Coy saw some dark patches on the sand and went closer to give them a look. Shingle and half-buried rocks covered with small seaweed. A little farther on he found the first object connected with life on the surface, a rusted tin can. He continued at a controlled pace, moving his head from left to right, and stopped when he calculated he had reached the edge of the radius of the circle he intended to search around the anchor. Then he oriented himself again and began to swim in an arc to his right. He was about to cross from the sandy bed to the rocks that marked the limits of the meadow when he spied a shadow a little farther away, almost at the edge of his field of vision. He went to it and found, to his disappointment, that it was a round rock covered with limy formations. Too round and too perfect, it occurred to him suddenly. He lifted it a little, raising a cloud of sand from the bottom, and the rock turned out to be surprisingly light as it broke apart in his hands, revealing a gray-green interior not unlike rotted wood. Astounded, Coy was slow to comprehend that it was exactly that— old, rotted wood. Maybe the wheel of a gun carriage. He felt his heart beating faster beneath the neoprene. His breathing was less tranquil now, and the rate rose to three mouthfuls every five seconds as he scratched in vain in the sand. The digging raised such a cloud from the bottom that he had to rise up a little to find clear water and continue looking. That was when he saw the first gun.
HE swam toward it, kicking very slowly, as if he feared that the large mass of bronze would deteriorate before his eyes like the wooden wheel. It was about five feet in length, and lay on the bottom as if someone had deposited it there with great care. It was almost entirely exposed, with a mossy film and a few incrustations, but the dolphin designs on the handles, the ball of the cascabel on the breech, and the heavy trunnions were all perfectly recognizable. It must weigh nearly a ton.
A little farther away he could make out the dark shadow of another gun. He swam to it and saw that it was identical, although in a different position. This one must have fallen almost straight down, diving mouth-first onto the ocean floor, its weight drilling it up to the trunnions in sand. There were also curious reddish stones around, which, when Coy cut them open, showed empty interiors like molds. Of course, he thought. When iron corrodes it leaves an imperfect copy of its shape in the limy formation that has covered it over time. Coy had to discipline himself not to shoot to the surface and shout the news. He had found the Chergui, or what remained of her. Instead, he fanned away sand, revealing wood fragments and objects better preserved because they were protected by the sand. He unearthed a bottle that appeared to be very old, its base intact but deformed. Melted, Coy was sure, by extreme heat. The corsair xebec, he concluded, had blown up precisely here, sixty-five feet overhead, and its remains were scattered over the bottom. A little farther on, close together, he found two more guns. They too had the green tone of bronze submerged for two and a half centuries, and were reasonably clean except for a few incrustations and the mossy coating. Now there was a lot of wreckage: wood protruding from the sand, metal objects in varying stages of corrosion, half-buried cannonballs, shards of clay, and shattered wood planking with iron nails. Coy even found a nearly intact wooden construction, which as he scooped away sand appeared to be larger and in better condition than he had thought at first sight. It looked as if it might be a sailmaker's table, with large deadeyes and bits of cordage that disintegrated as he touched them. And more guns. He counted nine, spread in an area some one hundred feet in diameter.
He was amazed at how clean everything was, and at the lack of more than a thin layer of sediment on the wreckage. The gentle, cold current flowing southwest might be one explanation; it had kept the site dear, emptying into a basin a little lower down and behind a low rocky ridge covered with anemones. Coy swam there to be sure, and could see that the depression, in the shape of a natural gully, drained off the sediment by directing it toward a series of terraces stepping down to deeper levels. An octopus, surprised in its den, skittered along the sand, its tentacles opened in the shape of an undulating star, shooting streams of ink to cover its retreat. Coy consulted his watch. It was getting more difficult to breathe, so he looked up toward the diffuse blue-green light above his head, pierced by silver bubbles. It was time to go back. He turned the valve at the base of the bottle to activate the reserve, and his lungs filled with air.
He was starting his ascent when he spotted the anchor. It lay at the edge of a second rocky, eroded ridge on the other side of the gully It was large and it was old, its rusted iron flukes covered with crusts of lime.. Both the anchor and the anemone-covered ridge held tangled remnants of old nets and rotted woven traps; over time, many fishermen had snagged their equipment here. But what caught his attention was that the anchor had a wooden shank, although the wood had rotted away and all that was left were a few splinters beneath the anchor ring. It was an anchor the xebec or the brigantine would have carried, and that encouraged Coy to cross the gully, swim around the ridge, and go closer, using the last minutes of his air reserve. On the other side of the rocks, sand alternated with a bed of shingle. The depression was more pronounced, varying from eighty to ninety feet in depth. And there, in the green darkness, looming in the depths like a ghostly dark shadow, was the Dei Gloria.
XV
The Devil's Irises
Everything found in the sea that has no owner belongs to the finder.
