The Nautical Chart (30 page)

TANGER
and Coy had stopped near the bow of a small schooner. She was looking across the bay, where the skyline of Algeciras was sharp and dear. The water was calm, a blue-green barely rippled by the breeze. There were more clouds in the sky now, moving slowly toward the Mediterranean. Opposite the port, at the foot of the massive Rock, ships at anchor dotted the water. Maybe the
Chergui
had sailed from this very spot on its last voyage, after lying to in the shelter of the English batteries on Gibraltar. A lookout aloft with a spyglass, a sail glimpsed on the horizon, moving west to east, an anchor quickly and stealthily weighed. And the chase.

"Nino Palermo knows there were emeralds," Tanger concluded. "Not how many or their size and quality, but he knows. He's seen some of the documents I've seen. He's intelligent, he knows his business, and he knows how to draw conclusions. But he doesn't know everything I know."

'At least he knows you deceived him."

"Don't be ridiculous. You don't deceive men like him. You fight them with their own weapons."

She turned toward the far end of the quay, where the
Carpanta
was tied up. Through the masts and rigging of neighboring boats, Coy could see El Piloto, who was completing some chores topside. He had arrived that morning, sleepy and unshaven, with dark skin cracked by sun, rugged hands, rough when you shook them, and eyes that always recalled a winter sea. Three days' sail from Cartagena. Steamers, he had said—El Piloto always called merchant ships steamers—had not let him get a wink of sleep the whole trip. He was getting too old to be sailing by himself. Too old.

"I worked it all out, you know," Tanger continued. 'All Palermo did was accidentally provide the mental click that fit everything into place. Set things in order that had been there, waiting... The kinds of things that for some reason you sense will have meaning someday, and that you store in a corner of your memory till that time."

Now she was being sincere, and Coy realized that. Now she had told the real story, and was still talking about it; at least with regard to concrete facts, she had nothing left to hide. Now he had the keys, the account of events. He knew what was at the bottom of the ocean and about the mystery. Even so, he was not exactly tranquil, or relieved. I will lie to you and deceive you. Some unknown, unidentifiable note was vibrating somewhere, like an almost imperceptible change in the rhythm of a diesel or the melodic insinuation of an instrument whose appropriateness is not possible to establish immediately, a deliberate or improvised line that seems mysterious until the end, when it can be properly assessed. He was remembering a piece by the Thelonious Monk Quartet, a blues classic that was called precisely that—"Misterioso."

"Intuition, Coy," she said. "That's the word. Dreams you are sure will materialize someday." She kept gazing at the sea as if replaying that dream, her skirt blowing in the breeze, hair blowing in her face. "I worked on that even before I knew where it was leading me, with a persistence you cannot imagine. I burned the midnight oil. And suddenly, one day, dick! Everything was clear."

She turned, a smile on her lips. A reflective smile, almost expectant when she looked at him, squinting slightly because of the light. This was a smile that extended to the freckled skin around her mouth and cheeks, so warm he could sense the flush spreading down her neck and shoulders and arms beneath her clothing.

"Like a painter," she added, "who's carrying around a world inside, and suddenly a person, a phrase, a fleeting image, creates a painting in his head."

"She smiled in that way beautiful and wise females have, serenely self-aware. There was flesh behind that smile, he thought, uneasy. There was a curve that blended into other perfect lines, a miracle of complicated genetic combinations. A waist. Warm thighs that hid the greatest of true mysteries.

"That's my story," Tanger concluded. "It was destined for me,
and all my life, my studies, my work at the Museo Naval were lead-
ing me to it before I realized it_______ That's why Palermo is nothing more than an interloper. For him it's only a ship, one among many possible treasures." She turned her eyes from Coy to gaze again at the sea. 'Tor me, it's the dream of a lifetime."

Awkward, he scratched his unshaven chin. Then the back of his neck, and finally he touched his nose. He was looking for words. Something ordinary, everyday, that would wash the impression of that smile from his flesh.

"Even if you find it," he pointed out, "you won't be able to keep the treasure. You can't just go out and salvage a ship."

Tanger was focused on the bay. The clouds were gradually turning the water gray. A splotch of sunlight slipped past them before striking the water lapping the quay, flashing emerald.

