The Nautical Chart (22 page)

'As I said," he continued, "going back to Nino Palermo. I had been warned. So I let him wander around without offering any worthwhile clues."

"I appreciate that," said Tanger.

"It wasn't just for you. That sly fox played me a bad turn a while back, when he was on the trail of the four hundred gold and silver bars—though others were talking about a half-million pieces of eight—taken from the
San Francisco Javier.
... But in those cases, instead of creating an uproar that doesn't do anyone any good, it's best not to say anything about it, and just keep it to yourself. Our paths will cross again."

They threaded between parked cars blocking the street, passing some rough-looking men along the way. The area was packed with dark little bars filled with unemployed fishermen, scroungers, and beggars. A young boy in sneakers, and with the look of someone who could win the 100-yard dash, followed them for a while, his eye on Tanger's purse, until Coy turned, set his feet in the middle of the street and scowled, at which the boy decided to test the air elsewhere. Prudent, Tanger shifted her purse. Now she carried it tucked against her ribs.

"What is it exactly that Palermo asked you?"

Gamboa stopped to light a cigarette. Again smoke escaped through the incense burner of his fingers.

"Same as you. He was looking for plans." He put away the lighter and turned toward Coy. "In any research involving shipwrecks, plans are of vital importance. If you have them, you can study the structure of the ship, estimate measurements, and all the rest. It isn't easy to get your orientation under water, because what you find, unlike what you see in the movies, tends to be a pile of rotted wood, often buried under sand. Knowing where the bow is, or the length of the waist, or where the hold was, is a big step forward. With plans and a tape measure you can make a reasonable assessment of life down there." He gave Tanger a meaningful look. "Of course, it depends on what you expect to find."

"It isn't a matter of looking for anything, at first," she said. "This is just research. The operative phase will come later, if it comes at all."

A thread of smoke filtered from between Gamboa s nicotine-stained incisors.

"Right. The operative phase." He narrowed his eyes maliciously. "What was the
Dei Gloria's
cargo?"

Tanger also laughed softly, placing a hand on his arm.

"Cotton, tobacco, and sugar from Havana. You know that perfectly well."

"Sure." Gamboa scratched his beard. "At any rate, if someone locates the ship and goes on to—what did you call it?—the operative phase, everything will also depend on what you're looking for. If it's documents or perishable goods, there is nothing you can do."

"Of course," she said, as imperturbable as if this were a game of poker.

"Paper dissolves, and, poof!
Arrivederci."
"Naturally."

Gamboa scratched his whiskers again before taking another drag on his cigarette.

"So... Cotton, tobacco, and sugar from Havana, you say?"

His tone was teasing. She raised both hands, like an innocent little girl.

"That's what the cargo manifest says. It isn't great, but it gives you a pretty good idea."

"You were lucky to find it."

"Very much so. It came to Spain among the papers concerning the evacuation from Cuba in 1898. Not to Cadiz, where it would have been lost in the fire, but to El Ferrol. From there it was sent to Viso del Marques, where I was able to see it in the Commercial Navigation section."

"You were lucky," Gamboa repeated

"I went to see if I could find anything, and suddenly there it was before my eyes. Ship, date, port, cargo, passengers... Everything."

Gamboa studied her intently.

"Or almost everything," he said in a bantering tone.

"What makes you think there's something more?" Coy asked.

Gamboa smiled calmly. He shook his head.

"I don't think, friend. I just observe this young woman___ And then I weigh Nino Palermo's interest in the same matter. And my own sense of it, because I wasn't born yesterday and I've been at this for years. This voyage from Havana to Valencia without a call at Cadiz—never mind the squeaky-dean Havana manifest you found in Viso del Marques—smells of an undercover operation. And if we consider the date and who chartered her, the conclusion is obvious: there was something fishy about the
Dei Gloria
What that corsair sank was anything but an innocent ship."

Having said that, the director of the observatory winked and again laughed as dgarette smoke seeped from between uneven teeth.

"Like her," he added.

