don’t want to take the stuff inside. I just want to know. And that’s absolutely fine. It might help us return it. If we know whose it is.
So I take the scissors to the bag again and start to cut. After a while I wander out to the deck with it. There was a sharp knife out there on the food trolley earlier. I find it and force it into the small opening I’ve already made and start to saw. Inside I hear Mark turn on the shower.
I keep sawing until I can get one hand into the hole, and then I pull with all my strength, opening the tear in the fabric. The canvas rips apart with a long satisfyingly bass-y tear. I’m in. I turn to shout to Mark but he’s in the shower. Should I wait before I look?
No.
I tip the bag out onto the wooden decking and look down at the contents.
I blink. A long time passes.
I think about calling to Mark. But I don’t. I just look.
Four objects. The largest by far is the one I reach out for first. It’s bulky but much lighter than its size would suggest. This was what was keeping the bag afloat. Paper. Tightly packed paper. More specifically, paper money. A clear plastic vacuum-sealed package of money. American dollars. In bundles, each bundle labeled “$10,000” with a paper currency strap. Real money. Actual real money. Lots of it.
It hits me. Viscerally. My stomach flips and I run toward the bathroom, but, impeded by the sharp stabs in my foot, I find myself vomiting halfway through my dash across the room. I lurch to my knees, bracing against the floor as my stomach muscles heave beyond my control. Bile, thick pungent bile. Fear made visible. I moan as I struggle to catch my breath between retches.
We shouldn’t have opened the bag.
I wipe my mouth on the bedsheet and stumble to my feet. I limp back outside and squat down in front of it. I stare at the money; the tight vacuum packing has somehow managed to keep the water out, and although, obviously, that wasn’t its original purpose, I doubt if we’d have ever found the duffel bag otherwise.
The next item is a cloudy ziplock bag about the size of an iPad mini. It’s full of small pieces of something. Something broken, maybe broken glass. The salt water has gotten into this bag and misted the plastic so I can’t quite make out what’s inside it. I run back into the room and grab a towel. I squat back down and rub at the plastic but the fogginess is inside as well. I grab the scissors again and snip the corner of the baggie carefully. I tip the contents out onto the towel.
Diamonds tumble out before me. Beautifully cut and sparkling back at me in the sunlight. So many. I can’t judge the number. A hundred? Two hundred? They twinkle innocently in the sunlight. Mainly princess and marquise cut by the look of it, but I see some heart and pear cut in there too. I know my cuts, colors, and sizes of diamond. We looked at every possible permutation before Mark and I settled on the one in my ring. I look at my hand, my own ring glittering in the sunlight. They’re all about the same size. The same size as my stone. That means they’re all about two carats. Oh my God. I look down at the beautiful sparkling pile, my breath catching in my throat. The sun glinting colors off of them. There could be over a million pounds in diamonds here. Oh wow. Wow wow. Holy crap.
“Mark!” I call, slightly off key, slightly too loud.
“Mark! Mark, Mark, Mark.” My voice sounds weird; I hear it coming from me but don’t recognize it. I’m standing now.
He runs out of the bathroom bare-chested. My arm goes up and I point at the pile before me. His eyes follow my finger. But he can’t see past the crumpled empty bag on the decking.
“Oh, watch out for the vomit,” I shout. He dodges it and stares at me like I’ve gone insane, finally coming out to me in the sunshine, completely confused.
“What the—” Then he sees it. “Oh Jesus Christ! Bloody hell. Right. Bloody—Okay. Christ.”
He stares at me. I can read his face as clear as day.
“Jesus.”
He’s squatting down in front of it all, turning the packet of money over and over in his arms. He looks up at me.
“It could be a million. They’re ten-thousand-dollar packs,” he says, his eyes bright. He’s really excited.
Because, let’s be clear, this is really bloody exciting.
“I know. That’s what I thought. What about the other stuff?” I say quickly. I squat down beside him.
He pushes the diamonds around on the towel with his finger. He moistens his lips and squints through the sun at me.
“Two carats, right? That what you’re thinking?” he asks.
“Yes. How many stones?”
“Hard to tell without counting. I’m guessing a hundred and fifty to two hundred.”
I nod. “That’s what I thought. So, maybe a million’s worth?”
“Yeah, could be more. But that seems right. Fuck.” He rubs the stubble along his jaw.
“What else is there?” he asks.
I don’t know; I haven’t looked at the rest yet.
He picks up another sealed clear plastic bag; just visible through the salt smears is a USB stick. Sealed tight, somehow still protected from the water. He places it back down carefully next to the stones and the money. He looks at me before picking up the final object.
It is a hard plastic case with a handle. He sets it down in front of us. I know what it is before he flips open the plastic latches.
It sits there, dark dense metal nestled in molded foam padding. A handgun. I don’t know what type. I don’t know about guns. The sort you’d see in a film, I guess. A modern film. That type. But a real one, on the decking, in front of us. Spare bullets nestled in a fresh cardboard box next to it in the foam. Sealed. There’s an iPhone in the box too. The plastic gun case must be airtight, because everything inside it is dry, and, I’d imagine, still in working order.
“Okay.” Mark closes the case. “Let’s go inside for a bit, shall we?”
