The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  BUM, bum. Bum. An exhausted Charlie Parker, who in the blink of an eye would be dead, had put his sax on the floor and was getting a drink at the bar, or, more likely, was shooting something in the men's room. Now, above the others, came the slap of Billy Hadnott's bass. In this last section he was again master of the melody, and it was at that moment that El Piloto came up from the cabin to join Coy, taking the other teak seat attached to the stern rail. In his hand he had the bottle of cognac they'd brought from Del Macho's to finish on board. He held it out to Coy, and when he refused, shaking his head to the music dying in his ears, his friend took a swallow before setting it straight up in his lap. Coy pulled the headphones from his ears.

  "What's Tanger doing?’

  "She's reading in her cabin."

  The San Pedro and Navidad lighthouses were flashing on the

  other side of the mole, marking the entrance to the port. Green and red, clusters of flashes every fourteen and ten seconds, familiar lights that had always been there for Coy, ever since he could remember. He looked up above the walls of shadows encircling the port. In the mountains, the lighted castles of San Julian and Galeras seemed suspended in the air, as in paintings from other centuries. The glow of the city outshone the stars. "What do you think, Piloto?"

  The clock in the town hall struck eleven before he answered.

  "She knows what she's doing. Or at least she acts like she knows. The question is whether you do."

  Coy wound the cord of the headphones around the Walkman. He half-smiled in the reflection from the oily water.

  "She's got me back at sea again."

  El Piloto kept looking at Coy.

  "If that's an excuse, fine," he said. "But don't be talking nonsense to me."

  He took another drink and handed Coy the bottle.

  "I told you before. I want to count those freckles." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Every bloody one."

  El Piloto said nothing, but reached out to reclaim the bottle. A night watchman walked down the quay, his footsteps sounding on the planks of the floating dock. He exchanged a greeting with them and went on his way.

  "Listen, Piloto. We men go through life stumbling from place to place. Usually we grow old and die without really understanding what it's all about. But they're different."

  He paused and stretched back, his arms extended. His head brushed the flag hanging limp from the mast, next to the mushroom-shaped antenna of the GPS. The night was so tranquil you could almost hear the screws in the bow rail rusting.

  "Sometimes I look at her and think she knows things about me I don't know myself."

  El Piloto laughed quietly, the bottle'in his hands. "My wife says the same thing/'

  "I'm serious. They're different. Clearheaded. So clearheaded that it seems almost like a sickness. You know what I mean?" "No."

  "It's something in the genes. It's even true of the stupid ones."

  El Piloto was listening intently, with an open mind. But the slight tilt of his head was skeptical. Occasionally he gave a glance around at the sea and the lights of the city, as if in search of someone who would bring some sense to bear on all this.

  "They're there. Not speaking. Watching us," Coy continued. "They've been watching us for centuries, you know? They've learned from watching us."

  Then he and El Piloto lapsed into silence. From the Swedes' boat came the sound of voices as they cleared the table and got ready to go to bed. The town-hall clock tolled the first quarter hour. The water was so still it looked solid.

  "This one is dangerous," El Piloto said finally. "Like that sea where ships get entangled and sit there until they rot."

  "The Sargasso Sea."

  "You told me she's bad. All I know is that she's dangerous."

  He had passed Coy the bottle of cognac again. He held it without taking a drink.

  "That's exactly what Nino Palermo said, Piloto. How about that. The day I talked with him in Gibraltar."

  El Piloto shrugged. He waited, patient.

  "I don't know what he told you."

  Coy took a pull from the bottle.

  "That we're bad because we're stupid, Piloto. Because we're dim-witted. We're bad because of ambition or lust, or ignorance. You understand?"

  "More or less."

  "I mean that they're different."

  "They aren't different. They're just survivors." That stopped Coy. He was surprised by how perceptive the comment was.

  "Palermo said that, too."

  Then he pointed at El Piloto with the hand holding the bottle, but said nothing. El Piloto leaned forward and took the bottle. "Too many books."

  After that he drank a last swallow, corked the bottle, and set it on the deck. Now he looked at Coy, waiting for him to stop laughing.

  "What's she defending against?" he asked. Coy raised his hands, evasive. How the hell, the gesture said, can I explain?

  "She's fighting," he said, "for a little girl she knew a long time

  ago. A sheltered kid, a dreamer, who won swimming contests.

  Who grew up happy until she stopped being happy and learned that

  everyone dies alone_____ Now she's refusing to let her disappear."

  'And what's your part in this?"

  "I get a hard-on like anyone else, Piloto."

  "You lie. There are answers for that, nothing to do with her."

  He's right, Coy told himself. When all's said and done I've had hard-ons before, and I never went around acting like a fool. No more than usual, at least.

  "Maybe it's like ships passing in the night," he said. "Have you ever noticed? You're at the rail and a ship you know nothing about passes by. No name, flag, or idea where she's headed. All you see is lights, and you think probably someone's leaning on the rail who's seeing your lights."

