The Nautical Chart (19 page)

He felt nostalgic as he looked up, vainly hoping to see a star. The glow of the city veiled the sky. He made a shield of one hand, which he lined up beneath his eyes, and when they adjusted he could see one or two tiny, weak points glinting in the distance. Above cities, when you could see anything at all, the stars always seemed dull, different, stripped of their brilliance and meaning. Above the sea, however, they were useful references, highways, companions. Coy had spent long hours of his watch on the flying bridge watching Sirius disappear in the springtime, and the seven Pleiades drop from the evening sky in the west and reappear on the other end of the night in the east in the early-morning summer sky. He even owed his life to the stars and, during a brief and intense period in his youth, they had helped him avoid imprisonment in Haifa. Before dawn one dreary morning, about to enter Lebanese waters on board the
Otago,
a small cargo ship navigating without lights between Larnaca and Saida in order to run the Israeli blockade, and before reaching the lighthouse at Ziri—one flash every three seconds, visible at six miles—Coy, as he awaited the appearance of Castor and Pollux on the eastern horizon, had sighted the black silhouette of a patrol boat lurking in the shadow of the dark line of the coast toward which they were sailing. Their three-thousand-ton ship—registered in Monrovia, with a Spanish owner, a Norwegian captain, and a Greek and Spanish crew— which officially transported salt between Torrevieja, Trieste, and Piraeus, cut her engines and lay to while Captain Raufoss, with night binoculars at his eyes and Viking curses on his lips, confirmed that it was indeed a patrol boat. Slowly he changed course, hard to starboard and easing forward, with not so much as a cigarette lighted on board in order to slip away discreetly in the darkness, an anonymous echo on the Israeli radar, and head back toward Cape Greco. The visual acuteness of the young second navigating officer with the ink not yet dry on his license had been rewarded by Raufoss with a bottle of Balvenie malt and a clap on the back that Coy felt for a week. Sigur Raufoss, stocky, sanguine, redheaded, and an excellent sailor, had been his first captain as an officer. Like most men of his nationality, he lacked the arrogance of English captains and surpassed them in professional competence. He didn't trust pilots unless they had gray in their hair, was capable of threading his ship through the eye of a needle, and was never sober when docked or drunk when sailing. Coy served with him in the Mediterranean for three hundred and seven days, and then he changed ship just in time, two voyages before Captain Raufoss's luck ran out. Carrying loose scrap from Valencia to Marseilles, the
Otago's
cargo shifted during a force 10 winter mistral in the Gulf of Leon. The ship capsized, going to the bottom with fifteen men aboard, leaving no trace other than an SOS picked up by the shore radio at Mont Saint-Loup over channel 16 VHF:
Otago
in 42°25'N and 3°53.5'E. Lying to at sea, listing badly. Mayday. Mayday. Afterward, not a scrap floating, not a life jacket, not a marker buoy. Nothing. Only silence, and the impassive sea that hides its secrets for centuries.

HE
looked at his watch: not yet midnight. The door of Tanger's room was closed and the music had stopped. Coy felt the silence that followed rain. He ambled aimlessly around the room, appraising the Tintins on their shelf, the carefully aligned books, the postcard of Hamburg, the silver cup, the framed snapshot. That Coy was not a brilliant fellow, and that he knew it, is clear. Nevertheless, he had a unique sense of humor, a natural ability to make fun of himself and his clumsiness. He had a Mediterranean fatalism that permitted him to cut a deal and warm himself at any fire. That awareness, or certainty, may have made him less stupid than another man would have been in the identical situation. That, added to his training in observing the sky and the sea and the radar screen for signals to interpret, had sharpened a certain kind of instinct or intuition. In that context, every single thing in that house seemed filled with meaning. They were, he decided, revealing milestones in a biography that was apparently straightforward, solid, free of fissures. And yet, some of those objects, or the fragile aspect of their owner they revealed like the tip of an iceberg, could also inspire tenderness. Unlike the attitudes, words, and maneuvers she flourished to achieve her goals, in the small signs spread about the apartment, in her equivocal irrelevance, in all the circumstances that involved Coy as witness, actor, and victim, the absence of calculation was evident. Those dues were not exhibited in any deliberate manner. They were part of a real life, and had a lot to do with a past, with memories that were not explidt but that undoubtedly sustained all the rest—the little girl, the soldier, the dreams, memory. In the frame, the blonde girl was smiling within the protective tanned arm of the man in the white shirt. The smile had an obvious relationship with others Coy knew, including the dangerous ones, but it also registered a marked freshness that made it different. Something luminous and radiant. Life filled with unrevealed possibilities, highways to travel, perhaps even happiness. It was as if in that photo she was smiling for the first time, in the same way the first man awakened on the first day and saw around him the newly created world, when everything was still to be lived, starting with a unique zero meridian, and there were no cell phones or black seas or AIDS virus or Japanese tourists or police.

