The Nautical Chart (6 page)

Near a full-scale replica of a section of the
Santa Ana's
mast, Coy passed an officer in the impeccable uniform of the nation's Navy, an impressive-looking man whose cuffs boasted the special loop in the third gold stripe that meant commander. He stared hard at Coy, who held his gaze until the officer looked away and walked off toward the back of the hall.

Twenty minutes went by. At least once every minute Coy tried to concentrate on what he was going to say when she appeared, if in fact she ever did, and all twenty times he was tongue-tied, unable to string together a coherent phrase, his mouth half open as if she were actually there before him. He was in the hall devoted to the Battle of Trafalgar, standing beneath an oil painting of the scene of the engagement between the
Santa Ana
and the
Royal Sovereign,
when again he was aware of the nerves in the pit of his stomach, like needles—yes, that was the exact word—needling him to get out of there. Weigh anchor, idiot, he told himself, and with that he seemed to wake from a dream, aghast. He felt the urge to scramble down the stairs, stick his head under cold water, and shake it until he cleared his mind. Damn fool, he berated himself. Damn fool, in spades.
Senora
Soto. I don't even know if she's living with someone or married.

He turned, stepping back in confusion. His eyes lighted on the inscription of a showcase: "Boarding sword worn during the Battle of Trafalgar...." He looked up and there was Tanger Soto, reflected in the glass. He hadn't heard her arrive, but she was there, motionless and silent, watching him with an expression between surprise and curiosity, as unreal as she had been the first time. As vague as a shadow locked inside the glass case, a shadow that wasn't hers.

COY
was not a sociable man. As already noted, that factor, along with a few books and a precociously lucid vision of the dark corners of the human soul, had early led him to sea. Nevertheless, this was not entirely incompatible with a candor that occasionally surfaced in his attitudes, in the way he would look at others without moving or speaking, in the rather awkward way he behaved on dry land, or in his sincere, confused, nearly shy smile. He had shipped out driven more by intuition than by conviction. But life does not advance with the precision of a good ship, and gradually his mooring lines slipped into the sea, sometimes fouled in the propellers or dragging along consequences. There were women, of course. A couple of them had got under his skin, into flesh and blood and mind, effecting the pertinent physical and chemical procedures, the analgesic balms and prescribed havoc. LPPP: Law of Pay the Price Punctually. At this point, that trail was faint, vague pangs of regret in the memory of a sailor without a ship. Precise, but also indifferent, memories closer to melancholy for the long-gone years—it had been eight or nine since the last woman who was important to Coy—than to a feeling of material loss, or absence. Deep down, those shadows were anchored in his memory only because they belonged to a time when everything was a beginning for him— new stripes on a brand-new blue jacket, new bars on the epaulets of his shirts, and long periods of time admiring them in the same way he admired the body of a naked woman, times when life was a crackling new nautical chart with all navigational notices updated, its smooth white surface as yet untouched by pencil and eraser. Days when he himself, sighting the profile of land against the horizon, still felt a vague attraction to persons or things awaiting him there. All the rest—pain, betrayal, reproaches, interminable nights lying awake beside backs turned in silence—were in those days simply submerged rocks, murderous shoals awaiting the inevitable moment, without any chart to give warning of their presence. The fact is that he did not really miss those female shadows; he missed himself, or missed the man he had been then. Maybe that was why those women, or those shadows, the last known ports in his life, surfaced at times, hazy in the outlines of memory, for ghostly rendezvous in Barcelona, at dusk, when he was taking long walks by the sea. Or when he was climbing the wooden bridge of the old port as the setting sun spread its crimson across the heights of Montjuich, the tower of Jaime I, and the piers and gangplanks of the Trans-Mediterranean, or was searching the old wharves and bollards for scars left on stone and iron by thousands of hawsers and steel cables, by ships sunk or cut up for scrap decades before. At times he thought about those women when he walked out beyond the city center and the Maremagnum theaters among other solitary, isolated men and women absorbed in the dusk, dozing on benches or dreaming as they stared out to sea, as gulls glided above the sterns of fishing vessels cutting through the sun-red waters beneath the clock tower. Not far from the clock tower was an ancient schooner stripped of sails and rigging mat he remembered being forever in that same place, its timbers cracked and weathered by the wind, sun, rain, and time. And that often led him to think that ships and men ought to disappear when their hour came, to sink to the bottom out in the open sea instead of being left high and dry to rot ashore.