He looked at Tanger. Then Coy saw her laugh in turn, the way she had before, with the same ease—intelligent, mysterious, complitious. Gamboa did not seem the least bit bothered, only amused, like someone tolerant of a naughty little girl who for some reason has your sympathy. And Coy observed that, as in so many other things, she knew how to laugh the right way. So again he felt that vague despair, that sense of being left out of everything, supplanted and uncomfortable. I wish we were already at sea, he thought, far away from all the others, on board ship where she has no choice but to look in my eyes all the time. Her and me. Looking for bars of gold, silver ingots, or whatever the fuck she wants.

Gamboa seemed to sense Coy's discomfort, for he shot him a friendly grin.

"I don't know what she's looking for," he said. "I don't even know whether you know. But in any case, very few things survive for two and a half centuries under water. Shipworm goes after the wood, iron corrodes and gets crusted with scale..."

'And what happens to gold and silver?"

Gamboa looked at him with sarcasm.

"She says she isn't looking for mat."

Tanger listened in silence. For an instant, Coy caught her serene gaze; she seemed indifferent to their conversation.

"What happens to them?" he persisted.

"The advantage of gold and silver," Gamboa explained, "is that the sea affects them scarcely at all. Silver gets dark, and gold... Well. Gold is much appreciated in wrecks. It doesn't oxidize, or turn green, or lose its brilliance or color. You bring it up just as it was when it went to the bottom." He winked, interrupting himself, and then turned to Tanger. "But we're talking about treasures, and that's a big word, don't you think?"

"No one has said anything about treasure," she said.

"Of course not. No one. Not even Palermo. But a buzzard like him isn't motivated by love of art."

"That's Palermo's business, not mine."

"Sure." Now Gamboa addressed Coy, jovial. "Sure."

Callejon de los Piratas, Coy suddenly saw on the front of a building. That narrow street with flaking white walls was called Pirates' Alley. Again he read the name in the ornamental tiles, incredulous, confirming mere was no mistake. He'd been in Cadiz before; he knew the area around the port, especially the now-vanished bars on calle Plocia, often frequented in the days of Crew Sanders, but he didn't know this part of the city. And certainly not this alleyway, whose picturesque name neatly made him burst out laughing. Maybe not so picturesque after all Nothing more appropriate, he reasoned, for a place like this and a pair like them—a sailor without a ship and a woman looking for sunken ships, the two of them roaming about the Phoenicians' Gades, the millenary city from which so many ships and so many men had sailed year after year, century after century, never to return. When you thought about it, it made sense. If the footsteps of pirates and corsairs still sounded off these dark round stones, the ancient ballast of the ships that brought gold from America, then the ghost of the
Dei Gloria
and her crew lost at the bottom of the sea, and Tanger and he, might waken appropriate echoes. Maybe what seemed relegated to certain pages and images, the territory of childhood, the exclusive ambit of dreams, might somehow be possible. Or maybe it was because a certain kind of dream lay waiting among whispers of stone and paper, on tombstones and walls eaten by time, in books that were like doors opened to adventure, in yellowed files that could signify the beginnings of passionate, dangerous days at sea that could multiply one life into a thousand lives, with its Stevenson and Melville phases, and its inevitable Conrad phase. "I have swum through libraries and sailed through oceans," he had read once, a long time ago, somewhere. It could also simply be that all those things were accessible in one form and not another, because there was a woman who gave them meaning. And because beginning from a certain moment, when you cleared a point of land and a part of a man's life lay ahead with wide-open seas, a woman,
the
woman, might be the one reason to look back The one possible temptation.

He watched Tanger walking on the other side of Gamboa, her purse secured beneath her elbow, eyes lowered, contemplating the ground before her leather sandals, oblivious to street names because she didn't need them—she trod her own streets—her hair still tousled by the sea breeze. The problem, Coy told himself, is that nautical science is completely useless the moment you need to navigate on dry land, or anywhere near a woman. No land or nautical charts give their soundings. Then he asked himself whether Tanger was looking for the magical gold of dreams or the more concrete yellow metal that survived time and shipwrecks unaltered.

'At any rate," Gamboa was saying, focused on Coy, "all recovery of objects from the sea is illegal without an administrative permit."

