The Nautical Chart

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  6

  Of Knights and Knaves

  There is a wide variety of puzzles about an island in which certain inhabitants... always tell the truth and others... always lie. RAYMOND M. SMULLYAN, What Is the Name of This Book!

  The gypsy went away after insisting a little longer, and Coy thought as he watched her go that perhaps he should have let her read his palm and tell his fortune. She was a woman of middle age, her dark-skinned face furrowed with an infinity of wrinkles^ her hair pulled back with a silver comb. Big-boned, fat, the hem of her skirt whirled as she swung her hips gracefully, stopping to offer sprigs of rosemary to the travelers returning along the palm-shaded avenue that spilled down behind the castle of Santa Catalina in Cadiz. Before she left, peeved by Coy's refusal to take the rosemary in exchange for a few coins, or to allow her to tell his fortune, the gypsy murmured a curse, half joking, half serious, that he was now mulling over. "You will have only one journey without cost." Coy was not a superstitious sailor— in this day of the Meteosat and the GPS, few of his calling were —but he maintained certain apprehensions appropriate to life at sea. Maybe for that reason, when the gypsy disappeared beneath the palms on Avenida Duque de Najera, Coy contemplated his left palm uneasily, before sneaking a look at Tanger, who was sitting at the same table on the terrace talking with Lucio Gamboa, the director of the San Fernando observatory, where the three of them had spent part of the day. Gamboa was a captain in the Navy, but he was in civilian clothes—checked shirt, khaki pants, and very old and faded canvas espadrilles. Cordial but unkempt, nothing about him betrayed his military affiliation. He was chunky, bald, and loquacious, with a scruffy, graying beard and the light eyes of a Norman. He had been talking for hours, showing no signs of fatigue, as Tanger asked questions, nodded, or took notes.

  Only one journey without cost. Coy again regarded the lines in his hand, telling himself once more that maybe he should have let the gypsy read his palm. If he didn't like the prediction, he thought, he could change the lines with a razor blade, any way he wanted, like that comic pen-and-paper sailor, Corto Makes, tall, handsome, gold earring in one ear, whom he wouldn't have minded in the least looking like every time he noticed Tanger's eyes fixed on him. Eyes that at times stopped paying attention to Gamboa s explanations to fall on Coy for a moment, expressionless, serene—confirming that he was still there and that everything was under control.

  Coy felt a stab in the lower ribs of his left side, still painful from the Berber chauffeur's punches. The incident had been resolved with thirty-two hours in the jail of the de Retiro police station and charges of disturbing the peace and assault and battery, which would come to trial in a few months' time. Nothing stood in the way, therefore, of his traveling to Cadiz with Tanger. As for Nino Palermo, after leaving the clinic where he was given emergency treatment for his nose, which the doctor on call diagnosed as badly bruised but not broken, he had made the interesting decision not to go to his lawyers to file legal proceedings. That was far from reassuring though, because, as Tanger had said when Coy left the police station and found her waiting at the door, Palermo was the kind of man who didn't need police or courts to settle his affairs.

  Again he studied his hand. Unlike Tanger, who had a long, clean line crossing her palm, his life, death, and love lines, and whatever the hell the others were, crisscrossed in a wild tangle like the halyards of a sailing vessel after a difficult maneuver in strong winds and high seas, as if someone had shaken them in a dice cup and thrown them out every which way. This made him smile inside. Not even the sharpest gypsy in the world could have made any sense out of those lines. The keys to the voyage, whether without cost or with prompt payment, were hidden not in those lines, but in the eyes that fell on him from time to time. That, he concluded with resignation, was the real journey Athena had arranged for him.

