The Nautical Chart (55 page)

"I wonder," she said, "what you will remember about me." She had spoken quietly, her voice low. It wasn't a question, but a shared confidence. Coy thought about what she'd said.

"It's too soon to know," he replied finally. "It isn't over yet." "I wonder what you will remember when it is over." Coy shrugged. They sat in silence.

"I don't know what more you expect," Tanger added after a while.

From the cabin came the sound of the VHF radio. It was ten-fifteen and El Piloto was listening to the weather forecast for the following day. Tanger's shadow was motionless.

"There are voyages," she murmured, "we can only take alone."

"Like dying."

"Don't bring that up," she protested.

"Dying alone, remember? Like Zas. Once you told me that you're afraid that will happen to you." "Don't say it."

"You asked me to be there with you. To swear it." "Don't say it."

Coy leaned back until he was lying flat on the deck with the dome of the heavens above him. A dark shadow leaned over him, a black hole in the stars.

"What could you do?"

"Give you my hand," Coy replied. "Be with you during that journey, so you don't have to go alone."

"I don't know when that will happen. No one knows."

"That's why I want to be with you. Looking after you."

"You would do that? You would stay with me and look after me? So I wouldn't be alone when the time comes?"

"Of course."

The dark silhouette was no longer there. Tanger had moved to one side, away from him. "What star is that?"

Coy looked in the direction indicated by the outline of her hand.

"Regulus. The foremost claw of Leo."

Tanger looked up, trying to see the animal sketched in the lights blinking high above them. A moment later she was paddling her feet in the water.

"Maybe I don't deserve you, Coy."

She said that so low he almost didn't hear. He closed his eyes and slowly let out his breath. "That's for me to say." "You're wrong. It isn't for you to say."

Again she was silent, the only sound her feet in the sea, stirring the black water.

"You're a good man," she said suddenly. "You truly are."

Coy opened his eyes, to fill them with stars and to bear the anguish radiating from his chest. All at once he felt helpless. He didn't dare move, as if he feared that the pain would be unbearable.

"Better than I am," she continued, "and everyone I've known. Too bad that..."

She interrupted herself, and her tone was different when she spoke again. Harder, and unemotional. And categorical.

"Too bad."

A long silence this time. A shooting star fell in the distance, to the north. A wish, Coy thought. I should make a wish. But the tiny streak faded before he could organize his thoughts.

"Where were you when I won my swimming cup?"

That she'll stay with me, he wished finally. But there were no shooting stars in the icy firmament now, he knew. The stars were fixed for eternity, and implacable.

"Living," he replied. "Getting ready to meet you."

He spoke with simplicity. There was a faint light on Tanger's dark face. A vague double reflection. She was looking at him.

"You
are
a good man."

With those words, the shadow moved toward him and he felt her moist lips on his.

"I hope," she said, "you find a good ship soon."

THE
lead frame of a window still retained shards of glass. Coy moved away for a moment from the blinding sediment and then went back to work. He had come to a place in the cabin where sand quickly filled the space he had just emptied, and he had to make constant trips back and forth with the short-handled spade to throw what he had just dug overboard. It was exhausting work and it made him use more air than he wanted. Bubbles were rising at a much faster rate than normal, so he set the spade aside and swam to a jutting frame, holding onto it to rest and to convince his lungs not to demand so much. Beneath his feet was a cannonball and a piece of chain shot, one of those used to destroy the enemy's rigging, which El Piloto had unearthed during his last dive. It was in better than usual condition, thanks to the sand that had protected it for two and a half centuries. Maybe it had been fired from the corsair, and had ended its trajectory here after doing damage to the brigantine's rigging and sails. He bent down a little to get a better look—what men devise to destroy their fellows, he was thinking—and then, through an opening at the base of a bulkhead, he saw the protruding head of a moray. It was huge, nearly eight inches thick, and a sinister dark color. It opened its maw, angered by the intrusion of this strange bubbling creature. Coy prudently retreated from the open jaws that could take half an arm in one bite, and swam to get the harpoon from its place on the line with their tools and uninflated floats. He cocked it, stretching the elastic, and returned to the moray. He hated to kill fish, but it was not a good idea to work around rotted planking with the threat of those hooked and poisonous teeth clamping on the back of his neck. The eel was still standing guard beneath the bulkhead, defending the entry to its domestic refuge. Its evil eyes were fixed on Coy as he approached and pushed the harpoon before the open maw. Nothing personal, friend, just your bad luck He pressed the trigger and the impaled moray thrashed wildly, furiously snapping at the steel shaft protruding from its mouth, until Coy unsheathed his knife and cut the eel's spinal cord.