He gathers the money, USB, and gun case into the destroyed canvas bag and ushers me inside. I carefully carry in the towel of diamonds.
He slides the glass door shut and sets the bag on the bed.
“Okay, Erin. First things first. We’re going to clean up the vomit, right? Clean ourselves, and the room, up. Then we’re going to have a chat, okay?” He’s watching me encouragingly. He’s speaking to me in the same, even, measured tone he had yesterday when he told me about the sharks. He’s extremely reassuring when he needs to be. Yes, I’ll clean up.
It doesn’t take me long. I use some of the disinfectant lotion from the first-aid kit to douse the floor. I wash my face, brush my teeth, and pull myself together. Meanwhile Mark’s cleaned the rest of the room. The food cart is gone. The bed is stripped now too, the bag the only thing on it. The diamonds sit in a whiskey tumbler. Mark wanders in from the lounge area holding my laptop.
“First of all, I don’t think we should contact the police until we know what the fuck is going on. I don’t fancy spending life in a Polynesian prison for diamond smuggling or whatever. I suppose we need to know if anyone is missing this stuff. Right? If anyone might know we have it?” he says.
I take the computer as he holds it out to me.
I see, we’re going to do a bit of research. Research I’m good at. He sits down on the bed and I sidle next to him.
“So, what should I check the news for, what do we think? Shipwreck? Missing persons? Or maybe robbery gone wrong? What are we looking for?” I ask. I’m not sure. My fingers hover over the keys. We need something to go on.
He looks at the bag again.
“Well, we have a phone.” He lets it hang there.
Yes. Yes, we do have a phone, which means we have a number, we also probably have an email address and emails, and we probably have an actual name.
“Shall we check the phone? See who they are?” I ask.
“Not yet. Wait. Let’s just think logically here, carefully. Are we breaking the law right now? Are we, Erin? Have we done anything? Anything at all wrong so far?”
Like I would know. I suppose my moral compass has always been slightly more true than his, but only slightly.
“No. No, I don’t think so,” I say. “I ripped the bag. But I ripped it to find out what was inside—to find out who it belonged to. It’s the truth; that should stand up.”
“Why didn’t we give it straight to the police or security?”
“We did. We handed it in to the hotel straightaway but they gave it back to us. And then we got drunk and we thought we’d sort it out ourselves. It’s stupid, but it’s not illegal.” I nod. That sounds all right, I decide.
“But this is wrong now,” I add. I say it as I think it. “We should call the police right now and tell them about it. The gun and the money are definitely red flags,” I say, nodding again.
I study the frayed bag. I can see the corner of the packet of money through the torn canvas. A million dollars. I look at Mark.
“Just a second,” I say. “I remember this. It came up in that Norwegian fishermen film.” I tap away at Google.
“Basically, flotsam and jetsam, maritime debris, salvage, whatever you want to call it, basically treasure, is covered by international maritime law. Here…look at this.” I scroll down and read from the gov.uk website.
“ ‘Jetsam’ is the term used to describe goods jettisoned overboard to lighten a vessel’s load in emergencies. ‘Flotsam’ is the term used to describe goods accidentally lost overboard in emergencies. Blah, blah, blah. The salvor must declare salvaged goods by completing a ‘report of salvage’ form within 28 days of recovery. Blah, blah, blah. A salvor acting within the law is likely to be entitled to the salvaged goods should the owner not come forward. Uh-huh. Oh, wait. Shit! Under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1995 this law applies to all salvage within UK territorial waters—up to the twelve-nautical-mile limit.” British law is totally irrelevant here. I’m not sure whether we’ll fall under French or U.S. law in Polynesia.
I search again. Tapping. Mark stares at the bag, mute.
“Here we go! U.S. Department of Commerce. ‘Flotsam’ and ‘jetsam’ are terms that describe two types of marine debris associated with vessels. ‘Flotsam’ is defined as debris in the water that was not deliberately thrown overboard, often as a result from a shipwreck or accident. ‘Jetsam’ describes debris deliberately thrown overboard by a crew of a ship in distress, most often to lighten the ship’s load. Under maritime law, the distinction is important.” I look up at Mark.
“Flotsam may be claimed by the original owner, whereas jetsam may be claimed as property of whoever discovers it. If the jetsam is valuable, the discoverer may collect proceeds received through the sale of the salvaged objects.” I stop.
Mark looks out of the window across the lagoon, frowning.
When he finally speaks he says, “So, I suppose the question is: is this flotsam or jetsam?”
“Uh-huh.” I nod, moistening my lips.
We need to go back there and find out. We need to go back to the paper circle tomorrow and see if there’s a wreck. If the owner went down in the storm and lost this bag, then that’s one thing. If he threw it overboard and ran away, that’s another.
If there’s nothing there, under the water, under all those papers, then we are two million richer.
“If there’s a wreck there, we’ll just put the bag back. Then we’ll report it. But if there’s nothing there…If the bag was abandoned, I think we’re all right. I think we’ll be all right, Mark.” I go to the fridge and grab some ice-cold water. I take a sip and pass it to him.
“Yes?” I ask.
He takes a sip. Runs his hand through his hair.
“Yes,” he agrees. “We’ll go back tomorrow.”