  He looked under the table. Tanger s legs were crossed beneath her full blue skirt, and she was slowly swinging a leather-sandaled foot He observed her freckled ankles, and then her profile, which at that moment was bent over the little notebook in which she was jotting notes with her silver pencil. Behind her, so golden it turned the tips of her hair almost white, the sun was an hour and a half from falling below the line of the Atlantic horizon beyond La Caleta beach, precisely between the castles that stood at either end. Coy contemplated the ancient walls, their empty embrasures, the turrets with rounded cupolas set into the corners, the black track of water that at high tide was licking at rocks worn by centuries of waves. Maintaining a prudent distance from the San Sebastian shoals, a sailboat was moving slowly in the distance, heading north, pushed by a fresh southwester. Force 5, he calculated, as he noted the whitecaps that rippled the sea and dashed small sprays of spindrift onto the isthmus that joined the land with the castle, its enormous lighthouse rising tall behind the battlemented walls of ancient batteries. Sky and water were impeccably blue, so luminous they hurt the eyes, though soon they would begin to be streaked with the reddish tones that were the prelude to sunset.

  'A couple of things," said Gamboa, "are most unusual about our story."

  Coy stopped looking at the sea and paid attention to the conversation. Because of their professions, Tanger and the director of the observatory had previously exchanged a number of calls. They had gone to see him at San Fernando as soon as they arrived from Madrid—a train to Seville and then a rented car to Cadiz —so he could provide some documentation on the Dei Gloria and the corsair Chergui, and clear up a few obscure points. Afterward, Gamboa had taken them to the old city and treated them to shrimp omelettes at Ca Felipe, on calle La Palma, where fresh fish were displayed to customers under the sign "Nearly all these fish were extras in the films of Captain Cousteau." They had ended up by the ocean, on the terrace at La Caleta.

  "I wish it were only a couple of things," sighed Tanger.

  Gamboa, smoking a cigarette, laughed, and his Nordic eyes made his bearded face seem boyish. His teeth were crooked and stained by nicotine, with a gap between the incisors. He had an easy laugh for the least thing and nodded his head as he did, as if every pretext were welcome. Despite his Merchant Marine prejudices regarding the Navy, Coy liked Gamboa. Even his pleasant, open way of flirting with Tanger—a gesture, a look, a way of offering her the cigarettes she refused—was inoffensive and likable. When they had called on him late that morning at his office, Gamboa had been happy to discover, as he said with no beating around the bush, how pretty his colleague from Madrid was, and how it was his misfortune that until now he had known her only by telephone and letter. Then he looked Coy over closely before shaking hands, retaining the hand in his grasp, as if touch might allow him to calculate the nature of the relationship between his colleague from the Museo Naval and this unexpected, quiet, short, broad-shouldered individual with large hands and a clumsy gait who was escorting her. She had simply introduced him as a friend who was helping her with the technical aspects of her problem. A sailor with a lot of free time.

  "That brigantine," Gamboa continued, "came from America without escort—And that's strange, considering that because of the English, the corsairs, and the pirates, it was mandated that every merchant ship cross the Atlantic in convoy."

  As he spoke, he nearly always addressed Tanger, although at times he turned to Coy, perhaps to avoid making him feel replaced. I gather you don't mind, the gesture said. I don't know your role in this story, friend, but I suppose it won't bother you if I talk to her and smile at her. Get this straight: you two are here for only a short while, and she's attractive. A sailor with free time, or complete dedication, or whatever you are... I don't know what there is between you, but I just want to enjoy her a while. A couple of beers and a laugh or two, you know, to charge my batteries. That's what I plan to collect for my services. Before long, she'll be yours again, or whatever part you get, and you can go on testing your luck. After all, life is short, and it isn't often that a woman like this comes along. At least I don't run into them.

  "They weren't at war
with England at that moment," Tanger pointed out. "Maybe the escort wasn't necessary."

  Gamboa, who had just lighted his umpteenth cigarette, exhaled smoke between his front teeth and nodded in agreement. In addition to his military appointment, he was a naval historian. Before being assigned to the observatory, he had been in charge of the historic heritage of the Navy in Cadiz.

