The Nautical Chart (17 page)

Coy stirred, uncomfortable. He would have been more at ease were there a few tears, some indignant complaints. In those cases, he thought, a man knows what to do. Or at least he thinks he does. Everyone plays his role, the way they do in the movies.

"You need to forget this happened."

She turned, almost in slow motion, as if he had become one of the objects she needed to move to a different place.

"Look, Coy. I didn't ask you to get involved in my affairs. And I haven't asked you to give me advice now. Is that clear?"

She's dangerous, he thought. Maybe even more dangerous than whoever cased her house and killed the dog. More than the melancholy dwarf and the Dalmatian treasure hunter. All this is happening because she is dangerous, and they know it, and she knows that they know. Dangerous for me, too.

"Yes, it's clear."

He shook his head, half evasive, half resigned. That woman had an awesome talent for making him feel responsible, and at the same time reminding him that his presence there was superfluous. Even so, Tanger did not seem satisfied with Coy's unadorned answer. She kept observing him like a boxer who ignores the bell, and the referee's warning.

"When I was a girl I loved cowboy movies," she said unexpectedly.

Her tone was far from reminiscent, or tender. It almost seemed to contain a gentle mockery of herself. But she was dead serious. "Did you like those movies, Coy?"

He looked at her, not knowing what to say. To answer that question would have required a brief period of transition, and she didn't give him time to come up with an answer. Nor did it seem to matter to her.

"Watching them," she continued, "I decided that there are two kinds of women: the kind who start screaming as the Apaches attack, and the kind who pick up a rifle and start firing out the window."

Her tone wasn't aggressive, just firm, and yet Coy felt that her firmness was aggressive as hell. She had finished, and it seemed she was not going to add anything.

But after a moment, she stopped before the framed snapshot and narrowed her eyes. Now her voice was hoarse and low: "I wanted to be a soldier and carry a rifle."

Coy touched his nose. Then he rubbed the nape of his neck and, one after the other, executed a routine of movements that in him tended to characterize confusion. I wonder, he asked himself, if this woman knows my thoughts or if in fact she's the one who puts them in my mind and then shuffles them and spreads them on the table as if this were a game of cards.

"This Palermo," he said finally, "offered me a job."

He held his breath. He had taken the calling card with the telephone number of the man from Gibraltar from his pocket. He held it between his second and third fingers, waggling it slightly. She didn't focus on the card, but on him. And she did it with enough concentration to have burned a hole in his brain.

'And what did you tell him?"

"That I'd think about it."

He saw a hint of a smile. A second of calculation and two seconds of disbelief.

"You're lying," she declared. "If that were true you wouldn't be sitting here now, looking at me." Her voice seemed to grow softer. "You're not that kind."

Coy turned his eyes toward the window, glancing outside, into the distance. You're not that kind. In some dusty corner of his memory Brutus was asking Popeye if he was a man or a mouse, and Popeye replied, "I'm a sailor man." A train was slowly approaching the long roof that covered the platforms of Atocha station, its elongated, articulated form following a route mysteriously traced through the labyrinth of tracks and signals. He felt a rancor sharp as a knife blade. You, he thought, don't have any idea what kind of man I am. He looked at his wristwatch. The Talgo, for which he was carrying a second-class ticket in the inside pocket of his jacket, had for some time now been rolling toward Barcelona. And here he was again, as if nothing had changed. He stared at the carpet where Zas had lain. Or maybe, he reflected, maybe he was there again precisely because some things had changed. Or because... Damn if he had a clue about anything! Suddenly his stomach turned over and something crossed his mind like a powder flash. He knew, as clear as could be, that he was there because someday he was going to teach this woman something. The thought so agitated him that it showed on his face, and she looked at him questioningly, surprised by the change in his expression. Coy almost stammered it out in his own silence. He was going to teach her something she thought she knew but didn't, something she could not control as easily as she did her expressions, her words, the situations around her, and, apparently, Coy himself. But he would have to wait before that moment came. That was why he was there; all he had was the wait. That was why they both knew that this time he wouldn't leave. That was why he was trapped, nibbling at the cheese until he sprang the trap. Snap. Man
or
mouse. At least, he consoled himself, it didn't hurt. Maybe at the end, when it's my turn, it will hurt. But not yet He uncrossed his legs, crossed them again, and leaned back a little in the sofa, his hands at his sides. He felt his pulse beating, slow and strong, in his groin. I suppose, he told himself, the precise word is fear. You know there are rocks ahead, and that's that. Navigate, eyes on the sea, feel the breeze in your face and salt on your lips, but don't be fooled. Know.

