The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  The three performers had finished their set and were taking their bows amid applause. The break was filled with canned music over loudspeakers installed in the ceiling. A couple got up to dance. "You're leaving because I want you to leave." Bolero. For a fraction of a second Coy was tempted to invite Tahger to dance. Ha. The two of them there, embracing, faces nearly touching. "I want other lips to kiss you," the song said. He imagined himself with a hand on her waist, stepping on her toes like a duck. Oh well, she was sure to be one of those women who jams an elbow between your body and hers.

  "It used to be," he continued, forgetting the bolero, "that a captain had to make decisions. Now he's signing documents in the port; there's a difference of half a ton and he's telephoning the owner. Do I sign the papers? Do I not sign the papers? And in some office are three guys, three pieces of garbage in ties, who say, Don't sign. And he doesn't."

  'And what's left of the sea? When do you feel you're still a sailor?"

  When there are problems, he explained. When someone on board was hurt, or broke something, people tended to rise to the occasion. Once, he told her, the mother of all waves had torn the rudder plate off the Palestine, near El Cabo. They were adrift for a day and a half, until the towboats arrived. And for that time the crew were all true sailors. For the most part, they're nothing but truck drivers on the ocean, or union officials, but in crises they all work together. Shifted cargo, serious damage, bad weather, tempests. All that.

  "That word sounds terrible: 'tempest.'"

  "Some are bad and others are worse. The unpleasant time for a sailor is when he calculates his course and the course of a major

  storm, and there's a convergence_______ I mean when the two get to the same place at the same time."

  There was a pause. Some things he would never be able to explain to her, he decided. Force n winds off Terranova, walls of gray and white water boiling in a mist of foam blending into sky, waves pounding the bow, a shuddering, creaking hull, crew yelling with terror, tied to their bunks, the radio saturated with the Maydays of ships in distress. And a few men with calm heads on the bridge, or securing loose cargo in the hold, or below manning the engines amid boilers, turbines, and pipes, not knowing what was going on topside, tending to controls and alarm lights and orders, concerned about the sloshing of diesel in the tanks, about the split in the hull that was leaking water into the fuel, about damage in the burners that might leave them at the mercy of the sea. Sailors trying to save a ship, and with it their lives, accelerating in the downward slopes to maintain control, moderating just before the crests, searching for troughs between the largest waves to veer into when the ship could no longer take it head on And the moment of anguish when, in mid-maneuver, a murderous wave strikes the hull dead abeam and the whole ship heels forty degrees while the men, clinging to anything they can, look at one another with frightened eyes, wondering whether the ship will right herself or not.

  'At times like that," Coy concluded aloud, "things go back to how they used to be."

  He was afraid he sounded too nostalgic. How could you long for horror? He was nostalgic for the way some men behaved facing horror; but that was impossible to explain at a restaurant table, or anywhere, for that matter. So he breathed hard, disturbed, looking around. He was talking way too much, he thought suddenly. It wasn't a bad thing to talk, but he wasn't used to telling about his life that way. He realized Tanger was the kind of person who chatted easily, the kind whose conversation consisted of asking the right questions and then leaving a silence so the other person could pick up and respond. A useful trick—you learn something and you come off well without giving up anything. After all, people love to talk about themselves. He's a brilliant conversationalist, they say later. And you haven't opened your mouth. Cretins. And he? Besides being a cretin, he was a blabbermouth, from truck to keel. Nevertheless, even with all that, he realized that talking about those things, at the most basic level, with Tanger there and listening, made him feel good.

  "Today," he said a moment later, "the kind of romantic sailing you dreamed of as a kid is reduced to a handful of small ships with strange registries that go around picking up coast trade, tubs with rusted hulls, the name painted over another, and greasy, poorly paid captains. I was on one of them just after I got my license as a second officer, because I couldn't find a berth anywhere else. She was named the Otago, and there weren't many times I was as happy as I was then. Not even on the ships of the Zoe line... But I didn't learn that till later."

