The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  "Don't you think that's interesting?" "Oh, very."

  She studied him appraisingly, as if she had caught the irony in his response. Coy kept a straight face. One of these times, he thought, she's going to end up telling me something that's actually worth listening to. He looked over her shoulder. The children were running back, sweaty, victorious; as trophies they were carrying tail feathers from the male, who at this moment. Coy calculated, must be winging toward Ciudad El Cabo at about one hundred and ten miles an hour. Maybe, he thought, Herod's massacre dispatched more than innocence.

  Tanger had fallen silent again, as if considering whether it was worth the effort to continue. Her head was tipped to one side and her fingers were drumming on the edge of the table with a rhythm that may have betrayed impatience.

  'Are you at all interested in what I'm telling your

  "Of course I'm interested."

  For some reason, her irritation made him feel better about himself. He settled into a more comfortable position and adopted an expression of keen attention.

  After a slight hesitation, Tanger went on. "When Charles in decided to create the cabinet for the Pesquisa Secreta, he appointed Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, Conde de Aranda, as head. He was from Huesca in Aragon, twice a grandee of Spain, and had been a military man and a diplomat He was captain general of Valencia when, right in the middle of Esquilache's mutiny, the king summoned him to Madrid to entrust him with a governorship, the presidency of the Council of Castile, and the position of captain general of New Castile. Intelligent, cultivated, and enlightened, he went into the history books as a Mason, although it was never proved that he belonged to any lodge, and modern historians deny that affiliation. To the contrary, there was evidence that he was an eclectic, and, of all the members of the secret cabinet, he may have been the one who best knew the Ignatians, by whom he had been educated and with whom he had many ties, including a brother who was a Jesuit. Compared to rabid anti-Jesuits like the treasurer, Campomanes, the minister of justice, Roda, and Jose Monino, the future conde de Floridablanca, Aranda could be considered moderate in his feelings toward the Society. Even so, he agreed to head the cabinet and countersign its conclusions. The inquiry began in Madrid on June 8,1766, with Aranda presiding. He was accompanied by Roda, Monino, and other confirmed anti-Jesuits, or, as they were called then, Thomists, to contrast them with the pro-Ignatians or 'friends of the fourth vow.' And the investigation was carried out so discreetly that even the confessor to the king was not apprised.

  "Nevertheless," Tanger continued, "there was an important connection between one man in the secret cabinet and a renowned Ignatian__ Paradoxically, one of the best friends of the Conde de Aranda was a Jesuit from Murcia, Padre Nicolas Escobar. Their relations had cooled slightly, but we know absolutely that until Aranda left his post as captain general of Valencia, bidden by the king, they were close friends. Although Aranda later destroyed his correspondence with Escobar, a few letters survive that corroborate their friendship."

  "Have you seen those letters?’

  "Yes. There are three, and they're in the library of the Universidad de Murcia, signed in Aranda's own hand. I obtained copies through a professor of cartography there, Nestor Perona, when I consulted him by telephone about the corrections we needed to apply to Urrutia's chart."

  Another conquest, Coy thought. He imagined Tanger's effect, even by telephone, on any professor, Devastating.

  "I have to admit that you've done your homework."

  "You'll never know how hard I've worked. Which is why I'm not eager to let anyone snatch it out of my hands."

  Now, Coy conceded, things were getting interesting. The story was moving away from handbooks and getting down to the fine print. Letters from this fellow Aranda. Maybe after all her ho-hum stories of secret cabinets and uncompromising kings, she was actually getting somewhere.

  "Nicolas Escobar," Tanger continued, "was an important Jesuit, well connected in the circles of power and with the nobles' seminary, which rotated among Rome, Madrid, Valencia, and Salamanca. Two decades earlier he had been director of the Ignatian college in Salamanca, the stronghold of the Society, whose presses—and this is just one of the coincidences—printed..."

  She stopped. Now guess... et cetera, et cetera. Coy couldn't help but smile. She had made it too easy and it was impossible to disappoint her. You and I are a team. You tell and I believe.

  "The Urrutia," he said.

  She nodded, pleased.