Now Coy had been talking for five minutes, almost uninterruptedly. He was sitting beside a window on the first floor of the

Museo Naval. He let words flow the way one fills a void that grows uncomfortable if the silences are too prolonged. He spoke slowly, in a calm tone, and smiled faintly when he paused. Sometimes he shifted his gaze outdoors, to the tender green of the chestnut trees lining the Paseo del Prado down to the Neptune fountain, then turned back to the woman. Some business in Madrid, he said. An official errand, a friend. By chance, the museum was around the corner. He said anything that came to mind, just as he had that time in Barcelona, with the candid shyness so typical of him, and she listened, her head tilted and the tips of her blond hair brushing her chin. Those dark eyes with the glints that again seemed navy blue were fixed on Coy, on the faint, sincere smile that belied the casualness of his words.

"That tells it all," he concluded.

That
told nothing, for as yet they were merely easing toward the harbor with great care, engines throtded back, waiting for the pilot to come aboard.
That
told nothing, and Tanger Soto knew it as well as he.

"Well," she said.

She was leaning against the edge of the table in her office, arms crossed, looking at him thoughtfully with that same intensity, but this time she was smiling a little, as if she wanted to reward his effort, or his calm, or the manner in which he met her eyes, without boasting or evasion. As if she appreciated the way he had presented himself, justified his presence, and then, not attempting to deceive her or deceive himself, awaited her verdict.

Now it was she who talked. She talked without taking her eyes off him, as if to measure the effect of her words, or maybe of the tone in which she was saying them. She talked naturally and with a hint of either affection or gratitude. She talked about that strange night in Barcelona, about how pleased she was to see him again. And then, as if everything that was possible to say had already been said, they simply observed each other. Coy recognized that once again the time had come for him to leave, or else look for some reason, some pretext, some damn thing that would allow him to prolong the moment. Either that or she would walk him to the door and thank him for the visit. Slowly, he got to his feet.

"I hope that fellow won't be bothering you again."

"Who?’

She had taken a second longer than necessary to answer. "The one with the ponytail, and the two different color eyes." He touched his face, indicating his own. "The Dalmatian." "Oh, him."

She didn't immediately add anything, but the lines around her mouth hardened.

"Him," she repeated.

She could either be thinking about the man or gaining time to go off on some tangent. Coy stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and looked around. The office was small and brightly lit, with a discreet sign: SECTION
IV
.
T
.
SOTO
.
RESEARCH
AND
ACQUISITIONS
.
There was an antique print of a seascape on the wall and a large corkboard on an easel covered with prints, plans, and nautical charts. There was also a large glass case filled with books and files, document folders on her worktable, and a computer whose screen was circled with little notes written in a round, good-little-schoolgirl hand that Coy easily identified—he had her card in his pocket—by the large circles dotting the "i"s.

"He hasn't bothered me again," she said finally, as if she'd needed time to remember.

"He didn't seem happy about losing the Urrutia."

Her eyes narrowed, her mouth still hard.

"He'll find another."

Coy looked at the line of her throat descending toward the bone-colored shirt. Open at the neck. The silver chain still gleamed there, and he wondered what hung on that chain. If it was metal, he thought, it would be devilishly warm.

"I still don't know," he said, "if the atlas was for the museum or for you. The feet is that that auction was..."

He stopped short as he caught sight of the Urrutia. It was with other large-format books in the glass case. He easily recognized its leather cover and gold tooling.

"It was for the museum," she replied, and after a second added, "Naturally."

She followed Coy's eyes to the atlas. The light from the window outlined the contours of her freckled profile.

