The Nautical Chart (12 page)

"Then it's most likely they took land references. Bearings. All they would have to do is cross two to find their position. I suppose you know how that's done."

"More or less." She smiled uncertainly. "Though I've never seen a real sailor do it."

Coy picked up the protractor, a clear plastic circle that had 360 degrees of circumference numbered in tens around the edge of the arc. That allowed direction to be calculated with precision by transferring indications on the ship's magnetic needle to the paper of a nautical chart.

"It's easy. You look for a cape or something you can identify." He placed the gum eraser on the chart, representing an imaginary ship, and moved the protractor toward the nearest coast. "Then you correlate it with your onboard compass, the needle, and you get, for example, 45 °N. So you go to the chart and draw a line from that point in the opposite direction, to 2250. You see? Then you take another reference, one separated by a clear angle from the first: another cape, a mountain, whatever. If that gives you, for example, 3150, you drawyour line on the chart toward 1350. Your ship is where the lines cross. If the land references are clear, the method is reliable. And if you complete it with a third bearing, better still."

Tanger's lips had tightened with concentration. She was staring at the eraser as if it were actually a ship sailing along the coast printed on the paper. Coy picked up a pencil and followed the drawing on the chart.

"This coast has shoals and sandy beaches," he explained, "but most of all areas of craggy slopes with tall rocks. There are lots of references for visual charting. I imagine the navigator of the
Dei Gloria
could have done it easily. Maybe he did it during the night, if there was a moon and he could make out the coast_____ Although that's more difficult. In those days they didn't have the lighthouses we have now. A tower with a beacon at most. But I doubt there was anything there."

I'm sure there wasn't, he said to himself, looking at the chart. I'm sure that on that night of the third and early morning of the fourth of February,
1767,
there wasn't any light or other helpful reference, nothing except maybe the line of the coast standing out in the moonlight, off the port side. He could imagine the scene: full sail aloft, the ship running at her best speed, the wind whistling in the rigging and the deck of the brigantine heeling to starboard, the sound of the water close to the rail, and to windward, glints of moonbeams on a choppy sea. A reliable man at the wheel, and on deck a lookout, tense and alert, staring back into the darkness. Not a single light on board, and the captain standing on the poop, his worried face turned up toward the ghostly pyramid of sail, listening to the creaking and wondering whether the yards and rigging damaged by the storm would hold out. Silent, so that none of the men who are counting on him will sense his uneasiness, but mentally calculating distance, course, set, and drift, with the anguish of someone who knows that the wrong decision will carry the ship and her crew to disaster. He clearly does not know his exact position, and this increases his apprehension. Coy imagines him casting glances toward the black line of the coast two or three miles distant, close but out of reach, as dangerous in the dark as the enemy's guns behind him; his crew too was looking into the night, where, sometimes invisible, sometimes hazily glimpsed as a vague shadow slicing through the waves, the xebec corsair was giving chase. And again the captain glances toward the coast, at the night ahead and the sea at the stern, and then again overhead, alert to the creak of the rigging or groan of the topmasts that freezes the heart of the men bunched windward of the shrouds, black, silent silhouettes in the darkness. Men who, like the captain himself—all except one—will be dead at this time tomorrow. "How does it look?"

Coy blinked, as if he had just returned from the deck of the brigantine. Tanger was observing him closely, awaiting a reply. It was obvious that she had gone over everything forward and backward, but she wanted to hear it from his mouth. He shrugged.

"Our first problem is that the crew of the
Dei Gloria
set their position on this chart, not on a modern one. And we have to chart ours on modern ones, even though we use this one as a point of departure. What we need to do is calculate the differences between Urrutia's chart and contemporary ones. Measure the exact degrees, and all that. We already know that Cabo de Palos is a couple of minutes too far south on the Urrutia." He indicated the spot with the pencil. 'As you can see, this line of coast from Cabo de Agua was drawn as if it were nearly horizontal, when in fact it rises a little obliquely to the northeast. Look where La Hormiga bay is on the Urrutia, and where it is on the modern chart."