  Tahger said that maybe it was because Coy was young then. He thought about it a minute. Yes, he admitted, it was likely that he was happy then because he was young. But with flags of convenience, businessmen captains, and owners for whom a ship isn't much different from an eighteen-wheeler, the whole thing had gone to hell. Some ships were so short of crew that they had to get men from the port in order to dock. Filipinos and Hindus were now elite crew, and Russian captains filled with vodka stove in their tankers a little here and a little there. The one possibility for experiencing the sea as sea was on a sailboat. There everything was still a matter of it and you. But you couldn't make a living that way, he added. And a good example of that was El Piloto.

  There was nothing but ice in Tanger's glass. Her fingers with those ragged nails were poking inside, rattling the cubes. Coy made a move to call the waitress, but Tanger shook her head.

  "The other night, on the bow with the flare, you impressed me."

  After saying that, she fell silent, looking at him. Her smile widened. Coy laughed quietly, again at himself.

  "That doesn't surprise me. I was the one who was impressed, when I hit the water."

  "I'm not talking about that. I was paralyzed as I watched those lights coming toward us. I didn't know how to react. But you went about doing things, one after the other, without even thinking. A kind of predisaster routine. You didn't lose your calm, your voice didn't change. Or Piloto's either. You both exhibited a kind of fatalism. As if it was all part of the game."

  Coy bunched his shoulders modestly. He studied his own wide, clumsy hands. He had never imagined having to talk about such things with anyone. In his world, that is, the saltwater world from which he'd recently been expelled, everything was obvious. Only on dry land did they ask you to explain things.

  "Those are the rules," he said. "Out there you assume disaster is part of the deal. Not willingly, of course. You pray and you curse, and if you have any class you struggle to the end. But you accept it. That's how the sea is. You can be the best sailor in the world, and the sea comes along and wipes you out. The one consolation is to do the best you can. I imagine that's how the captain of the Dei Gloria must have felt."

  At the mention of the brigantine, Tanger's face darkened. Suddenly she tilted her head, distracted, her elbows on the table, her chin in her hand.

  "That's not much consolation," she commented.

  "It is to me. Maybe it was to him, too."

  The beacons that marked the outlines of the bay had come on, and the water near the shore shone yellow in the drizzle, scored by shimmerings, as if schools of tiny fish were swimming near the surface. The light of the lighthouse was more concentrated, and in the moisture its piercing beam seemed almost substantial as it circled again and again toward the inky blackness slithering across the sea.

  "It must be very dark out there," she said.

  Coy heard an involuntary tremor in her voice, and that made him look at her more closely. Her eyes were lost in the night.

  "Falling overboard in the dark," she added after a few seconds, "must be terrible." "It isn't much fun." "You were very lucky."

  "Yes, I was. When you go over like that, you don't normally get rescued."

  Tanger's silver bracelet jingled as she put her right hand on the table, very near Coy's arm, but not actually touching. He felt his hair stand on end.

  'Tve dreamed about that," she was saying. "I've dreamed that for years. Falling into thick, dense blackness."

 
He searched her face, a little abashed by the confidential tone. And by the way she kept turning toward the shadows.

  "I suppose it's about dying," she continued in a low voice.

  She seemed almost frozen, staring with apprehension into the rain. She seemed, he thought, to be looking far beyond the shadowy sea.

  "To die alone like Zas. In the dark."

  She spoke those words after a long silence, in a tone that was almost a whisper, barely audible. Suddenly she seemed truly frightened, or moved, and Coy shifted in his chair, inhibited, as he shuffled through his emotions. He raised his hand to place it over hers, but dropped it back at his side without completing the gesture.

  "If that ever happens," he said, "I would like to be around, to hold your hand."

  He had no idea how that might sound, but he didn't care. It was sincere. Suddenly he saw a little girl who was afraid of the night, terrified of traveling alone through infinite darkness.

  "It wouldn't help," she replied. "No one can accompany you on that voyage."

  She had studied him closely when he said that about being around to hold her hand. Very serious and very intense, analyzing what she'd heard. But now, as if she didn't believe it, she was shaking her head with resignation, or defeat "No one."

