From Herring to Eternity by Delia Rosen Page A

Possibly both.
    Barron smiled crookedly. “Hi, Nash. Never expected to see you out here.”
    “Life is funny,” I said vaguely.
    “Come on aboard,” he said. “Just unlatch the—”
    “I see it,” I told him. The hook-and-eye latch was about as complex as a half-century-old country fence. I saw one, once, when I was nine, visiting my great-uncle Oskar in Maine, where he’d retired because it reminded him of his native Croatia. Except for the lack of pogroms, or whatever they called the anti-Semitic attacks in the Balkans. A week after that visit, I had tetanus. I swore never to leave a city again. I hooked the chain back behind me as I boarded. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
    “Nothing that can’t be continued some other time,” Barron said. “Just planning an excursion.”
    “Sounds interesting,” I said. And it might have been, too, if just being around Barron didn’t make me seasick.
    I walked in, past the other fellow. Barron was dressed in a blue jumpsuit that hugged his thickening-in-the-middle frame. The man with him was swarthy, about five-eleven, chiseled, with slightly Asiatic features. He was wearing a white t-shirt and swim trunks. He looked a little peaked. Barron introduced him as Yutu White.
    “Gotta love those double entendre names, eh?” Barron roared, winking.
    “They’re a riot.”
    “He’s an Inuvialuk, a Western Canadian Eskimo,” Barron went on, either not having heard me or not caring what I had to say or both. “Not very happy to be on a boat, you may have noticed. Can you imagine? An Eskimo who has never been in a kayak.”
    White pointed to a brown bag on the table. I couldn’t read the writing, but there was a picture of a wave on it. Dramamine, I guessed.
    “Yeah, Robert, that’s funny,” I said. “Like a free-spending Jew.”
    He looked at me with an expression that suggested agreement. He didn’t realize I was being ironic.
    “Hi, Yutu,” I said.
    He nodded gently.
    “Yutu says he knows the location of a Russian treasure ship from the early twentieth century,” Barron went on.
    “Shhh,” White said.
    “It’s okay,” I said. “I won’t steal it.”
    “No, I meant he’s talking too loud,” Yutu said. “Use your inside-cabin voice, Robert, not your on-deck one.”
    “Nash isn’t after my treasure. She’s got plenty of her own.” He winked again. God, what a boor. “It’s a fascinating story about that ship,” Barron said as he walked to a large chart table, which filled most of the room. Various maps were spread on it, held flat on the sides with empty beer bottles. Barron pointed to one which bore Cyrillic labels and the date 1917. “It was reportedly full of Romanov treasure the Czar was trying to sneak out before he abdicated. Gold, jewelry, art, all kinds of things. A barge left Moscow and went north to Arkhangelsk where it was loaded onto a battleship of the Imperial Russian Navy. The ship skirted the Arctic, headed east, bound for Canada—where it was supposed to be met by agents of the dynasty. Never made it.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “Ice floes and storms, according to a letter we found from an officer with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans who was in the region where it was supposed to make landfall,” Barron said. “Very severe weather that year.”
    “That would be quite a historic find,” I said.
    “It’d be colossal!” Barron said. “I”—he shot a look at Yutu—“ we will be rich and famous!”
    My eyes wandered around the table. The story was interesting, but not why I was here. I saw the top of a small map, with folds, that said Fiji—1790. Judging from what little I could see, it might have been just the right size to fold and tuck in a trumpet case. “What’s this one?” I asked.
    He looked where I was pointing, shuffled maps to cover it. “Nothing,” he said. “South Pacific, dead end, not a happy story.”
    “Tell me,” I said.
    “Yes, I am interested, too,” Yutu chimed