The Nautical Chart Read online

  "PEOPLE are so stupid," Tanger was saying. "Their dreams are limited to things they see on TV"

  She had returned the Tin tins to the shelf and was standing, hands in the pockets of her jeans, looking at him. Now everything about her was softer, from the expression in her eyes to the smile on her lips. Coy nodded, not knowing why. Maybe to encourage her to keep talking, or to indicate that he understood.

  "What do you want to find on the Dei Gloria, really?"

  She came toward him, slowly, and for a moment, caught off guard, he thought that she was going to touch his face.

  "I don't know. I swear to you, I don't know." Now she was standing, right beside him, studying the nautical chart on the table. "But when I read the boy's testimony, transcribed in the dry language of a clerk, I felt... That ship fleeing under full sail, and the corsair giving chase... Why didn't they take refuge in Aguilas? The atlases of the time showed a castle there, and a tower with two guns on Cabo Cope, where they could have sought protection."

  Coy glanced at the chart. Aguilas was beyond its boundaries, southwest of Cope.

  "You made that point yesterday, when you told me the story," he said. "Maybe the corsair was between them and Aguilas, and the Dei Gloria had to keep sailing east. The wind could have veered. Or maybe the captain feared the risk of putting into port at night. There's a stack of explanations for that. The fact is that she ended up sinking in the cove at Mazarron. Maybe he wanted to take shelter under the tower at La Azohia. That tower is still standing."

  Tanger shook her head. She didn't seem convinced.

  "Maybe. In any case, she was a merchant brigantine, and yet when she saw all was lost, she engaged in combat. Why didn't she strike her colors? Was the captain a stubborn man, or was there something on board that was too important to hand over without a fight? Something worth the lives of all the crew, something not even the sole survivor said one word about?"

  "Maybe he didn't know about it."

  "Maybe. But who were those two passengers the manifest identified only with the initials N.E. and J.L.T?"

  Coy rubbed his neck, amazed. "You have the manifest from the Dei Gloria?'

  "Not the original, no. But I have a copy. I got it from the naval archives at Viso del Marques. I have a good friend, a woman, who works there."

  She gave no more details, but it was obvious that something was going through her head. Her lip twisted, and her expression was no longer soft. Tintin had exited the scene.

  "Besides, there's something else."

  She said that and again stopped, as if that "something else" was information he was never going to hear. Quiet, silence, for a long while.

  "The ship," she said finally, "belonged to the Jesuits, remember? To Fornet Palau, a shipowner from Valencia who was their straw man. And another thing. Valencia was the destination. All this happens on February 4, 1767, two months before the royal decree of Charles III ordering 'the banishment of the Jesuits from Spanish domains and the appropriation of their temporalities___ ' Do you have any idea what that meant?"

  Coy said he didn't, that eighteenth-century history and Charles III were not his forte. So she elaborated. She did so very well, with few words, quoting key dates and facts without getting mired in superfluous details. The popular uprising of 1766 in Madrid against minister Esquilache, which shook the security of the monarchy and was said to have been instigated by the Society of Jesus. The Ignatian order's resistance to enlightened ideas spreading through Europe. The enmity of the monarch and his desire to rid himself of them. The creation of a secret council presided over by the Conde de Aranda, which prepared the decree of expulsion, and the unexpected coup of April 2,1767, the immediate expulsion of the Jesuits, the seizure of their wealth, and the subsequent dissolution of the Order by Pope Clement XIV That was the historical context in which the voyage and tragedy of the Dei Gloria had taken place. Of course, there was no proof of a direct connection between one thing and the other. But Tanger was a historian, she was trained to evaluate events and to find relationships among them, to formulate hypotheses and develop them. There could be a connection, or perhaps not. In any case, the Dei Gloria had gone to the bottom. At the very least, to sum it up, a sunken ship was a sunken ship—stat rosa pristina nomine, she recited cryptically. And she knew where.

  "That," she concluded, "is justification enough to look for it."

  Her expression had hardened as she spoke, as if at the hour of dealing with facts the ghost of the girl that had emerged as she looked at the pages of Tintin had faded away. Now the smile had disappeared from her lips and her eyes were shining resolutely, not provocatively. She was no longer the girl in the snapshot. She was becoming distant again, and Coy was annoyed.

  "Tell me about the others."

  "What others?"

  "The Dalmatian with the gray ponytail. And the melancholy dwarf who was watching your house last night. They didn't look like historians, not by a long shot. I don't think the expulsion of old Charles III and the Jesuits would ever raise their limp pricks."

  She seemed to be taken aback by his vulgarity. Or maybe she was just searching for an adequate response.

  "That has nothing to do with you," she said slowly.

  "You're wrong."

  "Listen, I'm paying you for this job."

  For the love of God, he said to himself. That's a serious mistake, beautiful. That is a really serious mistake, one that's unworthy of you—coming out with shit like that at this point in the game.