  After that, nothing. She was still looking at Coy so intently that he shifted in his chair again. He would have given everything he had—though he didn't have anything to give—to be good-looking, to be suave, or at least to have enough money to smile self-confidently before putting his hand on hers. Her protector. To say, I'll look after you, my dear, to a woman whom he'd called a goddamn scheming witch only a few minutes before, and suddenly he thought of the freckled little girl smiling in her father's arm in the framed snapshot, the champion of the swim meet, the winner of the silver cup that now, dented and missing a handle, was turning black on a shelf. But he was only a pariah with a seabag over his shoulder, aboard a sailboat that wasn't his, and he was so far from her that he couldn't even aspire to consoling her, or having the last hand that pressed hers before a hypothetical voyage to the end of the night He felt a bitter impotence as she contemplated the distance that separated their hands on the table and smiled sadly, as if smiling at shadows, ghosts, and regrets.

  "I fear that," she said.

  This time, without even thinking, Coy reached out and touched her hand. Eyes boring straight into his, she slowly removed it. And he, flustered by his gaffe, his blunder, looked away so she couldn't see him blush. But after only half a minute he was struck by how life can produce unique situations that might have been choreographed or directed by the malice of a joker hunched down in eternity. Because at the precise moment he turned toward the railing and the beach, embarrassed by the sight of his clumsy, solitary hand on the table, he saw something that came to his aid so opportunely that he had to choke back his jubilation—a blind impulse, totally irrational, that tensed the muscles of his arms and back and filled his brain with a flash of incomparable lucidity.

  Down near the lights bordering the beach, beneath the overhang of a closed little fish shop, he identified the small, unmistakable, and at this point almost perversely lovable figure of Horacio Kiskoros, the ex-Argentine petty officer and Nino Palermo's hired assassin. The melancholy dwarf.

  THIS time no one was going to steal the catch from his hook. So he waited thirty seconds and, using the excuse of a visit to the gent's, he ran down the steps two at a time, went out the rear door, past the garbage cans, and around in a direction that led away from the restaurant and the beach. He advanced cautiously beneath the palm and eucalyptus trees, planning his approach: one tack to starboard and one tack to port. The drizzle began to soak his hair and shirt, renewing the vigor that charged through his body, tense now with the acid pleasure of expectation. He crossed the road toward an open space, crept through the fennel growing in the ditch, and with the darkness behind him, crossed back, taking cover behind a trash barrel. I hear him breathing over there, he said to himself. He was to windward of his prey, who, unaware of what was about to hit him, was smoking and protecting himself from the wet beneath the cane and board overhang. A car was parked near the sidewalk, a small white Toyota with Alicante plates and a rental-car sticker on the rear windshield. Coy skirted the car and saw that Kiskoros was watching the lighted terrace and the main door of the restaurant. He was wearing a light jacket and bow tie, and his brilliantined black hair gleamed. The knife, thought Coy, recalling the Guardiamarinas arch, I have to watch out for his knife. He shook his hands and closed them into fists, evoking the ghosts of the Tucuman Torpedoman, Gallego Neira, and the rest of Crew Sanders. His sneakers helped him take eight silent, fiercely stealthy steps before Kiskoros heard something on the gravel and turned to see who was coming. Coy saw the sympathy fade from the sympathetic frog eyes, saw them fly open and the cigarette drop from a mouth turned into a dark hole, the last mouthful of smoke spiraling through his precise mustache. He leaped, spanning the remaining distance, and his first punch landed right in Kiskoros's face, snapping his head back as if his throat had been cut. Then he slammed him against the wall of the building just below a sign reading La Costa Azul. Best octopus in town.

  The knife, he repeated obsessively as he landed punch after punch, systematically, efficiently. Kiskoros, unable to stay on his feet before that onslaught, slid down the wall as he desperately tried to reach his pocket. But now Coy knew a few things about his opponent; he stepped back a little, built up steam, and the kick that landed on the Argentine's arm caused him, for the first time, to let out a long howl of pain, the howl of a dog whose tail has been run over. Then Coy grabbed him by the lapels and jerked him across the sidewalk in the direction of the sandy beach. He pulled, stopped to punch him, and pulled again. His victim, in agony, was emitting a series of muffled groans, struggling to get his hand to his pocket, but with each attempt Coy pounded him again. You're all mine now, he thought, all systems racing with that strange lucidity that occurs in the midst of rage and violence. I have you right where I want you; there's no referee, no witness, no police, and no one to tell me what I should or shouldn't do. So I'm going to lay it on till you're a sack of shit and your broken ribs nail your insides together, and you swallow your busted teeth one at a time and don't have the breath to whisde a tango.

