The Nautical Chart (38 page)

Captain Elezcano was a tenacious Basque. Resolved not to offer his neck to the butcher's knife without a price, he must have run through the brigantine, urging on his desperate gunners. There would have been guns blown from their trucks, wood splinters, roundshot and musket balls and fragments of metal flying in every direction, pieces of line, masts, and sails dropping from overhead. By that time the two Jesuits would have been dead, or maybe they had gone below to the captain's cabin to defend to the last breath the coffer of emeralds—or to throw it into the ocean. The last broadsides from the corsair were undoubtedly devastating. The
Dei Gloria's
foremast, its sails ripped like winding sheets, would have split before falling onto the bloody butcher's shop of the brigantine's deck. Perhaps by then Captain Elezcano, too, was dead. The ship was adrift, crippled and without her helm. Maybe the terrified fifteen-year-old ship's boy awaited the end huddled among coils of rope, boarding sword in his trembling hand, watching the masts of the
Chergui
approach through the smoke, preparing for boarding. But then he saw a fire aboard the corsair. The point-blank gunfire from the brigantine, or that from the xebec herself, had set alight one of the lower sails, which had not been taken in because of the unexpectedness of the maneuver. Now that sail was blazing and falling onto the deck of the corsair, it may have been near a cartridge of gunpowder, or the open hatchway of the magazine. Hazards of the sea. Suddenly there was a flash, and a brilliant explosion struck the dying brigantine with a fist of air, toppling the second mast and filling the sky with black smoke and pieces of wood and embers and human flesh that rained down everywhere. Standing on the rail of the blood-covered deck, deafened by the explosion, eyes bulging with horror, the ship's boy could see that the nothing remained of the corsair but smoking wood sputtering as it sank into the sea. At that moment the
Dei Gloria
heeled over in her turn, water pouring into the belly of her shattered hull, and the ship's boy found himself floating through the wreckage of wood and cordage. He was alone, but near him floated the boat Captain Elezcano had ordered jettisoned to clear the deck minutes before the battle began.

"
IT
must have happened more or less like that," said Tanger.

The three of them were silent, regarding a sea as still as a tombstone. Somewhere below, half-hidden in the sand of the ocean floor, were the bones of nearly a hundred dead men, what was left of two ships, and a fortune in emeralds.

"The most logical conclusion," she continued, "is that the
Chergui
disintegrated in the explosion, and that her remnants are scattered. The brigantine, however, went down intact, except for the masts. Since it isn't too deep here, you'd expect to find her on her keel, or on one side."

Coy was studying the chart, calculating distances and depths. The sun was beginning to warm his bade

"The bottom is mud and sand," he said. "With some rocks. It's possible she's so deeply buried that we can't dig."

"It's possible." Tanger bent over the charts so dose her hair brushed the paper. "But we won't know until we go down. The part that's covered will be in better shape than what has been exposed to the waves and currents. Shipworms will have done their work, boring into the wood. What hasn't been protected by sand will be gone. The iron rusted. It also depends on how cool the water is. A ship can remain intact at low temperatures, or disappear in short order in warm waters."

"It isn't very cold here," El Piloto put in. "Except for an occasional current."

He was showing interest but staying a little apart, his face showing no expression. His calloused fingers were mechanically tying and untying knots in a section of halyard, his fingernails as short and ragged as Tanger's. His eyes, tranquil and faded by years of Mediterranean light, moved back and forth between them. It was a stoic gaze that Coy knew well—that of a fisherman or sailor who expects nothing more than to fill his nets with a reasonable catch and return to port with just enough to go on living. He wasn't a man of illusions. Everyday life on the sea watered down chimeras, and deep down the word "emeralds" was as nebulous as the place where the rainbow meets the sea.

Tanger had pulled off the wool cap. Now one hand rested carelessly on Coy's shoulder.

"Until we've located the hull with the help of the plans, and we know where each part of the ship lies, we won't be sure of anything. The important thing is whether the area of the stern is accessible. That's where the captain's cabin will be, and the emeralds."

More and more her attitude was different from her mood on dry land. Natural, and less arrogant. Coy felt the light pressure of her hand on his shoulder, and the nearness of her body. She smelled of the sea, and of skin warmed by the slowly rising sun. You need me now, he thought. Now you need me more, and it shows.

"Maybe they threw the emeralds overboard," he said.

She shook her head. Her shadow on chart 463A was gradually shortening. For a while she was silent, but finally she said, "Well, maybe." That was impossible to know just yet At any rate, they had a perfect description of the chest, a wood, iron, and bronze box twenty inches long. The iron wouldn't have aged well under water, and by now it would be a blackish, unrecognizable mass. The bronze would have fared better, but the wood would be gone. Inside, the emeralds would be crusted together. They would look more or less like a block of dark stone, a little reddish, with greenish veins of the bronze. They would have to search for it among all the wreckage, and it wasn't going to be easy.