I have to say something, he thought. Something that has nothing to do with what I'm feeling. Something that will let her take over the helm again, or, rather, that will let me see her there again. After all, she's the one giving the orders, and we're still a long way from my watch.

He tore the card in two and put the pieces on the table. There were no comments. Matter closed.

"I still don't see it clearly," said Coy. "If there's no treasure, why is Nino Palermo interested in a ship that sank in 1767?"

"People who search for sunken ships aren't only after treasure." Now Tanger was close, sitting in a chair opposite Coy, leaning forward to narrow the distance between them. 'A ship that sank two and a half centuries ago can be of great interest if it's well preserved.

The State pays the costs___ They organize traveling exhibitions—

There's more than gold in the galleons. Consider the collection of Oriental porcelain on board the
San Diego,
for example. Its value

is incalculable__ " She paused, lips parted, before continuing.

"Besides, there's something more. The challenge. You understand? A sunken ship is an enigma that fascinates a lot of people."

"Yes. Palermo talked about that. The 'green murkiness below,' he called it. And all the rest."

Tanger nodded, serious, grave, as if she knew the meaning of those words. And yet it was Coy who had been on sunken ships, as well as on ships afloat... and on grounded ships. Not her.

"Besides," Tanger reminded him, "no one knows what was on the
Dei Gloria."

Coy let a sigh escape.

"So maybe there is a treasure after all."

She imitated Coy's sigh, although maybe not with the same motivation. She arched her eyebrows mysteriously, like someone exhibiting the wrapping that hides a surprise.

"Who knows?"

She was leaning toward him, close to him, and her expression lighted her freckled face, lending it the complicitous air of a determined little boy, an elemental, sharply physical attractiveness composed of flesh and young, vibrant cells, and golden tones and soft colors that imperiously demanded proximity and touching and brushing of skin against skin. Again blood throbbed in Coy's groin, and this time it wasn't fear. Again that flash of light. Again that certainty. So he let himself drift with the current, without concessions or regrets. At sea all roads are long. After all—and this was his advantage—he had no crew whose ears he had to stop with wax, no one to lash him to the mast to enable him to withstand the voices singing on the reefs, no gods to affect him unduly with their hatred or their favor. He was, he calculated in a quick summing up, fucked, fascinated, and alone. Under those conditions, this woman was as good a course to follow as any.

THE
afternoon was fading, and the yellow light that first illuminated the low clouds and then snaked across Atocha station, covering the intricate reflections in the labyrinth of track with elongated horizontal shadows, now filled the room, outlining Tanger's profile as she bent over the table, casting her dark silhouette beside

Coy's on the paper of the Naval Hydrographic Institute's nautical chart number 463A.

"Yesterday," he recapitulated, "we identified a latitude: 37°32'N__ That allows us to draw an approximate line, knowing that

the moment she went down the
Dei Gloria
was somewhere on that imaginary line between Punta Calnegre and Cabo Tinoso,

between one and three miles off the coast____ Maybe more. That can give us soundings of one to three hundred thirty feet."

"In fact it's less than that," Tanger put in.

She was following Coy's statements about the chart with close attention. Everything was as professional as if they were in the chartroom of a ship. With pencil and parallel rulers they had drawn a horizontal line that started at the coast, a mile and a half above Punta Calnegre, and ran to Cabo Tinoso below the great sandy arc formed by the Gulf of Mazarron. The depth, which was gentle and sloping on the west side, increased as the line neared the rocky coast farther east.

"In any case," Coy emphasized, "if the ship is too far down, we won't be able to locate her with our means. Much less dive down to what's left of her."

"I told you yesterday that I figure it at a maximum of one hundred sixty-five feet—"

Cold and silence, Coy remembered. And that greenish murk Nino Palermo had referred to. He could feel on his skin the sensation of his first deep dive twenty years before, the silvery light of the surface seen from below, the bluish and then green sphere, the gradual loss of color, the pressure gauge on his wrist, with the needle indicating the increasing internal and external pressure on his lungs, and the sound of his own breathing in his chest and eardrums, inhaling and exhaling air through the regulator. Cold and silence, naturally. And also fear.

