Just Needs Killin (18 page)

I had a five gallon pail in the truck, so we wrapped a blanket around the vase, put it into the larger bucket, and made a few trips to the tideline to fill it. This bucket had a lid, so at least we wouldn't slosh all the water out as we made our way back over the rough road.

We checked the vase out before we wrapped it and saw it was, indeed, marked on the bottom, and amazingly undamaged. I guess, since I'd never seen one before. Anyhow, no thanks to us, there were no visible chips or cracks.

The design was what I expected, with some dragons and the like, but even to an amateur like me, I could see it was quality.

Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

While I herded my pickup over tooth-rattling washboard tracks, Jan inspected our coins between stops. There were multiple stops.

On the way out to the beach the day before, we left a trail of small yellow plastic ties on bushes, and around rocks, so finding our way back would be easier. Jan, newly ecologically correct, what with her whale camp experience, insisted we gather each one, even though some of the bushes were heavily decorated with shredded plastic grocery bags. She wanted to snag those, too, but in the name of saving time, I promised, after we were rich, I'd hire and send in a cleanup crew.

The coins were mostly the same, about the size of an American quarter, but not as heavy, probably because they were pure silver, with irregular edges. They were embossed with what looked like two crowned columns and writing that looked to be Latin.

I'd seen the beautiful gold coins from the
Atocha
, and even considered buying one once in a moment of GOTTA HAVE ME ONE OF THOSE. These babies were fairly homely by comparison, but these coins were
our
coins, and once polished, they had to have some value. We were gleeful, and itching to get to a computer, and our best friend, Mr. Google, but first we had to stash our loot, and my pickup, at Granny Yee's house, then get back to the boat.

Grandmothers are supposed to be sweet little things who bake stuff and are totally predictable. Granny Yee, while sweet, little, and a fabulous cook, has been known to go off on a lark.

For example, when I first heard of her, I had this mental picture of a little old gray haired lady dressed in black, clutching rosary beads. What Jan and I soon learned was she was living with a man ten years her junior whom she'd met online. This, of course, didn't sit all that well with Chino, and when he told us this lamentable (in his opinion) tale, that's when Jan found out her
amor
, Chino, was twelve years younger than she.

Not only that, because of a family tradition of early motherhood, Chino, who is twenty-six, has a grandmother who is fifty-eight. Even worse, his mother is only forty-two! Jan is thirty-eight. Needless to say, this age thing is a major source of annoyance to Jan, one I take every opportunity to exploit when I need to get even with her about something.

But back to Grans Yee. We arrived at her house to find she had hopped a plane for Texas to spend a month with my Aunt Lillian, with hopes of meeting a new man. And since my aunt found all of hers at Veteran's Administration hospitals, maybe I should have contacted the President of the United States and warned him of the possible pillage of patients from the Texas
Veterans Alcohol and Drug
Dependence
Rehabilitation
Programs.

However, with Abuela Yee off on a manhunt, it was easy to hide our treasure inside her house, in a place no one would look while she was gone: her bathroom. While the house was always full of relatives, her personal quarters were off-limits, and no one dared break that rule. Well, except me, but desperate times and all.

A trip to the hardware store and the local
yunke
yard—both owned, of course, by Chino's cousins—yielded materials required for a short term fix for where to hide my treasures.

In her bathroom, I turned off the valve to the toilet and removed the water tank lid and the flushing and refill hardware. From past experience I knew I'd break a couple of parts in the process, but the replacement kit I bought would solve that problem later.

Abuela Yee is partial to baby blue, but that particular color wasn't to be found at the junk yard. I did, however, find a slightly cracked yellow toilet tank lid. I stashed the coins and vase in her toilet tank, filled it with seawater, replaced the blue lid with the yellow one, and superglued it down. I figured I'd have to break that lid when I retrieved the booty, so I put the blue one, and the replacement kit, away safely under her bed.

Just in case someone besides me had the nerve to breach the inner sanctum, I covered the toilet top with a baby blue bath towel, then replaced the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe nestled in a bouquet of blue plastic flowers. 

Jan, my lookout while I re-plumbed the bathroom, sat guard on the porch, hanging onto Po Thang's leash. Grannie's goat, Preciosa, was in her enclosure, but by her agitated bleats and stomping hooves, it was obvious she dearly wanted a piece of Po Thang. Po Thang knew it, and cowered behind Jan. Being a Sunday, all the kids, extra relatives, and fish stand employees were elsewhere, so we had the place to ourselves.

