The Nautical Chart (34 page)

At four in the morning El Piloto took over, and Coy went below to rest. In his narrow stern cabin, which hardly had room for a bunk and a locker, he lay down, still dressed, on his sleeping bag and minutes later, rocked by the waves, fell into a deep, dreamless sleep in which blurred shadows like ships floated through a phantasmagorical green darkness. Finally he was wakened by a ray of sunlight beaming through the porthole, rising and falling with the waves. He sat up in his bunk and rubbed his neck and injured eye, feeling the rasp of his beard on the palm of his hand. A good shave wouldn't hurt, he thought. He went down the narrow passageway toward the head, peering into the other cabin on the way. The door and porthole were open to let in the air, and Tanger was sleeping on her stomach in the bunk, still wearing the life jacket and harness. He couldn't see her face because her hair had fallen across it. Her feet, still in her tennis shoes, hung over the edge of the bunk. Leaning against the door frame, Coy listened to her breathing, punctuated by an occasional sharp intake or a moan. Then he went to shave. His swollen eye wasn't too bad, and his chin was painful only when he yawned. Considering everything, he mused, consoling himself, he'd come through the conversation at Old Willis reasonably well. Animated by that thought, he connected the water pump to wash up a little, then heated coffee in the microwave. Trying to keep from spilling, he drank one cup and carried another up to El Piloto. He found his friend sitting in the cockpit, a wool cap on his head, his beard gray against his coppery skin. The Andalusian coast was visible in the mist two miles off the port beam.

"You'd no more than gone to bed when she vomited over the side," El Piloto told him, taking the hot cup. "She lost everything. That was one sick girl."

Proud bitch, Coy thought. He regretted having missed the show—the queen of the seas and wrecks, all flags frying, hanging onto the taffrail and tossing her cookies. Wonderful.

"I can't believe it."

It was obvious he did believe it. El Piloto looked at him thoughtfully.

"Seemed she was just waiting till you got out of sight." "No doubt about that."

"But she never complained. Not once. When I went over to ask if she needed anything, she told me to go to hell. Then when she was a little calmer, she went below to bed like a sleepwalker."

El Piloto took several sips of coffee and clicked his tongue, the way he did every time he reached a conclusion.

"Don't know why you're smiling," he said. "That girl has class."

"Too much, Piloto." Coy's brief laugh was bitter. "Too much class."

"She even felt her way leeward before she heaved________ She didn't

rush, just made her way calmly, never losing her cool. But as she went past me, I saw her face in the light from the cabin. She was bone white, but she found enough voice to tell me good evening."

Having said that, El Piloto was silent for a while. He seemed to be reflecting.

"Are you sure she knows what she's doing?"

He offered Coy the half-empty cup. Coy took a sip and handed it back.

"The only thing I'm sure about is you." El Piloto scratched his head beneath the cap and nodded. He didn't seem convinced. Then he turned to study the vague outline of the coast, a long dark blotch to the north. It was difficult to see clearly through the mist.

THEY
passed few sailboats. Tourist season on the Costa del Sol hadn't yet begun, and the only pleasure craft they sighted were a French single-master and later a Dutch ketch, sailing with the wind free toward the Strait. In the afternoon, nearing Motril, a black-hulled schooner headed in the opposite direction passed by a half-cable's length away, flying an English flag atop the spanker of the mainmast. There were also working fishing boats to which the
Carpanta
frequently had to give way. The rules of navigation demanded that all ships keep their distance from a fishing boat with lines in the water, so during his turns on watch—he and El Piloto relieved one another every four hours—Coy disconnected the automatic pilot and took the wheel to avoid the trawlers and drift nets. He did not do so happily, because he had no sympathy for fishermen; they were the source of hours of uncertainty on the bridge of the merchant ships he'd sailed on, when their lights dotted the horizon at night, saturating the radar screens and complicating conditions of rain or fog. Besides, he found them surly and self-interested, remorselessly eager to drag every inch of the sea within reach. Bad humored from a life of danger and sacrifice, they lived for today, wiping out species after species with no thought of anything beyond immediate gains. The most pitiless among them were the Japanese. With the complicity of Spanish merchants and suspiciously passive marine and fishing authorities, they were annihilating the red tuna in the Mediterranean with ultramodern sonars and small planes. Fishermen were not the only guilty parties, however. In those same waters Coy had seen finbacks asphyxiated after swallowing floating plastic bags, and whole schools of dolphins crazed by pollution beaching themselves to the while children and volunteers weeping with impotence tried to push them back into a sea they refused.

