The Nautical Chart Read online

  He was sitting there, whisky in hand, as if he owned the place, and Coy was sitting across from him, listening. He had stopped being surprised a long time ago, and was taking it in with interest now, an untouched glass of tonic, ice, and lemon in front of him.

  The cognac was still slipping smoothly through his blood. From time to time the Dalmatian rattled the ice in his glass, regarded the contents pensively, then lifted it to his lips and took a sip before continuing his monologue. Coy had confirmed that the man's Spanish did have a touch of a foreign accent—say Andalusian overlaid with British.

  'And let me tell you something. When one of them decides to bully her way forward, there's no one... I'm here to tell you. When they finally come to a decision, whatever it is, they're hard as steel. I swear to you. I've seen them lie____ God almighty. I swear I've seen them lie... right there on my own pillow, talk to their husband on the phone... lie in cold blood. Incredible."

  Next door there was a store that sold mannequins, and occasionally Coy glanced toward the window. Naked bodies in assorted postures—sitting, standing, men and women with no genital identity, some with wigs, others whose craniums were bare, synthetic flesh gleaming in the strong lights. Several severed heads smiled on a shelf. The female dummies had breasts with jutting nipples. A window dresser with a sense of humor, affecting prudery, an accidental or conscious classical reference, had positioned the arm of one of the mannequins modestly across its breasts and placed the other hand to cover its supposed sex. Venus rising directly from her shell, the transvestite Pris Nexus 6 in Blade Runner.

  "Has she been on your pillow, then?"

  The Dalmatian looked at Coy almost reproachfully. His hair was clean and combed straight back, fastened with black elastic. His shirt was white, with a button-down collar he was wearing open, without a tie. Tan, but not excessively so. Impeccable shoes, comfortable, good leather. The expensive, heavy gold watch on the left wrist. Gold rings. Very carefully manicured fingernails. Another ring on the little finger of the right hand, wide, also gold. Gold chains visible at the neck, with medallions and an antique Spanish doubloon. Gold cuff links flashing at the wrist. This guy, thought Coy, looks like a Carrier display case. You could cast a couple of ingots with what he had on.

  "No___ Of course not!" The Dalmatian seemed sincerely scandalized. "I don't know why you say that. My relationship with

  her..."

  He stopped as if the connection, whatever it might be, was obvious. A second later he must have realized that it wasn't, because he rattled the ice in his glass and, this time without taking a sip, brought Coy up to date on the story. At least, he brought him up to date on his version of the story. He was, after all, Nino Palermo, and that gave his tale only relative value. But this individual was the one person who seemed willing to tell Coy anything. He had no source for another, more authentic version, and he doubted very much that he ever would. So he sat very still, attentive, turning his eyes toward the window with the mannequins only when his tablemate fixed first the green, and then the brown, eye on him for too long a time—an uncomfortable ocular duality to sit across from. So he learned that Nino Palermo was the owner of Deadman's Chest, an enterprise devoted to recovering sunken ships and maritime salvage with a home base in Gibraltar. Maybe Coy, since Palermo understood that he was a sailor, had heard of Deadman's Chest when they were working on refloating the Punta Europa, a ferry that had sunk the year before in the bay of Algeciras with fifty passengers on board? Or—he added after a brief pause—at the time of the recovery of the San Esteban, a galleon carrying a cargo of Mexican silver salvaged five years ago in the Florida Keys? Or perhaps the most recent case, a Roman shipload of statues and pottery off Ifach rock, at Calpe?

  At that point, Coy spoke aloud the words "treasure hunter," and the other man smiled broadly enough to show a tooth or two at the side of his mouth before saying, yes, in a way. Though this matter of treasure was a relative concept, according to, and how....

  Besides, my friend, all that glitters is not gold. And sometimes, what doesn't glitter is. Then, between more unfinished sentences, Palermo crossed and uncrossed his legs, rattled the ice in his glass again, and took a long swallow that left the ice cubes beached on the bottom of the glass.

