The Nautical Chart (45 page)

THEY
returned to the
Carpanta
streaming water, tripping through the darkness, clinging clumsily to each other. Arms entwined, they kissed with every step, frantically, as they neared their goal leaving a trail of water on the ladder and deck of the cabin. El Piloto, sitting smoking in the dark, saw them come down the companionway and disappear toward the stern cabins, and he may have smiled when they turned to the glowing ember of his cigarette to wish him a good evening. Coy was guiding Tanger, steering her before him, hands on her waist, as she turned with every step to kiss him greedily on the mouth. Coy tripped over a sandal she had managed to kick off, and then the other, and at the door of her cabin she stopped and pressed against him, and they embraced, crushed against the teak bulwark, hands stroking in the shadows, exploring bodies beneath the clothing they were undoing for one another—buttons, belt, skirt falling to the floor, unbuttoned jeans slipping down Coy's hips, Tanger's hand between jeans and skin, her warmth, the triangle of white cotton almost ripped from her thighs, the jangle of the metal ID tag. The lusty male vitality, rapt mutual appreciation, her smile, the incredible softness of bared breasts, silky, aroused. Man and woman, face to face, their panting close to challenge. Her inciting moan and his guiding her toward the bunk across the narrow cabin, wet clothes thrown everywhere, tangled beneath still-wet bodies, soaking the sheets, mutual invitation for the thousandth time, eyes locked to eyes, smiles absorbed, shared. I'll kill anyone who gets in the way now, thought Coy. Anyone. His skin and his saliva and his flesh were effortlessly entering flesh ever moister and more welcoming, deep, very deep, there where the key to all enigmas lies hidden, and where the centuries have forged the one true temptation in the form of an answer to the mystery of death and life.

MUCH
later, in the dark, rain drumming on the deck overhead, Tanger turned on her side, her face buried in the hollow of Coy's shoulder, one hand between his thighs. He, half-asleep, felt the naked body plastered to his, felt Tanger's warm, relaxed hand upon enervated flesh still wet, still smelling of her. They fit so perfectly that it was as if they had always been looking for one another. It was good to feel welcome, he thought, and not simply tolerated. That immediate, instinctive alliance was good, a recognition that needed no words to justify the inevitable. That way each had led in his or her part of the journey, with no false modesty. Sensing the unspoken "do this," the intimate, wordless, panting, intense duel that had very nearly cleared away the bad times, equal to equal, with no need for excuses or justifications for anything. No who pays for this, no equivocation, no conditions. No adornment or remorse. It was good that finally all that had happened, exactly as it should have.

"If anything happens," she said suddenly, "don't let me die alone."

He lay quiet, eyes open in the darkness. Suddenly the sound of the rain seemed sinister. His state of drowsy happiness was suspended and once again everything was bittersweet. He felt her breath in the hollow of his shoulder, slow and warm.

"Don't talk about that," he murmured.

He felt her shake her head.

"I'm afraid of dying alone in the dark."

"That isn't going to happen."

"That always happens."

Her hand was still between Coy's thighs, quiet, her face in his shoulder, her lips whispering against his skin. He felt cold. He turned and buried his face in her wet hair. He couldn't see her face, but he knew that at that moment it was the face in the framed snapshot. All women, he knew now, had that face sometime.

"You're alive," he said. "I feel your pulse. You have flesh, and blood circulating through it. You are beautiful, and you're alive."

"One day I won't be here any longer."

"But you are now."

He felt her burrow closer against him. Her lips touched his ear.

"Swear... that you won't... let me die alone."

She said it very slowly, and her voice was barely a murmur. For a while Coy lay motionless, his eyes dosed, listening to the rain. Then he nodded.

"I won't let you die alone."

"Swear it."

"I swear."

He felt her naked body swing astride him, her spread thighs gripping his hips, her breasts brushing against his chest, her lips seeking his. Then a hot tear fell onto his face. He opened his eyes, surprised, and saw a face made of shadows. Confused, he kissed the moist, open lips. Again he heard a slight sigh, and the long, suffering, female moan of a wounded animal.

