As I was talking I appropriated a couple of forks, a piece of bread, and a glass to reconstruct an approximation of a coast. The glass was in the center, representing Cartagena, and the tip of the fork marked Cabo de Palos. It wasn't an Urrutia chart, but it wasn't bad at all. What more did one need? The checked tablecloth even resembled the parallels and meridians of a nautical chart.

'And you two," I concluded, counting squares toward the fork on the right, "have been looking for that ship thirty-six miles west of where she lies."

XIV

The Mystery of the Green Lobsters

Although I speak of the Meridian as if there were only one, there are actually many. All men and ships have their own meridians. MANUEL PIMENTEL, Arte de Navcgar

They were cutting through the dawn mist, sailing east along parallel 37°32', with a slight deviation to the north in order to gain one minute of latitude. Screwed onto the bulkhead, the needle of the brass barometer tilted right: 1,022 millibars. There was no wind, and the deck cleats were shuddering with the gentle vibration of the engine. The mist was beginning to burn off, and although it was still gray behind the wake, dazzling rays of sun and gplden color were filtering through ahead of the bow, and off the port beam, faint and very high, they could see the phantasmal dark gashes of the coastline.

In the cockpit, El Piloto was setting the course. And below, in the cabin, bent over her parallel rulers, compass, pencil, and gum eraser, like a diligent student preparing for a difficult exam, Tanger was superimposing the squares of a graph on chart 464 of the Naval Hydrographic Institute: Cabo Tinoso to Cabo de Palos. Coy was sitting beside her, with a cup of coffee and condensed milk in his hands, watching her trace lines and calculate distances. They had worked all night without sleeping, and by the time El Piloto woke and cast off before dawn, they had established the new search area on the chart, with the center located at 37°33,N and o°45,W. This was the rectangle that Tanger, under the ligjht of the chart table, and with patience and careful allowance for the Carpanta's gentle rocking, was now dividing into tracks of one hundred sixty-five feet in width. An area a mile and a half long by two and a half wide, south of Punta Seca and six miles to the southwest of Cabo de Palos.

"... But it happened that after the wind veered to the north, and having already glimpsed the cape to the northeast, upon forcing more sail in avoidance of the chase of which she was object, she had the bad fortune to lose her foretopmast, while engaging in most lively combat almost yardarm to yardarm. Her foremast was lost and nearly all hands on deck dead or out of action by reason of the other's having raked them with shot and point-blank broadsides, but when the xebec was being brought alongside for boarding, the flames from one of her lower sails, as the deponent recalls having seen, jumped across to some cartridges of gunpowder, with the result that the xebec was blown up. The explosion also brought down the mainmast of the brigantine, sending her to the bottom. According to the deponent there were no survivors but himself, who was saved by knowing how to swim and finding the launch the brigantine had jettisoned as the battle began, spending there the rest of the day and the night. At nearing eleven hours on the following day he was rescued six miles to the south of that place by the tartane Virgen de los Paroles. According to the deponent, the sinking of the brigantine and the xebec took place at two miles from the coast at 37°31'N, 4°51'E, a position that matches the one written on a half-leaf of paper he was carrying in his pocket at the time of his rescue, the navigating officer having noted it once established on a chart of Urrutia, but having no time to log it because of the rapidity with which battle was joined. The deponent was quartered in the naval hospital of this city awaiting further proceedings.

The most Excl. Sr. Almirante requested the following day new investigations on certain points of this event, given the circumstance that the deponent had abandoned the environs of the hospital during the night, and there being until this moment no notice of his whereabouts. A circumstance about which the most Excl. Sr. Almirante has ordered that a timely investigation be initiated without prejudice to the depuration of responsibilities. Dated in the Headquarters of the Seaport of Cartagena, eighth February 1767. Lieutenant of the Navy Ricardo Dolarea."

EVERYTHING fit. They had discussed it inside and out, with the copy of the boy's testimony on the table, analyzing every turn in the exasperating posthumous joke that the ghosts of the two Jesuits and sailors of the sunken Dei Gloria had played on them and everyone else. With 464 spread out before him and compass in hand, the line of the coast in the upper portion of the chart— Tinoso to the left, Palos to the right, and the port of Cartagena in the center—Coy had easily calculated the dimensions of their error. That night and predawn morning of February 3 and 4, 1767, with the corsair tight at her stern, the brigantine had sailed much faster and much farther than they had originally thought. At dawn, the Dei Gloria was not southwest of Tinoso and Cartagena, but had already passed those longitudes and was sailing further east. She was southeast of the port, and the cape glimpsed from her bow, to the northeast, was not Tinoso but Palos.

Tanger had finished. She laid her rulers and pencil on the chart, and sat looking at Coy.

"For that they tortured Abbot Gandara for eighteen years— They were looking for the ship in the location given by the ship's boy. They may even have gone down with divers and diving bells, but they found nothing because the Dei Gloria wasn't there."

Lack of sleep had left dark circles under her eyes, making them look bigger. Less attractive, more exhausted.

"Now tell me what happened," she said. "Your final version."

Coy looked at chart 464. It was lying above the reproduction of Urrutia's chart, which was also covered with penciled marks and notations. The dark brown line of the shore and the blue band of shallows followed the coastline, ascending in a gentle diagonal toward Palos point and the Hormigas Isles in the upper right corner of the chart. All the geographic features were represented, from west to east: Cabo Tinoso, the port of Cartagena, Escombreras Island, Cabo de Agua, Portman Bay, Cabo Negrete, Punta Seca, Cabo de Palos_ Maybe the wind from the southwest had been stronger that night than they calculated, Coy argued. Twenty-five or thirty knots. Or maybe Captain Elezcano had taken the risk of putting the rigging at jeopardy earlier, and had set more sail. It could also be that the wind veered to the north, blowing offshore long before dawn, and that the corsair, a ship able to sail close to the wind, thanks to the jib on her bowsprit and lateen sails on her foremast and mizzenmast, had gained the weather-gauge and slipped between the brigantine and Cartagena to prevent her from taking refuge. There was also the possibility that in the course of some nocturnal maneuver intended to throw the corsair off the trail, the Dei Gloria had put herself in a perilous position by sailing too far from potential protection. Or maybe the captain, stubborn and holding to his instructions, gave strict orders not to enter any port but Valencia, to prevent the emeralds from falling into the wrong hands.