  "It isn't adventure, it's work," he said slowly, as if he wanted to offer Coy every opportunity to understand. 'It's one thing to go to the movies, or to live as if you're sitting in row fourteen eating popcorn with your sweetheart, and it's quite another to invest money, do your research, and do your prospecting with professionalism. I work for myself and for my partners; I raise the necessary capital, I obtain results, and I portion out the dividends, rendering to Caesar.... You know. The state, with its laws and taxes. I also make gifts to museums, institutions__ Things like that."

  "Something must end up in your pocket."

  "Of course. I try to make it be... God almighty. I have money. Listen. I try to risk my partners* money, naturally, but I also risk mine. I have lawyers, researchers, and experienced divers working for me. I'm a professional."

  Having said all that, he sat a moment without speaking, his bicolor gaze fixed on Coy, weighing the effect. But Coy, whose expression hadn't changed, must not have seemed very impressed.

  "The difficulty," he continued, "is that this work of mine calls for.... A person can't go around telling the story of his life. That's why you have to move with caution. I'm not talking about anything illegal, although sometimes... Oh, well. You take my word for it. The key word is caution."

  'And where does she fit into all this?"

  As Palermo spoke his amiable air had turned hard, and anger suddenly showed in his eyes and mouth. Coy saw him clench a fist, the one with the wide gold ring on the little finger, and he would have burst out laughing at that fit of choler if he hadn't been so interested in the story his interlocutor was telling in a bitter, surly tone that at times was close to raw aggression. He had stumbled across a lead. The search for ancient shipwrecks always began with some simple, sometimes almost stupid lead, and he had— God almighty. Chance, in the guise of a man named Corso, a man who liked to dig through libraries, a guy who fed him material having to do with the sea, ancient nautical charts, atlases, things like that—a sort of unscrupulous guy, if he might say so in passing, who charged him an arm and a leg—had placed in his hands a book on the maritime activities of the Society of Jesus, published in 1803. It was titled The Black Fleet: The Jesuits in the East and West Indies, and had been written by a Francisco Jose Gonzalez, a librarian at the San Fernando naval observatory, and it was in this book that Palermo had found the Dei Gloria.

  "Right there it was____ God almighty. I knew immediately.

  You know when something is there waiting for you." He rubbed his nose with his thumb. "I feel it here."

  "I guess you're referring to treasure."

  "I'm referring to a ship. To a good, old, and beautiful sunkenship. The business of any treasure comes later, if it comes at all.

  But don't think that__ Imperative isn't the word. No, it isn't."

  He lowered his head, staring at his large ring. In that moment Coy took a really good look. Apparently another ancient, authentic coin. Arabic maybe, or Turkish.

  "The ocean covers two-thirds of the planet," Palermo said unexpectedly. "Can you imagine all the stuff that has ended up on the bottom in the last three or four thousand years? Five percent of all the ships that ever sailed... I'm telling you. At least five percent is under water. The most extraordinary museum in the world. Ambition, tragedy, memory, riches, death__ Objects that are worth lots of money if we can bring them to the surface, but also... Understand? Solitude. Silence. Only a person who's felt a shiver of terror when he sees the dark silhouette of a sunken hull... I'm talking about that green murkiness below, if you know what I mean.... You know what I mean?"

  The green eye and the brown one were fixed on Coy, lit by a sudden gleam that seemed feverish, or dangerous, and maybe both at once.

  "I know
what you mean."

  Nino Palermo favored Coy with a vague smile of appreciation. He had spent his life, he said, getting into the water, first for others and then for himself. He had inspected coral-encrusted wrecks in the Red Sea, he'd discovered a cargo of Byzantine glass off Rhodes, he'd searched for gold sovereigns on the Carnatic, and off Ireland brought up two hundred doubloons, three gold chains, and a crucifix of precious stones from the galleon Gerona. He had worked with the salvage team that recovered mercury from the Guadalupe and the Tolosa, and with Mel Fisher on the Atocha. But he had also dived amid the ghostly ships of a sunken fleet at two hundred sixty feet in Martinique, near Mount Pelee, dived to the hull of the Yongala in the Sea of the Serpents, and of the Andrea Doria in the watery tomb of the Atlantic. He had seen the Royal Oak belly up at the bottom of Scapa Flow and the propeller of the corsair Emden on Los Cocos atoll. And at sixty-five feet, in a phantasmal gold and blue light, the collapsed skeleton of a German pilot in the cabin of his Focke-Wulf, downed over Nice.

