The Nautical Chart (18 page)

Tanger had unfolded a map with less detail, much more general than the others, and was referring to imaginary vertical lines on it,

"It can't be Paris," she said. "That meridian passes through the Balearic Isles, and in that case the ship would have gone
down halfway between Spain and Italy. Or Tenerife, because that would put it in the middle of the Atlantic. That leaves Cddiz and Cartagena___ "

"It isn't Cartagena," Coy said.

He could see that at a glance. If the
Dei Gloria
had sunk almost five degrees east of that meridian, she would have been too far out to sea, almost two hundred and fifty miles farther, in depths—he leaned a little closer to the chart—of 9,850 feet.

"Then it has to be Cadiz," she stated. "They found the ship's boy the next day, some six miles south of Cartagena. Calculating the longitude from there, it all comes together. The chase. The distance."

Coy looked at the chart, trying to estimate the drift of the survivor in his launch. He calculated distance, wind, and currents. Then nodded. Six miles was a logical distance.

"If that's so," he concluded, "the wind would have shifted to the northwest."

"It's possible. In his statement, the boy said that the wind
veered at dawn__ Is that normal in that area?"

"Yes, the south-westerlies, which we call
lebeches
here, often blow in the afternoon, and sometimes through the night, which was, according to you, what happened during the chase of the
Dei Gloria.
In the winter the wind tends to veer to the northwest and blow offshore in the mornings. A west wind or a mistral could push it to the southeast."

He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Again she was chewing a thumbnail, her eyes fixed on the chart. Coy tossed down his pencil and it rolled across the paper.

"Besides," he said, "we should throw out anything that doesn't fit your hypothesis__ Right?"

'It isn't a question of my hypothesis. The normal thing would be for them to calculate the longitude from the Cadiz meridian. Look"

She unfolded another of the reproductions of the Urrutia chart she had brought from the Museo Naval that morning. With a blunt-tipped index finger, she followed the different meridians as she explained to Coy that Cadiz, first in that city's observatory and then in the observatory of San Fernando, had been the prime meridian Spanish sailors used in the second half of the eighteenth century and a good part of the nineteenth. The San Fernando meridian, however, was not used until 1811, so that a reference in 1767 was still the line from pole to pole that passed through the observatory located in the Guardiamarinas castle in Cadiz.

"So it was natural for the captain of the
Dei Gloria
to use Cadiz as a meridian to measure longitude. Look. That way all the figures fit, especially mat 4°5i' the ship's boy gave as the last known position of the
Dei Gloria.
If we count east from the Cadiz meridian, the point where the ship went down would be here. You see? Right here, east of Punta Calnegre and south of Mazarron."

Coy studied the chart. It was relatively sheltered and near the coast, not the worst area.

"That's on the Urrutia chart," he said. "What about the modern ones?"

"That's where things get complicated, because when Urrutia put together his
Atlas Maritimo
longitude was established with less precision than latitude. They still hadn't perfected the marine chronometer, which allowed an exact calculation. So errors of longitude tend to be more substantial— Cabo de Palos, where you immediately noticed an error of a couple of minutes latitude, is at longitude o°41.3' to the west of the Greenwich meridian. To situate it with regard to the Cadiz meridian on modern charts you have to subtract the difference in longitude between Cadiz and Greenwich. Isn't that right?"

Coy agreed, amused and expectant. Not only had Tanger learned her lesson well, she could calculate degrees and minutes with the ease of a sailor. He himself would not have been able to keep all that information in his head. He realized that she needed him for the practical aspects of the project more than anything else, and for confirming her own calculations. Navigating on paper in a fifth-floor apartment across from Atocha station wasn't the same as being at sea on the rolling deck of a ship. He focused on the penciled annotations she had written on a notepad.

"That gives us," Tanger explained, "a position of 5°50' from Palos with respect to the Cadiz meridian on modern charts. But on

Urrutia's, the position is 5°34, you see____ So we have a margin of error of two minutes in the latitude and sixteen in longitude. I've used the correction tables given in Nestor Perona's
Aplicaciones de Cartografia Histfrica.
If you apply them along the coast from Cadiz to Palos, it allows us to situate each of Urrutia's positions with respect to Cadiz at contemporary positions relative to Greenwich."