Coy tried to describe that first glimmer of morning—the still hazy coastline, the uneasy glances between the captain and the navigation officer as they attempted to recognize where they were, and their devastation when they discovered that the corsair was still there, giving chase, drawing closer, and that they had not lost her in the dark. At any rate, with that first light, while the captain kept looking up to the rigging, wondering whether it could tolerate so much canvas, sailing close-hauled as she was, the navigation officer went to the port rail and took bearings on the land to establish their position. Doubtless he obtained simultaneous bearings, situating Junco Grande at 345 °, Cabo Negrete at 2950, and Cabo de Palos at 300. Afterward he would have joined those three lines on the chart, and established the brigantine's position at their intersection. It wasn't difficult to imagine him with his spyglass and the alidade or bearing circle on the magistral, alien to everything other than the technical steps of his responsibilities, and the ship's boy at his side, paper and pencil ready to jot down the observations, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the sails of the corsair, red in the slanting rays of dawn and closer every minute. Then the officer, hurrying below to make the calculation on the Urrutia chart, and the ship's boy running back to the poop along the sharply listing deck, the paper with the bearings in his hand, showing them to the captain just at the moment when high overhead the topmast sprang with a crack and everything fell to the deck, and the captain ordered the crew to cut it free, throw it overboard, and ready the guns, and the Dei Gloria gave the tragic yaw that confronted her with her destiny.

Coy stopped, a quiver in his voice. Sailors. After all, those men were sailors like him. Good sailors. He could feel their fears and sensations as clearly as if he himself had been aboard the Dei Gloria.

Tanger was studying him.

"You tell the story very well, Coy."

Through the porthole he could see light struggling through the fog as the sun rose past the hazy gray circle. He also saw the bow of the corsair Chergui gradually bearing toward one of the open gunports of the brigantine.

'It isn't hard," he said. "In a way, it isn't hard."

He half-dosed his eyes. His mouth was dry, sweat was running down his naked chest, and the doth he had just tied around his forehead was dripping wet. Bent down behind a black four-pound gun in the smoke of the sizzling fuse, he heard the breathing of his comrades crouched beside the gun carriage with rammer, sponge, and worm, poised to ease off the tackle, load, prime, and fire again.

"Oh, well," he added after a few seconds, ‘I’m not saying that is how things happened."

"How do you explain the position of the ship's boy?"

Coy bunched his shoulders. The roar of the cannonade and shattering wood was slowly fading from his head. He pointed to a place on the chart before tracing a diagonal line southwest.

"Just the way we explained it before," he said. "With the difference that after the shipwreck, the wind pushing the launch wasn't blowing from the northwest, but northeast. The offshore breeze could have shifted a few quarters to the east when the sun was high that morning and sent the boy out to sea, bringing him closer to the true bearing on Cartagena, a few miles to the south, where he was rescued the next day."

That wasn't hard to imagine either, Coy thought, looking at the line of drift on the chart marked with recorded depths. The boy, alone in this little drifting boat, dazed and bailing water. The sun and the thirst, the immense sea and the coast growing fainter and fainter in the distance. The restless sleep, face down so the gulls wouldn't peck his face, his head lifted occasionally to look around, then total hopelessness—nothing but the impassive sea and all the secrets stored in its depths. Up on the surface rippled by the breeze, he was another Ishmael floating on the blue tomb of his comrades.

"It's strange he didn't give the true position of the Dei Gloria," Tanger said. "A boy like him couldn't have been aware of all the implications."

"He wasn't so young. I've mentioned before that boys went to sea when they were just kids, but after four or five years at sea, they matured in a hurry. By then they were men in their own right. True sailors."

She nodded, convinced.

"Well, even so," she said, "it's amazing how he kept his mouth shut. He was an apprentice, and had to know that the longitude didn't refer to the Cadiz meridian___ Yet he knew not to say anything, and he fooled the investigators. There's nothing in the report that indicates the least doubt."

It was true. They had been reviewing the documents, the rescued boy's declaration, and the official report, and there was not a single contradiction. The ship's boy had been firm about the latitude and longitude. And he had the paper in his pocket as proof.

"He was a fine boy," Tanger added. "Loyal as they come."

"So it seems."

'And clever. You remember his testimony? He talks about the cape to the northeast, but doesn't name it. From the position he gave, everyone believed it was Tinoso. But he was careful not to correct them. He never said what cape it was."

Again Coy looked out at the sea through the porthole.

"I suppose," he said, "it was his way of carrying on with the fight."

The sun was well up by now and the mist was burning off. The dark outlines of the coast were becoming clear off their port. Punta de la Chapa emerged with its white lighthouse east of Portman Bay, the Portus Magnus of old, with the slag of abandoned mines on the old Roman highway and silt clogging the cove where ships with eyes painted on their bows had loaded silver ingots before the birth of Christ.

"I wonder what became of him?"

He was referring to the boy's disappearance from the naval hospital. Tanger had her own theory, which she sketched out, leaving Coy to fill in the blank spaces. In early February of 1767, the Jesuits could still rely on money and power everywhere, including the maritime district of Cartagena. It was not difficult to bribe the right people and assure the discreet removal of the ship's boy from center stage. All that was needed was a coach and horses and a safe passage to get past the city gates. No doubt agents of the Society arranged for him to leave the hospital before a new interrogation, taking him far away, out of reach, the day after his rescue at sea. "Unauthorized leave," was how it had been noted in the file, which was somewhat irregular for a very young merchant seaman being questioned by the Navy. But that "unauthorized leave" had later been corrected by an anonymous hand and replaced with "approved discharge." And there the trail ended.

It was easy, Coy thought as he listened to Tanger's story. It all fit together, and it took no effort to imagine the night. The deserted corridors of the hospital, the light of a candle, sentinels or guards, their eyes closed by gold, someone arriving, heavily cloaked and with precise instructions, the boy surrounded by trusted agents. Then the empty streets, the clandestine council in the city's Jesuit convent. A serious, quick, tense interrogation, and scowls that eased as it was ascertained that the secret was well guarded. Perhaps claps on the back, approving hands on his shoulder. Good lad. Good, brave lad. Then again the night, and people signaling from a shadowy corner; no hitch in the plan. The coach and horses, the city gates, the open country and star-filled skies. A fifteen-year-old sailor dozing in the coach seat, accustomed from boyhood to far worse jouncing, his sleep watched over by the ghosts of his dead comrades. By the sad smile of Captain Elezcano.

"However," Tanger concluded, "there's something... maybe interesting...maybe strange. The ship's boy was named Palau, Miguel Palau, remember? He was the nephew of Luis Fornet Palau, the Valencian outfitter of the Dei Gloria. Maybe it's only a coincidence..." She held up a finger, as if requesting a moment's attention, and then went through the documents in the drawer of the chart table. "Here. Look at this. When I was checking names and dates, I consulted some later shipping lists in Viso del Marques, and I came upon a reference to the hoy Mtdata, of Valencia. In 1784 that ship had a battle with the English brig Undaunted, near the straits of Formentera. The brig tried to capture her, but the hoy defended herself very well and was able to escape— And do you know what the Spanish captain's name was? M. Palau, the reference said. Like our ship's boy. Even the age is right—fifteen in 1767, thirty-two or thirty-three in 1784."

She handed Coy a photocopy, and he read the text. "Notice of the events of the fifteenth day of the present month, regarding the engagement between the hoy Mulata commanded by captain don M. Palau and the English brig Undaunted off Los Ahorcados island."