It was a long day of maneuvering among unpredictable fishing vessels, which might plow straight ahead one moment and then turn suddenly to port or starboard to lay out or pull in their nets. Coy steered among them, changing course with professional patience, thinking of how sailors acted with considerably less circumspection aboard merchant ships in less carefully governed waters. Sailboats and working fishing vessels had theoretical right of way, but in practice they were well advised to keep a wide berth from merchant ships moving at top speed, with their Indian, Filipino or Ukrainian crews cut back to save money, commanded by mercenary officers and with a flag of convenience, a course set as straight as possible to economize on time and fuel, and sometimes, at night, with a minimal watch on the bridge, unattended engines, and a sleepy officer relying almost completely on onboard instruments. And if by day the engines or wheel were seldom touched to alter speed or course, at night such a ship became a lethal threat to all small craft crossing its path, whether or not they had legal priority. At twenty knots, which is more than twenty miles an hour, a merchant ship beyond the horizon could be upon you in ten minutes. Once, en route from Dakar to Tenerife, the ship Coy was second officer on had run down a fishing boat. It was five minutes after four in the morning, and Coy had just ended his watch on the bridge of the
Hawaiian Pilot,
a seven-thousand-ton traditional cargo ship. As he was going down the companionway toward his cabin he thought he heard a muffled sound from the starboard side, as if something had scraped the ship from stem to stem. He went back on deck just in time to see a dark shadow capsizing in the wake, and a faint glimmer that looked like a low-wattage lightbulb dancing crazily before suddenly going out. He rushed back to the bridge, where the first officer was calmly checking the set of the gyroscope. I think we just sank a fishing boat, Coy sputtered. And the first officer, a phlegmatic, melancholy Hindu named Gujrat, stood there looking at him. On your watch or mine? he asked finally. Coy said that he'd heard the noise at 0405 and seen the light go out. The first officer stared at him a little longer, moughtful, before stepping out on the wing bridge to take a quick look toward the stern and check the radar, where the echoes of the waves showed nothing special. Nothing new on my watch, he concluded, again giving his full attention to the gyroscope. Later, when the first officer reported Coy's suspicions to the captain—an arrogant Englishman who made lists of the crew separating British subjects from foreigners, including officers—he approved the fact that the incident had not been entered in the logbook- We're in open waters, he said. Why complicate life?

AT
ten in the evening they reached 30 longitude west of Greenwich. Except for brief appearances on deck, always with the air of a somnambulist, Tanger spent almost every moment secluded in her cabin. When Coy went by and found her asleep, he noticed that the box of Dramamine was quickly being depleted. The rest of the time, when she was awake, she sat at the stern, still and silent, facing the coastline slowly passing on the port side. She barely tasted the food El Piloto prepared, although she agreed to eat a little more when he told her it would help setde her stomach. She went to sleep almost as soon as it was dark, and the two men stayed in the cockpit, watching the stars come out. They headed into the wind all night, forcing them to use the motor. That meant they had to go into port at Almerimar at six the next morning, to refuel, take a break, and restock provisions.

THEY
cast off at two that afternoon, with a favorable wind: a fresh south-southeaster mat allowed them to shut down the motor and set first the mainsail and men the Genoa almost as soon as they rounded the buoy at Punta Entinas, on the starboard tack with the wind on her quarter and at reasonable speed. The swell had reduced, and Tanger felt much better. In Almerimar, where they had docked next to an ancient Baltic fishing boat refitted by ecologists for following whales in the sea of Alboran, she had helped El Piloto hose down the deck. She seemed to hit it off with him, and he treated her with a mixture of attentiveness and respect. After lunch at the seamen's club, they had coffee in a fishermen's bar, and there Tanger described to El Piloto the vicissitudes of the day's run of the
Dei Gloria,
which had been following, she said, a route similar to theirs. El Piloto was interested in details of the brigantine, and she answered all his questions with the aplomb of someone who had studied the matter down to the last particular. A clever girl, El Piloto commented as an aside, when the three of them were on their way back to the boat, loaded with food and bottles of water. Coy, who was watching her as she walked ahead of them along the quay—in jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, her hair blown by the breeze, a supermarket bag in each hand—agreed. Maybe too clever, he was about to say. But he didn't.

She didn't get seasick again. The sun was beginning to sink toward the horizon behind them. The
Carpanta
was moving under full sail past the Gulf of Adra, showing four knots on the log and with the wind, now veering toward the south, abeam. Coy, whose swollen eye was considerably better, was watching the bow. In the cockpit, with hands expert at mending nets and sails, El Piloto was sewing up the jacket ripped during the incident at Old Willis, never missing a stitch despite the rolling of the boat. Tanger's head appeared in the companion; she asked their position and Coy told her. After a moment she came and sat between them with a nautical chart in her hands. When she unfolded it in the protection of the small cabin, Coy saw that it was number 774 of the British Admiralty: Motril to Cartagena, including the island of Alboran. For long distances, the smaller-scale English charts, which were all the same size, were more manageable than the Spanish ones.