  "Pay? What the fuck are you talking about?"

  He saw clearly that Tanger was flustered. She lifted a hand. Take it easy, cool down, I was wrong. Come on, let's talk. But he was furious.

  "Do you really believe I'm sitting here because you intend to pay me?"

  He immediately felt ridiculous, because in fact he was. He stood up, overturning his chair so abruptly that Zas retreated, unsettled. "You misunderstood," she said. "Really. I'm only saying that those men have nothing to do with it.

  "Nothing to do with it," she repeated.

  She seemed frightened, as if all of a sudden she was afraid she would see him jerk open the door and stalk out, as if until that moment she had never considered the possibility. That gave Coy a twisted kind of satisfaction. After all, even if it was just self-interest, she was afraid she might lose him. That made him enjoy the situation. A crumb is a crumb.

  "They have enough to do with it that I want you to clarify it for me or you'll have to look for someone else."

  It was like a nightmare, but a nightmare that was strengthening his self-esteem. All very bitter, treading on the verge of rupture, of an end to it all, but he couldn't turn back.

  "You aren't serious," she said.

  "You bet I'm serious."

  He heard himself as if he were a stranger speaking, an enemy willing to toss everything overboard and say good-bye to Tanger forever. His problem was that the only way he could go along was by being towed. As when the Torpedoman began to break things, and Coy had no choice but to gulp air, grab the neck of a broken bottle, and prepare for a battle royal.

  "Look," he added. "I can understand that I seem a little simple-

  minded to you___ You may even take me for an imbecile. I'm not

  much on land, it's true. Clumsy as a duck. But you mink I'm mentally retarded."

  "You're here..."

  "You know perfectly well why I'm here. But that isn't the question, and we can talk about that calmly another day if you want. In fact, I hope to be able to talk about it calmly another day. For the moment though, I'll limit myself to demanding that you tell me what I'm getting myself into."

  "Demand?" She looked at him with sudden contempt. "Don't tell me what I should or shouldn't do. Every man I ever met wants to tell me what I must or I mustn't do."

  She laughed quietly, humorlessly, as if exhausted, and Coy decided that she laughed with a European ennui. Something indefinable that had a lot to do with old whitewashed walls, churches with cracked frescoes, and
black-clad women staring at the sea past grapevines and olive trees. Few North American women, he thought suddenly, could laugh like that.

  "I'm not telling you what to do. I just want to know what you expect of me."

  "I've offered you a job___ "

  "Oh, shit. A job."

  Saddened, he rocked on his toes as if he were on the deck of a ship and about to leap to land. Then he picked up his jacket and took a few steps toward the door, with Zas happily trotting at his heels. His soul turned to ice.

  'A job," he repeated sarcastically.

  She was standing between him and the window. He thought he saw another flash of fear in her eyes. Difficult to tell against the light.

  "Maybe they think," she said, and she seemed to be choosing her words with care, "that it's about treasure and things like that. But it isn't a treasure, it's a secret. A secret that may not have any importance today, but that fascinates me. That's why I got into this."

  "Who are they?'

  "I don't know."

  Coy took the last steps toward the door. His eyes paused for an instant on the small dented cup.

  "It's been a pleasure knowing you." "Wait."

  He had her complete attention. She reminded him, he concluded, of a gambler with mediocre cards, trying to calculate what the other player held.

  "Don't go," she said after a moment. "You're bluffing."

  Coy put on his jacket.

  "Maybe. Try me." "I need you."

  "There are sailors on every corner. And divers. Many as stupid as me."

  "I need you."

  "Well, you know where I live. So it's up to you."

  He opened the door slowly, with death in his heart. All the while, until he closed it behind him, he was hoping she would come take his arm, force him to look her in the eye, tell him anything to keep him from going. Hoping she would take his face in her hands and press her lips to his with a long, sincere kiss, after which, damn the Dalmatian and the melancholy dwarf! He would be willing to dive with her and her Captain Haddock and the devil himself to look for the Unicorn or the Dei Gloria, or the impossible dream. But she stood there with the golden light behind her, and did nothing and said nothing. Coy found himself going down the stairs, hearing the whimpering of Zas, who missed him. He went with a frightening void in his breast and his stomach, with his throat dry and an irritating tickle in his groin. With nausea that made him stop on the first landing, lean against the wall, and cover his mouth with trembling hands.

