The Nautical Chart (10 page)

'After all," he added, as if reflecting, "I don't have anything better to do."

Tanger seemed neither satisfied nor disenchanted. She just clipped her head a little lower, as he had seen her do before, and the tips of her hair once again brushed her face. The eyes on Coy were taking in every detail.

"Thanks."

Finally she'd said it, just as he was beginning to wonder why she wasn't saying it.

"You're welcome." Coy touched his nose. "And now it's my turn. You promised me a question and an answer_____ What is it

exactly you're looking for?"

"You already know that. We're searching for the
Dei Gloria."

"That much is obvious. My question is why. I'm asking what
you're
looking for."

"Museo Naval aside?" "Museo Naval aside."

The light from the lamp fell obliquely on her freckled face, intensifying the effect of the fading whorls of cigarette smoke. The play of light and shadow turned her hair to shades of matte gold.

"I've been obsessed with this ship for some time. And now I think I know where she is."

So that was it. Coy felt like smacking himself on the forehead for being so stupid. He looked at the framed photograph: Tanger as a teenager, light hair, freckles and a T-shirt loose over bare, brown thighs. She was leaning against the chest of a tan middle-aged man in a white shirt, with short hair. About fifty, he estimated. And she, maybe fourteen. Behind them was the ocean and a beach, and he also noted an obvious resemblance between the girl and the man. The shape of the forehead, the willful chin. Tanger was smiling into the camera, and the expression in her eyes was much more luminous and open than any he had seen. She looked expectant, on the verge of discovering something, a present or a surprise. Coy remembered. LDS: Law of the Diminishing Smile. Maybe you smile at life like that when you're fourteen, and then with time your lips grow chill.

"Go easy. There aren't any more sunken treasures."

"You're wrong." She scowled at him. "Sometimes there are."

To convince him, she talked a while about treasure hunters. There were people like that, obsessed with old maps and secrets, and they searched for things hidden at the bottom of the sea. You could see them in Seville, in the Archivo de Indias, the New World archives, bent over old files, or casually dropping by museums and wandering through ports, attempting to wheedle information without giving away dues or raising suspicions. She had seen several come by number 5 Paseo del Prado on the trail of a piece of evidence, asking if they could look something up in the archives or consult old sea charts, sowing a patch of false information to camouflage their true objectives. One of them, an Italian and a very pleasant man, had gone so far as to woo one of her fellow employees in order to gain access to classified documents. These were unique, interesting people, adventurers in their way, dreamy or ambitious. Most of them looked like bookish library mice, fat, bespectacled, not even remotely like the muscular, tanned types with tattoos you saw in movies and television documentaries. Nine out of ten followed impossible dreams, and only one out of a thousand ever fulfilled his ambition.

Coy kept petting Zas, contemplating the dogs faithful eyes. He felt Zas's appreciative breath on his wrist. Moist.

"That ship wasn't carrying treasure, unless you didn't tell me the whole story. Cotton, tobacco, sugar, you said."

"That's correct."

'And you also said one in a thousand, didn't you?"

She nodded through the smoke, took another puff of her cigarette and nodded again. She was looking at Coy as if she didn't see him.

"The
Dei Gloria
was also carrying a mystery on board," she said. "Those two passengers, the interception by the corsair. You understand? There's something more. I read the survivor's statement, it's in the naval archives. There are pieces that don't fit together. And then his sudden disappearance. Pouf! Vanished into thin air."

She had put out her cigarette, crushing it until the last little ember was extinguished. She is one tenacious girl, Coy said to himself. No one who wasn't would have got this far, nor would she have those poker-player eyes, or crush the life out of cigarettes as if she were murdering them. This babe knows exactly what she wants. And I, for good or for ill, am standing right in her path.

"There are treasures," she said, "that don't have a price."

Coy took another quick glance toward the train tracks illuminated in the distance, and a look at the service station across the street, halfway between the door to this building and the terminal. A man was standing in front of the station, and he seemed to be looking up, although from the fifth floor that was difficult to determine. Something in his attitude or his appearance, however, seemed familiar.