"If it's the same Palau," said Tanger, "he didn't give up that time either, did he?"

"It is reported before the maritime authority of this port of Ibiza that following a course from Valencia to this locality, when heading for the main channel of the straits at Formentera and in the vicinity of Las Negras and Los Ahorcados, the Spanish hoy Mulata, of eight guns, was attacked by the English brig Undaunted, of twelve, which had approached under false French colors and attempted to seize her. Despite the difference in size she sustained heavy fire but with great damage to both sides, and also an attempt to board by the English, who succeeded in getting three men aboard the hoy, there being then three dead heaved into the sea. The vessels separated and very bloody combat ensued for the space of half an hour, until the Mulata, despite an unfavorable wind, was able to pass to this side of the straits thanks to a maneuver of notorious risk, consisting of slipping through the middle strait, with only four brazas below and very near the reef of La Barqueta; a most uncommonly skillful maneuver that left the English on the other side, their captain not daring to proceed due to conditions of the wind and the uncertainty of the bottom, and the Mulata able to arrive in this port of Ibiza with four men dead and eleven wounded without further occurrence—"

Coy handed the copy of the report back to Tanger. Years before, on a sailboat with minimal length and draft, he had passed through the middle strait at that very place. Four brazas was less than twenty-two feet, in addition to which, depths diminished rapidly from the center to each side. He remembered well the sinister sight of the bottom through the water. A hoy fitted with guns might have a draft of ten feet, and a contrary wind would make sailing on a straight course very difficult; so whether the ship's boy Miguel Palau and Captain M. Palau were the same man, whoever was captaining the Mulata had very steady nerves.

"Maybe the name is just a coincidence."

"Maybe." Tanger was quietly rereading the photocopy before replacing it in the drawer. "But I like to think it was him."

She was quiet for a moment, and then turned to the porthole to focus on the line of the coast revealed by the rising mist, clean and free off the port bow, with the sun shining on the dark rock of Cabo Negrete:

"I like to think that that ship's boy went back to sea, and that he continued to be a brave man."

FOR eight days they combed the new search area with the Pathfinder, track by track from north to south, beginning at the eastern edge, in depths from two hundred sixty to sixty feet. Deeper and more open to winds and currents than Mazarr6n cove, the sea was rough, complicating and slowing their job. The bottom was uneven, rock and sand, and both El Piloto and Coy had made frequent dives—necessarily brief because of the depths—to check out irregularities picked up by the sounding device, including an old anchor that had raised their hopes until they identified it as an Admiralty model with an iron shank, one used later than the eighteenth century. By the end of the day, exasperated and exhausted, they would drop anchor near Negrete on nights with little wind, or, if sheltering from levanters and lebeches, in the small port at Cabo de Palos. The weather dispatches had announced the formation of a center of low pressure in the Atlantic, and if the storm didn't take a turn to the northeast its effects would take less than a week to arrive in the Mediterranean, forcing them to suspend the search for some time. All this was making them nervous and irritable. El Piloto went entire days without opening his mouth, and Tanger maintained her stubborn watch at the screen in a somber mood, as if each day that went by tore away another shred of hope. One afternoon Coy happened to see the notebook where she had been recording the results of the exploration. There were pages filled with incomprehensible spirals and sinister crosses, and on one the hideously distorted face of a woman, the lines scrawled so hard that in some places the paper was ripped. It was a woman who seemed to be screaming into a void.

Nights were not much more pleasant. El Piloto would say good night and close his door at the bow, and they would bed down, weary, skin smelling of sweat and salt, on mats in one of the cabins at the stern. They came together in silence, seeking each other with an urgency so extreme it seemed artificial, their union intense and brutal, quick and wordless. Each time Coy would seek to prolong the encounter, holding Tanger in his arms as they leaned against the bulkhead, trying to control the body and mind of this unknowable woman. But she would struggle, escape, try to hasten along their lovemaking, investing only breath and flesh, her mind far away, her thoughts unreachable. Sometimes Coy thought she was with him, as he listened to the rhythm of her breathing and felt the kisses of her parted lips, the pressure of her naked thighs around his waist. He would kiss her neck or breasts and hold her very tight, capturing her wrists, feeling the beat of her pulse on his tongue and groin, thrusting deep inside her, as if he hoped to touch her heart, to saturate it and make it as soft as the moistness he felt inside her. But she would draw back, a prisoner trying to escape his embrace. In the end she refused him the thought he was striving to capture. Her gleaming, remote eyes, boring into him in the shadows, would become absent, somewhere far beyond Coy and the ship and the sea, absorbed in arcane curses of loneliness and blackness. And then her mouth would open to scream, like the woman he had glimpsed in the drawing, a scream of silence that echoed in Coy's gut like the most galling insult. He felt that lament pounding through his veins, and he bit his lips, holding back an anguish that flooded his chest and nose and mouth, as if he were drowning in a viscous sea of sorrow. He wanted to cry the large, copious tears he had wept as a child, incapable of warming the cold shiver of such loneliness. It was a weigjht too heavy to bear. All he had done was read a few books, sail a few years and know a few women. He believed that was why he lacked the right words and the right moves, and he also believed that even his silences were sullen. But he would have given his life to get deep inside her, to filter through the cells of her flesh and slowly, softly, lick that center of her being with all the tenderness he could offer, to clean away the painful and malign tumor left there like ballast by hundreds of years, thousands of men, and millions of lives. That was why each night they were together, once she stopped moving and lay quiet, recovering her breath after the last of her shudders, Coy tenaciously insisted, forgetting himself and lashed by desperation, that he loved her more than anyone or anything. But she had gone away, too far away, and he did not exist; he was an intruder in her world and her instant. And that, he thought with pain, was how it would end. Not with noise, but with a nearly imperceptible sigh. In that moment of indifference, punctual as a verdict, everything in her died, everything was held in suspense as her pulse recovered its normal beat. Again Coy would be aware of the porthole open to the night, and of the cold creeping in from the sea like a biblical curse. He would fall into a desolation as barren as a vast, perfect, polished marble surface. A terrifyingly motionless Sargasso Sea, a nautical chart with names invented by those ancient navigators: Deception Point, Bay of Solitude, Bitterness Bay, Island of God-Help-Us-AU— Afterward she would kiss him and turn her back, and he would lie on bis back, wavering between loathing for that last kiss and disgust for himself. Eyes staring into the darkness, ears tuned to the water lapping against the Carpanta's hull and to the wind rising in the rigging. Thinking how no one would ever be able to draw the nautical chart that would allow a man to navigate a woman. And with the certainty that Tanger was going to walk out of his life before he possessed her.