"The
Dei Gloria
belongs to me," she said. 'And no one is going to take it away. It's my Maltese falcon."

IX

Forecastle Women

There is nothing I love as much as I hate this game. JOHN
MCPHEE
,
Looking for a Ship

It's time," said Tanger.

He opened his eyes and saw her across from him, waiting. She was sitting on a teak bench in the cockpit of the
Carpanta,
looking at him intently. Coy was lying on the other bench with his jacket as cover, his head toward the bow and feet close to the tiller and binnacle. There was no wind, and the only sound was the gentle slapping of the swell against the sides of boats tied up at the quay in Marina Bay. Overhead, beyond the slightly swaying mast, the highest cumulus clouds were touched with soft pink.

"Right," he answered hoarsely.

Coy had the habit of waking up alert, fully lucid. An ability acquired from many early shifts on watch. Setting his jacket aside, he stretched a bit to loosen his stiff neck and went below to splash water on his face and hair. He returned and combed it back with his fingers after shaking his head like a wet dog. His beard rasped as he felt his chin; he had neglected to shave because of his long nap, which was necessary since they planned to sail at night. Tanger hadn't moved, and now she was studying the heights of the Rock with the preoccupied air of a mountain climber preparing to make an assault. She had changed from the long blue cotton skirt to jeans and a T-shirt, with a black sweater knotted around her waist. They were surrounded by the screams of gulls in the fading light. El Piloto was polishing the brightwork with a rag, his hands black. Take care of your boat, he always said, and she will take care of you. The Carpanta was a classic sailboat with a center cockpit and single mast, built in La Rochelle before plastic replaced iroko, teak, and copper.

"Piloto," he said.

The gray eyes, circled with dark wrinkles, glanced up from beneath thick eyebrows and gave Coy a friendly, tranquil wink. According to his own words, although ne wasn't much given to words, El Piloto had sailed for sixty years with the wind at his back. He had given orders on the cruise ship
Canarias
when one still gave orders with a cornet, and had also worked as a fisherman, sailor, smuggler, and diver. His hair was the same lead gray as his eyes, curly, and very short, his skin tanned like old leather, his skillful hands rough- Less than ten years ago he was still good-looking enough to have played a heartthrob in an action film—say a sponge diver or a pirate—with Gilbert Roland or Alan Ladd. Now he had put on a little weight, but his shoulders were as broad as ever, his waist reasonably trim, and his arms still powerful. As a young man he'd been an excellent dancer, and in those days women in the bars of Molinete had fought over a bolero or paso doble with him. Still today, mature women who rented the
Carpanta
to fish or swim or just sightsee in the vicinity of Cartagena felt their legs tremble when he held his arms in a little circle and invited them to take the helm.

"Everything OK?"

"Everything's OK"

They had known each other since Coy was a boy playing hooky to fool around the docks, where there were ships with foreign flags and sailors who spoke languages he could not understand. El Piloto, son and grandson of sailors who had also been called Piloto, could be found mornings outside some bar in the port, an honest man for hire, waiting for clients for his aging sailboat. Besides taking out women tourists, whose behinds he cupped to help them aboard, in those days El Piloto would dive to clear line from propellers, scrape barnacled hulls, and salvage outboard motors that had fallen into the water. In his free time he devoted himself, like everyone in those days, to small-time smuggling. Nowadays his bones were a little old to soak for too long, and he earned a living taking families out for Sunday outings, as well as crews from the tankers anchored at Escombreras, pilots on stormy days, and staggering-drunk Ukrainian sailors who tossed their cookies leeward after having drunk themselves blind in the bars. The
Carpanta
and El Piloto had seen it all. A vertical sun, without a breath of air, focusing laser heat on the bollards in the port. The sea really wild: God jumping and skipping. A westerly zinging in the rigging like harp strings. And those long red Mediterranean sunsets when the water looks like a mirror and the peace of that world is peace itself, and you understand that you are only a tiny drop in three thousand years of eternal ocean.

"We'll be back in a couple of hours," Coy said, shooting a glance up at the Rock, "and then shove off straightaway."