'Are you expecting anyone?" Coy asked.

She turned to him, surprised. She said nothing, but slowly walked toward him, focused on him, not the window. When she got there, she looked down. As she leaned forward her hair fanned across her chin, hiding her face. She raised a hand to brush it back, and Coy studied that profile hardened by the broken nose, lit by the glow from the street. She seemed preoccupied.

"That man's been there a while," he said.

Tanger was holding her breath, then finally released it like a groan or a sob of irritation. Her expression had turned somber.

"You know him?" Coy asked.

Administrative silence. Sphinx, Venetian domino, Aztec mask. Mute as the ghosts of the
Chergui
and-the
Dei Gloria.

"Who was that man with the ponytail? Why were you arguing with him that night in Barcelona?"

Zas's eyes were shifting from one to the other, tail wagging with glee. Tanger stood there quietly a few seconds more, as if she hadn't heard the question, and placed her hand on the window-pane, leaving the mark of her fingerprints. She was very close, and Coy again breathed in the scent of warm, clean flesh. A gentle erection began to press against the left pocket of his jeans. He imagined her naked, leaning against that same window, the illumination from outside lighting her skin. He imagined tearing off her clothes and turning her toward him. He imagined picking her up in his arms and carrying her to the sofa, or to the bed in the next room, with Zas affectionately wagging his tail from the doorway. He imagined that he went mad and followed her through wind and storm to the lighthouse at the end of the world. He imagined that she wanted more from him than just to use his skills. He imagined all that and much more in a sequence of quick scenes, moving through them rapidly, ardently, desperately, until suddenly he realized that she was scrutinizing him, and that the expression in her eyes was exactly that of the woman on me yacht near Venice, the time he had spied her through the binoculars and believed that despite the distance he was penetrating her thoughts.

"I promised you one answer," she said finally. "There've been enough for tonight. The rest will have to wait."

HE
wanted to go to bed with that woman, he thought, as he ran down the stairs two at a time. He wanted to go to bed with her not once, but an infinite number of times. He wanted to count every golden freckle with his fingers and his tongue, and then lay her back, gently part her thighs, enter her, and kiss her mouth as he moved in her. Kiss her slowly, taking his time, tirelessly, until, as the sea molds a rock, he softened those hard lines that made her seem so distant. He wanted to put sparks of light and surprise in her navy-blue eyes, to change the rhythm of her breathing, and cause her flesh to throb and shiver. And then in the darkness, like a patient sniper, he would watch for that moment, that brief, fleeting moment of self-centered intensity, when a woman is absorbed in herself and her face contains the faces of all women ever born and yet to be born.