  "That could be one explanation," he conceded. "But it still seems strange___ In 1767, Cadiz had a monopoly on commerce

  with America. It wasn't until eleven years later that Charles III issued a decree liberalizing trade, changing the rule that designated Cadiz as the only port for a ship returning directly from America. So the voyage of that brigantine from Havana was slightly illegal, if we read the royal orders strictly. Or at least it was irregular." Reflecting, he took long drags on his cigarette. "The normal thing would have been to call in here before continuing on to Valencia, or whatever the final destination was." Another drag. 'And apparently that didn't happen."

  Tanger had an answer. In feet, Coy had realized, she seemed to have answers for almost everything. It was as if more than researching new information, she was trying to confirm what she already had.

  "The Dei Gloria," she explained, "had the benefit of special status. Don't forget she belonged to the Jesuits, and they had certain privileges. Their ships had specific exemptions; they sailed to America and the Philippines using the Society's captains, navigators, courses, and nautical charts, and they were surrounded by what today we would call fiscal opacity.... That was one of the matters brought against them in the trial for expulsion that was being prepared in secret."

  Gamboa was listening attentively.

  "So it was the Jesuits, eh?"

  "Exactly."

  "That would explain several inexplicable things."

  She has spent hours, Coy said to himself, in that house I know across from Atocha station, going over and over all this. She has spent days and months lying on that bed I glimpsed once, sitting at the table covered with books and documents, tying up loose ends in that cool head of hers, the way someone plays a game of chess having planned all the moves in advance. Setting courses for all of us. I'm convinced that this conversation, this bearded, smiling man, the landscape here at La Caleta, and maybe even the hours of high tide and low tide, were calculated ahead of time. All she's doing now is outfitting her ship carefully, nailing down every last detail before setting out to sea. Because she is one of those women who don't forget anything on shore. She may never have sailed, but I'm sure that in her imagination she has already dived dozens of times on the wreck of the Dei Gloria.

  "At any rate," said Gamboa, "it's a pity we don't have more documentation." He turned a little toward Coy. "The archive here in Cadiz is the only one that wasn't sent to the general marine archives at Viso del Marques, where they centralized nearly all the important documents in El Ferrol and Cartagena, postdating what was conserved in the Archivo de Indias in Seville. Here, a pigheaded admiral refused to let go of them. As a result the complete collection was destroyed in a fire, all the papers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including some original cartographical plates of Tofifio."

  Gamboa took another drag and chortled jovially.

  "Bound to happen, no?" he said to Tanger. "The obligatory fire. But I suppose that lends the charm of adventure to your job."

  "Not everything was lost," she replied.

  "Not everything, that's true. Some of it had been misplaced. No one knows what we have lying around here. The plans of the Dei Gloria, for example, were forgotten, and in a totally illogical place—under mountains of dusty papers in the storeroom for

  nautical instruments in the naval dockyard at La Carraca_______

  Thrown in with stuff from scrapped ships, logbooks, charts, and a thousand things that have never been catalogued. I saw them by chance about a year ago, when I was looking for something else. And when I got your telephone call, I remembered— It was pure luck that the ship was built here."

  In fact, Gamboa clarified to Coy, it wasn't the plans for the Dei Gloria herself, but the Loyola, her twin, because both were built in Cadiz between 1760 and 1762, within a short period of time. But Lady Luck didn't favor either of them. The Loyola was lost in 1763 in a violent storm near Sancti Petri, before her sister ship went down. Funny how things turn out. Very dose to the place where she'd been launched only a year before. Some ships are just bad-luck ships, as Coy undoubtedly knew from professional experience. And those two brigantines had a bad star.