Of course not. Coy yearned for it to be difficult. A needle in a haystack, as Lucio Gamboa, between laughs and cigarettes, had suggested in Cadiz. If the wreck was buried, they would need hoses to suction off the mud and sand. No way to be discreet.

"Well, now it doesn't matter," Tanger concluded. "First we have to find it."

"What about the depth finder?" Coy asked.

El Piloto finished a double bowline knot.

"No problem," he said. "We'll get that hooked up this afternoon in Cartagena, and also a GPS repeater for the cockpit." He observed Tanger with suspicious gravity. "But all that will have to be paid for."

"Of course," she said.

"It's the best fish-sounding equipment I could find." El Piloto was talking to Coy. "A Pathfinder Optic with three beams, like you asked. The transducer can be installed on the stern without much trouble."

Tanger looked at Coy, inquisitive. He explained that with that sounder they could cover a 90-degree area beneath the
Carpanta's
hull. The machine was generally used to locate schools of fish, but it also gave a clear and very detailed profile of the bottom. Most important, thanks to the use of different colors on the screen, the Pathfinder differentiated bottoms according to density, hardness, and composition, detecting any irregularity. An isolated rock, a submersed object, even changes of temperature, showed up quite clearly. And metal, say the iron or bronze of the guns if they projected above the sand, would be seen in intense, darker color. The fish sounder wasn't as precise as the professional systems Nino Palermo had at his disposal, but it would do in a depth of sixty-five to one hundred seventy feet. Navigating slowly until they had combed the search area and assigned coordinates for each submersed object that caught their attention, they could trace a map of the zone, determining possible sites for the wreck. In a second phase they would explore each location with the aquaplane, a towed wooden sled that would keep a diver within view of the bottom. "Strange," said El Piloto.

He had taken the wineskin from the binnacle and drank head tilted back, eyes to the sky. Coy knew what he was thinking. With a wreck no deeper than that, fishermen would have snagged their nets on it. Someone would know about it. And by now someone would have taken a look, out of curiosity. Any amateur diver could do it.

"Yes. I'm wondering why some fisherman hasn't said anything about a wreck out here. They tend to know the bottom better than the hallway in their homes."

Tanger showed them the chart: S, M, R. The small letters dotted the area beside the numbers that gave the depths.

"It says rocks too, see? That might be protecting the wreck."

"Protect it from fishermen, maybe," Coy offered. "But a wooden ship sunk among rocks doesn't last long. In shallow seas the waves and currents destroy the hull. There won't be anything left like your illustration in
Red Rackham's Treasure."

"Maybe," she said.

She was staring at the sea with a stubborn expression. El Piloto's eyes met Coy's. Suddenly, once again, the whole thing seemed crazy. We're not going to find anything, the sailor's expression said as he handed the wineskin to Coy. I'm here because I'm your friend, and besides, you're paying me, or she is, which is the same thing in the end. But this woman has your needle spinning. And the real kicker is that you haven't even got her in bed.

THEY
were in Cartagena. They had sailed close to the coast, beneath the escarpment of Cabo Tinoso, and now the
Carpanta
was entering the inlet of a port used by Greeks and Phoenicians. Quart-Hadasht: the Carthago Nova of the feats of Hannibal.