IT was about that time that I heard from them again. Tanger called me from El Pez Rojo, a restaurant at Cabo de Palos, to ask me about a technical problem that involved an error of half a mile of east longitude. I cleared up the question and inquired with interest as to their progress. She told me everything was going well, many thanks, and that I would be hearing from them. In fact, it was a couple of weeks before I had news of them, and when I did it was from the newspapers, leaving me to feel as stupid as nearly everyone else in this story. But I don't want to get ahead of myself. Tanger made the telephone call one noontime that found the Carpanta put up alongside the quay in that old fishing town converted into a tourist haven. The storm in the north Atlantic was still stationary, and the sun was shining on the southeast Iberian Peninsula. The needle of the barometer was high, without crossing over the dangerous vertical to the left, and that was, paradoxically, what had brought them to the small port that stretched around a wide black sand cove, dangerous because of the reefs just below the surface and presided over by the lighthouse tower rising high on a rock set out in the sea. That morning the heat had triggered the appearance of some anvil-shaped, gray, and threatening cumulo-nimbuses that were boiling higher by the minute. A wind of twelve to fifteen knots was blowing in the direction of those clouds, but Coy knew that if this cumulonimbus anvil kept building, by the time the gray mass was overhead strong squalls would be unleashed on the other side. A silent exchange of glances with El Piloto, whose squint in the same direction deepened the wrinkles around his eyes, was enough for the two sailors to understand one another. El Piloto brought the Carpanta's bow around to face Cabo de Palos. So there they were, on the whitewashed porch of the Pez Rojo, eating fried sardines and salad, and drinking red wine.

'A half a mile more," said Tanger, returning to her seat.

She sounded irritated. She picked up a sardine from the tray, looked at it a minute as if hoping to attribute some portion of responsibility to it, and threw it down with disgust.

"One damned half-mile more," she repeated.

From her lips, that "damned" was almost a curse. It was strange to hear her speak that way, and much stranger to see her lose control. Coy observed her with curiosity.

"It isn't all that serious," he said.

"It's another week."

Her hair was dirty and matted from saltwater, her skin shiny from too much sun and not enough soap and water. El Piloto and Coy, after several days without shaving, presented no better picture, and they were equally as sunburned and sweaty. They were all wearing jeans, faded T-shirts and sweatshirts, and sneakers, and signs of their days at sea were clear.

"One whole week," Tanger repeated. 'At least."

She stared somberly at the Carpanta, still lit by the sun and tied up below them at the Muelle de la Barra dock. The gray anvil was gradually darkening the cove, as if someone were slowly drawing a curtain that doused the sun's reflection on small white houses and cobalt-blue water. She's losing hope, Coy thought suddenly. After all this time and all this effort, she's beginning to accept the possibility of failure. Where we're searching now it's deeper, and that may mean that the wreck will be beyond our recovery even if we find it. On top of that, the time allotted for the search is running out, and so is her money. Now, for the first time since who knows when, she knows the feeling of doubt.

He looked at El Piloto. The sailor's gray eyes were silently seconding his conclusions. The adventure was beginning to verge on the absurd. All the data had been verified, but the main thing was missing—the sunken ship. No one doubted it was somewhere out there. From the slight elevation of the restaurant they may even have been looking at the very spot where the brigantine and the corsair had gone down. Maybe they had sailed several times above where it lay beneath yards of mud and sand. Maybe the whole effort had been nothing more than a series of errors, the first one being that hunting treasure was not compatible with lucid adult rationality.

"We have a mile and half still to explore," Coy said gently The minute he had spoken those words, he felt ridiculous. Him, giving a pep talk? The truth was, all he wanted to do was put off the final act. Put it off, before going back to being on his own, an orphan clinging to Queequeg's coffin. To the launch of the Dei Gloria.

"Right," she replied blankly.

Elbows on the table, hands crossed under her chin, she kept staring toward the cove. The gray anvil was above the Carpanta now, turning the sky black over its bare mast. The wind died, the sea flattened around the dock, and the sailboat's halyards and flag drooped limply. Then Coy watched as across the cove the reefs and rocks along the shore became streaked with white, lines of foam breaking as a darker color spread like an oil stain across the surface of the water. There was still sunlight on the restaurant porch when the first gust of wind rippled the water on the bay. On the Carpanta the flag suddenly stood straight out and the halyards cracked against the mast, jingling furiously as the boat tilted toward the quay, pushing hard against her fenders. The second gust was stronger, thirty-five knots at least, Coy calculated. The bay was filled with whitecaps and the wind howled, climbing the scale note by note around the hollow chimneys and eaves of the rooftops.

Now everything was somber and fnghteningly gray, and Coy was happy to be sitting there eating fried sardines.

"How long will this last?" Tanger asked.

"Not long," said Coy. "An hour, maybe. Could be a little longer. It will be over by dark. It's just a summer storm."

"The heat," El Piloto added.

Coy looked at his friend, smiling inside. He feels as if he needs to console her too, he thought. After all, that's really what has brought us to this point, although El Piloto doesn't rationalize that kind of thing. Or at least I don't think he does. At that moment the sailor's eyes met Coy's. They were as tranquil and serene as always, and Coy had second thoughts. Maybe he does rationalize such things.

"Tomorrow we'll have to include that additional half mile," Tanger announced. "To forty-seven minutes west."

Coy didn't need a chart. He had 464 engraved on his brain from having studied it so long, and he knew the search area down to the last detail.

"Well, the good news," he said, "is that the depth decreases to between fifty-nine and seventy-nine feet on that side. Everything will go much easier."

"What's the bottom like?"

"Sand and rock, right, Piloto? With clumps of seaweed."

El Piloto nodded. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and stuck one in his mouth. Since Tanger was looking at him, he nodded again.

"There's more seaweed the closer you get to Cabo Negrete," he said. "But that area is clean. Rock and sand, like Coy says. With a little shingle where you find the green lobsters."

Tanger, who was taking a sip of wine, stopped, holding the glass to her lips, and focused on El Piloto.

"What is that about green lobsters?"

El Piloto was concentrating on lighting his cigarette. He made a vague gesture.

"Well, just that." Smoke escaped from between his fingers as he spoke. "Lobsters that are green. It's the only place you find them. Or used to. Nobody catches lobsters around here anymore."

Tanger had set her glass down. She placed it carefully on the cloth, as if afraid of spilling it. She was staring hard at El Piloto, who calmly wound up the wick in his lighter.

"Have you been there?"

"Sure. A long time ago. It was good for fishing when I was young."

Coy remembered something. His friend had told him once about North African lobsters with shells that were green rather than the usual dark red or brown speckled with white. That had been twenty or thirty years ago, when there were still langoustine, clams, tuna, and forty-five-pound groupers in those waters.

"They had a good flavor," El Piloto explained, "but the color put people off."

Tanger was following every word.

"Why? What color was that?"

'A kind of mossy green, very different from the red or bluish color of fresh-caught lobsters, or that dark green of the African or American lobster." El Piloto may have smiled behind the tobacco smoke. "They weren't very appetizing, which is why the fishermen ate them themselves, or sold the tails already cooked."

