The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  "The forecast looks good," said El Piloto. "But I figure we'll lose a few days."

  "Two weeks," Coy calculated. 'At a minimum."

  "Maybe three."

  "Maybe."

  Tanger was listening attentively, elbows on the table and fingers under her chin.

  "You said we would attract attention from land— Would that raise suspicions?"

  'At first, I don't think so. But as we work our way closer, maybe. This time of year people are already coming to the beach."

  "There are also fishing boats," El Piloto pointed out, with a segment of mandarin in his mouth. 'And Mazarr6n's pretty close."

  Tanger looked at Coy. She had picked up a piece of peel from El Piloto's plate and was tearing it into little pieces. The aroma perfumed the table. "Is there some way we can justify what we're doing?"

  "I suppose so. We can be fishing, or looking for something we've lost."

  'A motor," El Piloto suggested.

  "That's it. An outboard motor that dropped off. It's to our advantage that El Piloto and the Carpanta are well known in the

  area, and don't attract much attention_________ As for what happens

  ashore, that won't present any problems. We can tie up one night in Mazarr6n, another in Aguilas, sometimes in Cartagena, and the rest of the time drop anchor outside the area. There's nothing strange about a couple renting a boat for two weeks of vacation."

  He was joking when he said that, but Tanger didn't seem to find it amusing. Or maybe it was the word "couple." She tilted her head, the mandarin peel still in her hands, considering the situation.

  'Are there patrol boats?" she asked without emotion.

  "Two," El Piloto answered. "Customs and the Guardia Civil."

  Coy explained that the Customs HJ generally operated at night, and concentrated on contraband. They didn't need to worry about them. As for the Guardia, their assignment was to watch the coast and enforce the laws regarding fishing. The Carpanta wasn't their affair in principle, but there was always the possibility that when they saw them there day after day, they'd come and nose around.

  "The good thing is that El Piloto knows everyone, including the Guardias. Things have changed now, but when he was young he worked with some of them a little. You can imagine—blond tobacco, liquor, a percentage of the profits." He looked at El Piloto with affection. "He always found a way to make a living."

  El Piloto made a fatalistic and wise gesture, ancient as the sea he sailed, the heritage of countless generations of adverse winds.

  "Live and let live," he said simply.

  Coy had accompanied him once or twice in those days, taking on the role of cabin boy in clandestine nocturnal outings near Cabo Tinoso or over toward Cabo de Palos, and he remembered the episodes with the excitement appropriate to his youth. In the dark, waiting for lights from a slowing merchant ship that stopped just long enough to lower a couple of bales to the deck of the Carpanta. Boxes of American tobacco, botdes of whiskey, Japanese electronics. Then the return trip in the black of night, maybe unloading the smuggled goods in a quiet cove, transferring it to the hands of shadows that waded out in water up to the chest. For the boy Coy was then, there was no difference between that and what he'd read, which was enough to justify the adventure. From his point of view, those pages of Moonfleet and David Balfour and The Golden Arrow and all the others—waiting for a burst of gunfire in the dark remained for a long time his deepest yearning—were pretext enough. The fact was that later, when they got back to port and threw an innocent line to be tied to the bollard, there was always a Guardia Civil or minor coast guard official waiting to collect the lion's share. After paying the bribe, what was left for El Piloto, after risking his boat and his freedom, was barely enough to get him to the end of the month. Live and let live. But there's always someone who's living better than you are. Or at the cost of others. Once, in the Taibilla bar, as they were eating bocadillos, someone took El Piloto aside and proposed a more involved venture, going out on a moonless night to meet a fishing boat coming from Morocco. Pure Ketama, he said. One hundred pounds. And that, the guy explained in a low voice, would earn a thousand times what El Piloto got from his little night excursions. From their table, sandwich in hand, Coy watched El Piloto listen carefully. Then he finished his beer and casually set the empty glass on the counter before punching the man all the way to the door and throwing him out on calle Mayor.