  "You won't deny," he said, "that's some resume."

  He paused and, signaling the waiter, ordered another whisky for himself and a new tonic for Coy, who still hadn't touched the first. Lukewarm by now, Palermo said. Underwater searches were his life and his passion, he continued, staring at Coy as if he defied him to prove the contrary. But not all wrecks were important, he explained. Greek divers were already recovering treasure in ancient times. Which was why the best shipwrecks were ones with no survivors, because for lack of information about where they went down, they remained hidden and intact Now Palermo had found a new lead. A good and beautiful and virgin lead in an old book. A new mystery, or challenge, and the possibility of looking for an answer.

  "Then"—he raised his glass as if he were looking for someone whose face he could dash it in—"I made the mistake of... You know what I mean? The mistake of going to that bitch."

  Fifteen minutes later the second tonic was untouched, as lukewarm as the first. As for Coy, the vapors of the Centenario Terry had dissipated a little more and he was getting the drift of the other side of the drama. Or at least the version held by Nino Palermo, a British subject residing in Gibraltar, owner of Deadman's Chest: Undersea Exploration and Maritime Salvage.

  Six months earlier, Palermo had gone to the Museo Naval in Madrid, as he had other times, looking for information. He hoped to confirm that a brigantine that had sailed from Havana and disappeared before reaching its destination had sunk somewhere near the Spanish coast. The ship was not carrying cargo known to be valuable, but there were interesting hints: the name, Dei Gloria, for example, was in one of the letters seized when the Society was broken up during the reign of Charles III, which Palermo had found mentioned in the San Fernando librarians book on the ships and maritime activity of the Jesuits. The quote, "but the justice of God did not allow the Dei Gloria to reach her destination with the people and secret she was carrying," was cross-checked by him with catalogues of documents in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, in Viso del

  Marques, and the Museo Naval in Madrid____ Bingo! In the catalogue of the museum's library he found a report dated February, 1767, in Cartagena, "on the loss of the brigantine Dei Gloria in an encounter with the xebec corsair presumed to be the Chergui" That had led him to get in touch with the Museo Naval, and with Tanger Soto, who—curse the day and curse her and hers—was in charge of that department. After a first exploratory meeting, they had gone to

  have dinner at Al-Mounia, an Arab restaurant on calle Recoletos. There, over lamb couscous and vegetables, he had set out his case in a convincing manner. Not opening his heart to her, of course. He was a wise old dog and he knew the risks. He had mentioned the Dei Gloria among other matters, just the slightest offhand allusion. And she, polite, efficient, a pleasant goddamn witch, had promised to help him. That's what she had said, help him. Look up a copy of the documents for him if they were still in the papers entrusted to the institution, et cetera, et cetera. I'll call you, the bitch had promised. Without blinking an eye, by God. Not one blink. That had been months ago, and not only had she not called, she had used the influence of the Navy to block any access to the museum's archives. Even to documents pertinent to the cargo manifest of the brigan-tine in Havana, which he finally had located in the catalogue of the naval archives in Viso del Marques. He had not been able to consult them, however, because they were—he was told—under official examination by the Ministry of Defense. Palermo had kept moving ahead, of course. He knew the drill and he had money to spend. His parallel inquiry was progressing well, and now he was reasonably sure that the brigantine had sunk near Cartagena, and that it was carrying something—objects or people—of major importance. Perhaps the attack by the corsair Chergui—an English Chergui with Algerian registry that had been lost in the same waters and same time frame—was not entirely coincidental. Palermo had tried many times to talk with Tanger Soto, to ask for explanations. To no avail. Total silence. She was very clever about ducking the issue, or she had luck, as she had in Barcelona when Coy walked up to them. By God, she had luck. In the end, Palermo had realized, idiot that he was, that she had not only played him along, but had been moving her own pieces on the sly. Suspicion became certainty when he saw her at the auction, bidding for the Urrutia.