Legislation in regard to sunken ships, he explained, involved a variety of factors: ownership of the boat and its cargo, historical rights, territorial and international waters, cultural patrimony, and other details. Great Britain and the United States tended to be receptive to private initiative, leaning more toward the business than the cultural end. The Anglo-Saxon principle, he summarized, was search, find, and collect. But in Spain, as in France, Greece, and Portugal, the State was very stria, with constraints that went back to Roman law and the Code of the Siete Partidas.

"Technically," he concluded, "to take even a piece of an amphora is a crime. Simply looking for it is."

They had now come out onto the plaza in front of the cathedral, with its two white towers and neoclassic facade dominating the esplanade. Older couples and mothers with baby carriages strolled beneath the palm trees, and children raced among the tables on the nearby terraces. As the last light was fading, doves flocked to the eaves, where they would spend the night nested among Ionic pilasters. One of them swept very close to Coy's face.

"There's no problem as far as this phase is concerned," said Tanger. "Research doesn't jeopardize anything."

Gamboa s stained teeth showed in another of his placid smiles. It was obvious he was having a good time. You, his expression said, are really laying it on thick At my age, and with my experience as a ship's captain.

"Of course not," he said. "Absolutely not!" "That's what I said."

Tanger walked on a few steps, unperturbed, her eyes still on the ground before her. Coy gazed at the line of her bent head, the nape of her neck. It was deceptively fragile. When he turned toward Gamboa, he realized that the observatory director had been studying him with interest.

"Maybe a little farther along," Tanger said without looking up, "if we find anything, we can propose a plan for a serious search—"

Coy heard Gamboa's low laugh. He was still looking at him. "That is, if Palermo doesn't get there first." "He won't."

They walked past a large old house with a faded exterior and a rusted iron balcony above the main door. Coy read the marble plate screwed onto the wall. "In this house died D. Federico Gravina y Napoli, Admiral of the Fleet, as a result of a wound received on board the
Principe de Asturias
in the memorable Battle of Trafalgar."

"I just love self-confident girls," Gamboa was saying.

Coy glanced at him. He was speaking to Coy, not to Tanger, and Coy didn't like the friendly sarcasm gleaming in those Norman eyes. You must know what you're getting into, they said. In any case, know or not know, if I were in your shoes I'd keep my eyes open, friend. That is, proceed slowly, and keep dropping your lead line. There aren't many fathoms beneath the keel, and rocks everywhere. It is obvious that this woman knows what she's looking for, but I doubt you're as clear about it as she is. You only have to compare her words to your silences. You only have to look at your face, and then look at hers.

THEY
had said good-bye to Gamboa and were walking through the old quarter of the city, looking for a place to eat. The sun had gone down some time ago, leaving a strip of light in the west beyond the roof tiles mat stepped down toward the Atlantic. "This was the place," said Tanger.

Since they'd been alone again, her attitude had changed. More relaxed and natural, as if she'd let down an imaginary guard. Now she paused from time to time as she talked, full blue skirt swinging from the cadence of her steps, as they wound through narrow streets. When he turned to look at her, he saw the pale light of the street lamps reflected in her dark irises.

"Here is where the Guardiamarinas castle stood," she told him.

They had stopped in a street ascending to the Roman theater and the old city wall, beside ruins topped with stone columns and two pointed arches that once had supported a roof. There was a third, semicircular arch a little farther ahead that marked the entrance to an alleyway. The air bore the salt tang of the ocean, which could be heard pounding against the walls beyond, and the smell of ancient stone, urine, and filth. It had the stench, Coy thought, of dark corners in decaying ports that had never seen batteries of halogen lights atop cement towers, places technology and plastic seemed to have passed over, trapping them in dead time like the foul water at the base of the pier, and strewing them with cats and garbage pails, red lights, glowing tips of cigarettes in the shadow, broken bottles on the ground, cheap cocaine, women for so much a quarter-hour, bed not included. Not even the port of Cadiz—on the other side of the city—had any connection with this area now, where former brothels and boarding-houses had been replaced by bars and respectable inns. There were no stalks of bananas piled beside sheds and cranes, no drunken crewmen looking for their ships at dawn, no patrols of shore police or wounded Yankee sailors. Such scenes existed elsewhere in the world, but even there things were different. There were still a few places like