  TERRA firma, he concluded after long deliberation, was nothing more than a vast conspiracy determined to harass the sailor. It had underwater peaks that didn't show on the charts, and reefs, sandbars, and capes with treacherous shoals; and besides, it was peopled by a multitude of officials, customs officers, shipowners, port captains, police, judges, and women with freckles. Sunk in such gloomy thoughts, Coy wandered around Madrid all afternoon. Wandered like the wounded heroes of films and books, like Orson Welles in Lady from. Shanghai, like Gary Cooper in The Wreck of the Mary Deare, like Jim pursued from port to port by the ghost of the Patna. The difference lay in the feet that no Rita Hayworth or

  Marlow spoke to him, and he wandered unnoticed and silent among the crowd, hands in the pockets of his bluejacket, stopping at red lights and crossing on green, as insipid and gray as everyone else. He felt insecure, displaced, miserable. He walked on, desperately searching for the docks, for the port, where at least in the smell of the sea and splashing of water beneath iron hulls he would find the consolation of the familiar, and it took a while— when he stopped indecisively on the Plaza de las Cibeles without knowing what direction to take—to get it through his head that this huge and noisy city didn't have a port. That reality hit him with all the force of an unpleasant revelation, and he slowed, almost stumbled, so weak in the knees that he sat down on a bench across from the gate of a garden by which two soldiers with aigu-illettes, red berets, and rifles across their chests, observed him with suspicion. Later, when he resumed his walk and the sky in the west was beginning to grow red at the far end of the avenues, and then somber and gray on the opposite side of the city, silhouetting the buildings where the first lights were being turned on, his desolation gave way to a growing exasperation, a contained fury composed of contempt for the image pursuing him in the reflection of the shop windows, and of anger toward all the people brushing against him as they passed, crowding and pushing when he stopped at crosswalks, waving their arms idiotically as they babbled into their cell phones, blocking his way with their huge shopping bags, ambling erratically in front of him, and stopping to engage in conversation. Once or twice he returned the shoves, rabid with rage, and once the indignant expression of a pedestrian turned to confusion and surprise when he glimpsed Coy's rock-hard expression, the malicious, menacing look in eyes dark as death. Never in his life, not even the morning the investigating commission sentenced him to two years without a ship, had he felt such empathy with the pain of the Flying Dutchman.

  An hour later he was drunk, without any insistence on Sapphire blue or any other color. He had gone into a bar near the Plaza de Santa Ana, and after pointing toward an old bottle of Centenario Terry that must have been sleeping the sleep of the just on that shelf for at least half a century, retired to a corner supplied with it and a glass. Having a cognac hangover is exactly like being poleaxed, the Torpedoman had said one time when he had dropped to his knees and vomited up his guts after having put away enough to speak knowingly on the subject. Prognosis: terminal. Once, in Puerto Limon, the Torpedoman had got soused on Duque de Alba and passed out on top of a tiny little whore who'd had to yell for help to move the two hundred pounds that were about to squeeze the life out of her. And later, when he awoke in his berth—they'd had to find a van to take him back to the ship —he spent three days lightening ballast in the form of bile, in between bouts of the cold sweats and begging at the top of his lungs for some friend to put him out of his misery. Coy didn't have anyone to pass out on top of that night, or a ship to go back to, or even friends to carry him—the Torpedoman was God knows where, and Gallego Neira had ruptured his liver and his spleen when he fell from the Jacob's ladder of a tanker a month after earning a pilot's spot in Santander. But Coy did the honors to his cognac, letting it slide down his throat again and again, until everything began to fade into the distance, and his tongue and hands and heart and groin stopped hurting, and Tanger Soto was just one more among the thousands of women who every day are born, live, and the in this wide, wide world, and he observed that the hand going and coming between the glass and the bottle was beginning to move in slow motion.

  The bottle was half empty, just a little below the Plimsoll line, when Coy, calling on one last scintilla of good sense, stopped drinking and took a look around. Everything seemed to be listing badly, until he realized that his head was resting on the table and he was the one off plumb. Nothing more grotesque, he thought, than some jerk all alone getting smashed in public. Slowly, he got up and went outside. Trying to disguise his condition, he proceeded very carefully, shoulder touching the walls of buildings to help keep to a straight line and parallel to the curb. When he crossed the plaza, the air did him good. He stopped and sat down on a bench beneath the statue of Calderon de la Barca. From there, with the palms of his hands on his knees, Coy observed the people passing before his unfocused eyes. He saw the beggars who'd shared the wine bottle, the three men and a woman who had been sitting on the ground drinking with their little mutt the other day, watched by RoboCop from the door of the Hotel Victoria. He shook his head when a Moroccan from the Magreb offered him some hashish—a joints about the last thing I want, man—and finally, a little clearer of head, he started toward his lodging. Now that the Centenario Terry had been sufficiently diluted in his lungs, his urine, or wherever it might have made its way, things were a little less hazy. And as a consequence, he saw that the Dalmatian, that is, the guy from Barcelona with the gray ponytail and the one green and one brown eye, was sitting at a tabl
e in the bar, by the door, a glass of whisky in his hands, legs crossed, waiting for him.

  "TAKE my word for it," the man concluded. "They want us to take them to bed. That is, they want us to want to take them to bed. But most of all they want us to pay for it. With our money, our freedom, our mind... In their world, believe me, there's no such word as gratis."