"Do you remember the place?"

"Sure." Tanger's interest was beginning to make El Piloto uncomfortable. He used the excuse of drawing on his cigarette to take longer and longer pauses, and to look at Coy. "Cabo de Agua abeam and the headland of Junco Grande around ten degrees north."

"What's the depth?"

"Shallow. Sixty-some feet. Lobsters are usually in deeper waters, but mere were always a few around there."

"Did you dive there?"                                                                                                                                    -

Again El Piloto glanced at Coy. Tell me where this is going, his eyes said. Coy turned his hands palm up—I don't have the least fucking idea.

"Those days we didn't have the diving equipment we have now," El Piloto answered finally. "Fishermen set out reed traps or trammel nets, and if they got lost they stayed below."

"Below," she repeated.

Then she was silent. After a pause, she reached for her glass of wine, but had to set it down because her hand was trembling. "What is it?" Coy asked.

He couldn't understand her mood or her trembling—nothing about Tanger's sudden interest in lobsters. It was one of the dishes on the menu, and he'd watched her pass over it without a flicker of interest.

She laughed. A strange, quiet laugh. A sort of chortle, unexpectedly sardonic, shaking her head as if enjoying a joke she'd just told. She put her hands to her temples—she might have been in sudden pain—and looked back toward the bay, now gray but lighter where choppy waves foamed under incessant bursts of wind. The filtered light outside accentuated the blued steel of her eyes. Absorbed. Or dazed.

"Lobsters," she murmured. "Green lobsters."

Now she was shivering, with a laugh too close to a sob. With a new attempt, she had spilled wine on the tablecloth. I hope she hasn't lost it, Coy thought with alarm. I hope all this shit hasn't pushed her over the edge, and instead of taking her back to the Dei Gloria we end up stopping by the loony bin. He dabbed at the wine with his napkin, then put a hand on her shoulder. He could feel her trembling.

"Calm down," he whispered.

"I am completely calm," she said. "I have never been more calm in my life."

"What the hell's going on?"

She had stopped laughing, or sobbing, or whatever she'd been doing, though her eyes were still on the ocean. Finally the shivering stopped. She sighed deeply and looked at El Piloto with a strange expression before leaning across the table and planting a kiss on the astounded sailor's face. She was smiling, radiant, when she turned back to Coy.

"That's where the Dei Gloria is! Where the green lobsters are."

RIPPLED sea, nearly flat, and a gentle breeze. Not a cloud in the sky. The Carpanta was rolling softly about two and a half miles off the coast, with her anchor chain falling straight down from the sheave. Cabo de Agua lay off the beam and Junco Grande ahead, ten degrees to the northeast. The sun wasn't high, but it burned into Coy's back when he bent down to check the pressure gauge on the cylinder: sixteen liters of compressed air, reserve above that, harness ready. He checked the valve and then fitted over it the regulator that would provide air at a pressure varying with the depth, compensating for increasing atmospheres on his body. Without that apparatus to equalize the internal pressure, a diver would be crushed, or would explode like a balloon filled with too much air. He opened the valve wide and then turned it back three-quarters. The mouthpiece was an old Nemrod; it smelled like rubber and talcum powder when he put it in his mouth to test it. Air circulated noisily through the membranes. Everything was in order.

'A half hour at sixty-five feet," El Piloto reminded him.

Coy nodded as he put on the neoprene vest, weight belt, and emergency life vest. Tanger was standing holding onto the backstay, watching in silence. She was wearing her black Olympic-style suit, fins, a diving mask, and a snorkel. She had spent most of the evening and part of the night explaining about the green lobsters.

She went over it backward and forward, questioning El Piloto exhaustively, making pen and paper sketches, and calculating distances and depths. Lobsters' shells, she had told them, have mimetic properties. As nature does with many other species, it provides those crustaceans with the ability to camouflage themselves as a means of defense. So they tend to adapt to their habitat. It had been proven that lobsters that live around sunken iron ships often acquire the rusty red hues of deteriorating metal plates. And the mossy green El Piloto had described coincided exactly with the color bronze acquires after long immersion in the sea.

"What bronze?" Coy had asked.

"The bronze of the guns."

Coy had his doubts. It all sounded too much like the Crab with the Golden Claws, or some other adventure. But they weren't living in a Tintin comic book. At least he wasn't.

"You said yourself, and we checked it carefully, that the Dei Gloria's guns were iron. There weren't any great quantities of bronze on board the brigantine."

Tanger's expression was tranquil and superior, as at other times when she seemed to imply that he hadn't zipped his fly, or that he was an idiot.

"That's right. The guns on the Dei Gloria were iron, but the Chergui's weren't. The xebec carried twelve guns—four six-pounders, eight four-pounders, and those four pedreros, remember? They had come from the Flamme, an old French corvette. And those twelve guns were bronze." She removed the plan of the xebec from the bulkhead and tossed it on the table in front of Coy. "That's in the documents Lucio Gamboa gave us in Cadiz. There are nearly fifteen tons of bronze down there."

Coy exchanged a look with El Piloto, who was merely listening, offering no objections. As for the rest, Tanger continued, it was obvious. The two ships had gone down in close proximity. Because of the explosion that finished the Chergui, it was likely that bits of the corsair were scattered around the main wreck. Since one of the components of the bronze guns was copper, the weapons had begun to take on that characteristic undersea coloration, which was then adopted by the lobsters that lived around the wreckage and in the mouths of the guns. There was an additional and very encouraging circumstance. The most important, really. If the lobsters had adopted the color of the bronze, that meant the area of dispersion was reasonably compact, and that the wreckage was not covered by mud or sand.

COY heard a splash and saw that Tanger was no longer by the backstay. She had jumped into the water and swum around the stern of the Carpanta, wearing her mask and respirator. She wasn't going to dive with him but wait at the surface, watching the bubbles to keep track of his location. The radius within which he planned to explore was difficult to maintain while tethered to the sailboat with a safety line. Coy readied himself, knife on his right calf, depth meter and watch on one wrist and compass on the other, then went to the edge of the stern step. Sitting with his feet in the water, he put on the fins, spit onto the glass of his mask, and put it on after rinsing it in the sea. He lifted his arms so El Piloto could place the cylinder of compressed air on his back, and tightened the straps and put the mouthpiece in his mouth. Air whistled in his ears as it circulated through the regulator. He turned on one side, protecting the glass of his mask with his hand, and fell backward into the sea.

