The Nautical Chart (58 page)

They all looked at him. He hadn't opened his mouth since Tanger disappeared through the hatchway to the deck

'And she's dumping you," he added for Kiskoros's benefit, "just like us."

The Argentine stared at him, Then he smiled, skeptical. A neat, slick-haired frog. A self-congratulatory dandy. "Don't give me that shit."

"It's all so dear. Tanger asked you to hold us till daylight, isn't that right? Then you dose the hatch, leave us here, and join her. True? At seven or eight in the morning at such and such a place.

Tell me if I have it right so far." The Argentine's silence and expression said that in fact he did. "But Palermo is right. She isn't going to be there. And I'm going to tell you why. Because by that time she will be somewhere else."

Kiskoros didn't like that. His expression was as dark as the black hole of the barrel.

"You think you're very clever, don't you? Well, you haven't been so smart up to now."

Coy shrugged.

"Maybe," he conceded. "But even a fool can understand that a newspaper opened to a certain page, a certain kind of question, a postcard, a couple of trips, a matchbook cover, and information Palermo unknowingly provided some time ago in Gibraltar, all lead to one particular place. You want me to tell you, or shall I be quiet and wait for you to discover it yourself?"

Kiskoros was playing with the safety on the pistol, but it was obvious his thoughts were elsewhere. He frowned, uncertain.

"Go ahead."

Never taking his eyes from Kiskoros, Coy again rested his head against the bulkhead.

"We begin," he said, "with the fact that Tanger doesn't need you now. Your mission—play the double agent, keep Palermo in control, convince me that she was helpless and in danger—ends tonight, with you guarding us while she leaves. You don't have anything to give her. So what do you think she'll do? How can she get away with a block of emeralds? At airports they check the hand luggage with X-rays, and she doesn't dare to risk destroying such a fragile fortune in a checked suitcase. A rental car leaves a paper trail. A train means borders and cumbersome changes. Does any alternative occur to you?"

He sat quietly, waiting for an answer. Saying those things aloud he had experienced a strange sense of relief, as if he were sharing the shame and bile he felt boiling inside. This night there's something for everyone, he thought. For your boss. For poor Piloto. For me. And you, blockhead, it's not all roses for you, either.

But the answer came from Palermo before Kiskoros could speak. He slapped his thigh.

"Of course! A ship. A goddamn ship!"

"Precisely."

"God in heaven. Clever as hell." "That's my girl."

Stunned, standing at the foot of the companionway, Kiskoros was trying to digest the news. His batrachian eyes went from one to the next of them, wavering among scorn, suspicion, and reasonable doubt.

"That is too many suppositions," he protested finally. "You think you are intelligent, but you base everything on conjecture.

You don't have anything to confirm a ridiculous story like that

No proof. Not a single fact to hold on to."

"You're wrong. There is." Coy looked at his watch, but it had stopped. He turned to El Piloto, still quiet but alert in his corner. "What time is it?"

"Eleven-thirty."

Coy looked at Kiskoros with amusement. He was laughing quietly, and the Argentine, unaware that in truth Coy was laughing at himself, did not seem to appreciate the joke. He had stopped fiddling with the safety and was pointing the gun at Coy.

'At one o'clock this morning," Coy informed him, "the cargo ship
Felix von Luckner
,
of the Zeeland line, sets sail. Belgian flag. Two trips a month between Cartagena and Antwerp, carrying citrus fruits, I think. She accepts passengers."

"Fuck," muttered Palermo.

"Within a week"—Coy's eyes never left Kiskoros—"she will have sold the emeralds in a certain place on the Rubenstraat. Your former boss can verify that." He invited Palermo with a nod of his head. "Tell him."

"It's true," Palermo admitted.

"You see." Coy laughed disagreeably once again. "And then you also have the postcard she sent you."

This time the blow hit home. Kiskoros's Adam's apple bobbed wildly in a confusion of convoluted loyalties. Even swine, Coy thought, have a soft spot in their hearts.

"She never said anything about that." Kiskoros was glaring at Coy, as if he blamed him. "We were going to..."

"Of course she didn't say anything." Palermo was trying to light his cigarette. "Cretin."