"It was here, and more or less this hour, when they sighted the corsair's sails from the
Dei Gloria,"
Tanger explained. "It was following in their wake, gradually gaining. It could have been any ship at all, but Captain Elezcano was a distrustful man, and it seemed strange to him that the other ship would begin to approach after leaving Almeria behind, just when there was a long stretch of coast ahead that offered no refuge for the brigantine— So he ordered them to put on more sail and keep a close watch."

She indicated the approximate position on the chart, eight or ten miles to the southwest of Cabo de Gata. Coy could easily imagine the scene—the men gazing astern from the sloping deck, the captain on the poop, studying his pursuer through his spyglass, the worried faces of the two priests, Escobar and Tolosa, and the chest of emeralds locked in the cabin. Suddenly the yell, the order to lay on sail that sent sailors scurrying up the ratlines to set more canvas, the jibs flapping above the bowsprit before straining with the wind, and the ship heeling a couple of strakes more as she felt the additional sails. The wake of foam straight over the blue sea and behind her, and toward the horizon, the white sails of the
Chergui
now openly giving chase.

"It was close to nightfall," Tanger continued, after glancing toward the sun, lower and lower off the stern. "More or less like right now. And the wind was blowing from the south, and then the southwest."

"Here's what's happening," said El Piloto. He had finished stitching the jacket and was observing the dancing waves and the look of the sky. "It's going to veer a couple of quarters astern before nightfall, and we'll meet a fresh
lebeche
when we double the cape."

"Fantastic," she said.

The navy-blue eyes moved from the chart to the sea and the sails, expectant. Her nostrils were dilated, and she was taking deep breaths through half-open lips, as if in that moment she were contemplating the sails and rigging of the
Dei Gloria.

"According to the report of the ship's boy," Tanger continued, "Captain Elezcano at first hesitated to hoist all the sails. The ship had suffered damage during the storm in the Azores, and its upper masts weren't to be trusted."

"You're referring to the topmasts," Coy informed her. "The upper masts are called topmasts. If you say they weren't in good shape, too much canvas could finish springing them. If the brigantine had a wind abeam the way we do, I suppose she'd be carrying her jibs, lower staysails, main course, fore course, and perhaps the main topsail and the fore topsail, well braced to leeward, and reserving the upper sails, the topgallants, to avoid risk. At least for the moment."

Tanger nodded, and studied the sea behind them as if the corsair were there.

"She must have flown across the water. The
Dei Gloria
was a swift ship."

Coy, in turn, looked back. 'Apparently the other ship was too."

Now he transported himself in his imagination to the deck of the corsair. According to the details of the ship Lucio Gamboa had described to them in Cadiz, the
Chergui,
a polacre-rigged xebec, would have had all sails set, the enormous lateen on the foremast swollen with wind and hauled to the bowsprit, the sails on the mainmast set, lateen and topsail on the mizzenmast, cutting through the waves with the slender lines of a ship constructed for the Mediterranean, her gunports closed but the battle-trained crew preparing the guns. And that Englishman, that Captain Slyne, or Misian, or whatever the SOB's name was, would have been standing on the high, slanting poop, never taking his eyes off his prey. The stern chase would be long, as the brigantine he was pursuing was also swift. The crew of the corsair would be calm, aware that unless the prize damaged something they wouldn't close on her until after dawn. Coy could imagine the crew of renegades, the dangerous scum of the ports. Maltese, Gibraltarians, Spaniards, and North Africans. The worst from every rooming house, whorehouse, and tavern, skilled pirates who sailed and fought under the technically legal cover of letters of marque, which in theory kept them from hanging if they were captured. Desperate, daring, and cruel rabble with nothing to lose and everything to gain, under the command of unscrupulous captains who operated as privateers with letters from Moorish tribal kings or His Britannic Majesty, with accomplices in any port where complicity could be bought. Spain, too, had people like that—officers dismissed from the Navy, stripped of their title or fallen into disgrace, adventurers seeking their fortune or some way to find their way back to walk the deck of a ship-of-the-line, who served at the orders of anyone who would have them, and the commercial alliances that fitted out ships and sold the booty calmly through normal channels. In another time, Coy reflected with deeply personal sarcasm, a dishonored officer like him without a berth might have ended up on a corsair himself. With the vagaries of the sea, he might just as well have found himself on board the prey as on the hunter, sailing those same waters under full sail, with the dark silhouette of Cabo de Gata visible on the horizon.