We locked up the house and gate and walked down to the wharf, where our panga waited. That walk took the very last of our energy reserves, and all three of us fell asleep in the panga on the thirty-minute boat ride out to
Nao de Chino
.

We boarded just as Rosa was pounding her spatula on the dinner bell, and were the first to the table. I was so hungry it was halfway through the meal when I noticed Kazoo and Moto were missing. Since Sunday was a king of kickback and do your own thing day, that wasn't all that unusual, but I asked Chino where they went.

"Out for more abalone."

Jan and I shared a sidelong glance, and I wondered if those might be "gold abalone" and how we could find out where they were diving.

Tired as we were, we met in my cabin after dinner to start our search for information on both the coins and the vase. We downloaded photos of our finds into our PCs and split our research. I took the coins, Jan, the vase.

It didn't take long to identify the coins as early Mexican. In fact, this series was minted in Mexico City between 1536 and 1542. They were fashioned by hand with a set of die punches sent over from Spain in order to make "cobs"—coins fashioned from irregularly shaped blanks cut from the end of a bar of silver, and stamped by a worker bee using only a hammer, the dies, and an anvil. The original cobs were meant to be shipped to Spain, and remelted to make regular Spanish coins. The word, cob, is thought to be derived from the Spanish,
cabo de barra
, or end of the bar.

My eyes were closing as I read, and I realized I was re-reading some things three or four times without retaining their meaning.

"Jan, I'm done in. At least before I crash and burn I know our coins are the real deal, if not their value. That means the vase is probably authentic Ming, as well. How are you doing on your end?"

"I'm toast. Evidently coins are easier than vases, because there were so damned many of them. I found a few on eBay that look kinda like ours, but they're all reproductions. I'm too sleepy to do more tonight." She closed her PC, stood, and gave Po Thang a pat. "Night, you two."

After Jan left I crawled into my bunk and the next thing I knew it was first light. I let Po Thang out to head for his pee pad while I headed for mine, and on the way back I heard a noise outside. Peering out a porthole, I watched while Kazoo and Moto unloaded equipment and what I hoped were bags of abalone from their panga.

Po Thang returned, and whined for his morning dog greenie—supposedly the equal to human toothpaste in biscuit form—and I groused, "When do those guys sleep, for crying out loud?"

Which got me to thinking about where they go all the time, and more importantly, how to find out what they are up to besides glomming onto sushi makings.

Monday was a no-dive day on the ship, so we calibrated equipment, repacked rebreathers with CO2 absorbent, recharged air tanks, and did routine ship and panga maintenance.

Jan and I used disposable rebreather cartridges, or scrubbers, most of the time, which are good for about two hours, but they were not practical for the larger units utilized by the "real" divers. During my Monday inventory, I found we were burning through our stores of CO2 absorbent at an alarming rate, so I went online and ordered a big batch. I also added more pre-packed cartridges for Jan and me, as we seemed to be diving more.

Rosa fixed a tray for us to take to my cabin for lunch, so Jan and I could once again fire up our PCs and get back on the trail of Spanish silver coins and Ming vases. I made an information file, copied and pasted important info on our coins into it, opening two windows to switch back and forth, comparing our photos with those I found on the Internet.

Our coins, referred to as Charles and Johanna cobs, were technically not cobs. Why? I think the Spaniards did this just to confuse me almost five hundred years later, but probably because cobs were crude, and these coins showed more sophistication, so maybe were not destined for a Spanish meltdown like the true cobs were. CAROLVS ET IOHANA REGES, legible on one side of the coin, told me they were minted during the reign of King Charles—or Carlos—and his mother, Johanna. A shield, divided into four parts, was marked with an M, for Mexico, and the Leon and Castile herald (lion and castle) were inside the shield, the castle in the upper left and lower right quadrants, and a lion in the lower left and upper right.

On the reverse side were two crowned columns—the Pillars of Hercules—which, if I remembered my Ancient History 101 correctly, graced both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, and served as a warning to GO NO FURTHER. Huh? If no one was supposed to navigate past the Strait of Gibraltar, why were these pillars depicted on coins minted over five thousand miles west of that strait connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea? This sent me off, as I am wont to do, in search of a reason and found that the Holy Emperor of Spain, King Carlos (or maybe his mum or minions) had a sense of ironic humor. Not only were the pillars on his royal shield, they added the words,
Plus Ultra
, meaning
further beyond
.

