“Yes, I do. Do you know where that cargo is now?”
“No, I don’t. But she never sunk in deep water—I know that. She’s ashore somewhere in the Mozambique Channel. Now I propose to you, Elliott, that we join forces. You’re playing a lone hand, I reckon, and it takes money to play a game like this. I have a partner with me, and we’ve got $25,000 to spend. What do you say?”
“I’d like to hear a little more,” said Elliott.
“Well, I’ll play my cards face up. Look here. That gold was stolen from the treasury at Pretoria by a gang of crooked Dutchmen. You may know that. My partner, Carlton, was in Pretoria at the time, and he got wind of it, and found out what ship it was going to be sent on. Do you know what we did? We squared the ship’s mate, Burke, to pile the old hooker up on the Afu Bata reef, off Mozambique. It cost us five thousand cash to make the deal with him, and we had to promise him a share of the plunder. Now do you see why we’re interested?”
Elliott saw, and he saw furthermore that the affair was revealing mazes of complexity that he had not suspected.
“Yes,” he said, trying not to look surprised. “Then you must know where she was wrecked, after all.”
“No, because the mate threw us down—the thief! He took our money and did us dirt. We hung around the Afu Bata reef in a dhow for three weeks, off and on, and the Clara McClay never showed up. At last we put into Zanzibar, and found that she hadn’t been sighted anywhere since she left Lorenzo Marques. A little later we heard that she had been wrecked, and that the mate had been picked up, and that he had said that she was sunk in deep water.”
“But that wasn’t the mate at all,” Elliott remarked.
“Yes, I know. I heard the story from that sanctimonious old hypocrite on the Peak. But it was the mate that sunk her. It was Burke that ran her ashore somewhere and figured to have all the plunder himself. It wasn’t his fault that he got drowned or whatever happened to him. The question now is—where is that wreck?”
Elliott laughed. “Good Lord, that’s the question I’ve been trying to solve for three months.”