XIII

The Master Cartographer

Erring due to the vagaries of the sea is not the worst thing. Some err by using bad information. JORGE
JUAN
,
Compendio de navegacion para guardiamarinas

The
Dei Gloria
wasn't there. Coy was gradually coming to that conclusion as they swept the grid marked on the chart without finding anything. At depths from sixty-five to two hundred feet, the Pathfinder had imaged nearly the entire relief of the two square miles in which they should have found what remained of the brigantine. The days passed, each warmer and calmer than the last, and the
Carpanta,
to the incessant purr of the motor, was sailing along at two knots across a sea as flat and shining as a mirror, tacking north and south with geometric precision, and with continuous satellite position readings. Meanwhile, the beam of the sounder swept the floor beneath the keel as Tanger, Coy, and El Piloto, bathed in sweat, relieved one another before the liquid crystal screen. The colors indicating the composition of the ocean floor—soft orange, dark orange, pale red —marched by with exasperating monotony. Mud, sand, seaweed, shingle, rocks. They had covered sixty-seven of the seventy-four projected tracks, and made fourteen dives to reconnoiter suspicious echoes, without finding the least sign of a sunken ship. Now hope was fading with the last hours of the search. No one had spoken the ominous verdict aloud, but Coy and El Piloto were exchanging long looks, and Tanger, sitting obstinately before the sounder, was growing increasingly irritable and uncommunicative. Failure was in the air.

The eve of the last day they were anchored with one hundred feet of chain in twenty-three feet of water, between the point and La Cueva de los Lobos island. El Piloto stopped the motor, and the bow of the
Carpanta
slowly rode around the anchor and pointed west. The sun was hiding behind the dark, jagged mountains, illuminating clumps of thyme, palmettos, and prickly pears with tones of gold and russet. At the foot of the escarpment the sea was almost still, lapping softly on rocks and the narrow fringe of sand gleaming whitely amid tangles of seaweed.

"It isn't here," Coy said in a low voice.

He wasn't speaking to anyone in particular. El Piloto had just furled the mainsail on the boom and Tanger was sitting on the steps at the stern, her feet in the water, staring at the sea.

"It has to be," she replied.

Her gaze was unfaltering; she was focused on the imaginary rectangle where they had sailed, almost without respite, for two weeks. She was wearing one of Coy's T-shirts—so big it came to the top of her thighs—and was slowly kicking her feet, splashing like a child on the shoreline.

"This is crazy, all of it," Coy commented.

El Piloto had gone below to the cabin, and through an open porthole came the sounds of his dinner preparations. When he came back up on deck to open the chest that held the butane bottle and to connect the gas for the galley, his grave eyes met Coy's. This is your affair, sailor.

"It has to be," Tanger repeated.

She was still kicking her feet in the water. Coy was slouched against the binnacle, looking for something adequate to say, or do. Since he couldn't think of anything, he went to get a diving mask and jumped from the bow to check out the anchorage. The water was clean, warm, and pleasant, and the waning light allowed him to follow the line of the chain stretched across the bottom of sand and scattered rocks. The anchor, a fifty-five-pound CQR, was in the correct position, free of the seaweed that might have let it drag if the wind freshened during the night. He went down a little farther to see dearly, and then slowly came to the surface and swam to the sailboat on his back, paddling with his feet, unhurried, enjoying the water. He wanted to postpone as long as possible having to face Tanger again.

Once on board, he dried himself with a towel, contemplating the arc of the coast stretching eastward. Now totally red from the setting sun, it was the route of marble, Roman legions, and the gods. This time, however, he drew no pleasure from the view. He hung the towel to dry and went down into the well, where he sat on the last step of the ladder. El Piloto was busy with pots and pans in the galley, preparing a platter of macaroni, and Tanger was sitting in the cabin with the nautical charts spread out on the main table.

"There's no possibility of error," she assured Coy before he could say anything.

She had her pencil in hand and was pointing out the coordinates of latitude and longitude on various charts, determining miles on the scales in the margins, and transferring them with the compass onto the graphed rectangle, just as he had taught her to do.