Comfortable in a teak chair at the sailboat s stern, Coy was observing Escombreras island. There, below the defile in the south face, he had dived as a boy for Roman amphoras, wine and oil vessels with elegant necks, long curving handles, and the marks of their makers in Latin, some sealed just as they had sunk into the sea. Twenty years before, that zone had been an enormous field of debris from shipwrecks, and also, it was said, from navigators who threw offerings into the sea within view of the temple dedicated to Mercury. Coy had dived there many times, and come up, never faster than his own bubbles, toward the dark silhouette of the
Carpanta
waiting on the glossy surface, her anchor line curving downward into the depths. Once, the first time he went to two hundred feet—two hundred three, the depth gauge on his wrist recorded—Coy had gone down slowly, with pauses to adapt to the change in pressure on his eardrums, letting himself fall deeper into that sphere where colors were disappearing, shading into a ghostly, diffuse light where only tones of green remained. He had eventually lost sight of the surface and then fallen slowly onto his knees on the clean sand bottom, with the cold of the deep rising up his thighs and groin beneath his neoprene suit. Seven point two atmospheres, he thought, amazed at his own audacity. But he was eighteen. All around him, to the edge of the green circle of visibility, scattered every which way on the smooth sand, half buried in it or grouped in small mounds, he saw dozens of broken and intact amphoras, necks, and pointed bases—millenary clay that no one had touched or seen for twenty centuries. Dark fish flashed among narrow amphora mouths in which evil-looking morays had taken up residence. Intoxicated by the feel of the sea on his skin, fascinated by the darkness and the vast field of vessels motionless as sleeping dolphins, Coy had pulled the mask from his face, keeping the air hose between his teeth, to feel on his face all the shadowy grandeur surrounding him. Then, suddenly alarmed, he put the mask back on, clearing it of water with air expelled through his nose. At that moment, El Piloto, made taller by his rubber fins, turned into another dark green silhouette descending at the end of a long plume of bubbles, had swum toward him, moving at the slow pace of men in the depths, signaling with a harsh gesture to the depth gauge on his wrist, and then touching his temple with a finger to ask, silently, whether Coy had lost his mind. They ascended together very slowly, following the jellyfish of air that preceded them, each carrying an amphora. And when they were almost at the surface, and the sun's rays began to filter through the smooth turquoise above their heads, Coy had turned his amphora upside down and a shower of fine sand, shining in the watery light, spilled from inside and enveloped him in a cloud of gold dust.

He loved the sea that was as old and skeptical and wise as the endless women in the genetic memory of Tanger Soto. Its shores bore the imprint of the centuries, he thought, contemplating the city Virgil and Cervantes had written about, clustered at the back of the natural port among high stocky walls that for three thousand years had made it nearly impregnable against the assault of enemies and winds. Despite the decay of its crumbling, filthy facades and the empty lots where houses had tumbled down and not been rebuilt that at times gave it the curious aspect of a city at war, the city looked beautiful from the sea, and its narrow alleyways were resonant with the echoes of men who had fought like Trojans, thought like Greeks, and died like Romans. Now he could make out the ancient castle on a hillock above the wall, on the other side of the breakwater that protected the inlet and entrance to the arsenal. The old abandoned forts of Santa Ana and Navidad passed by slowly to starboard and port of the
Carpanta,
still with empty gun embrasures that continued to stare toward the sea like blinded eyes.

Here I was born, thought Coy. And from this port I first dipped into books and oceans. Here I was tormented by the challenge of faraway things and the before-the-fact nostalgia for all that I didn't know. Here I dreamed of rowing toward a whale with a knife between my teeth and the harpooner poised in the bow. Here I sensed, before I could speak English, the existence of what the
Mariners' Weather Log
calls the ESW: Extreme Storm Wave. I learned that every man, whether he encounters it or not, has an ESW waiting somewhere. Here I saw the gravestones of dead sailors on empty tombs and realized that the world is a ship on a one-way voyage. Here I discovered, before I needed it, the substitute for Cato's sword, for Socrates's hemlock: the pistol and the bullet.

As the
Carpanta
motored into port, Coy watched Tanger, sitting ramrod straight beside the anchor, with one hand holding onto the Genoa rolled on its stay, and smiled at himself. In the cockpit, El Piloto was steering manually through waters he could have sailed blind. A gray Navy corvette, making for the sea from the San Pedro dock, passed on the starboard side, its young sailors hanging over the rail to get a look at the motionless woman in the bow of the sailboat—a gilded figurehead. The offshore breeze carried the scent of the nearby hills. They were bare and dry, baked by the sun, with thyme, rosemary, palmetto, and prickly pear sprouting from dark crags, dry gullies spotted with fig trees, and orderly rows of almond trees in rock-walled terraces. Despite the cement and glass and steel and steam shovels, and the interminable succession of bastard lights blemishing its shores, the Mediterranean was still there, enduring amid the quiet murmur of memory. Oil and red wine, Islam and Talmud, crosses, pines, cypresses, tombs, churches, sunsets crimson as blood, white sails in the distance, rocks carved by man and time, that unique hour in the evening when everything was still and silent except for the song of the cicada, and nights in the light of a driftwood bonfire and a slow moon rising above the sea. Sardines on the spit and bay and olives, watermelon rinds washing back and forth in quiet waves at dusk, the sound of rolling pebbles in the dawn undertow, boats painted blue, white, or red beached on shores with ruined windmills and gray olive trees, and grapes yellowing in the arbors. And in the shadows, eyes lost in the intense blue stretching eastward, men staring at the sea, swarthy, bearded heroes who knew about shipwrecks in coves designated by cruel gods in the guise of mutilated statues sleeping, open-eyed, through the silence of centuries. "What's that?" asked Tanger.