  Tanger paid for their meal and they left. The temperature was pleasant, so they strolled in the direction of the Murcia gates and the old city. There was a marine standing motionless at the white door of the harbormaster's office—the same building, Tanger commented, in which the ship's boy of the Dei Gloria had been questioned. They also saw the blinking green lights of bored taxi drivers waiting at the Mariola theater, and people sitting around on cafe terraces. Every once in a while Coy saw a familiar face, exchanged a silent nod of the head, or said hi, see you later, without any intention of seeing anyone later, or ever, or even of getting an answer. He no longer had anything in common with anyone here. He saw a boyhood sweetheart, now a respectable matron with two children holding hands and one in a baby buggy, accompanied by a husband with gray, thinning hair, whom Coy remembered vaguely as an old schoolmate. As she went by, her face showed no sign of recognition in the glow of the postmodern streetlights that cluttered the sidewalks. But you know me all right, he thought, amused. LWUTSYWSYN: Law of Who Used To See You and Who Sees You Now. Me waiting at the gate of San Miguel, our hands brushing in the Cafe Mastia. That impromptu bash one New Year's Eve at your house when your parents were out of town: Je t'aime, moi non plus, couples embracing in the near dark as Serge Gainbourg and Jane Birkin held forth on the record player. The dark corner, and your brother's bed with a Madrid Ati6tico pennant pinned to the wall with thumbtacks, and the fit your father had when he returned unexpectedly to break up the party and found us all playing doctor. Of course you know me.

  "The search phase," he said, "concerns me less than what happens if we do find the Dei Gloria. In that case, even if we mask what we're doing by coming and going, just being in that spot day after day will make us more suspicious." He turned to Tanger. "What I don't know is how long we can carry that off."

  "I don't either."

  They had gone up calle Del Aire as far as the Del Macho tavern. The steps of La Baronesa hill ascended toward the ruins of the old cathedral and Roman theater, past openings to narrow streets, few of which remained but whose layout was indelible in Coy's memory. Farther on were the barrios of the port workers and fishermen crowded together below the castle, with wash strung from balcony to balcony. The neighborhood was run-down now, occupied by African immigrants who stared at them, hostile or complicitous, from every corner. Good hash, lady. Jus' here from Morocco. Beneath old iron window grates filled with flowerpots, cats slipped along the walls like commandos on a night raid. From nearby bars came the mingled smells of wine and fried sardines, and a solitary whore paced like a bored sentinel beneath a little lighted niche containing a figure of La Virgen de la Soledad.

  "In order to locate the bow and the stern, you'll have to take measurements of the wreck and compare them with the plans," said Tanger. "And then zero in on the place where the captain's cabin should be. Or what's left of it."

  'And what if it's buried?"

  "Then we'll leave and come back with the necessary equipment."

  "You're the boss." Coy avoided meeting El Kioto's eyes, which he could feel boring into him. "Whatever you say."

  The Del Macho tavern wasn't called that any longer, nor did it smell of olives and cheap wine, but the old bar was still there, along with the dark oak barrels and the look of an old wine cellar that Coy remembered. El Piloto was drinking Fundador cognac, and the naked woman tattooed on his forearm moved lasciviously every time his muscles contracted to raise his glass. Coy had seen those blue lines fade with the passage of time. El Piloto had it done when he was very young, during a visit of the Canarias in Marsei
lles, and then been down with a fever for three days. Coy himself had nearly been tattooed in Beirut, when he was serving as third officer on the Otagp. He'd chosen a very pretty winged serpent from the designs the artist had exhibited on the wall. But once his bare arm was extended and the needle ready to touch his skin, he thought better of it. So he put ten dollars on the table and left with his arm untouched.

  "There's another minor hitch," he said. "Nino Palermo. He's bound to have someone around here watching us. It wouldn't surprise me if he let us do the searching and then showed up the minute we locate the ship."

  He drank a sip of his Sapphire gin and tonic, letting it slip, cool and aromatic, down his throat. He could still taste the salt from his nocturnal bath.

  "That's a risk we have to take," she said.

  Between her thumb and index finger she was holding a glass of muscatel she'd scarcely tasted. Coy watched her over the lip of his glass. He was thinking about the .357 magnum. He'd gone through her luggage, cursing in a low voice, without finding it. He was prepared to throw it into the sea, but all he found were notebooks, sunglasses, clothes, and a few books. As well as a box of tampons and a dozen cotton panties.

  "I hope you know what you're doing."

  He'd glanced at El Piloto before he spoke to her. It was best if the old sailor didn't know about the revolver, because he was not going to be happy about having weapons on the Carpanta. Not happy at all.

  "I've done fine so for," Tanger replied glacially. "You two take care of finding the ship, and let me worry about Palermo."

  She has a card or two up her sleeve, Coy told himself. The little -bitch has cards up her sleeve that no one knows about but her. Otherwise she wouldn't be so sure of herself when it comes to that damn Dalmatian. I'll bet my boots she's already considered everything—possible, probable, and watch out! The problem is knowing which one I figure in.