He took the compass, measured the distance from Cape Palos to the nearest parallel, and then placed the compass on the vertical scale at the left of the chart to get the number in miles. Tanger followed his every move, her hand motionless on the table, very close to Coy's arm.

"Let's calculate exactly...." Coy noted the figures in pencil on a page of the notebook. "You see? We convert Urrutia's 37°35'.

Yes. 37°38' true latitude. In fact, 37°37' and thirty or forty seconds, which, expressed in figures on a modern nautical chart, where seconds are represented as decimal fractions added to the minutes, gives us 37°37.5'. Which makes a two-and-a-half-mile error here at the tip of Cabo de Palos. Maybe even a mile at Cabo Tinoso. That difference is essential when we're dealing with a wreck... With a sunken ship. That could place it near the coast, at sixty or seventy feet, where it would be easy to reach, or it could be too far, with soundings that keep going up past three hundred, five hundred feet, or more, making it impossible to dive, or even locate it." He paused, turning to her. Still bent over the chart, she was studying the numbers of the soundings marked on the chart. It was obvious that she knew all that very well. Maybe she needs someone to confirm it aloud, Coy thought. Maybe she wants someone to tell her that it's possible. The question remains: why me?

"Do you think you could dive to one hundred sixty-five feet?" she asked.

"I suppose so. I've gone a little deeper than two hundred, although the safe limit is one hundred thirty. But I was twenty

years younger then___ The problem is that at that depth you have very little time below, at least with normal compressed-air equipment. You don't dive?"

"No. It terrifies me. And yet..."

Coy continued to fit pieces together. Sailor. Diver. Knowledge of navigation under sail. It was dear, he told himself, that she didn't have him here because she was fascinated by his conversation. So don't get any ideas, kid. She's not interested in your pretty face. Supposing your face had ever been pretty.

"How far down do you think you could go?" Tanger wanted to know.

"You're going to let me go down alone, without watching what I do”

"I have faith in you."

"That's what bothers me. That you have too much faith in me."

When he said that, she finally turned toward him. Damn, he thought. You would guess she spends her nights planning every gesture. His eyes were on the silver chain that disappeared into the neck of the white T-shirt, headed in the direction of suggestive curves molded beneath the open shirt. Not without effort, he repressed the impulse to pull out the chain and look at it.

"Unless you use special equipment, the deepest a diver can go without problems is two hundred sixty feet," he explained. 'And that's very deep. Besides, if you're working you get tired and use up more air, and that complicates things. You have to use mixtures and detailed decompression tables."

"It isn't very deep. At least that's what I believe."

"You've already calculated it?"

"Within a range of possibilities."

"But you seem very sure."

Coy smiled. Only half a smile, but she didn't seem to like it.

"If I were very sure I wouldn't need you."

He leaned back in his chair. The movement disturbed Zas, who got up and gave him a couple of affectionate licks on the arm.

"In that case," he hazarded, "I may be able to go down. This matter of positions is always relative, though, even using modern charts and GPS. It isn't easy to locate a ship, or what remains of one. Much less a ship that sank two and a half centuries ago. It depends on the nature of the bottom and many other things. The wood will have rotted to hell, and the whole wreck may be covered with mud. And then there are the currents, poor visibility...."

Tanger had picked up the cigarettes, but all she did was turn the box over and over. She contemplated Hero's picture.

"Do you have much experience as a diver?"

"I have some. I took a course at the naval diving center, and a couple of summers I worked cleaning ships' hulls with a wire brush, blind to anything farther away than my nose. During vacations, I also dived for Roman amphoras with Pedro el Piloto."

'And who is Pedro el Piloto?"

"The owner of the
Carpanta.
A friend."

"That's prohibited now."

"Having friends?"

"Bringing up amphoras."

She had set the cigarettes down and was watching Coy. He thought he saw a spark of interest in her eyes.