Kiskoros's spirits plunged.

"We had a rental car," he muttered, confused.

"Well," suggested Palermo, "now you'll be able to return the keys."

He couldn't get his lighter to work, so the treasure hunter bent down toward the flame of the paraffin lamp, cigarette in his mouth. He seemed to be amused by the splendid joke of which they all were the butts.

"She never..." Kiskoros began.

W
E
may just get there in time, thought Coy. As they scrambled up the ladder the night air struck his face. There was a multitude of stars, and the scrapped ships were ghostly in the glow from the port. Behind them, lying on the floor of the hold, the Argentine was no longer moaning. He had stopped moaning when Palermo stopped kicking him in the head, and the blood bubbling from his seared nose was blending with the rust of the floor and sputtering as it hit his smoking clothing. He had lain writhing at the bottom of the companionway, jacket blazing, screaming, after Nino Palermo, leaning forward to light his cigarette, had thrown the lamp at him. The arc of flames whirred through the darkness of the hold, passed Coy, and hit Kiskoros dead in the chest, just as he was saying "She never..." And they never learned what it was she hadn't done or said because at that instant the paraffin spilled over Kiskoros, who dropped the pistol when a lick of flame touched his clothing and raced upward to engulf his face. An instant later Coy and El Piloto were on their feet, but Palermo, much quicker than they, had swooped down and picked up the pistol. The three of them stood there, looking at each other unblinkingly as Kiskoros twisted and turned, lost in flames and emitting bloodcurdling screams. Finally Coy grabbed Palermo's jacket and put out the flames, first slapping at them and then throwing the jacket over Kiskoros. By the time he removed it, Kiskoros was a smoking ruin. Instead of hair and mustache he had blackened stubble and he was braying as if he were gargling turpentine. That was when Palermo had landed all the kicks to the Argentine's head, in a systematic, almost bookkeeper-like fashion. As if in farewell he were laying money on a table for his indemnification. And then, holding the pistol but not pointing it at anyone, and with a not-at-all-amused smile on his face, he sighed with satisfaction and asked Coy if he was in or out. That was what he said—"in or out"—looking at Coy in the gleam of the last flames from the spilled torch on the floor, his face that of a night-prowling shark about to settle a score.

"If you hurt her, I'll kill you," Coy replied.

That was his condition. He said it even though it was the other man who had the chrome and mother-of-pearl pistol in his hand. Palermo didn't object; he just grinned that white-toothed shark's grin and said, "Okay, we won't kill her tonight." Then he put the pistol in his pocket and hurried up the ladder toward the rectangle of stars. And now the three of them—Coy, Palermo, and El Piloto—were running along the dark deck of the bulk carrier as across the port, under the illuminated cranes and dock lights, the
Felix von Luckner
was preparing to cast off her mooring lines.

T
HE
light was on in the window of the Cartago Inn. Coy heard Palermo's exhausted-dog, snuffling laugh beside him. "The lady is packing her bags."

They were standing beneath the palms along the city wall, with the port below and behind them. The lighted buildings of the university shone at the end of the empty avenue.

"Let me talk with her first," said Coy.

Palermo touched the pocket that held Kiskoros's pistol.

"Not a chance. We're all partners now." He kept staring up, his smile somber. "Besides, she would find a way to convince you again."

Coy bunched his shoulders.

"To do what?"

"Something. Give her time and there's no question she'd convince you of something."

They crossed the street, followed by El Piloto. Palermo never lost sight of the window, and once inside the door of the inn he again parted his pocket.

"Does she still have that cannon she had at Gibraltar?"

His stare was intense. The green eye resembled cold glass.

"I don't know. She may."

"Shit."

Palermo reflected, then turned to Coy, as if reconsidering his offer to talk with Tanger alone.

"She has her reasons," Coy pointed out.

The man from Gibraltar half-smiled, cornered on that point. "That's right. We all do." He motioned toward El Piloto, who was waiting behind them expectantly. "Even him." "Let me talk to her." Palermo thought about it briefly. ‘All right."