THE water was very cold, too cold for the time of year. Maps of the currents indicated a gentle flow from northeast to southwest, with a difference of five or six degrees compared to the general temperature of the water. Coy felt his skin contract with the unpleasant sensation of cold water beneath his neoprene vest; it would take a few minutes to warm to his body temperature. He took a couple of slow, deep breaths to test the regulator. With his head half out of the water he could see El Piloto standing there over the stern of the Carpanta. He sank down a little, looking around at the blue panorama surrounding him. Near the surface, with the sun's rays lighting the clear, quiet water, there was good visibility. About thirty feet, he calculated. He could see the black keel of the Carpanta, with its rudder turned to port and the chain of the anchor descending vertically into the depths. Tanger was swimming nearby, with gentle thrusts of her orange plastic fins. Putting her out of his mind, he concentrated on what he was doing. He looked down to where the blue became darker and more intense, verified the position of the hands on his watch, and began the slow descent toward the bottom. The sound of the air as he breathed through the regulator was deafening, and when the needle of the depth gauge showed fifteen feet, he stopped and pinched his nose beneath the mask, to adapt to the increased pressure on his ears. As he did that, he raised the mask, relieved, and saw bubbles rising from his last exhalation. The sun had turned the surface of the sea into a ceiling of shimmering silver. The black hull of the Carpanta was overhead. Tanger had dived to swim slightly above him, and was looking at him through her mask, her blond hair floating in the water, her slim legs, extended by the fins, treading slowly to maintain her depth near Coy. When he breathed again, another plume of bubbles ascended toward her, and she waved her hand in salute. Then Coy looked down and continued his slow descent through a blue sphere that closed above his head, darkening as he neared the bottom. He made a second stop to compensate for the pressure when the gauge marked forty-six feet. Now the water was a translucid sphere that extinguished all colors but green. He was at that intermediate point where divers, with no point of reference, can become disoriented and suddenly find themselves contemplating bubbles that seem to be falling rather than rising; only logic, if in fact they retain that, reminds them that a bubble of air always rises upward. But he hadn't yet reached that extreme. Shapes began to emerge from the darkness on the floor beneath him, and moments later Coy fell very slowly onto a bed of pale, cold sand near a thick meadow of sea anemones, posidonias, and tall, grasslike seaweed enlivened by darting schools of ghostly fish. The depth meter indicated sixty feet. Coy looked around him through the half-light. Vision was good, and the mild current cleared the water. Within a radius of sixteen to twenty-three feet he could easily make out a landscape of starfish, empty seashells, large spade-shaped bivalves standing upright in the sand, and, marking the boundaries of the submarine meadow, ridges of stone with rudimentary coral formations. Small microorganisms floated past him, pulled by the current. He knew that if he turned on his light, color would return to all those monotone objects magnified through the shatterproof glass of his mask. He breathed deliberately several times, trying to adapt his lungs to the pressure and to oxygenate his blood, and checked his bearings on the compass. His plan was to move fifty or seventy feet to the south and then trace a circle around the Carpanta's anchor, which was to the north, behind him. He began to swim slowly, with gentle movements of his legs and fins, hands at his sides, about a yard above the bottom. His eyes searched the sand, alert for the slightest sign of something buried beneath it—although the bronze guns, Tanger had insisted, had to be exposed. He swam to the edge of the meadow and peered into the seaweed and undulating blades. If there was anything in that thicket it was going to be difficult to find, so he decided to continue exploring the area of bare sand which, though it seemed flat, actually descended in a gentle slope to the southwest, as he confirmed with the depth meter and compass. He was inhaling and exhaling every five seconds, and the sound of air was interspersed with intervals of absolute silence. He concentrated on moving slowly, reducing his physical effort to a minimum. The slower the breathing rhythm, the less air consumption and fatigue, went the old divers' rule, and the more available reserves. And this was going to take a while. With lobsters or without them, this was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

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 the 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 dropped 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.

COY took off the headphones as the distant clock on the city hall struck seven. Its dong-dong-dong seemed to sound the last notes. Sipping lemonade, he continued to watch Tanger, asleep on the mussed bed. Gray light cast faint shadows on the sheet partially covering her. She was sleeping on her side, with one hand out from her body and the other between her pulled-up knees, her back to the uncertain light of dawn. The sweep of her naked hips was a slope of light and shadow on freckled skin, dimpled flesh, chasms, and curves. Motionless in the rocking chair, Coy studied the hidden face, hair falling onto wrinkled sheets that denned the shape of shoulders and back, the waist, the expanse of hips and inner line of thighs seen from behind, the beautiful V of flexed legs, and the soles of her feet. And especially that sleeping hand whose fingers lay between her thighs, very close to the intimation of pubic hair, golden and shadowed with darker tones.

Coy stood up and walked closer to the bed, to fix the image in his memory forever. The dresser mirror on the opposite wall reflected Tanger's other hand, resting on the pillow, the tip of a knee, and Coy himself integrated into the picture, a portion of his body reflected in the quicksilver of the mirror—one arm and one hand, the line of a naked hip, the physical certainty that the image belonged to him and no other, and that it was more than a play of mirrors in his memory He regretted that he didn't have a camera to record the details. So he made an effort to engrave on his retina the half-waking, half-sleeping mystery that so obsessed him, the intuition of a mutable, all too brief moment that might perhaps explain everything. There was a secret, and the secret was in plain view, barely disguised in the obvious. It was another matter to isolate and understand it, though, and he knew he would never have enough time, and that in an instant drunken and capricious gods, unaware of their ability to create as they slept, would yawn and awake and everything would dissipate as if it had never existed. Possibly, he thought with desolation, that fleeting moment would never be repeated with such clarity, that flash of lucidity capable of placing things in their proper perspective, of balancing void, horror, and beauty. Of reconciling the man reflected in the mirror with the word "life." But Tanger began to stir, and Coy, who knew that he was on the verge of grasping the key to the enigma, felt that one-tenth of a second too late or too soon would distort the connection between scene and observer, like the fuzzy focus of an image impossible to decipher. And in the mirror, beyond the foreshortening of his own body and that of the woman lying on the bed, ships in the rain were once again reflections of black ships on a millenary sea.

Tanger awoke, and with her all the women in the world. She woke warm and lazy, her hair stuck to her face and her lips parted. The sheet slipped from her shoulders and back, uncovering the extended arm, the line of armpit to dorsal muscles, and the firm indication of a breast compressed beneath the weight of her body. The back tanned by the sun, lighter below the line of her swimsuit, appeared full length and, as Coy watched, the small of that back arched and Tanger emerged from sleep like a beautiful, tranquil animal, eyes squinting against the square of gray light in the window, discovering Coy's proximity with a smile first of surprise, then warmth. Suddenly, however, the eyes were serious and grave, aware of her nakedness and the scrutiny of which she was the object. Finally the challenge—turning, slowly and deliberately, onto her back before his eyes. Now her body was entirely free of the sheet, one leg stretched out and the other bent, one hand near her sex without hiding it, the other limp on the sheet, the lines of her stomach converging toward the inner face of her thighs like signals of no return. Motionless. And always the unwavering stare, the eyes fixed on the man observing her. After a few moments, she slid over to one side of the bed and rose to her knees before the mirror, showing him her naked back and hips. With her lips almost touching the glass, she breathed on it until it clouded over, and, without taking her eyes from the image of Coy, she left the print of her lips in the mist obscuring their reflection. Then she got out of bed, slipped into a T-shirt, and sat at the other side of the table, near the platter of fruit. She peeled an orange and began to eat it without separating the sections, biting into it, juice dripping from her lips and chin and hands. Coy sat down across from her. Tanger looked at him the same way she had when she was lying on the bed, but now with a smile. She held up her wrists and licked the juice trickling down to her elbows, and the shredded membrane and pulp in her fingers disappeared into her mouth. Coy shook his head as if he were refuting something. He sighed as if all his sadness and resignation were escaping in a moan. Very deliberately, he went around the table, took her hands, and just as she was, sitting there in a T-shirt barely covering her torso and with the taste of orange on her lips, he went in search of the road to Ithaca that lay on the other shore of the sea ancient and gray as memory.