Take that, you wimpy ancients!

I shared that bit of fun with Jan, who needed a laugh because her research was giving her a giant headache. "Okay, Hetta, here's what I've got. Our vase is either worth forty-nine dollars and fifty cents, or several million."

"Can you narrow that down a tad?"

"Not without more time. There were thousands of vases made, all of them called Ming."

"That Ming was one busy dude."

She grinned. "It was a dynasty, not one guy. Actually lasted for two-hundred and seventy-five years, evidently most of it making porcelain."

"Luckily the Mexicans only made these particular coins for about six years, but the info is still somewhat sketchy. I narrowed the ones we photographed as four reale coins, a little larger and slightly heavier than an American half-dollar, and worth around five or six hundred bucks."

"And we have how many?"

"We don't know yet. I did a rough count of a hundred, but the vase is still half full. Let's say we have two hundred, multiplied by five hundred dollars is a hundred thousand smackaroos."

"Holy crap!"

"But get this, if we have an eight reale in there, only three, count 'em,
three
, are known to exist."

"Wow. What are those worth?"

"Only one I could find sold for two-hundred and seventy thousand dollars, whaddya think about that?"

"Uh, we're gonna need a bigger boat?"

After our lunch break, I was called to First Mate duty.

As we did each Monday, Fabio and I inspected our ship, starting on the bridge and working our way into the engine room. Let me just start by saying Fabio is gorgeous and I'd considered inspecting
him
on occasion, but after I met his equally gorgeous wife, Fluff, I got over it.

There are many things that can go wrong on a boat. On a ship? Far, far, more.

Fabio, a stickler for safety, had a checklist two pages long, and that was only the Monday list. I'd learned more about boat maintenance in the past few weeks than I ever did on
Raymond Johnson
, mainly because I'd lazily relied on Jenks when he was around.

There are also things that tell you when the brown stuff is about to hit the prop. Gauges abound, and alarms that scare the you-know-what out of you when you haven't been watching your gauges close enough.

Oh, and there are holes in the hull. Lots and lots of them. Water and steam are generated by many sources, and they are supposed to go back out. When they don't, sensors hopefully pick up the problem and alarms go off.

So, kind of like going around your house with a box of matches, or a cigarette, to test your smoke alarms, we spent a couple of hours each Monday testing those on the ship.

On a vessel the size and age of
Nao de Chino
, water intrusion is a fact of life. Water sloshes in the bilge at all times, because there are leaks around packing glands and goodness knows what else, that are expected. Newer boats have dryer bilges, but not ours. Also, for some reason our shower water drains into the bilge. Why? Maybe it was just a Japanese design thing Chino didn't have the money to replumb. The first time I re-reddened my hair, Fabio noticed the bilge pump was on, looked overboard, saw a stream of red, and thought someone had been murdered onboard. He now insists I go with Jan to the
Estética Unisex Yee in town
for a touch up, which is fine with me. We keep it in the family, and while I'm there I get a mani/pedi and an eyebrow redo. For a couple of grunts on a dive boat, Jan and I keep pretty well shipshape.

So, when we got underway on Monday, and even after our meticulous inspection the bilge alarm went off, Fabio shut down the engines and Chino dropped the anchor, even though we were a mile offshore, because that is what you do when you lose power.

Fabio, Enrique and I rushed into the engine room to find the source of excess water in the bilge, but there was none. One by one we checked the bilge pumps and found a smaller one was stuck open, probably by debris that washed into it. A quick cleaning, and it worked, thereby shutting down that shrieking alarm.

Fabio, however, wasn't satisfied with that quick fix, and insisted on a new unit being installed, and that I help with the job. This First Mate thing stinks. There is nothing I hate worse than working in bilge water. No matter how clean a boat is, how well maintained, the bilge is always a stinky mix of salt water and oil, but the fact that our shower water dumped into this one made it even worse.

I ripped off a pair of yellow rubber gloves from under the sink in Rosa's galley to save myself from what I perceived as death-by-other-people's-cooties, and reluctantly returned to the bowels of the ship to help Enrique remove the old pump, run wires for the new one, and test to make sure the alarm works. My revenge on Fabio was holding the float switch into open position, sounding the alarm with no fair warning to the bridge.

Fabio was likely going to make me walk the plank for that little stunt.

Right after he changed his shorts.