"Even one hundred sixty-five feet is too much," he said. "That dive will take equipment we don't have, or brief dives with long decompression periods, something both uncomfortable and dangerous. Let's say that the reasonably safe limit, in our case, is one hundred thirty. Not a foot more."

She was still bent over the chart, thoughtful. He watched her chew a thumbnail. Her eyes were following the depths marked along the pencil line drawn by Coy, which ran almost twenty miles. Some of the numbers indicating depths were accompanied by a letter: S, M, R. Sand and mud bottoms, with occasional rock. Too sandy and too muddy, he thought. In two and a half centuries that kind of bottom could cover a lot of things.

"I think it will be enough," she said. "One hundred thirty.'"

I'd like to know where she gets that kind of certainty, he thought. The only sure thing about the sea—Coy, like many sailors referring to its physical attributes, sometimes thought of it as feminine,
la mar,
though he had never thought of giving it a female personality—was that nothing about it was sure. If you managed to do things right, if you stowed the cargo properly, set the correct heading for bad weather, and moderated the engines, and if you didn't steam through raging waves and a wind that was force 9 on the Beaufort scale, the bad-humored old bastard
—el mar
—might tolerate intruders— But challenge him? Never. When it came to a showdown, he always won.

"I don't believe it's any more than that." Tanger again.

She seemed to have forgotten about Zas and her apartment, Coy noted with amazement She was focused on the legends of degrees, minutes, and tenths of a minute that bordered the charts, and once again he admired that apparent willpower. He heard her speaking the appropriate words, with no boasting or unnecessary verbiage. If this is normal, I'll eat my left ball, he said to himself. No woman can be as much in control of herself as she seems to be. She's harassed, she has just been given a sinister warning, and she's high as a kite, scribbling notes on a nautical chart. She's either a schizophrenic or, to put it another way, an extraordinary woman. In either case, it's obvious that she can hold her own, that she's capable, after everything she's been through, of standing here and wielding that pencil and compass as cold-bloodedly as a surgeon wields a scalpel. Maybe she's the one doing the harassing after all, and Nino Palermo, the melancholy dwarf, the Berber chauffeur, and the secretary—and me, for that matter—are just members of her chorus, or her victims. All of us.

He tried to concentrate on the chart. Having correlated the latitude with the corresponding parallel, they now needed to situate the longitude: the point where that parallel intersected the meridian. The trick was to determine
which
meridian it was. Conventionally, in the same way the line of the Equator constitutes zero parallel for calculating latitude north or south, the Greenwich meridian is universally considered o°. Nautical longitude is also measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds, or tenths of minutes, counting 1800 degrees to the left of Greenwich for longitude west and 1800 to the right for longitude east. The problem was that Greenwich hadn't always been the universal reference.

"The longitude seems to be clear," Tanger answered: "4°51'E."

"I don't see that it's clear. In 1767 the Spanish didn't use Greenwich as the prime meridian__ "

"Of course they didn't. First it was Hierro island, but then every country ended up using their own. Greenwich didn't become the universal reference until 1884. That's why Urrutia's chart, printed in 1751, has scales for four different longitudes: Paris, Tenerife, Cadiz, and Cartagena."

"Well"—Coy looked at her with respect—"you know a lot about this. Almost as much as I do."

"I've tried to study it. It's my job. If you look carefully, you can find everything in books."

Coy silently questioned that. He had read about the sea all his life, and he had never found anything there about a porpoise's scream of anguish as it leaps through the water with one flank ripped away by a killer whale's teeth. Or about the shortest night in his life, as the light of dawn blended into dusk on the reddish horizon of the Oulu roads a few miles from the Arctic circle. Or the song of the Kroomen, black stevedores on the fbrecasde one moonlit night near Pointe-Noire, in the Congo, with holds and deck stacked with trunks of okoume and akaju wood. Or the terrifying clamor of a sudden storm in the Bay of Biscay, when sky and water were indistinguishable beneath a curtain of gray spume, forty-five-foot seas, and an eighty-knot wind, with the waves crumpling the containers lashed on deck as if they were paper before tearing them loose and sweeping them overboard, the watch on duty clinging somewhere on the bridge, terrified, and the rest of the crew in their cabins, tossed across the deck into the bulkheads, vomiting like pigs. It was like jazz, really, the improvisations of Duke Ellington, the tenor sax of John Coltrane, or the percussion of Elvin Jones. You couldn't read that in a book either.