The night clerk of the inn said hello to Coy, confirming that the senora was upstairs and that she'd asked her to prepare the bill. They crossed through the lobby and went to the second floor, trying not to make any noise. Framed prints of ships lined the walls and a statue of the Virgen del Carmen filled a small niche. The door of Tanger's room opened directly onto the landing at the top of the stairs. It was closed. Coy reached it first, followed by Palermo. The hall carpet had deadened their footsteps.

"Good luck," Palermo whispered, his hand in his pocket. "You get five minutes."

Coy tried the doorknob, turning it without difficulty. It wasn't locked. As he turned the knob, he realized how pointless it all was. The absurdity of his being there. Rejected lover, deceived friend, swindled partner. In truth, he suddenly knew that when he looked at things rationally, he didn't have anything to say. She was about to leave, but in fact she had left long before, setting him adrift, and nothing he could say or do was going to change the course of things. As for the emeralds, he was used to thinking of them as a chimera far beyond reach; they hadn't mattered to him before, and they didn't matter now.

Tanger was the person she wanted to be. She wanted freedom of choice, and from the beginning he had known she would always be that way He had seen the old silver cup missing its handle and the snapshot of a young girl smiling in black and white. That was what was needed to understand that the word "betrayal" was out of place, regardless of what she did. In fact. Coy would have turned and walked away, walked past El Piloto and kept on walking to the
Carpanta
,
with a stop at the nearest bar, had the door not already been opening. He felt no rancor, not even curiosity anymore. The door continued to open, revealing on the far wall the window overlooking the port, the half-packed suitcase on the table, the package of emeralds, and Tanger standing there in her dark-blue cotton skirt, white blouse, and sandals, her hair freshly washed, the asymmetrical tips still dripping water onto her shoulders. And her skin, freckled and tanned by the weeks of sea and sun, the navy-blue eyes wide with surprise, blued steel, metallic as the .357 magnum she had seized from the table when she heard the door open. Now Nino Palermo played his part in this series of betrayals. Without waiting the five minutes he'd promised, he slipped past Coy with the chrome and mother-of-pearl pistol glinting in one hand. Coy opened his mouth to shout "No! Stop!" That's enough, let's rewind this whole absurd story we've seen a thousand times at the movies, but her finger had already contracted and a white flash erupted at the level of Coy's hip, with a blast that reached him a millisecond after the impact below his ribs, a crack! that whirled him half around, throwing him against Palermo, who at that moment was firing back. This time the shot thundered close to Coy's ear, and he tried to throw a hand out to stop Palermo from firing a second time. But there was another flash behind him, and another roar shook the air, and Palermo leaped back as if jerked from behind, propelled toward the landing and down the stairs. It wasn't a bang! the way it sounds in films, but pumba, pumba, pumba, three times, very dose together, and now an infernal cloud of smoke filled the room, a harsh, acrid odor... and absolute silence. When Coy turned to look, Tanger wasn't there. He looked more closely and saw why she wasn't standing. She was lying on the floor on the other side of the table, blood pouring out in a brilliant red, thick, pulsing stream, staining her blouse and the floor. She lay there moving her lips, and all at once she seemed very young and very alone.

So this was when Coy walked out. It was a perfect night, with Polaris visible in its prescribed location, to the right and five times the distance of the line formed between Merak and Dubhe. He walked to the balustrade of the wall, and stood there, pressing his hand against the wound in his side. He had felt beneath his shirt and found that the rip in his flesh was superficial, and that he wasn't going to die this time. He counted five weak beats of his heart as he contemplated the dark port, the lights on the docks, and the reflection of the castles high on the mountains. And the bridge and lighted deck of the
Felix von
Luckner
,
about to cast off her lines. Tanger had spoken to him. Her lips were moving when he bent over her, as El Piloto tried to stop the hole in her breast through which life was escaping. She spoke so inaudibly that he had to lean close to understand what she was saying. It was too much effort for her to put words together; her voice grew weaker and weaker, and then faded as the crimson blood pooled beneath her body. Give me your hand. Coy, she had said. Give me your hand. You promised you wouldn't let me go alone. Her voice was silenced, and the remnants of her life seemed to have gathered in her wildly staring eyes, as if she saw before her a desolate, barren plain that held only horror. You swore, Coy. I'm afraid to go alone.