The twilight had by now retreated to the walls and ceiling of the room, covering the table with angular shadows, and Tanger interrupted what she was doing to turn on a lamp, illuminating the center of the chart. Then she crossed her arms and stood looking at what she'd drawn.

"Applying the corrections, the position to the east of the Cadiz meridian that the ship's boy reported for the
Dei Gloria
would be 1°21' west of Greenwich on modern charts. Of course, this isn't absolutely correct, and the margins of reasonable error would leave a rectangle a mile long and two wide. That is our search area."

"You don't think that's too small?"

"As you said the other day, they undoubtedly took their position from land bearings. Using the same chart and a compass, that allows us to refine the location."

"It isn't that simple. Their ship's compass may have been off, we don't know whether the magnetic declination was significant in those days, and they may have had to rush the reading. Lots of things could throw off the calculations. There's no assurance that yours are going to coincide with theirs."

"We have to try it, don't we?"

Coy studied the area on the chart, trying to translate it into seas. He was considering a search zone of three to five square miles, a difficult task if the waters were murky or time had deposited too much mud and sand over the wreck. Sweeping the area could take a month at least. He used the pair of compasses to calculate longitude east with respect to Cadiz on the Urrutia, then turned to the modern chart 463A and transposed that figure to longitude west from Greenwich, then transferred the estimate back to the Urrutia. He consulted the correction tables Tanger had drawn up. Everything was within acceptable margins. "Maybe it can be done," he said.

Tanger hadn't missed a single detail of his movements. She took up a pencil to draw a rectangle on chart 463A.

"The idea is that the
Dei Gloria
is somewhere in this strip. At a depth that varies from sixty-five to one hundred sixty-five feet."

"What's the bottom like? I suppose you've checked that."

She smiled before unfolding a large-scale chart, number 4631, corresponding to the Gulf of Mazarr6n from Punta Calnegre to Punta Negra. Coy observed that it was a recent edition, with corrections of warnings to sailors dated that same year. The scale was very large and detailed, and every sounding was accompanied by the corresponding nature of the sea floor. It was the most precise reading available for the zone.

"Sandy mud and some rock. According to the references, relatively clear."

Coy set the compasses on the scale at the side, calculating the area again. One mile by two, off Punta Negra and the Cueva de los Lobos. Considering that a minute of longitude was equal to 0.8 miles in that location, the sector was defined between 1°19.5' and 1°22,W, and between 37°31.5' and 37°32.5,N. He observed with pleasure the familiar ocher-colored coast, the water growing bluer over the sandbanks as they descended from the coast. He compared those drawings with his own recollections, mentally situating references of inland mountains on the circles of topographical levels that clustered closer together on the peaks of Las Viboras and Los Pajaros, and on Morro Blanco.

"This is all very relative," he said after a moment. "We can't be sure of anything until we're on the water, setting our position with the charts and the bearings we take on land. It's pointless to define the area of search from here. All we have now is an imaginary rectangle drawn on paper."

"How long would it take us to sweep that?" "Us?"

"Of course." She held the pause. "You and me."

Coy smiled, barely, and shook his head.

"We'll need someone else," he said. "We'll need El Piloto."

"Your friend?"

"Him. More water has dripped off his T-shirts than I've sailed on in a lifetime."

Tanger asked him to tell her about his friend, and Coy did so, very superficially, with that slight hint of a smile as the memories returned. He talked briefly about his own boyhood, about the graveyard of ships with no name, about his first cigarette and the thin, tan, prematurely gray sailor, about their dives looking for amphoras, their fishing trips, about waiting at dawn for squid that came to the Punta de la Podadera to sleep. El Piloto, his wineskin, his black tobacco, and his boat rocking on the ocean swell Or maybe he didn't say as much as he thought he did, maybe he only briefly recounted some unconnected episodes and his memories did the rest, crowding together in the line of that smile. And Tanger, who was listening attentively without missing a gesture or a word, realized what that name meant to Coy.

"You said he has a boat."

"The
Carpanta:
a forty-six-foot sailboat with a midship cockpit, a stern deck, a sixty-horsepower engine, and an air compressor." "Would he rent it?"