"I knew that at the time," he admitted, "but the secrecy made it exciting. Besides, in a port where you're known, none of the
guardias
check your seabag when you come back from a dive. You say Hi, he says Hi, you smile, and that's it. Those days, just off Cartagena, the coast was a huge field of archaeological artifacts. I was especially looking for necks of amphoras, which are very beautiful, and other vessels. I used a Ping-Pong paddle to fan away the sand that covered them. And I found dozens."

"What did you do with them?"

"Gave them to my girlfriends."

That wasn't true, at least not completely. Once back on land, with the amphoras discreetly spirited past the police, El Piloto and Coy had sold them to tourists and antiquarians, splitting the proceeds. As for the girlfriends, Tanger didn't ask whether there had been a lot or a few. In truth, Coy remembered only one with special affection from those days. Her name was Eve, and she was North American, the daughter of a technician at the Escombreras refinery. A healthy, blonde, tan girl with very white teem and the shoulders of a windsurfer, with whom he spent a summer while he was still an apprentice. She laughed happily at the least thing, had beautiful hips, and was passive and tender when they made love in hidden coves tucked among steep black rocks, with the sea licking their legs and their skin coated with brine and sand. For a while, Coy carried the taste of her flesh and her sex on his fingers and lips. For a few years he had also kept a photograph of Eve by the sea, with bare breasts, wet hair, and her head tilted back drinking from a wineskin that left dribbles like blood between her small, insolent, girlish breasts. Like any good young
gringa,
her historical memory, only two or three centuries old, made it difficult for her to accept that the clay fragment Coy had given her from a wreck, the neck and handles of an elegant oil amphora from the first century, had for two thousand years lain at the bottom of the sea on whose shore they made love that summer.

"You know those waters well, then," said Tanger.

It wasn't a question but a reflection. She seemed satisfied, and he made a vague gesture toward the chart.

"In some places I do. Especially between Cabo Tinoso and Cabo de Palos. I even dived on a couple of shipwrecks_____ But I

never heard of the
Dei Gloria."

"No one has, for several reasons. First of all, there was some mystery on board, which was proved by the limited information
they got from the ship's boy, along with his strange disappearance.
As well as the position he gave the authorities__ "

'Assuming it was authentic."

"Let's assume that, since we don't have anything else." 'And if it isn't?"

Tanger raised her eyebrows and lay back in her chair with a sigh.

"Then you and I will have wasted our time."

Suddenly she seemed exhausted, as if Coy's appraisal had made her consider the possibility of failure. She was leaning back, frowning at the chart for only a moment. Then she set a firm hand on the table, stuck out her chin, and said there were other reasons no one had searched for the ship. The position the ship's boy gave was in an area difficult to get to in 1767. Later, technical developments made that kind of dive easy, but the
Dei Gloria
was already buried in files and dust, and no one remembered her.

"Until you came along," Coy pointed out.

"That's right. It could have been anyone, but it was me. I found the document and I got to work on it. What else was I going to do?" With her fingertips, she stroked, almost affectionately, the Hero on her cigarette box. "It was one of those things you dream about when you're a girl. The sea, a treasure..."

"You said there aren't any treasures to be found."

"That's true. There aren't. At least in silver ingots, doubloons, or pieces of eight. But the enchantment is still there— I'm going to show you something."

She seemed different, younger, as she got up and went to the bookshelf She moved with a vigor and decisiveness that set the tails of the open military shirt flying behind her. Her eyes were a deeper blue than ever and seemed to be smiling when she came back to the table carrying two of Tintin's adventure books in her hands:
The Secret of the Unicorn
and
Red Rackham's Treasure.

"The other day you told me you aren't a Tintin fan. Is that right?"

Coy nodded in response to the strange question, and said, "Not at all, definitely not." His favorites had been
Treasure Island, Jerry on the Island,
and other books about the sea by Stevenson, Verne, Defoe, Marryat, and London, before he moved on lock, stock, and barrel to
Moby-Dick.
Conrad came later, quite naturally, with
Heart of Darkness
and with time.

"Is it really true you read only books about the sea?"