  "Exactly. Urrutia's Atlas Maritimo, printed in the Jesuit college of Salamanca in 1751 under the protection of another minister friend, the Marques de la Ensenada, the driving force behind the Navy and nautical studies in Spain. And when the secret cabinet was being formed, Padre Escobar, a friend of famous mariners like Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, was in Valencia. Can you guess where?"

  "No. I'm afraid this time I don't have a clue."

  "In the house of an old acquaintance of yours and mine. Mine especially: Luis Fornet Palau, 'friend of the fourth vote,' straw man for the Jesuits' fleet and owner of the Dei Gloria"

  She stopped, pleased by Coy's expression, and leaned across the table, looking deep into his eyes. He glimpsed in hers an ambition glittering hard and pure as dark polished stone. The dream had ceased to be a dream some time ago, he realized. Now there was obsession, solid and concrete. As she reached out and placed her hand over his, he was desperately searching for the right word to describe her. He felt the weight of that warm hand, the fingers laced with his. Soft, warm, strong, so sure of herself that the gesture seemed the most natural thing in the world. That hand was not meant to console him, or fire him up, or pretend. In that instant it was sincere; it shared. And the word for her obsession, which finally came to him, was "implacable."

  "The Dei Gloria, Coy," she said in a low voice, her hand still in his. "We are talking about the brigantine that leaves Valencia for America on November 2, when the secret cabinet had been meeting for five months, and returns to the coast of Spain a few weeks before they deliver the final blow to the Jesuits." The pressure of her fingers increased. 'Are you tying the loose threads? The rest —that is, the what or who could have been on board, and the why— I will tell you on the way to Gibraltar. Or, as they said in the old newspaper serials, in the next installment."

  VIII

  The Reckoning Point

  The location at which the ship finds itself as a result of prudent judgment only, or of data about which there is considerable uncertainty, is called the reckoning point. GABRIEL DE CISCAR, Curso de estudios elementales de marina

  The small polished guns in the plaza were gleaming. The terrace of the Hungry Friar was full, and groups of Anglo-Saxon tourists were photographing the changing of the guard at the convent, visibly enchanted that Britannia still had colonies from which to rule the waves. Beneath the lazily waving flag, in a Gothic arch, a sentry stood at attention with his Enfield rifle, rigid as a statue, faithful to the scene and the setting. The sergeant in charge barked orders in the compulsory military-jargon, shouting at the top of his lungs, inches from the sentry's face. England is counting on you to do your duty to the last drop of blood, Coy thought as he watched them. He stretched his legs beneath the table, leaned back to drain the last of his beer, and squinted at the sky. The sun was reaching its zenith; it was blazing hot, and above the Rock a plume of clouds was beginning to disperse; the wind had shifted from east to west and in a couple of hours the temperature would be more bearable. He paid for his beer, got up, and made his way through the crowds in the plaza.

  The focus of dozens of camera lenses, the sweating sergeant was still shouting martial commands at the unflinching sentry. As he walked away, Coy made a mocking face. This morning, he told himself, he had been tapped for guard duty.

  He walked through the main street of Gibraltar, mingling with the crowd as he ambled past store after store—Chinese pajamas, T-shirts with silk screens of the Rock and its apes, mantillas, radios, liquor, cameras, perfumes, Llad
ro and Capodimonte porcelain, Bossom porcelain miniatures. Coy had docked at Gibraltar before, when the British colony was still a conventional port in the old sense, a base for dealers who ran black-market tobacco and Moroccan hashish through the Straits, before Gibraltar had become a tourist beehive and financial haven for drug traffickers and the thousands of English who had retired to the Costa del Sol. In truth, any place near the Mediterranean was a tourist trap by now. But in Gibraltar, along with hamburger joints and fast-food restaurants and drinks in plastic cups, businesses owned by Hindus and Jews alternated with the facades of banks and houses with discreet signs beside the door—lawyers offices, real estate companies, import-export companies, Spanish SA. companies, English Ltd. companies, shell companies. More than ten thousand businesses were registered here, where Spanish and English money was laundered and every kind of business transacted. The flag of the European Union flew at the border, and tourism and the flimflam of fiscal paradise had superseded contraband as the principal source of income. Slick young lawyers who spoke perfect English with a Spanish accent were replacing local Mafia godfathers and the once ubiquitous lowlife. Old sea dogs with gold rings in their ears and tattoo-covered arms, the last pirate scum of the western Mediterranean, were languishing in Spanish or Moroccan jails, serving hamburgers at McDonald's, or loafing around the port, gazing longingly at the fifteen miles that separated Europe from Africa, a distance that a decade earlier they had crossed on moonless nights, skimming over the waves between Punta Carnero and Punta Ores at forty knots, with ninety-horse outboards powering their black Phantoms.