That was Coy's state of mind as he stepped out into the street well past midnight, his erection retreating woefully to its cold bachelor's nest. That was why he found nothing strange in the fact that instead of following the sidewalk downhill to his right, he should look both ways at the Paseo Infanta Isabel, cross at a red stoplight, and walk straight in the direction of the man standing by a light in front of the service station. At heart, and in body, Coy did not like to fight. On the wildest of his shore leaves, during the happy time when he had ships from which to go ashore, he had played the part of involuntary actor, chorus, and comrade. He was one of those guys who goes along with friends and then, when the atmosphere heats up and things come to a boil, he is suddenly punching and taking punches without being responsible for any of it. That happened especially in the days of the Torpedero—the Tucuman Torpedoman—and Crew Sanders, when Coy would often return to the ship with an eye black as a widow's weeds, the collar of his jacket turned up in the cold of dawn, walking along wet quays reflecting yellow light from the sheds and the derricks and the dark silhouettes of moored ships. Three, four, ten staggering men, sometimes with the arms of a drunken buddy over their shoulders, feet dragging, and always some laggard on the edge of alcohol coma who followed farther behind, weaving dangerous "s"s past the bollards at the edge of the water. Jan Sanders was the man who drew the humorous illustrations for the Sigma naval calendars peopled with a crew of plastered, whoring, trouble-making sailors who despised their captain, a petty little tyrant with a huge mustache, and who shared catastrophes, scraps, and shipwrecks across all the seas and through all the whorehouses of the world. Independent of the calendars, Crew Sanders had been composed of Coy, Gallego Neira, and chief engineer Gorostiola, alias the Tucuman Torpedoman, when the three sailed on Zoe ships between Central America and northern Europe, and were just as likely to be broiling in anchorages and ports with tropical Caribbean rhythms as shivering with cold when an icy wind swept the deck and the bridge and the mercury dropped off the thermometers in New York, Hamburg, or Rotterdam. These three were the basic Crew, the standard models, although others were added depending on the port. Neira was six feet five and weighed two hundred and ten pounds, and the Torpedoman was a shade shorter and a few pounds heavier. That was useful, even reassuring, in places like Panama, where they were advised to go no farther than the duty-free shop at the end of the pier, because any farther and there were always pistols and knives waiting for you. Between those two wild men, Coy looked like a dwarf. They had arms like twenty-inch hawsers, hands like propeller blades, and a marked inclination to break things—bottles, bars, faces—after the fifth whiskey. Where those two walked— with Coy in tow—the grass never grew again. In a bar in Copenhagen, for example, filled with blond men and blonde women who in the end turned out to be more blond men, the Torpedoman got riled because when he copped a feel he found a handful of something he hadn't expected. After a brief skirmish he and Neira grabbed Coy, one by each arm, and took off with his feet dangling between them, back to the port and the ship with a half-dozen police—also, inevitably, blond—hot on their heels. "I swear to God I thought he was a bimbo," the Torpedoman kept repeating. Neira was making fun of the Torpedoman's questionable eye for women, and even Coy was in stitches—something his newly split lip could have used—while the Torpedoman was shooting glances at them out of the corner of his eye, highly offended. "Now don't you tell anyone, you hear? Don't even think of it. Assholes."

The man at the service station was just standing there, watching Coy bearing down on him. Coy zeroed in, hands in his jacket pockets, feeling an intense inner energy, a vital exuberance that made him want to shout at the top of his lungs, or pick a fight— with or without Crew Sanders. He was a puppy dog in love. He was aware of it, and yet instead of feeling miserable, he felt stimulated. From his point of view, the sailors with Ulysses who had sealed their ears with wax in order not to hear the sirens' song would never know what they'd missed. Everyone knows the old saw: Any sailor who has nothing to do, looks for a ship, but a woman too. And that justification was as good as any. This adventure, or whatever the devil it turned out to be, included in the same package a ship— albeit a sunken one—and a woman. As for the consequences—the blows and fighting that the ship, the woman, and his own state of mind might generate—he didn't give a rat's ass.

Once at the service station, Coy walked straight toward the stranger standing sentry duty by the light and the closer he got the stronger was the feeling of familiarity he'd had looking down from the window. When he was almost upon him, and his target was watching him with obvious suspicion, Coy began to coil his line, recognizing the short individual from the auction, the same one he thought he'd seen beneath the arcades on the Plaza Real, and who now, no question about it, was right there before him in his green country-estate car coat, looking as if he were dressed for a parody of a morning hunt in Sussex. The parody bit accentuated his short stature, as well as the bulging eyes and melancholy expression Coy remembered so clearly. The English apparel was laughably at odds with his Mediterranean appearance—black eyes and mustache, gelled hair gleaming at the temples, and sallow, southern European skin.

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

Coy approached his quarry at an angle just in case, hands held a little away from his body, muscles tensed, because more than once he had seen pint-sized guys leap forward and sink their teeth into fellows the size of a refrigerator, or palm a knife and bury it in a man's thigh before you could say Hail Mary At any rate, the man was not about to show Coy his profile, maybe because in that getup he was a strange hybrid of formal and grotesque, a kind of cross between Danny DeVito and Peter Loire decked out for a rainy-day turn about the English countryside.

"Sorry?"

The man smiled, sadly. Coy thought he heard a vague South American accent. Argentine, maybe. Or Uruguayan.

"One meeting might be chance," Coy said. "Two, a coincidence. Three, my balls tell me..."

The little man seemed to consider his comment. Coy noted the