FRANCISCO COLOANE, El camino de la ballena
In short, nervous musical phrases, the alto was improvising as no one had ever done. "Ko-ko" was playing, one of the themes Charlie Parker had recorded when he had invented everything he was destined to invent before rotting and exploding in a laughing fit. And in that order—first he rotted and then he died laughing, watching television. That had happened half a century ago, and now Coy was in his room in the Cartago Inn. The window offered a rainswept view of the port, and he was sitting naked in a rocking chair, a tray of fruit on the table beside him, listening to the digitalized recording of that old cut. Be-do-be-dooo. Toomb, toomb. Be-bop. Coy was holding a botrie of lemonade and watching Tanger sleep.
It was raining on the port, on derricks, wharves, and Navy ships berthed two by two alongside the San Pedro dock, and on the rusting hulls in the Graveyard of Ships With No Name, where the Carpanta was moored by the stern to the mole with an anchor at the bow. It was pouring buckets because the storm had finally arrived.
That had been arranged from the headquarters of the low-pressure system located over Ireland and spreading evilly outward in concentric, closely drawn isobars. Strong winds from.the west were pushing successive fronts in the direction of the Mediterranean, weather maps were covered with black warnings and thunderbolts and signs of rain, and the coasts were pierced by arrows with wispy fletchings in the shaft, aimed at the heart of unwary ships. So that after three days of working at the site of the shipwreck, the crew of the Carpanta found themselves obliged to return to port. Despite Tanger's impatience, she agreed that they could use the break to plan the last stages of the search, and to obtain the equipment they needed before a final assault on the secrets of that underwater tomb. The Dei Gbria's tomb was now definitively situated two miles off the coast, at 37°33.3,N and 0°46.8,W. with her stern at eighty-five feet and her bow at ninety-two.
For several days, during which they lived with one eye on the sea and the other on the barometer, Tanger had directed the operation from the Carpanta's cabin. Coy and El Piloto worked hard, taking turns below in spans of thirty to forty minutes, with intervals long enough to make long decompressions unnecessary. They had discovered in their earliest explorations that the ship was in good condition, considering the two and a half centuries she'd lain beneath the sea. She had gone down bow-first, losing one of her anchors on the rocky ridge before settling onto the bottom on a northeast-southwest axis. The hull, resting on its starboard side, was buried in sand and sediment to the waist. The deck was rotted and covered with marine life, but still intact at the stern. Toward the bow, the planking and beams of th
e deck were missing, and some of the frames protruded from the sand, recalling the ribs of a skeleton. When Coy and El Piloto explored the rest of the Dei Gloria on subsequent dives, they established that the aft third of the ship was clear of debris, and that the damage would have been more major in other waters and in a different position. The waist seemed to be buried beneath a tangle of wood, clusters of iron powdery from corrosion, sand, and sediment that grew deeper as you approached the crushed and buried bow. It was obvious that the ten iron guns on deck and all other heavy objects had shifted forward as the brigantine started down, and that over time the deck planking had caved in under their weight, disappearing beneath the sand. That was why the stern was a little higher and had sustained less damage, although many beams and ribs had yielded to the years, and sand had piled up in the rotten timberwork. They saw the stump of the mainmast, which had been blasted off during battle, as well as a pyramid of planks, petrified in the shape of the companion, two gun ports on the port gunnel, and the sternpost, still held by bronze pins, rusty and full of filaments and incrustations, and the remains of the rudder stock.
They were lucky, Tanger declared that first night as they rode at anchor above the wreck. The three of them were grouped around Urrutia's chart and the plans of the Dei Gloria in the feint light of the cabin lantern, celebrating the find with a bottle of white Pescador that El Piloto had on board. They were lucky for many reasons, but the main one was that the brigantine went down bow first. That gave them better access to the captain's cabin, which was where valuable objects were usually stored for safekeeping. It was likely that the emeralds, if they were still on board at the time of the sinking, were either there or in the adjacent orlop reserved for passengers. The feet that the stern was not completely buried made their task much easier, because searching beneath the sand would have required suction hoses and more complex equipment. As for her state of preservation—optimum after so much time at the bottom of the sea—that was owing to the rocky ridge she lay behind, with natural channels and rocks protecting her from the action of the waves, marine sediment, and fishermen's nets. The gentle current of cold water flowing from Cabo de Palos had also lessened the work of teredos, those marine mollusks that devour wood and find their most favorable conditions in warm waters. For all these reasons, the work that lay ahead would be exhausting, but not impossible. Unlike archaeologists conducting research on a sunken ship, they did not have to preserve anything; they could destroy anything in the way of their objective. They did not have the technical means or the time to move with care. So the next day, acting in compliance with Tanger s work on the plans spread out on the bulkheads and chart table, Coy and El Piloto spent one whole day in successive dives, laying a white halyard from bow to stern of the sunken vessel, following the apparent center line. Then, moving cautiously through shattered wood and limy growths that could cut like knives, they laid out shorter pieces of lead-weighted halyard in seven-by— seven feet squares, perpendicular to both sides of the longitudinal line. That divided the wreckage into segments corresponding to those Tanger had drawn with pencil and ruler on the plans of the brigantine, establishing rudimentary points of identification between reality and paper, locating the site of each part of the hull according to the 1:55 scale on the plans provided by Lucio Gamboa. The day that the barometer began to fall and the weather dispatches drove them to take shelter in Cartagena, they had already succeeded in calculating the position of the after part of the orlop, steerage, and the captain's cabin located beneath the poop. But what condition would they find Captain Elezcano s cabin in? Would the internal structure have withstood the pressure of sediment on rotting wood? And would it be possible to move around once they had discovered how to get inside, or would everything be so flattened and mixed up that they would have to begin at the top, breaking and clearing away debris until they came to the hundred thirty square feet next to the escutcheon at the stern which made up the captain's living space?