  Coy walked along the sidewalk that offered the most shade, his sweat-soaked shirt stuck to his back, checking the numbers of the houses. Tanger had kept her word, at least in part. Between Cadiz and Gibraltar, as he had maneuvered the rented Renault around the S turns of the highway that snaked along the hills of Tarifa and the cliffs overlooking the Strait, she finished the story of the Jesuits and the Dei Gloria. Or at least the portion she thought it convenient for him to know—that is, why the brigantine had traveled to America and why it had returned from Havana.

  "They wanted to abort the coup," she summarized.

  With her eyes fixed on the road, she expounded her theory for Coy. The cabinet of the Pesquisa Secreta was not so secret after all. There was a leak, a hint of what was being plotted. Maybe the Jesuits had an informer there, or intuitively suspected what was being schemed.

  "Of all the members of that cabinet," Tanger explained, "only one was not a pure Thomist. The Conde de Aranda could be considered, if not a 'friend of the fourth vow,' at least more favorable to the Ignatians than the radical Roda, Campomanes, and others. Maybe he was the one who dropped a few timely words to his former social intimate, Padre Nicolas Escobar. It wouldn't have had to be a confidence, not even words. Among people so schooled in nuances and diplomacy, silence itself could be read as a message."

  Then Tanger had Men silent, leaving Coy to imagine the era and the cast. Her left hand was resting on her knee, on the blue cotton skirt an inch from the gearshift. Occasionally, Coy brushed against it when he shifted from fourth to fifth on the straightaway or shifted down before a curve.

  'And then," she said, "the Jesuit leadership formulated a plan."

  Another silence, with that thought in the air. She should write novels, Coy thought admiringly. She handles the unfinished story better than anyone I know. And though I don't know which of her assertions are true, I never saw anyone state them with such aplomb. That's not even considering the way she gradually lets out line—just enough slack that the fish doesn't get away, just enough tension that it doesn't throw the hook before she sinks a gaff into its gills.

  'A risky plan," she said, taking up the story, "with no guarantee of success. But it was based on knowledge of the human condition and the Spanish political situation. As well, of course, as familiarity with Pedro Pablo Abarca, Conde de Aranda."

  In a few words, in the objective tone of someone reading off data, never taking her eyes from the asphalt ribbon that undulated before them in the searing heat, Tanger described Charles's minister: an aristocrat with all the privileges of breeding, brilliant military and diplomatic careers, French intellectual and social influences; pragmatic, enlightened, energetic, impetuous, a bit insolent. A fine choice to head the Council of Castile and the cabinet for the secret inquiry. Also given to luxury, to expensive carriages with splendid horses and liveried servants, and theater and bullfights in an open coach, he was popular, ambitious, a free-spender and good friend to his friends. Wealthy, and yet always in need of more funds to maintain a lifestyle that at times verged on excess.

  "The words," Tanger continued, "were money and power. Aranda was vulnerable in those areas, and the Jesuits knew that. It wasn't for nothing he had been their student, or was well known to the Society's directors.

  "The plan was conceived with meticulous audacity. The best of their ships, the fastest and safest, with the best captain, secretly set sail for America. Padre Escobar was a passenger. There was no official record of his leaving Valencia, because the shipping documents for that stage of the Dei Gloria's voyage were not preserved, but the Jesuit was definitely on board the return voyage. His initials, along with those of his companion, Padre Jose Luis Tolosa, were on the manifest of the brigantine when she left Havana on January 1, 1767. And they had certain documents and objects with them. Keys to influencing the will of the Conde de Aranda."