  'And what color are the lights you see?"

  "What does the color..." Coy shrugged his shoulders, annoyed. "How do I know? Red. White."

  'If they're red, the other ship has right-of-way. Hard to starboard."

  "I'm speaking in metaphors, Piloto. Don't you get it?"

  El Piloto didn't say whether he did or didn't. His silence was eloquent, and not very favorable to metaphors of ships, nights, or anything else. Don't screw up your compass, his unspoken words said. It's her pussy. Period. Sooner or later everything leads back there. The reason is your business, what makes me uneasy are the consequences.

  "So what are you going to do?" he asked finally.

  "Do?" Coy paused. "No idea. Be here, I suppose. Keep an eye on her."

  "Well, you remember the old saying: With women and wind, act with caution."

  After that El Piloto sank into another unsociable silence. His eyes were on the lights in the oily film.

  "Shame about your ship," he added after a long silence. "Everything was going fine there. But on land it's nothing but problems."

  "I'm in love with her."

  El Piloto was standing now. He studied the sky, seeking a hint of what the weather would bring the next day.

  "There are women," he said as if he hadn't heard anything, "who have strange ideas in their heads, like others have gonorrhea. And what they do is come along and give it to you."

  He had bent down to pick up the bottle, and when he stood up the lights of the city gleamed in his eyes.

  "So after all," he said, "maybe it isn't your fault."

  With the wrinkles making shadows on his face, and his short gray hair turned to ash in the dark, he resembled a weary Ulysses, indifferent to sirens and harpies, to pubescent girls on beckoning beaches, to looks hazy with alcohol, "come" or "go," scornful or indifferent. Suddenly Coy envied him with all his heart. At his age it wasn't likely that a woman would cost him his life or his liberty.

  XII

  Southwest Quarter to South

  This road differs from those on dry land in three ways. The one on land is firm, this unstable. The one on land is quiet, this moving. The one on land is marked, the one on the sea, unknown.


  MARTIN CORTES, Breve compendiode la esfera

  At dawn on the fourth day, the wind that had been blowing gently from the west began to veer to the south. Uneasy, Coy checked the oscillation of the anemometer and then the sky and the sea. It was a conventional anticyclonic day at the beginning of summer. Everything was calm in appearance— the water riffled, the sky blue with a few cumulus clouds—but he could see medium and high cirrus moving in the distance. And the barometer had dropped three millibars in two hours. After he'd woken up and had a quick dip in the cold blue water, he listened to the weather dispatch, noting in the log on the chart table the formation of a pyramidal center of low pressure moving across the north of Africa, not too far from a stationary high of 1,012 over the Balearic Isles. If the isobars of those two came too close together, the winds would blow strong out to sea, and the Carpanta would have to seek shelter in port and postpone the search.

  He disconnected the automatic pilot, took the wheel, and brought the boat around a hundred and eighty degrees. The bow was again pointed north, toward the sunlit coast beneath the dark shoulder of the peak of Las Viboras. They were beginning to sweep sector number 43 on the search chart. That meant the Pathfinder had already covered more than half the area, with no result. The positive aspect of this was that they had eliminated the deepest areas, where dives would have been complicated and difficult. Coy looked toward Punta Percheles on the port beam. A fishing boat was casting nets so close to land that it looked ready to scrape the shells off the beach. He calculated course and distance, and concluded that they would not come too close, although the erratic behavior of fishing boats macle them unpredictable. Then he glanced skyward again, connected the automatic pilot, and went below to the cockpit, where the monotonous drone of the motor beneath the ladder was more noticeable.

  "Track forty-three," he said. "Heading north."

  The sun was at the meridian, and it was hot despite the open portholes. Sitting at the chart table, near the echo sounder, the radar, and the repeater of the positioning system of the GPS satellite, Tanger was watching the screen like an overzealous student, jotting down latitude and longitude every time the surface of the ocean floor showed any irregularity. Coy looked at the depth indicator and speed: 118 feet, 2.2 knots. As the Carpanta followed the course set on the automatic pilot, the precise profile of the bottom was modified on the Pathfinder screen. They had taken enough turns there by now to be able to identify, without difficulty, the different shades the instrument assigned to features on the floor. Soft orange was sand and mud, dark orange was seaweed, and pale red indicated loose rock and shingle. Banks of fishes were reddish brown, shutting smudges with green streaks and blue borders, and important irregularities—large individual rocks, say, and the metal remains of an old sunken fishing boat already on the charts—were imaged as jagged hills of intense red.

  "Nothing," she said.