  "There's one other matter." There were only a few customers now, and the tavern keeper was at the other end of the counter, yet he lowered his voice before he spoke. "The emeralds."

  "What about them?"

  In El Piloto's eyes Coy read that his friend was thinking the same thing: If you decide one day to play poker, try not to play with her. Even if you've been playing a long time.

  "Let's suppose they show up," he answered. "And that we find the chest. Is it true what Palermo said? That you've thought about where to take them? That they'll have to be cleaned, or whatever? And that it will require a specialist?"

  She frowned. She looked at El Piloto out of the corner of her eye.

  "I don't think this is the time..."

  Coy pounded his fist on the counter. His irritation was building, and this time he didn't bother to hide it.

  "Look, El Piloto is in this up to his eyebrows, just like you and me. He's gambling his boat, and trouble with the law. You have to guarantee him_____ "

  Tanger lifted one hand. Mine tremble sometimes, Coy thought. In fact, mine are trembling nearly all the goddamn time. And look at her.

  "What I've promised you justifies the risk for the time being. Later, with the emeralds, we will all be well compensated and happy."

  She had emphasized the all, turning to Coy with a hard expression. He was once again wondering how many pieces she had used to construct her personality, as she lifted the muscatel to her lips, barely moistening them, and set it back on the counter. She held her head to one side, as if considering the advisability of whether to add something. Veronica Lake, Coy thought, admiring the asymmetrical curtain covering half her face. Tanger had mentioned The Maltese Falcon, but Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential was more like it, a movie he had seen two hundred times in the video room of the Fedallah. Or Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way.

  "Regarding the emeralds," Tanger added after a minute, "I can only tell you that there is a buyer. I spoke with him, as Palermo

  told you____ Someone will come here to take charge of them as

  soon as we bring them up. With no further negotiations or complications." Again she paused and stared defiantly at them both. "With plenty of money for everyone."

  It wasn't going to be easy, Coy sensed, looking at her freckles. Or, to be more exact, he knew it wasn't going to be easy. They were still on that island of knights and knaves, and the last knight had been dead and buried for centuries now. His preserved skull still showed the befuddled grin of a fool.

  "Money," he repeated mechanically, little convinced.

  He wrinkled his nose before looking questioningly toward El Piloto, who was listening with apparent indifference. After a moment he saw him half-close his eyes, agreeing.

  "I'm getting old," El Piloto commented. "The Carpanta barely pays for herself, and I've never paid any Social Security contribu-

  tions___ I'd buy a little motorboat, and take my grandson out fishing on Sundays."

  He almost smiled, and stroked his gray stubble. His grandson was four years old. Whenever they went out hand in hand around the port, the boy scrupulously kept count of the beers El Piloto drank, following his grandmother's orders, and then tattled when they got home. It was a stroke of luck that he'd only learned to count to five.

  "You'll buy your boat, Piloto," said Tanger. "I promise you."

  She grasped his forearm spontaneously. An almost masculine gesture of camaraderie. Precisely, Coy observed, on the faded tattoo of the naked woman.

  LIKE the stutterings of a hoarse guitar, the first notes of "Lady, Be Good" stippled the lights of the city reflected in the ink-black water between the Carpanta's stern and the dock. Little by little, the classic swing of bass chords was interwoven with the intricate entrances of the rest of the instruments—the trumpets of Killian and McGhee, the solos of Arnold Ross at piano, and Charlie Parker on alto. Coy listened to it all intently, headphones to his ears, watching the luminous dots on the water as if the notes flooding his head had materialized on that oily black surface. Parker's sound, he decided, was saturated with alcohol, and shirtsleeves reeking of tobacco smoke, and vertical clock hands plunged like knives into the belly of the night. That melody, like the others, had the taste of a port of call, of women sitting alone at the far end of a bar. Of silhouettes reeling beside garbage cans, and red, blue, and green neon lighting the red, blue, and green half-faces qf faltering, drowsy drunks. The simple life, hello and good-bye, with no complication but what the stomach and bowels could take, here I catch you and here I kill you. No time to court the princess of Monaco: Oh, my word, mademoiselle, how beautiful you are, allow me to invite you to have a cup of tea, I too read Proust. Which was why Rotterdam and Antwerp and Hamburg had porno movies, topless bars, mercenary madonnas knitting on the other side of sheer-curtained show windows, cats with a philosophical air observing Crew Sanders pass by, zigzag from sidewalk to sidewalk, vomit Black Label oil of turpentine, to kill time while waiting to return to vibrating steel plates, wrinkled sheets in your berth, and the ashen light of dawn filtering between the curtains at the porthole. Ta-da-da-da. Dong. Ta-da-da. The alto of Charlie Parker kept underlining the absence of commitment, the almost autistic nature of the theme. It was like the ports of Asia, Singapore and all the others, when you were outside the harbor, riding the anchor with the shore beyond the gunnel on which you're leaning, waiting for the launch with Mama Sans girls and their lively, birdlike trills as they come on board, aided by the third officer, with Mama San chalking up accounts on the door of each cabin like a waiter on his marble bar: one x, one girl, two x's, two girls. Fragile, accommodating, satin-skinned girls, with malleable thighs and obedient mouths. No problem, sailor, hello and good-bye. You just haven't done it, the Tucuman Torpedoman once said, until you've done it here with three at a time. You never saw a depressed sailor when Asia or the Caribbean lay at the bows between the eyes of the hawseholes. But Coy had seen men crying like babies when headed in the opposite direction, simply because they were going home.