  With his hands on the wheel, Coy laughed quietly. "In short, they wanted to buy him."

  "Or blackmail him," she replied. "In one way or another, the fact is that the mission of the Dei Gloria, of Captain Elezcano and the two Jesuits, was to bring back something that would change the course of events."

  "From Havana?"

  "Precisely."

  'And what did Cuba have to do with all this?"

  "I don't know. But in Havana they brought something on board that could convince Aranda to manipulate the secret inquiry. Something that would nullify the storm that was going to be unleashed upon the Society."

  "It could have been money," Coy suggested. "The famous treasure."

  He tried to underplay the importance of his words, but he felt a shiver as he spoke the word "treasure."

  Tanger, eyes straight ahead, was stony as a Sphinx. "It could have, it's true," she said after a bit. "But that doesn't mean money is always involved."

  'And that is what you intend to find out."

  He stole a glance at her from time to time. Her eyes never left the blacktop.

  "I intend to locate the Dei Gloria first of all. And then find out what she was carrying... Whatever it was, whether by chance or by the cold calculations of the Society's enemies, it never reached its destination."

  Coy slowed as they came to a tight curve. On the other side of a fence were real bulls, grazing beneath an enormous one-dimensional black bull advertising a well-known sherry.

  "Do you think it was a coincidence that the corsair xebec was where she was?"

  'Anything is possible. Maybe the other side knew what was going on and wanted to get a head start. Maybe Aranda himself

  was dealing from two decks____ Or if the Dei Gloria was carrying

  something that could be used against him, he might have wanted to neutralize her."

  "Well, depending on what it was, it's also possible that it hasn't withstood two and a half centuries at the bottom of the sea. Lucio Gamboa said..."

  "I remember perfectly well what he said."

  "Well, so you know. Treasure, maybe. Anything else, forget it."

  Now the highway wound downhill through brilliant green meadows before again ascending. One of Andalusia's famous white villages lay up to the right, hanging from the peak of a mountain. Vejer de la Frontera, Coy read on a road sign. Another arrow pointed toward the sea: Cape Trafalgar, 16 kilometers.

  "I hope it's treasure," Coy said. "Spanish gold. Bars of silver. Maybe our Aranda could be bribed." After a pensive moment, biti
ng his lower lip, he asked, "How could we bring it up without anyone knowing?"

  He was amused at the idea. Jesuit treasure. Bars of gold piled up in a hold. Unloading by night on a beach amid the ratde of stones dragged by the undertow. Doubloons, Deadman's Chest... yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum. He ended up laughing aloud. Tanger did not join in, and he turned to look at her.

  "I know for sure you have a plan," he added. "You're the kind of person who always has a plan."

  He had accidentally brushed her hand as he shifted, and this time she drew it back. She seemed annoyed.

  "You don't know what kind of person I am."

  Again he laughed. The idea of the treasure, the pure absurdity of it, had put him in a good mood. He felt years younger: Jim Hawkins was making faces at him from a book-filled shelf in the Admiral Benbow Inn.

  "Sometimes I think I know," he said sincerely, "and sometimes I don't. In any case, I'm not taking my eye off you. With a treasure or without it. And I hope you've thought about my share, partner."

  "We're not partners. You're working for me."

  "Oh shit, I'd forgotten."

  Coy whistled a few bars of "Body and Soul." Everything was in order. She had orchestrated the song of the sirens, the doubloon of Spanish gold was gleaming from the mast before the eyes of the sailor without a ship, and meanwhile the rented Renault was leaving Tarifa behind, with its constant wind and ghostly blades whirling on wind turbines. The engine was getting too hot on the hills, so they stopped at a scenic viewpoint above the Strait. The day was dear, and on the other side of the strip of blue they could see the coast of Morocco. More distant and to the left were Mount Acho and the city of Ceuta. Coy watched the slow progress of an oil tanker sailing toward the Atlantic. It was a little outside its lane, crowding the markers separating the two-way traffic, and would obviously have to alter its course to make way for a cargo ship approaching its bow. He imagined the officer on watch on the bridge—at that hour it would be the third in command—eyes glued to the radar, waiting till the last minute to see if he was lucky and the other ship would alter course first.