He went back to work in a pile of wood and debris in the corner of the cabin. Again and again sand filled the space his hands had dug. Snails and bits of ragged metal had shredded his gloves —this was the third pair he'd worn out—and his fingers were a pitiable mass of cuts and scratches. He found the barrel of a pistol whose wooden butt had disappeared, and also a black and crusted crucifix that looked as if it might be silver and a nearly intact leather shoe. He pulled away some planks that broke in his hands, again thrust up above the swirling sediment, and when he came back saw a dark block covered with rusty and brown concretions. At first view it looked like a very large, square brick. He tried to move it, but it seemed to be stuck to the bottom. It's impossible, he told himself. Treasure chests have lids that open to reveal a glittering interior of pearls and jewels and gold coins. And emeralds. Treasure chests do not have the innocuous look of a rusty, lime-covered block, nor do they have the grace to turn up under an old shoe and splintered boards. So it is not possible that this thing I have before me is what we are looking for. Emeralds big as walnuts, Devil's irises, and things like that. Too easy.

He scrabbled at the sand around the encrusted block, shining the light directly on it to bring out the actual colors. It was about sixteen inches long, sixteen inches wide, and not quite that deep, and it still had bronze cornerpieces that had stained the agglomeration of tiny snails green. The rest of the block was covered with a hard, brittle crust, and splinters of rotted wood and rust-colored stains. Bronze, wood, and corroded iron, Tanger had said, and she had also said that in case they found anything matching that description, it must be handled with care. No hammering or digging into it. The emeralds, if it was the emeralds, would be stuck together in a calcareous block that would have to be dissolved with chemicals. And emeralds were very fragile.

Coy easily freed the block from the sand. It did not seem very heavy, at least in the water, but there was little question that it was a chest. For almost a minute, he didn't move, breathing quietly, releasing bubbles at a slower and slower rhythm, until he calmed down a little and his temple stopped pounding and his heart was beating normally beneath the neoprene vest. Take it easy, sailor. Chest or no chest, take it easy. Be Mr. Cool for once in your life, because nerves are not compatible with breathing at eighty-five feet compressed air under two hundred atmospheres of pressure. So after resting there a while, he removed one of the plastic floats, made a basket of sorts from some fine net, tied it to the parachute lines of the float, and secured the whole thing to a shackle with a bowline knot, then from his mouthpiece he fed a little compressed air into the float. Despite Tanger s instructions, he pried a little into the block with his knife point, breaking off a bit of the crust, without spotting anything notable. He dug a little deeper, and a chunk about the size of half his fist came loose from the rest. He picked it up to examine in the beam of the torch, and a fragment of the chunk broke loose and drifted slowly to the sand. It was an irregularly shaped, translucent stone with polyhedral planes. Green. Emerald green.

XVI

The Graveyard of Ships With No Name

Have you, as always, deceived and conquered that innocent with tricks?

APPOLONIUS
RHODIUS
,
Argonautica

They could see the city clustered beneath the castle in a mist of whites, browns, and blues heightened by light from the west. The sun was about to take its rest behind the massive silhouette of Mount Roldan when the
Carpanta,
on the port tack under Genoa and single-reefed mainsail, passed between the two lighthouses and beneath the empty embrasures of the old forts guarding the inlet. Coy held his course until he had the Navidad lighthouse and white heads of the fishermen sitting on the blocks of the breakwater on his stern fin. Then he turned the wheel to weather, and the sails flapped as the boat luffed, slowing in the tranquil water of the protected dock. Tanger was turning the crank of a winch, gathering the jib, as he freed the clamp on the mainsail halyard and the sail slid down the mast. While El Piloto fastened it to the boom, Coy started the engine and set their bow for El Espalmador, toward the cut-up hulls and rusting frames of the ships with no name.