Basically, that was the question. Once I smiled like that, too, he thought. And those modest objects scattered around—the dented cup, the photograph of the girl with the freckles—were the remains of the shipwreck of her smile. To sense that was to feel something turn inside him, as if the music no longer playing had slowly seeped through his gut to suffuse his heart. Then he saw himself, forsaken, as if it were he and not Tanger who smiled in the snapshot with the man in the white shirt. No one can ever protect another person. He recognized himself in that image, and that made him feel as if he were orphaned, loyal, and furious. First came a feeling of personal desolation, of extreme loneliness that rose from his chest to his throat and eyes, and then a clear, intense anger. He looked at the place where Zas had lain, and then his eyes fell on Nino Palermo's card, ripped in two and left on the table. He stood stock-still. Then he consulted his watch again, matched the two pieces, and picked up the telephone. He dialed the number, taking his time, and after a while heard the voice of the seeker of sunken ships. He was in the bar of his hotel, and of course he would be happy to meet Coy in fifteen minutes.

As the uniformed doorman saw Coy come through the glass double doors and enter the vestibule of the Palace Hotel, he stared with suspicion at his sneakers and the frayed jeans below the uniform jacket. Coy had never been there before, so he went up the steps, walked across the rugs and white marble floor, then stopped, indecisive. To the right was a large antique tapestry and to the left the door to the bar. He walked toward the center rotunda and paused beneath the columns that encircled the area. In the rear, an invisible pianist was playing
"Cambalache,"
and the music was muffled by the quiet hum of conversation. It was late, but there were people at nearly all the tables and sofas, well-dressed people; men in jacket and tie, bejeweled, attractive women, impeccable waiters gliding soundlessly by. A small cart displayed several bottles of champagne chilling on ice. All very elegant and correct, he could appreciate. Like a movie.

He walked a few steps into the rotunda, ignoring a waiter who asked if he would like a table, and steered a direct course toward Nino Palermo, whom he had glimpsed sitting on a sofa beneath the large central chandelier suspended from the glass cupola. Palermo was accompanied by the secretary Coy had seen at the auction in Barcelona, now dressed in a short dark skirt, legs revealed to mid-thigh, knees modestly together and inclined to one side, high-heeled shoes. The model of the perfect secretary on a night out with the boss, dress code page five. She was sitting between Palermo and two Nordic types. The seeker of sunken ships did not see Coy until he was very close. Then he stood, buttoning his double-breasted jacket His ponytail was tied with a black ribbon, and he was wearing a dark-gray suit, silk tie against a pale-blue shirt, and black shoes; the gold chains and watch glittered more brightly than his smile. The ring with the ancient coin also gleamed when he reached out to shake Coy's hand. Coy ignored it

"It's good that you've come to your senses..." Palermo said.

The friendly tone froze on his lips in mid-sentence, his outstretched hand disregarded. He looked at it, amazed to see it untouched, and slowly pulled it back, confused, inquisitively studying Coy with his bicolored eyes.

"You've gone too far," said Coy.

The other's confused grimace intensified to arrogance.

"So you're sticking with her?’ he asked coldly.

"That's beside the point."

Palermo seemed to reflect. He made a show of looking sideways at the two men waiting on the sofa.

"You said yesterday that you were... Didn't you? Out of it. And when you telephoned a while ago... God almighty I thought you were agreeing to work for me."

Coy drew a deep breath. Palermo was more than a head taller than he. Coy stood looking up at him, his large hands hanging threateningly at his sides. He rocked a little on his toes.

"You've gone too far," he repeated.

The pupil in the greenish eye was more dilated than the other, but both seemed icy. Palermo again looked toward his companions. His mouth twisted scornfully.

"I never dreamed you were coming to make a scene," he said. "You're... an ass. That's it. You're making an ass of yourself."

Coy nodded slowly. Twice. His hands were a little farther now from his sides, and he felt the muscles of his shoulders, arms, and stomach tense as tight as the knots of a fisherman, well tied. Palermo had begun to turn away, as if to end the conversation.

"I can see," he said, "that the bitch has her hooks in you good."

