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  MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.

  After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.

  Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.

  West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil’s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.

  Morris West died at his desk in 1999.

  THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION

  FICTION

  Moon in My Pocket (1945, as Julian Morris)

  Gallows on the Sand (1956)

  Kundu (1957)

  The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)

  The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)

  The Second Victory (US title: Backlash) (1958)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1959)

  The Naked Country (1960)

  Daughter of Silence (1961)

  The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

  The Ambassador (1965)

  The Tower of Babel (1968)

  Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)

  The Salamander (1973)

  Harlequin (1974)

  The Navigator (1976)

  Proteus (1979)

  The Clowns of God (1981)

  The World is Made of Glass (1983)

  Cassidy (1986)

  Masterclass (1988)

  Lazarus (1990)

  The Ringmaster (1991)

  The Lovers (1993)

  Vanishing Point (1996)

  Eminence (1998)

  The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)

  PLAYS

  The Illusionists (1955)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1961)

  Daughter of Silence (1962)

  The Heretic (1969)

  The World is Made of Glass (1982)

  NON-FICTION

  Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)

  Scandal in the Assembly (1970, with Richard Frances)

  A View from the Ridge (1996, autobiography)

  Images and Inscriptions (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Terms used in the text do not always reflect current usage.

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  First published in Great Britain in 1956 by Angus & Robertson

  Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1956

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  Cover design: Julia Eim

  Cover image: iStock

  ISBN 978 1 76029 752 7 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 76063 832 0 (ebook)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  THE letter was delivered to my room at a quarter past twelve on Wednesday the thirtieth of June. It was addressed to Mr Renn Lundigan, Department of History, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.

  There was a baroque seal on the flap of the envelope, and an address in Spanish in the lower left-hand comer. The postmark was slightly askew and the typescript was fine and clear.

  I remember all these things so clearly because I looked at the envelope for a long, long time, before I dared to open it.

  Finally I picked up a paper-knife, slit the envelope carefully, took out the folded sheet and sat down, lit a cigarette and began to read.

  The man who had written the letter was the Chief Archivist of the City of Acapulco, Mexico.

  He told me with Latin flourish of the interest my inquiry had awakened in his department. He told me of his eagerness to establish so definite a link between the Spanish navigators of the eighteenth century and the new continent, Terra Australis Incognita. He told me how gratified he was to co-operate with so scholarly a gentleman on so important a piece of historical research.

  He told me that in October 1732 the Dona Lucia had left Acapulco with twenty chests of minted gold for the colonies of His Most Catholic Majesty in the Philippine Islands.

  That the Dona Lucia had never arrived at Manila and was presumed either to have foundered in a storm or fallen victim to pirates in the China seas.

  That the gold coin of which I had sent such an excellent rubbing was of a minting contemporary with the Dona Lucia, and could in fact have been part of her cargo.

  He told me ....

  But the rest was courtesy and I was no longer interested.

  I was thinking of a tiny island off the coast of Queensland, one of the hundred islands and atolls strung like chips of jade and emerald along the coral thread of the Great Barrier Reef.

  A two-homed island, sheer to the sea on one side, with a narrow crescent of white beach on the other. An island where the winter tourists never came, because the surveys of the Queensland Government said there was no water there, and no channel through the reefs and no shelter for fishing-boats or cabin-cruisers.

  But I knew there was a channel. Jeannette and I had run a thirty-footer clean through the reef and beached her without a scratch on her copper sheathing. We had camped for days under the pandanus and found a spring at the foot of the western horn. We had walked the reef and gone spearfishing at high tide and one day Jeannette had brought up a gold chain, defaced, encrusted with coral.

  Then, before our honeymoon was past a month, Jea
nnette had died of meningitis and I was left—with a junior lectureship, a battered coin and the dream of a golden girl on a white beach in the sun. And the dream of a Spanish treasure-ship under rioting coral-branches.

  The memory of Jeannette faded slowly, faded to a dull ache in my heart, that flared occasionally into savage pain and drove me to wild nights of drinking and chasing my luck with the baccarat boys and the hard-heads round the poker table, and the strappers who stood round the tracks in the misty mornings trying to pick Saturday’s winners.