"He does that sometimes. He has to live." "I mean to us. To you and me."

"Of course. He'd scutde the boat if I asked him." Coy thought for a moment. "Well, maybe not scuttle it. But anything else I asked."

"I hope that won't be much," Tanger seemed uneasy. "In this first phase we'll have limited resources. We'll be using my savings."

"We'll manage," Coy soothed her. "In any case, if the ship is lying at the depth you say, the equipment we'll need to look for her will be minimal. We can get along with a good fishing sounding device and an aquaplane tow; you do that with a sheet of wood and one hundred sixty-five feet of line."

"Perfect."

She didn't ask if his friend was trustworthy. She just looked at Coy as if his word were a guarantee.

"Besides," Coy said, "El Piloto was a professional diver. If you guarantee him enough salary to cover his costs, and a reasonable percentage if there are profits, we can count on him."

"Of course I'll guarantee it. As for you___ "

He looked into her eyes, expecting her to continue, but though she held his gaze she said nothing. There is the spark of a smile hiding inside there, he told himself. She can smile because now she has two sailors and a ship and a rectangle of one mile by two drawn on a nautical chart. Or maybe...

"We already talked about my share," said Coy. "For the present you're covering my expenses, right?"

She stood motionless, looking at him with the same expression and the little spark that seemed to dance in the depths of her navy-blue irises. It's just an effect of the light, he thought.' Maybe the twilight, or the reflection of the lamp.

"Of course," she said.

HE
decided to sleep there, and did so without either of them saying much about it. They worked till very late, and finally she thrust back her elbows and rolled her head as if her neck pained her. She smiled a little at Coy, exhausted and distant, as if everything on the table beneath the cone of lamplight—the navigational charts, the notes, the calculations—had ceased to interest her. Then she said, I'm tired, I can't do any more, and got up, looking around her oddly, as if she had forgotten where she was. Her eyes came to a stop, however, and darkened when she came to the spot where the corpse of Zas had lain. She seemed to remember then, and unexpectedly, in the same way someone carelessly half-opens a door, Coy saw her stumble forward, and he captured the shiver that traveled across her skin as if a current of cold air had blown through the window, the supporting hand on a corner of the table, the helpless look that darted from object to object, seeking someplace to shelter until she composed herself, just before her eyes reached Coy. By then she seemed master of herself again, but he had already opened his mouth to suggest, I can stay if you want, or, Maybe it would be better not to leave you alone tonight, or something like that. He froze, mouth open, because at that moment she moved her shoulders in an almost questioning way, searching his eyes. Still he said nothing, and she repeated the gesture, the deliberate way she had of shrugging her shoulders that she seemed to reserve for questions whose answers were unimportant. Then he did say, "Maybe I should stay," and she said, "Yes, of course," in a low voice, with her usual coldness, and nodded her head as if she thought the suggestion appropriate, before going to her bedroom and returning with a military sleeping bag—an authentic green military sleeping bag that she unrolled on the sofa, placing a cushion beneath it for a pillow. With a minimum of words, she explained where he would find a clean towel, before going to her room and closing the door.

Below, in the distance, through darkness that stretched beyond the station, the long chains of train lights moved with deceptive slowness. Coy went to the window and stood there quietly, watching the muted glow from the farthest suburbs, the streetlights below him, the headlights of a few cars traveling along the deserted street. The sign on the gas station was still illuminated, but he saw no one except the attendant, who was stepping out of his little cubicle to serve a customer. Neither the melancholy dwarf nor the treasure hunter was in sight.

Tanger had left the tape playing. It was a sad, slow melody Coy had never heard. He went to the player and checked the title:
"Apres la pluie."
He didn't know anything about this E. Satie— maybe some friend of Justine's—but the title seemed appropriate. Yes, after the rain. The music made him think of the wet deck of a ship becalmed on a gray sea where concentric circles of the last drops of rain lingered on the water, small undulations resembling the movement of jellyfish on the surface, or minute waves of radar, and of someone watching all that whose hands rested on a wet gunnel as somber clouds, low and black, receded on the line of the horizon.