With those last words, he made a move toward the sofa, but that's all it was, a move, because Coy had already made a quick calculation. He knew that Palermo was taller, and that he wasn't weak, or alone, and that it was best to hit a man while he's still talking because his reflexes are slower then. So again Coy rocked on his toes, composed a quick smile to give Palermo a sense of confidence, and in the same instant kneed him in the testicles, so brutally that a second later, when Palermo was bent over with the breath knocked out of him and his face congested, Coy was able without much trouble to deliver a second blow, a head butt to Palermo's nose, which crunched beneath his forehead as if someone had broken a piece of furniture. Coy had learned that move with choreographic precision during a dustup in the port of Hamburg. The third move, in the improbable case that the adversary was still in the game, consisted of another knee to the face; and as a finale, all your tricks and a few of the pipe-fitters' thrown in. But he saw that it wasn't necessary: Palermo had dropped to his knees, white and loose as a sack of potatoes, his face against Coy's thigh, staining his jeans with the shockingly red blood streaming from his nose.

In the next five seconds, all hell broke loose. The secretary began to scream and scooted back in the sofa, so unnerved in her scrambling that she showed her panties, which were black. The two foreigners, at first stupefied, jumped up to help the downed man. As for Coy, he could see out of the corner of his eye that all the waiters in the room, and a few of the customers, were running toward him, and he found himself tackled, pinned by strong hands that lifted him off the ground and hustled him toward the door as if they intended to lynch him before the indignant and astonished eyes of employees and clients. The glass doors opened, someone shouted something about calling the police, and at that moment Coy saw, in succession, the illuminated facade of the building of the Cortes, the green lights of the taxis parked at the door, and to their mutual surprise, the melancholy dwarf, staring at him from the nearest traffic light. Coy was unable to see more, because someone had a tight grip on his hair, but even so he caught a glimpse of the Berber chauffeur's tough face—everyone in the cast seemed to be at the Palace that night—before he felt a furious tug that snapped his head back and then came one, two, three, four, professional punches to the solar plexus that took his breath away. He fell to the pavement, gasping for air and his mouth working like a fish out of water. LNA: the Law of No Air, or... you're never there when I need you. At that point he heard a police siren and said to himself: You've torn it now, sailor. You'll get six years and a day for this, and the girl will have to dive by herself. Then after several fruitless attempts to catch his breath he was able to get some air, although when he did it hurt as it rasped in and out of his lungs. His lower ribs seemed to move of their own accord, and he thought one was broken. Sonofabitch. He was still on the ground, face down, when someone handcuffed his wrists—dick-dick— behind his back. He was consoled by the thought that for the next few days, Nino Palermo, every time he looked in the mirror, would remember Tanger Soto, him, and poor Zas. He was pulled to his feet as a whirling blue light hit him full in the face. He missed Gallego Neira, the Tucuman Torpedoman, and the rest of Crew Sanders. But these were different times, and different ports.

6

Of Knights and Knaves

There is a wide variety of puzzles about an island in which certain inhabitants... always tell the truth and others... always lie. RAYMOND
M
.
SMULLYAN
,
What Is the Name of This Book!

The gypsy went away after insisting a little longer, and Coy thought as he watched her go that perhaps he should have let her read his palm and tell his fortune. She was a woman of middle age, her dark-skinned face furrowed with an infinity of wrinkles^ her hair pulled back with a silver comb. Big-boned, fat, the hem of her skirt whirled as she swung her hips gracefully, stopping to offer sprigs of rosemary to the travelers returning along the palm-shaded avenue that spilled down behind the castle of Santa Catalina in Cadiz. Before she left, peeved by Coy's refusal to take the rosemary in exchange for a few coins, or to allow her to tell his fortune, the gypsy murmured a curse, half joking, half serious, that he was now mulling over. "You will have only one journey without cost." Coy was not a superstitious sailor— in this day of the Meteosat and the GPS, few of his calling were —but he maintained certain apprehensions appropriate to life at sea. Maybe for that reason, when the gypsy disappeared beneath the palms on Avenida Duque de Najera, Coy contemplated his left palm uneasily, before sneaking a look at Tanger, who was sitting at the same table on the terrace talking with Lucio Gamboa, the director of the San Fernando observatory, where the three of them had spent part of the day. Gamboa was a captain in the Navy, but he was in civilian clothes—checked shirt, khaki pants, and very old and faded canvas espadrilles. Cordial but unkempt, nothing about him betrayed his military affiliation. He was chunky, bald, and loquacious, with a scruffy, graying beard and the light eyes of a Norman. He had been talking for hours, showing no signs of fatigue, as Tanger asked questions, nodded, or took notes.