THEY returned to the Dei Gloria as soon as the storm had passed, after the last clouds fled with dawn, streaking the horizon with red. Once again the sea was intensely blue and the sun blazed on the white houses along the coast, leading a gentle breeze by the hand. It was a shift for the better according to El Piloto. That same day, with vertical rays casting his shadow on the surface, Coy dived again, descending from a marker buoy—one of the Carpanta's side fenders—attached to an anchored one-hundred-foot line that had a knot every ten feet. He touched bottom a short distance off the port beam of the sunken vessel, more or less at the waist, and swam along the hull to check whether the grid they had laid before the storm was still in place. Then he consulted the chart he'd brought down—wax pencil on a plastic tablet—calculated distances with the help of a tape measure, and began to clear away debris on the companion, crusted with marine growth. Using an iron crowbar and a pick, he tore away rotted planking, which collapsed in a blinding cloud. He worked slowly, trying not to do anything that would increase his air intake. Occasionally he moved back a little to rest and let the sediment settle enough for him to see. He succeeded in breaking through the companion, and when the water cleared he looked inside as he'd done the day before when he peered into the hold of the bulk carrier. This time he cautiously thrust in the arm holding the light and illuminated the chaotic innards of the brigantine, where fish disoriented by the brightness darted about madly, seeking ways to escape. The light returned the natural colors to everything, annulling the monotonous green of deep water. There were sea anemones, starfish, red and white coral formations, multicolor seaweed swaying gently, and the glittering scales of fish slicing through the beam like silver knives. Coy saw a wooden stool that seemed to be well preserved. It had fallen against a bulkhead and was covered with some green growth, but he could distinguish the carved spiral legs. Straight down from the opening he'd made was something that looked like a crusted spoon, and beside it was the lower part of an oil lamp, the brass clotted with tiny snails and half buried in a small mound of sand that had filtered through the rotted deck. Shooting the beam in a half-circle, Coy saw the remains of what looked like a collapsed cabinet in one corner, and in a heap of broken planks he could identify coils of cordage covered with brown fuzz, and objects of metal and clay—tankards, jugs, a few plates and bottles, all of it covered with a very fine layer of sediment. In other aspects, however, the panorama was not very encouraging. The beams that supported the deck had collapsed in many places, and half the cabin was a jumble of wood and sand that had sifted in through the broken frame. The beam of light revealed openings large enough to enable him to move around cautiously inside, as long as the frames and beams that supported the structure of the hull did not give way. It would be more prudent, he decided, to tear away as much of the planking of the poop as possible, and work from the outside, in the open, pulling away the timberwork with the help of air flotation devices that would reduce the effort involved. That would be slower, but it was preferable to having him or El Piloto trapped in the wreckage at the first careless move.

With great care Coy removed the tank of compressed air, lifting it forward over his head. He took a large mouthful of air and set the cylinder on the deck with the mouthpiece anchored beneath the valves. Then he pushed half his body through the open hole over the companionway, careful not to get hooked on anything, and moved toward the half-buried lamp until he could touch it. It was very light and came free from the bottom with little difficulty. At that moment he saw the eyes of a large grouper observing him open-mouthed from an opening beneath a bulkhead. He waved a hand in salute and gradually worked his way backward until he was again out on the deck, careful not to release the last bit of oxygen, which he would need to clear the mouthpiece of the regulator and start taking air again. He clamped the mouthpiece in his teeth, exhaled into the bubbling regulator, and breathed fresh air without a problem. He slipped the cylinder back over his head and tightened the harness. On his wrist, El Piloto's waterproof Seiko indicated he'd been down thirty-five minutes. It was time to go up, pausing at the knot that marked ten feet and waiting the seven minutes required by the decompression tables. He tugged five times on the line that was tied to a cleat on the Carpanta and began to swim upward, carrying the lamp in his hands, going slower than his own bubbles, seeing the water change from dark greenish shadows to green, and from green to blue. Before he got to the surface he stopped at the ten-footmark, holding onto the knot in the line, with the black shadow of the motionless sailboat sitting overhead on a surface like polished glass. The glass shattered into foam as Tanger, wearing a diving mask, her hair flowing in the water, jumped in and stroked down toward Coy. She swam around him like an exotic siren, and the light filtering from above turned her freckled skin pale, making her appear naked and vulnerable. Coy showed her the lamp from the Dei Gloria and saw her eyes widen with wonder behind the glass of her mask.

FOR four days, taking turns, Coy and El Piloto tore away part of the brigantine's deck at the level of the captain's cabin. They stripped it away, removing rotted planks from top to bottom with crowbars and picks, taking care not to weaken the structure of the frames and beams that kept the shape of the hull beneath the poop. To lift large sections of wood they called on Archimedes' principle, using a volume of air equivalent to the weight of the object to be raised. Once the heavy planks were free, they used nylon line with floats resembling plastic parachutes, which they filled with compressed air from reserve bottles tethered off the side of the Carpanta. The work was slow and tiring, and at times the cloud of sediment was so thick that they were forced to rest until the water cleared.

They found human bones. They would come across them trapped in a tangle of planking or half-buried in sand, occasionally with fragments of what had been belts or shoes. Like the skull with an entry wound in a parietal that Coy found beneath a thin layer of sediment near one of the gun ports and quickly reburied in the sand, moved by an atavistic impulse of respect. The sailors of the Dei Gloria were still there, manning their sunken ship, and as he moved around amid the ruined wood of the brigantine, his only company the sound of the regulator, Coy could feel them close by in the green semidarkness.

There was an accounting every night beneath the midship cabin light, in meetings that resembled war councils, headed by Tanger with the plans of the brigantine spread out before her, and with Coy and El Piloto in sweatshirts despite the mild temperature, to offset the cold they still felt after so many hours in the water. Then Coy would sleep a heavy sleep barren of dreams or images, and the next morning start diving again. His skin was like soaked garbanzo beans.