  Like a bull looking for a barrier to fall against, Kiskoros was barely struggling. His bow tie was twisted below his ear. The knife, which he'd finally got out of his pocket, had slipped from his unresponsive fingers and lay on the sand where Coy had kicked it. The light from the nearest street lamp gave density to the fine mist as Coy used his foot to roll the sand-coated Argentine over and over to the edge of the water. The last blows came when Kiskoros was already in the drink, splashing and moaning painfully as he attempted to keep his mouth out of the water. Coy waded in ankle-deep to deliver a last kick that rolled his target a few feet farther, and he watched as it disappeared completely beneath the yellow reflections and rnirrored image of the shed on the black water.

  He retraced his steps and sat down hard on the sand. The tension in his muscles began to relax as he recovered his breath. His ankles hurt from the kicks he'd delivered, and the whole back of his right hand, and up his forearm to his elbow, seemed tied in knots. Never in my whole life, he told himself, have I had such a good time beating someone up. Never. He rubbed his fingers to ease the stiffness, lifting his face a little so the rain could wet his forehead and closed eyes. Motionless, gasping through his open mouth, he waited for the galloping to still in his chest. He heard a noise and opened his eyes. Streaming water that made him glisten among the reflections, Kiskoros was crawling along the waterline. Coy kept his seat in the sand, watching his efforts. He could hear the jagged breathing and the dark grunts of a mauled beast, the clumsy splashing of hands and of legs incapable of supporting a body.

  It was good to fight, Coy thought. Like cleaning out the bilges. It was stupendous for the circulation and gastric juices to pour all your anguish and b
ad humor and soul-rending despair into your fists. It was downright therapeutic for action to take your mind off your problems, and for atavistic impulses from days when a person had to choose between death and survival to claim their place in the game of life. Maybe that's why the world was the way it was today, he reflected. Men had stopped fighting because it was frowned on, and that was making everyone crazy.

  He kept rubbing his sore hand. His rage was cooling. He hadn't felt so good in a long time, so at peace with himself. He saw the Argentine, on all fours, lift his body out of the water but then fall back, covered from the waist down. The yellowish light revealed hair and a mustache clotted with sand and reddened by streams of blood.

  "Bastard," said Kiskoros from the water, breathless and moaning. "Hey, shove it up your ass."

  Then both were silent, Coy sitting and watching, the Argentine face down, breathing with difficulty, moaning quietly from time to time when he tried to move. Finally he pulled himself forward on his elbows, leaving a furrow in the sand, until he was clear of the water. He looked like a turtle about to deposit her eggs, and Coy watched dispassionately. His anger had nearly dissipated. He wasn't quite sure what to do next.

  "I'm only doing my job," Kiskoros muttered after a bit.

  "Your job's pretty dangerous."

  "I was just shadowing you."

  "Well, go shadow the bitch who birthed you out there on the pampas."

  Coy stood up unhurriedly, brushing sand from his jeans. Then he walked toward the Argentine, who was getting to his feet with great difficulty, and stared at him a minute—until he decided to punch him again, this time a less impulsive and more businesslike punch, knocking him flat. Small, wet, stiff, and coated with sand, Kiskoros looked like a pitiful croquette. Coy bent over him, hearing his breathing—thousands of little whistles in his lungs—and methodically checked his pockets. A cell phone, a pack of cigarettes, and the keys to the rental car. Coy threw the keys and the phone far out into the water. The dwarf's billfold was huge, stuffed with money and papers. Coy walked over to the nearest light to take a lpok. A Spanish identification card with a photo and the name Horatio Kiskoros Parodi, other people's business cards, Spanish and English money, Visa and American Express credit cards. Also a color photocopy of a page from a magazine, which he unfolded carefully because it had been handled many times and was damp with saltwater. Under the heading "Our divers humiliate England" was a photograph of several British Marines with their hands up, guarded by three Argentine soldiers, feces blackened with grease, pointing automatic rifles at them. One of those three was short, with a frog's bulging eyes and an unmistakable mustache.