  The memory of Jeannette faded, but whenever I opened the drawer of my desk the old coin, burnished from daily handling, seemed to glow like fire. My girl was gone, lost to me for life, but my treasure-ship was there. It must be there—timbers rotted, decks canted under the coral and the sea-grasses, while the rainbow fish swam round and round the treasure-chests in the hold.

  It must be there. I was a historian. I could prove it must be there. At least I must prove it could be there.

  It was old Anson who gave me the clue—George Baron Anson, not yet an Admiral of the Fleet, not yet First Lord of the Admiralty, cruising months on end between the Ladrones and the Carolines waiting for the galleons that came every year from Acapulco to Manila. George Anson who literally lashed his leaky hulk together so that he could wait another month and another while the barnacles grew on his hulk and his water-casks split and his men died of scurvy under the tropic sun.

  The old Spaniard would come nosing out of Acapulco, sniffing for the north-east trades that would drive him westward along the equatorial belt until it was time to tack north again past the Ladrones to Manila . . . but October would be late for him. Summer would be drifting down towards Capricorn, and if he drove too far south the hurricanes might catch him. And if the hurricanes caught him—they would whirl him down, past the Bismarcks and the Solomons, and westward on to the Great Barrier. He would be under jury rig by now, listing perhaps and leaking, in no condition to thread his way through the islands and the reefs. And if the weather did not blow itself out, one day, one night, perhaps, the coral claws would rake him open and he would founder—on the outer reef of an island with twin horns.

  It could have happened like that, it must have happened like that. Else where did my doubloon come from, that dull golden eye that mocked me from the bottom of my drawer?

  There was a knock at my door and the little blonde from the Registrar’s office came in with a wire tray stacked with pay envelopes.

  She smiled and fluttered her eyelashes and shifted the tray so that I could see what her sweater did for her figure, and made her little joke when she handed me the envelope.

  “Don’t spend it all at once, Mr Lundigan.”

  I smiled and said thank you and then made my little joke.

  “Let me take you out one night and I’ll spend some of it on you.”

  She giggled as she always did, lifted her chest a little higher, picked up her tray and walked out, swinging her hips.

  I tore the top from the envelope and tipped its contents on my blotter. Two fivers, eight singles and some assorted silver, the weekly stipend—less tax—of a junior lecturer in history.

  Take a week’s board out of that and cigarette-money and tram-fares and the pound I’d borrowed from Jenkins on Tuesday, that left enough for a stake at Manny’s. But not enough, not nearly enough to buy an island and a boat and an aqualung and stores and help and all the other things a man needs when he starts looking for sunken treasure, and then trying to raise it when he has found it.

  Still, it was a stake. And last week I had seen a fellow turn a fiver into five hundred and then into a thousand and then into two thousand. After which Manny sent him home in a hired car, with one of his own bruisers for safe conduct. I had seen it done. Perhaps I could do it myself.

  I wouldn’t even need two thousand. One would be enough. Five hundred for the island. The Queensland Government sells cheap when there is no water and no channel and no harbourage. Two hundred for a boat—no cabin-cruiser at that. A hundred for a new aqualung. That would leave two hundred for incidentals and there’d be more than enough of those, but it could be done . . . if I won a thousand pounds at Manny’s.

  I folded the letter from the Chief Archivist of Acapulco and put it in my pocket. I took the gold piece from the drawer and slipped it into my fob for luck. I counted out eight pounds, ten shillings, and sealed them in an envelope. At least I would eat, and sleep with a roof over my head and take a tram to work and smoke twenty cigarettes a day ... if I didn’t win a thousand pounds at Manny’s.

  The junior lectureship in history does not carry a private telephone, so I had to walk down the hall and fumble in my pocket for pennies before I could make my call.

  A laconic voice said, “This is Charlie.”

  “This is the Commander. Where is it?”

  “Same as last week. It’s a clear night.”

  “Thanks.”

  I hung up. It was a clear night. The police had been paid and Manny would not be raided tonight. I would have my chance to win a thousand pounds.

  You should meet Manny Mannix.

  He’s quite a boy. Brooklyn Irish on his father’s side, Brooklyn Italian on his mother’s. Manny was a supply sergeant with the United States Army, who fought a gallant war from King’s Cross and, when the war was over, decided to stay in Sydney.