"You checked the figures yourself," she added "From Mazarron to the headland of Las Viboras, to Punta Percheles, to Cabo Tinoso." She was bent over, showing him the results, like a serious student trying to convince her professor.
"37°32'
north of the equator and 4° 51' east of Cadiz on Urrutia's nautical chart corresponds to 37°32,N and 1°21'W relative to the Greenwich meridian. You see?"

Coy pretended to review the numbers. He had done that operation so many times that he knew them by heart. The charts were covered with annotations in his hand.

"There could be an error in the conversion charts."

"There isn't." She shook her head energetically. "I've already told you they came from Nestor Perona s
Aplicaciones de Cartografia Historica.
Even that error of seventeen minutes in the Cadiz longitude relative to Greenwich on the Urrutia charts is corrected there. Every minute and every second is precise. It's thanks to these tables that they found the
Caridad
and the
Sao Rico
two years ago."

"Maybe the position the ship's boy gave wasn't accurate. In all the commotion, they may have made a mistake."

"No. That's not possible." Tanger kept shaking her head with the stubbornness of someone hearing what she doesn't want to hear. "It was all too exact. The ship's boy even talked about how close the cape was, to the northeast— Remember?"

In unison they looked through the open starboard porthole toward the reddish mass outlined at the end of the semicircle of coast, beyond the bay of Mazarron and Cabo Falco. "Having already sighted the cape," the ship's boy had declared, according to the report.

"It may be," Tanger added, "that the
Dei Gloria
is buried in sand and we passed right over her without picking her up."

It was possible, Coy thought. Although not very likely. In that case, he explained, the sounder would at least have signaled differing densities in the composition of the floor. But it had been constantly indicating layers of sand and mud of seven feet, and that was deep not to show anything.

"Something would have to be there," he concluded. "Even if it was just the metal from the guns. Ten guns in one spot is a significant mass of iron. And to those ten you have to add the twelve on the corsair, even though they were scattered by the explosion."

Tanger was drumming her pencil on the chart, chewing the thumbnail of the other hand. The furrows in her forehead resembled scars. Coy reached out to touch her neck, hoping to erase that frown, but she was indifferent to the caress, focused on the charts. The drawings of the brigantine and the xebec were also where she could see them, taped to one of the cabin bulkheads. She had even estimated the dispersion of the corsair's guns on the localized charts, taking into account the explosion, drift, and distance to the bottom.

"The ship's boy," Coy offered, taking away his hand, "could have lied."

Another shake of the head as the frown lines grew more pronounced.

"Too young to come up with a deception of that complexity. He talked about the nearby cape, about a couple of miles of

coast__ And in his pocket he had the penciled data on latitude and longitude."

"Well, I can't think of anything else— Unless Cadiz isn't the right meridian."

Tanger gave him a somber look.

"I thought about that too," she said. "The first thing. Among other reasons because Tintin and Captain Haddock make a similar error in
Red Rackham's Treasure,
when they confuse the Paris and Greenwich longitudes."

Sometimes, Coy thought as he listened to her, I wonder if she's pulling my leg. Or if this isn't some childish adventure she dreamed up out of a comic book. Because it sure isn't serious. Or doesn't seem to be. Or wouldn't seem to be, he corrected himself, if it didn't involve that Argentine dwarf with his knife, dogging our shadows, and that boss of his, the Dalmatian. A little girl's dream of searching for sunken ships. With treasures and villains.

"But we know the meridians they used at that time," he said. "We have the position the ship's boy provided, and we can confirm it on the chart, along with where he was picked up after the ship went down. It can't be the Hierro meridian, or Paris or Greenwich."

"Of course not." Tanger pointed to the scale in the upper margin of one of the charts. "The longitude is definitely relative to Cadiz. With it, everything works out. The zero meridian of our search is the Guardiamarinas castle. That's where it was in
1767
and that's where it was in 1798. Old longitude from Cadiz to the wreck: 4°51'E. Present longitude, after the correction: 5°12,E. Relative to Greenwich, 1°21'W. No other meridian can situate the
Dei Gloria
so perfectly on Urrutia's and modem charts."

"That's all well and good. Perfect, you say. But we're missing the most important part—the ship."