"And that's what you do? Acquire things?"

She bent forward slightly, her hair swinging. She was wearing a gray wool jacket, unbuttoned, a full dark skirt and flat-heeled black shoes, with black stockings that made her seem taller and more slender than she was. A well-bred girl, he mused, appreciating her in the natural light. Strong hands and a well-bred voice. Wholesome, proper, calm. At least in outward appearance, he thought, scanning those telltale fingernails.

"Yes, in a way that is my job," she agreed. "Check auction catalogues, oversee purchases of antiques, visit other museums, and travel when something interesting shows up. Then I make a report, and my superiors decide. The board provides limited funds for research and new acquisitions, and I try to see that the money is invested in the most appropriate way."

Coy grimaced. He remembered the hard-nosed duel in the Claymore auction gallery.

"Well, your friend the Dalmatian got his shot off before he went down. The Urrutia cost you an arm and a leg."

She sighed, sounding both fatalistic and amused, then nodded, turning up her palms to indicate she had blown her last penny. As she gestured, Coy again noted the unexpectedly masculine stainless-steel watch on her right wrist. Nothing more, no rings, no bracelets. She wasn't even wearing the small gold earrings he'd seen three days before in Barcelona.

"It did cost us. We don't usually spend that much___ Especially

since we already have a lot of eighteenth-century cartography in this museum."

"It's that important?"

Again she leaned forward from the edge of the table, and for a brief instant stayed like that, head down, before looking up with a different expression on her face. Once more the light played up the gold of her freckles, and it crossed Coy's mind that if he took just one step forward he might, perhaps, decipher the aroma of that enigmatic, speckled geography.

"It was printed in 1751 by the geographer and mariner Ignacio Urrutia Salcedo," she was explaining, "after five years of toil. It was the best aid for navigators until the appearance of Tofino's much more precise
Atlas Hidrogrdfico
in 1789. There are very few copies in good condition, and the Museo Naval didn't have one."

She opened the glass door of the case, took out the heavy volume, and opened it on the table. Coy moved closer. They studied it together, and at last he confirmed what he had thought from the moment he met her. Not a trace of cologne or perfume. Only the scent of clean, warm skin.

"It's a fine copy," she said. 'Among rare book dealers and antiquarians there are plenty of unscrupulous people, and when they find one of these they take it apart and sell the individual plates. But this one is intact."

She turned the large pages carefully, and the thick white paper, well preserved despite the two and a half centuries since it was printed, whispered between her fingers.
Atlas Maritimo de las Costas de Espana,
Coy read on the tide page, beautifully engraved with a seascape, a lion between columns bearing the legend Pitts
Ultra,
and various nautical instruments.
Divided into sixteen spherical charts and twelve plans, from Bayonne in France to Cape Creus.
The navigation charts and plans of ports were printed in large format and bound to facilitate their preservation and handling. The volume was open to the chart that embraced the sector between Gibraltar and Cape St Vincent. It was drawn in extensive detail, and included soundings measured in fathoms and a meticulous key to indications, references, and dangers. Coy followed the coastline between Ceuta and Cape Spartel with his finger, stopping at the place marked with the name of the woman beside him, Tangier. Then he followed it north, to Punta de Tarifa, and continued to the northwest, pausing again on the shoals of La Aceitera, which were much better defined, with little crosses marking danger spots, than the passage between Terson and Mowett Grave islands in the modern surveys of the British Admiralty. He knew the charts for the Strait of Gibraltar well, and everything was remarkably exact. He had to admire the rigor of the plotting; it was more than he would have expected from the hydrographies of the period, so long before the satellite image, or even the technical advances of the end of the eighteenth century. He observed that each chart had scales for latitude and longitude detailed in degrees and minutes— the former on the left and right sides of the engraving and the latter graduated four times in accord with the four different meridians: Paris and Tenerife in the upper portion, Cadiz and Cartagena in the lower. At that time, Coy recalled, the Greenwich meridian hadn't yet been adopted as the universal reference.