  Gamboa had provided Tanger with a copy of the plans after he had showed the two of them around the observatory—white facade with columns and cupola shimmering in the sunlight, whitewashed corridors with showcases of antique instruments and nautical and astronomy books, a line on the floor indicating the exact delineation of the Cadiz meridian, and the magnificent library of dark woods and overflowing shelves. There, on a vitrine table that contained works by Kepler, Newton, and Galileo, the Viaje a la America Meridional and the Observaciones of Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, as well as other books on eighteenth-century expeditions for measuring a degree of the meridian, Gamboa had unfolded various plans and documents. Some copies were meant for Tanger, and the rest, originals difficult to reproduce, she photographed one by one with a small camera she had in her leather purse. She had taken two rolls of thirty-six exposures, her flash reflecting in the paintings on the wall and in the glass of the showcases, while Coy, out of professional curiosity, took a look at the ancient tables of nautical ephemerides and precision instruments scattered around the room, vestiges of a time when the San Fernando observatory was the essential reference in the Europe of the Enlightment: a Spencer octant, a Berthoud watch, a Jensen chronometer, a Dollond telescope. As for the Dei Gloria, Coy was presented to her when Gamboa, after a deliberate and theatrical pause, pulled out four plans on a scale of 1:55 that he'd had photocopied for Tanger. A slim brigantine ninety-eight feetrin length and with a twenty-six foot beam, she had two masts, square sails, a gaff sail on the mainmast, and was armed with ten iron four-pounders. Those copies were there before them now, spread on a table on the terrace.

  "She was a good ship," said Gamboa, contemplating a distant sail that had passed the beach and was disappearing beyond the castle of Santa Catalina. 'As you can appreciate on the plans, she had clean lines and was very seaworthy. A modern ship for her time, constructed of heart of oak and teak, with the usual flush deck and guns mounted on it; five gunports on each side. Swift and trustworthy. If a xebec could catch her, she must have suffered a lot of damage during the Atlantic crossing. Otherwise..." Now the observatory director was looking at Tanger with smiling intensity. "That's another point of the mystery. Why she didn't put into Cadiz for repairs?"

  Tanger didn't answer. She was playing with her silver pencil, focused on the white cupolas of the resort to their left, built on pilings in the sand.

  'And the Chergui" Coy asked.

  Gamboa, who was watching the woman, turned slowly. Oh, the matter of the corsair was clear, he answered. And they were in luck, because among the new documents was valuable material. For instance, a copy of the description of the Chergui, the original of which had been located in the Privateering and Prizes section in Viso del Marques. Unfortunately, there were no plans for that ship, but he had found one for a xebec of similar characteristics, the Hakonero, which was very close in length, armament, and rigging.

  "We don't know the place or year of construction," Gamboa explained, taking a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket, "but we do know that she operated using Algiers and Gibraltar as bases. There are also detailed descriptions of what she looked like, given by her victims or by people who saw her in ports when she was flying British colors—which she changed as the occasion demanded, since she was fitted out by an Algerian businessman and by a Maltese located on Gibraltar. We have evidence that documents the Chergui's fortunes between 1759 and 1766. The most meticulous, however," the observatory di
rector consulted his notes, "was that of don Josef Mazarrasa, captain of a small coastal boat, the Podenco, which succeeded in escaping a xebec he identified as the Chergui in September 1766, after a skirmish near Fuengirola. Since they were on the point of being boarded, he was able to observe her, much to his displeasure, at close quarters. There was a European on her quarterdeck, whose description may coincide with that of an Englishman known as Slyne, or Captain Mizen, and the rather numerous crew seems to have been composed of Moors and Europeans—the latter undoubtedly English." Again Gamboa consulted his notes. "The Chergui was a xebec with a jib boom and classic high poop, polacre-rigged main and mizzen masts, and a lateen-rigged foremast; she was relatively swift among ships of her class, some one hundred and fifteen feet in length and with a twenty-six or thirty-foot beam. According to this Captain Mazarrasa, who sustained five dead and eight wounded in the encounter, she was carrying four long six-pounders, eight four-pounders, and at least four pedreros, devices for throwing rock and scrap iron. It seems she had been fitted out in Algiers with good bronze pieces, old but efficient, off a captured French corvette, the Flamme. That armament made her fearsome against ships of lesser tonnage and more fragile lines, like the Podenco and the Dei Gloria.... Supposing, that is, she did in fact meet up with your ship."