  "Little Miss Innocence," Palermo concluded, "had decided... God almighty. You get it? The Dei Gloria was hers."

  Coy shook his head, although in truth he was digesting what he had just heard.

  'As far as I know," he interjected, "she works for the Museo Naval."

  Palermo's laugh was a snort.

  "That's what I thought. But now... She's one of those women who can take a big chunk out of you without ever opening her mouth."

  Coy touched his nose, still confused.

  "In that case," he said, "get in touch with her superiors and blow the lid off her operation."

  Palermo rattled the ice in his new whiskey.

  "That would blow the lid off mine as well______ I'm not that stupid."

  Again he smiled that quick smile that exposed a couple of teeth. This guy, Coy thought, smiles like a shark sighting a tasty squid.

  "It's like a cross-country race, you know?" added Palermo. "I have better... God almighty. She gained the advantage because of my carelessness. But that kind of effort... I've gained ground. I'll gain more."

  "Well, I wish you luck," Coy said.

  "Some of that luck depends on you. I just have to look a man in the eye once to know...." Palermo winked the brown eye. "You get what I mean, no?"

  "Wrong. I don't get what you mean."

  "To know what it takes to buy him."

  Coy didn't like the look he was getting. Or maybe he was annoyed by the intimate, complicitous tone of Palermo's last words. "I'm out of it," he said coldly. "You don't say."

  The bantering tone did not improve matters. Coy felt his antipathy revive.

  "Well, mat's how it is. You'll have to deal with her." Coy tried to twist his lips into the most insolent sneer possible. "You two haven't tried to join forces? Apparently you're from the same litter."

  Palermo did not seem the least offended. Instead, he was considering the idea with total calm.

  "That's a possibility," he replied. "Though I doubt that she... She thinks she holds all the aces."

  "She just lost a couple. Well, at least one joker."

  Again, the shark smile. Now flavored with hope, which did not make it any more pleasant.

  'Are you serious?" Palermo reflected, interested. "I mean about not working for her anymore."

  "Of course I'm serious."

  "Would it be indiscreet to ask why?"

  "You said it a minute ago; she doesn't play fair. More or less like you___ " Suddenly he remembered something. "And you can tell your melancholy dwarf he can relax. Now I won't have to beat him to a pulp if I run into him."

  Palermo, about to take a sip of his drink, stopped, looking at Coy over the rim of the glass.

  "What dwarf?" />
  "Don't you be clever, too. You know who I'm talking about."

  The glass was still poised; the bicolor eyes narrowed, astute.

  "Don't get the wrong..." Palermo started to say something, but thought better of it and stopped, using the pretext of taking a sip. As he put the drink on the table, he changed the subject.

  "I can't believe you're leaving her, just like that."

  Now it was Coy's turn to smile. Of course I couldn't smile like this prick even if I tried, he thought He felt swindled by everyone, including himself.

  "I don't completely believe it myself," he said.

  'Are you going back to Barcelona? What about your problem?"

  "How about that." Coy shook his head, annoyed. "I see that now you're interested in my resume, too."

  Palermo raised his left hand, as if he'd been struck by an idea. He took a calling card from a thick billfold stuffed with credit cards, and wrote something on it. Lights from the window with the mannequins glinted off his rings. Coy glanced at the card before slipping it into his pocket: "Nino Palermo. Deadman's Chest Ltd. 42b Main Street. Gibraltar." Palermo had written the telephone number of a hotel in Madrid on the bottom.

  "Maybe I can compensate you in some way." Palermo paused, cleared his throat, took another swallow, and looked at Coy. "I need someone close to this Senorita Soto."

  He left that sentence in the air. Coy sat quietly for a minute, observing Palermo. Then he leaned forward, placing his palms on the table.

  "Shove it up your ass."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  Palermo had blinked, having expected something different. Coy started to get up, and with secret pleasure saw that the other man sat back a little in his chair.

  "Just what I said. Up your ass. Up your bunghole. Shove it where the sun don't shine. You want me to draw you a picture?" Now the hands on the table had closed into fists. "That is, screw you, the dwarf, and the Dei Gloria. And don't forget her."