  Sydney, according to Manny, was New York cut down to workable size, and Manny was ready and willing to work it. He worked the disposals racket and the sly-grog racket and the used-car racket and the immigration racket, and when the profits started to slide Manny slid out too, with a bank-balance that bought him a block of flats, a slice of a night-club and a string of assorted fillies whom he paraded for the decorative effect. Manny was never a man to let love interfere with business. Manny also bought himself a small piece of the gaming squad—enough to guarantee him a phone-call before the cars turned into his street.

  For Manny that was more than enough . . . life was too sweet to spoil it with a conviction. Manny dressed well and ate well and drove a Cadillac as long as a housefront, but no matter what he wore or where he dined he carried always the stink of the city, the smell of stale women and the reek of racket-money.

  You should meet Manny Mannix.

  He calls me Commander because in an unguarded moment I told him I ran a lugger round the Trobriands in the last years of the war. He pumps my hand and slaps my shoulder and offers me a drink which I never refuse. While we drink, Manny talks. About Manny, about money and Manny, about girls and Manny and Manny’s plans for Manny’s future. And while he talks he smiles, but never with his eyes, which dart from the bouncers at the door to the tense little groups round the tables, and the stewards moving about with trays of drinks held shoulder high.

  You should meet Manny.

  You would hate him as much as I do; but you might not hate yourself as much as I do, because I drink his liquor and listen to his patter and smile at his jokes, because I want to preserve the privilege of losing my money at his game and having Manny pat me tolerantly on the shoulder and tell me better luck next time.

  If I won tonight there would be no next time. I would cash my chips and go; and turn my face to a green island and a white beach and a golden hoard where the reef dropped down into deep water.

  So, at nine o’clock on Wednesday night the thirtieth of June, I hailed a taxi and drove out past the flying-boat base at Rose Bay to a discreet crescent near Vaucluse. On the loop of the crescent there was a high stone wall, broke by gates of wrought iron.

  The gates were locked, but there was a bell-push on the pillar, and when I pressed it a man came out from the lodgekeeper’s cottage. I told him it was a clear night. He made no argument about it but opened the small side gate and let me in.

  I walked up the gravelled drive to the house. The curtains were drawn and the shutters were closed but the front door was open and I saw men and women who might have been guests at a cocktail party and a waiter in a wh
ite coat crossing the carpeted hall.

  I nodded to the sad-eyed Pole who kept the door, handed him my overcoat and went upstairs to the big room with the black-glass bar and the great windows that would show you the lights of the harbour, if they were opened—but they never were.

  To run a business like Manny’s you need to shut out the moon and the stars and the wind that comes in from wide waters. You must draw the drapes and close out the cheep of crickets and the silken wash of the ebb-tide. You must have music and laughter and the click of the wheel and the clack of the counters stacked and unstacked on the baize. You must have strong liquor and staling smoke and the shabby illusion of friendship and community.

  To run a business like Manny’s, you wear shining pumps and knife-creased black trousers and a silver-grey tuxedo with a burgundy tie and a red carnation in your buttonhole. You take your elbow off the bar when your guest comes in, you toss a wink to the model draped on the corner stool, and you say:

  “Hiya, Commander! Long time no see.”

  “Hiya, Manny! Long time no money.”

  I delivered my line with a little smile and Manny laughed and choked on his cigar-smoke. He took me by the elbow and steered me to the stool next to the model. He tapped the bar and called to the steward.

  “Set one up for the Commander, Frank. Pink gin. Commander, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Miss June Dolan. June, this is Commander Lundigan. Watch out for him, sweetheart. You know what these navy boys are.’’

  Manny choked again and grinned and the model gave me a small professional smile and a long professional look that set my six-foot figure against Manny’s six-figure prospects and found me wanting. Which was exactly what Manny knew she would do. Otherwise he would never have introduced me.

  Manny said, “You feeling lucky tonight, Commander?”

  I shrugged and spread my hands and made a rueful mouth. It’s a little act. I do it very well. Jeannette used to tell me it was part of my boyish charm. Now I felt rather ashamed of it. It was so like the smile of Manny’s drooping model.