The rain was still trickling down the windowpanes and Charlie Parker was fading from the landscape, cloaked on the road to eternal dreamland by the trumpet of Dizzy Gillespie. It was Tanger who had given Coy that recording, which she'd bought in a record shop on cafle Mayor. They had been sitting by the door of the Gran Bar with El Piloto, after walking through the rain to the city's Museo Naval. Along the way they had gathered provisions in marine supply shops, supermarkets, hardware stores, and pharmacies. Tanger had withdrawn the money from an ATM—after two attempts that had failed for lack of available funds. I'm diving with my reserve tank too, she said sarcastically as she put the wallet into the back pocket of her jeans. They had been able to buy everything they needed, from hardware to chemicals, and the purchases were in bags beneath their chairs. The bar's canvas awning protected them from the warm drizzle, which had slicked the street, putting a melancholy face on the empty balconies of modernist buildings whose ground floors, which Coy remembered alight with cafes, had been turned into lugubrious banking offices. And there they were, the three of them, drinking aperitifs and watching raincoats and wet umbrellas pass by, when Tanger laid the local newspaper on the table—it was open to the page on ship arrivals and departures, Coy observed—got up and walked to a record shop opposite the Escarabajal bookstore. She came back carrying a package, which she put in front of Coy without saying anything. Inside were two double CDs with the master cuts of eighty pieces Charlie Parker had recorded for the Dial and Savoy labels between 1944 and 1948. Given the circumstances, he truly appreciated the gesture. This Parker was really a gem.
That same day Coy thought he saw Horacio Kiskoros. They were on their way back to the Carpanta, laden with their purchases. When they came to the walls of the old Navidad fort, next to the ship graveyard, Coy had turned and looked around. He did that often, instinctively, whenever he was ashore. Although Tanger seemed indifferent to Nino Palermo's threats, Coy still had them in mind; he hadn't forgotten the last encounter with the Argentine on the beach at Aguilas. He was following Tanger and El Piloto toward the mole where the Carpanta was tied up when he saw Kiskoros at the foot of the old tower. Or thought he saw him. That was a path often followed by fishermen on their way to the breakwater, but the silhouette, black against the gray light, between the tower and the dismantled bridge of the Korzeniowski, did not look like any fisherman. He was small and dapper, with some resemblance to a full-page ad for Barbour. In green. "There's Kiskoros," he said.
Tanger stopped, surprised. She and El Piloto turned to look where he was pointing, but there was no one there. Anyway, Coy thought, LWLHMBM: Law of White, Liquid, and Homogenized, Must Be Milk. So Barbour, dwarfish and there, could only be Kiskoros. Besides, when bad guys hang around, sooner or later you're going to get a glimpse of them. He set the packages on the ground. It wasn't raining, but gusts of the warm southwest wind that had come whistling down the slopes of San Julian were rippling the puddles as his feet splashed toward the tower. There was no one there when he reached it, but he was sure he'd seen the hero of the Malvinas, and the abrupt disappearance reaffirmed his conviction. He looked around among the piles of blowtorched metal plate, the twisted iron staining the sand red, and stood still to listen. Nothing. There was a hollow clang of metal as he climbed the ladder of the scrapped bridge of the packet, staining his hands with rust. Runoff from the rain dripped from its roof, soaking the rotted wood of the deck; some boards yielded to his weight, so he tried to be careful where he stepped. He went down the other side and over to the split-open belly of the bulk carrier, its interior bulkheads filthy with caked black grease. This was a labyrinth of old iron, with junk piled everywhere. He skirted the base of a crane and went onto the ship by way of a listing passageway where water puddled against the hatchway coamings. His heightened senses absorbed the oppressive sadness of all that desolation, which was only intensified by the dirty light filtering in. On the far side of a stripped and empty cabin with all its cables pulled out and piled in a corner, he peered into the dark cavity of a hold. He droppe
d a piece of scrap and from the depths the sinister echo bounced back and forth between unseen metal plates. Impossible to go down there without a flashlight. Then he heard a noise behind him, at the end of the passageway, and he retraced his steps with his heart jumping in his chest. It was El Piloto, frowning and tense, with a foot-long iron bar in his hand. Coy cursed silently, caught between disappointment and relief. Tanger was waiting behind him, leaning against a bulkhead, hands in her jeans pockets, a somber expression on her face. As for Kiskoros, if in fact it had been he, he had disappeared.
The Nautical Chart Page 42