Tanger had just finished taking in the sheets and was looking at him. A long look, as if she were studying his face, and he responded with the hint of a smile. She returned the smile, and went to lean against the companion, facing the bow where El Piloto had opened the anchor well. Coy looked toward the commercial dock, where the
Felix von Luckner
was anchored beside a large passenger ship, and lamented that they had to be so secretive. He would have liked to fly a victory signal at the mast, the way German submarine commanders flew pennants on their conning towers announcing the tonnage they'd sunk. "Returning from Scapa Flow, mission accomplished." I announce that treasures exist, and that we are carrying one aboard.

The emeralds were on board the
Carpanta.
The block of limy accretions that contained them had been wrapped in several layers of protective foam, packed in an innocent-looking tote bag. They had cleaned their find carefully before wrapping it up, disbelieving what they saw before them, marveling at the accomplished reality of the dream Tanger had long ago as she studied a file of old documents—"Clergy/Jesuits/Various n°356." It was as if they were floating on a cloud, so unreal that Coy hadn't dared tell El Piloto the approximate value the dirty, rocklike block rescued from the sea would bring on the international black market. El Piloto hadn't asked, but Coy knew him well, and he picked up an unusual excitement beneath the sailor's apparent indifference. It was a particular gleam in his eyes, a different kind of silence, a curiosity tempered by the self-restraint of men of the sea, who are at ease in their world but uncertain, timid, and suspicious of the traps and temptations of terra firma. Coy was afraid he would frighten him if he told him that those two hundred raw emeralds, even if badly marketed by Tanger and sold for a fourth of their value, would produce, at the minimum, several million dollars. An amount that El Piloto would never be able to picture in spite of his good imagination. At any rate, the plan was to wait while Tanger negotiated with the middlemen, and then split the profits—seventy percent for her, twenty-five percent for Coy, and five percent for El Piloto—which they would spread around discreetly to avoid suspicion. Tanger had already researched the appropriate mechanisms during the visit she had made months before to Antwerp, where her local contact had connections with banks in the Caribbean, Zurich, Gibraltar, and the English Channel Islands. Nothing would stand in the way, for instance, of El Piloto's later buying a new
Carpanta,
registered in Jersey, or Coy's collecting a salary from a hypothetical shipping company in the Antilles while he waited for his license to be reinstated. As for Tanger herself, she had replied to Coy's question—without looking up from the brush she was using to clean away the encrustation on the block of emeralds—that that was no one's affair but her own.

Under the chart-table light, they had discussed these matters the night before, after they had carefully hauled the Jesuits' chest aboard the
Carpanta.
They washed in it fresh water, and then, with patience, the proper instruments, and several technical manuals, Tanger went about removing the outer calcareous layer with chemical solvents in a plastic tub, while Coy and El Piloto watched with reverential respect, not daring to open their mouths. Finally they had seen a cluster of crystals—sharp protuberances and indications of hexagonal formations, still uncut and with their original irregularities—which in the cabin's light cast bluish-green reflections as clear and transparent as water.

They were perfect, Tanger had murmured, fascinated, working persistently, with the back of her hand wiping away the sweat beaded on her forehead. She had one eye closed and a jeweler's loupe held to the other, a small, slender ten-power loupe. Bent over the block, she was examining the interior of the stones at a distance of an inch or two, lighting it from various angles with a powerful Maglite torch. Translucent green, literally Be3Al2Si6O18, ideal in color, brilliance, and clarity. She had studied, read, and patiently asked questions for months to be able to make that announcement now. Raw emeralds, between twenty and thirty carats, with no inclusions or flaws, clean as drops of oil. Once they were studied for the most beautiful color and refraction, skillful jewelers would cut them into rectangular and octagonal facets, converting them into valuable jewels that ladies of high society and wives and lovers of bankers, millionaires, Russian mafiosi, and oil sheiks would flaunt in bracelets, diadems, and necklaces. They would never question their provenance nor the long road traveled by those unique formations of silica, aluminum, beryllium, oxides, and water for which men throughout time had killed and died, and would forever continue to do so. Perhaps, as happens, among a certain few initiates the word would spread that some of the emeralds, the very best, had been salvaged from a ship documented to have sunk two and a half centuries before, and the price of the best pieces, the largest and most beautifully crafted, would shoot up on the black market to the limits of madness. For the most part, the stones would again sleep a long sleep in obscurity, this time in safe-deposit boxes around the world. And someone, in a discreet workshop on a street in Antwerp, would quadruple his fortune.