El Piloto nodded, continuing to polish a brass cleat. By his side an adolescent Coy had learned a few things about men, the sea, and life. Together they dived for Roman amphoras and quietly sold them, fished for squid at sunset on the Punta de la Podadera, caught swordfish,
marrajo,
and sharks on trotlines off Cope, and twenty-pound sea bass with a harpoon among the black rocks of Cabo de Palos—when there were still sea bass to fish for. In the Graveyard of Ships With No Name, to which old tubs made their last voyage, to be cut up and sold as scrap, El Piloto had taught Coy to identify each of the parts that composed a ship as they squeezed lemon juice on raw clams and sea urchins, long before Coy went off to be a seaman. And in that desolate landscape of rusted iron, superstructures beached on the sand, funnels that would never smoke again, and hulls like dead whales beneath the sun, El Piloto had pulled out a packet of unfiltered Celtas—the first cigarette in Coy's life—and lit one with a metal pocket lighter that had an acrid, burnt-wick smell.

Coy picked up his jacket and jumped to the quay. Tanger followed, the strap of her shoulder bag secure across her chest.

"What will the weather be like tonight?" she asked.

Coy took a look at the sea and the sky. A few isolated clouds were beginning to break apart, streaking the sky in several directions.

"Good weather. Not much wind. Maybe a mild sea when we round Punta Europa."

Surprise, enjoyment, a flash of vexation when she heard the word "sea." It would be funny, he thought, if she got seasick. Until that moment he had never considered the possibility of seeing her glassy-eyed like a tuna, skin yellowed, clinging weakly to the gunnel.

"You have any Dramamine? Maybe you'd better take one before we shove off."

"That's none of your business."

"You're wrong. If you get seasick, you'll be in the way. That is my business."

There was no answer, and Coy shrugged. They walked down the quay toward the Renault parked in the marinas parking lot. The setting sun, visible over Algeciras, shone red on the vertical face of the Rock, picking out the dark hollows of the old embrasures dug out of the rock. Two battered smugglers' launches, retired from sea duty and with blue and black paint dribbled down then-sides in gobs, were rotting on sawhorses amid rusted engines and empty steel drums. The sounds of the city intensified as they got closer to the parking lot. A bored customs officer was watching television in his guardhouse. A long queue of automobiles was lined up to cross the border in the direction of La Linea de la Concepcidn.

It was Tanger who took the wheel. She drove carefully, handbag in her lap, confident and without haste, down the street that ran behind the border barriers to the bay, then left, toward the rotunda of the Trafalgar cemetery. She had not said a word until that moment. Then she stopped the car, engaged the brake, looked at her watch, and turned off the engine.

"What's the plan?" Coy asked.

There wasn't any plan, she replied. They were going to drive up to Old Willis viewpoint to hear what Nino Palermo had to say. They would do exactly that, and then go back to the port, leave the car in the parking lot and the keys in the Avis mailbox, and shove off as planned.

"And if there are complications?"

Coy was thinking of Horatio Kiskoros and the Berber. Palermo wasn't the type who would be satisfied with offering a proposal and having them say, Well, we'll see, and See you later. With that in mind, before he left the boat he had picked up a Wichard bosun's knife, very sharp, with a four-inch blade and marlinspike, which El Piloto kept to sever halyards in an emergency. He could feel it in the back pocket of his jeans, between his right buttock and the seat. It wasn't a big deal, but it was better than making a social call empty-handed.

"I don't think there will be any complications," she answered.

At the cemetery, Tanger stood for a long time in front of one of the tombstones: for Captain Thomas Norman, RM, who died December 6,1805, of wounds received aboard the
Mars,
at Trafalgar. Then they went up to the viewpoint to study the place they were to meet Palermo at nightfall. Coy watched as she walked over the old concrete mounts, now empty of guns. She studied everything carefully: the access road and the one that climbed toward the tunnels of the Great Siege, the empty whitewashed military barracks, the British flag flying over Moorish Castle, the isthmus where the airport was located, and the broad Atunara beach that stretched northeast to Spanish territory. She brought to mind an officer studying the terrain before a battle, and Coy found himself doing the same—calculating possibilities, safe havens and dangers, the way you study charts and courses of a treacherous coast you want to reach by night.