  Sand and seaweed, the screen said. The echo had turned blood red on only two occasions, tracing significant crests on the underwater relief, hard echoes at respective depths of 158 and 140 feet. They weren't capable of interrupting the run, so they noted the positions and returned very early the next morning, after spending the night, as usual, anchored between Punta Negra and Cueva de los Lobos. Coy was suffering the last effects of a cold, a minor souvenir of his night plunge, but they were enough to make it impossible for him to compensate for pressure on eardrums and sinuses. So it was El Piloto who got into his mended black neo-prene wetsuit and jumped into the water, a compressed air tank on his back, knife on his right calf, and a hundred-yard line tied to a bowline at the waist of his self-inflating jacket. Coy stayed above, swimming at the surface with fins, snorkel, and mask, watching the trail of bubbles ascending from the old Snark Silver III demand regulator with dual rubber hoses that El Piloto still insisted on using because he didn't trust modern plastic. The old equipment, he said, never let you down. The echoes, he informed them when he emerged, were caused by an enormous rock that held tatters of tangled nets, and by three huge metal drums crusted with rust and algae. On one of them you could still read the word "Campsa."

  Over Tanger's shoulder, Coy looked at the flat bottom the sounder was imaging. Her eyes never left the liquid-crystal screen. A silver pencil was in her hand, the squared chart before her. Her freckled arms were exposed below the short sleeves of the white cotton T-shirt, her back wet with sweat. The rolling of the boat was rhythmically swinging the damp tips of her hair, which was kept in place with a kerchief tied around her forehead. She was wearing khaki shorts, and her legs were crossed beneath the table. Sitting at the rear of the cockpit, beside a porthole that cast an oscillating circle of sun on his short gray hair, El Piloto was tying a hook onto his fishing line, a crested lure he had just fashioned from a bit of old halyard. From time to time he looked up at them from his labors.

  "We may get a change in the weather," Coy said.

  Without taking her eyes from the screen, Tanger asked if that meant they would have to interrupt the search. Coy answered maybe. If a wind came up, or heavy seas, the sounder would give false echoes, and besides, they would be very uncomfortable bobbing around out here. In that case, the best thing would be to sit it out in Aguilas or Mazarron. Or go back to Cartagena.

  "Cartagena is twenty-five miles away," she said. "I'd rather stay around here."

  She was still focused on the Pathfinder and the chart. Although they took turns at the echo sounder, she was the one who spent the most time watching the curves and colors taking shape on the screen, hanging on until her eyes were bloodshot and she had to yield her post. When the slight swell became a little stronger, she would get up, looking pale, her hair stuck to her face with sweat, visible signs that the rolling and the constant roar of the diesel motor were affecting her more than she admitted. But she never said anything, or complained. She forced herself to eat everything, out of discipline, and they would see her disappear toward the head, where she splashed water on her face before lying down a while in her cabin. Her package of Dramamine, Coy observed, was close to empty. Sometimes when they'd finished a series of sweeps, or when they were sick of the heat and continual noise, they stopped the boat and she dived into the sea from the stem, swimming straight out with a slow, steady crawl. She swam with the correct rhythm and breathing, not splashing unnecessarily with her kick, the palms of her hands cutting like knives with every stroke. Occasionally Coy dove in to swim with her, but she managed to keep her distance, in a way that was casual only in appearance. Sometimes he watched her dive between two waves, her arms pulling strongly, her hair undulating past schools of fish that parted as she passed. She swam in a flattering black one-piece suit with narrow straps, cut very low to reveal a V of coppery back. She had long slim legs, maybe a little thin—too tall and skinny, El Piloto had judged. Her breasts were not large, but they were as arrogant as Tanger herself. When she took off her bathing suit in her cabin, her body still wet, her nipples made damp circles on her T-shirt, leaving a residue of salt when they dried. At last Coy discovered what was hanging on the chain she wore around her neck—a steel tag with her name, national identification number, and blood type, O negative. A soldier's ID.

  The echo sounder registered a change in the reddish tone of the floor, and Tanger bent closer to note the latitude and longitude. But it was a false alarm. She leaned back again in her chair at the chart table, pencil gripped in fingers with ragged nails that she was now chewing constantly. She still had the serious, focused expression of a model student that Coy so enjoyed watching. Often, seeing how absorbed she was in her notepad, the chart, or the screen, he tried to imagine her with blond pigtails, in a school uniform and white anklets. He was sure that before she used to hide in the bathroom to smoke cigarettes, before she became insolent to the nuns, before she dreamed of Red Rackham's treasure, of nautical charts and corsair booty, someone had tagged her as an exemplary little girl. It wasn't difficult to imagine her with a stubborn expression reciting amo-amas-amat, H2S0>4, "I
n a village of La Mancha," and all the rest. And with flowers for the Virgin.

  He leaned against the table at her side to look at the charted squares of the search area. On the bulkhead the radio was sputtering on low volume, tuned to receive and transmit. A naval frigate was requesting dock hands to take their mooring line, but no one was appearing. From time to time, a Ukrainian sailor or Moroccan fisherman would reel off long paragraphs in his tongue. The master of a fishing boat was complaining that a steamer had cut his trawl lines. A patrol of Guardia Civil was blocked because of damage to a bridge in port Tomas Maestre.