  He looked up, focusing on something on the other
side of the quay. The crew of a Swedish sailboat were having dinner in the cockpit, by the light of a lamp where nocturnal moths were circling dizzily. From time to time, despite the music, he would catch a few loud words, or a laugh. They were all blond and size XXL, with tiny children who tottered around the deck naked during the daytime, connected by harnesses to the manropes. Blondes like one he remembered, a pilot of the port of Stavanger whom he'd met when the Monte Pequeno spent two months there. She was the Nordic beauty you see in photographs and films, tall and substantial, a thirty-four-year-old Norwegian woman with the rank of captain in the Merchant Marine. She had confidently climbed the sea ladder from the launch in open water, leaving all the men on the bridge breathless, and then maneuvered the ship into the fjord in perfect English, directing the tugs with a walkie-talkie while don Agustin de la Guerra stared at her out of the comer of his eye and the helmsman stared at him. Stop her. Dead slow ahead. Stop her. A little push now. Stop. Afterward she drank a glass of whiskey and smoked a cigarette with the captain, before Coy, who at the time was a cadet of twenty-two, accompanied her to the gangway. An athlete in canvas pants and a heavy red anorak who smiled at him before she left. So long, officer. He ran into her three days later, while the crew of the tanker was going crazy over the dream-girl Scandinavians, in the Ensomhet, a well-appointed and sad bar by the red houses on the Strandkaien dock, which was filled with men and women for whom a spree meant drinking for hours without saying a word, like stupefied tunas, until they tied on a 9mm Para-bellum drunk. He'd gone into the bar by chance, and she—there with a bearded, impassive Norwegian who looked as if he'd recently been paid off from a Viking drakkar—recognized him as the young man from the gangway of the tanker. Hey, Spanish boy, Shorty, she said in English. Then she smiled and invited him to have a drink. An hour later, the impassive Viking was still leaning on the bar, as far as Coy knew, while he, naked and soaked with sweat despite the early morning air blowing through a window open to the fiord and the snowy mountains towering over the sea, was making an all-out assault on the awesome broad-shouldered woman with muscular thighs, whose light eyes stared at him from the dark as her lips, when Coy's mouth left them free, emitted strange whispers in a barbaric tongue. Her name was Inga Horgen, and for the two months the Monte Pequeno was in Stavanger, Coy, envied by everyone from the boy in the scullery to the captain, spent every free minute with her. From time to time they drank beer and aquavit with the impassive Viking, who never objected when the woman stepped back from the bar with gleaming eyes and a slight imprecision in her walk, and Shorty, the "Spanish boy," took off in the company of that Valkyrie nearly nine inches taller than he was. With her he got to know the Lyse Fjord and Bergen, koldtbord, a few intimate words in Norwegian, and certain useful secrets about female anatomy. He even learned to think he was in love, and that not every woman takes the trouble, or the precaution, to fall in love first. He also learned that sometimes, when you get close enough and pay attention, the woman without her mask, whose half-open eyes wander absently across the ceiling as you open a way into her depths, wears the face of all the women who have inhabited the earth over the centuries. Finally, one night when there was a problem on board and he went ashore later than usual, young Spanish Shorty went directly to the house of black logs and white windows and there found the impassive Viking as drunk as he always was in the bar, the only difference being that this time he was naked. She was too, and she looked at Coy with a fixed and indifferent smile, hazy with alcohol, before speaking words that never reached his ears. Maybe she said "come," maybe she said "go." He slowly closed the door and returned to his ship.