On the third day, as he was ascending, ready to stop at the ten-foot mark to purge his blood of dissolved nitrogen, he looked up and felt a jolt. The dark silhouette of another hull lay beside the Carpanta, rocking in the increasing swell. He came to the surface without completing the decompression, with a stab of alarm that intensified when he saw the Guardia Civil patrol boat. It had stopped by to take a look, its crew curious about the Carpanta's immobility. Fortunately, the lieutenant in command was an acquaintance of El Piloto, and the first thing Coy picked up when his head emerged from the water was a calming glance from his friend. Everything was under control. El Piloto and the lieutenant were smoking and talking, passing the wineskin back and forth between boats, while a pair of young Guardias dressed in green fatigues sent definitely unsuspicious looks at Tanger, who was reading on the stem deck in sunglasses, bathing suit, and baseball cap, apparently indifferent to what was happening. The story El Piloto had just finished telling in offhand bits and pieces was about these tourists who liked to dive and had leased his boat. For a lark they were searching for a fishing boat that had sunk a couple of years before in these same waters—the Leo y Vero, out of Torrevieja. His invention had sounded reasonable to the lieutenant, especially when he learned that the man climbing aboard the Carpanta, who looked vaguely surprised but gave him a wave after hanging his tank and harness on the stern ladder, was a native of Cartagena and an officer in the Merchant Marine. The patrol boat pulled away after the lieutenant perfunctorily checked Coys diving license and recommended he renew it, since it had lapsed a year and a half before. As soon as the boat was half a mile away, at the end of a straight white wake, and Tanger had closed the book of which she'd been unable to read a single line, and the three of them had looked at each other with silent relief, Coy jumped back into the water with the bottle of compressed air, sank to the ten-foot mark, and stayed there, surrounded by white and dark jellyfish slowly drifting by in the current, until the nitrogen bubbles formed in his blood by the precipitous rise to the surface had dissipated.

ON the fifth day enough of the brigantine's poop had been removed to allow a first serious exploration. Almost all the deck planking was gone, and the naked structure of the hull at the stern revealed part of the captain's cabin, the remains of an intact bulkhead, and a passengers' locker in the steerage. Working from outside, Coy could undertake the search by sorting through jumbled objects, splintered wood, and residue that formed a layer nearly three feet thick. He dug with gloved hands and a short-handled spade, tossing useless material over the side, away from the hull, moving back again and again to let the sediment settle. He pulled out things that normally would have piqued his curiosity, but that now he simply discarded—assorted tools, pewter jugs, a candelabrum, broken glass and pottery. He came across the large bronze hilt and enormous hand guard of a sword, with the stump of a badly corroded wide blade, a cutlass whose only purpose was to slash human flesh during a boarding operation. He also found a block of musket balls fused together in the shape of the box in which they'd sunk, though the wood itself had disintegrated Buried in sand he found half a door, complete with hinges and a key in its lock, and also balls for the four-pounder, a clump of iron nails hollowed out by rust, and bronze nails that had fared much better. Beneath the loose boards of a cupboard, Coy found Talavera pottery cups and plates that were miraculously clean and intact, so perfect he could read the mark of their makers. He found a clay pipe, two muskets covered with tiny snails, blackened disks that were probably silver coins, the cracked glass of a sand clock, and an articulated brass ruler that had once traced routes on Urrutia's charts. For reasons of security, especially following the visit from the Guardia Civil, they had decided not to bring up any object that could raise suspicion, but Coy made an exception when he unearthed an instrument encrusted with lime. It had originally been composed of wood and metal, although the wood crumbled between his fingers when he shook off the sand, leaving only an arm with metal parts on the upper portion, and an arc below. Deeply moved, he had no difficulty identifying it as the brass or bronze metal parts corresponding to the index bar and the graduated arc of an ancient octant, probably the one the pilot of the Dei Gloria had used to establish their latitude. That was a good trade, he thought. An eighteenth-century octant in exchange for the sextant he had sold in Barcelona. He set it aside where it would be easy to find later. But what truly hit him hard in the gut was what he found in a corner of the locker, fuzzy with minute dark filaments, behind the boards of a chest: a simple length of line, perfectly coiled, with a knot tightened in the last two hitches, just as it had been left by the expert hands of a conscientious sailor who knew his trade. That intact coil of line affected Coy more than anything he had found, including the bones of the Dei Gloria's crew. He bit on his rubber mouthpiece to contain the bitter smile of infinite sadness he felt knot in his throat and mouth the closer they came to the sailors who had died in this shipwreck. Two and a half centuries before, men like him, sailors accustomed to the sea and its dangers, had held those objects in their hands. They had calculated courses with the brass rule, coiled the line, measured the quarters of the watch by turning the sandglass, and shot the stars with the octant. They had climbed to the yards, struggling against a wind fighting to tear them from the shrouds, and had howled their fear and humble courage into the oscillating rigging as they gathered canvas in stiff fingers. They had faced the Atlantic's northwesters and the murderous mistrals and lebeches of the Mediterranean. They had battled gun to gun, hoarse from yelling and gray with powder, before going to the bottom with the resignation of men who do their job well and fight bravely to the end. Now their bones were scattered amid the detritus of the Dei Gloria. And Coy, moving slowly beneath the plume of bubbles rising straight up into that shroudlike darkness, felt like a furtive grave robber violating the peace of a tomb.

LIGHT from the porthole was seesawing on Tanger's naked skin, a small square of sun bobbing up and down with the movement of the boat, slipping down her shoulders and back as she lifted herself from Coy, still breathless, gasping like a fish out of water. Her hair, which days at sea had faded almost white at the tips, was stuck to her face with sweat. Dribbles of sweat ran down her skin, leaving tracks between her breasts and beading on her upper lip and her eyelashes. El Piloto was eighty-five feet below them, working his dive. The nearly vertical sun had turned the cabin into an oven, and Coy, sitting on the bench beneath the companionway to the deck, let his hands slip down Tanger's sweaty flanks. They had made love right there, impulsively, when he had taken off his diving vest and was looking for a towel after his half hour at the site of the Dei Gloria and she walked by, brushing against him accidentally. Suddenly his fatigue was gone and she was quiet, looking at him the way she sometimes did, with that silent thoughtfulness, and an instant later they were locked together there at the foot of the companionway, attacking one another furiously, as if the emotion they shared was hate. Now he was leaning against the back rest, drained, and slowly, inexorably, she was withdrawing, shifting her weight to one side and freeing Coy's moist flesh. That small square of sun was sliding down her body, and her gaze, which was again metallic blue, dark blue, navy-blue, the blue of blued steel, was directed toward the light and the sun tumbling through the opening from the deck. From where he was still sprawled on the bench, Coy watched her walk naked up the ladder, as if she were leaving forever. Despite the heat he felt a chill crawl across his skin, precisely in those places that held a trace of her, and the thought came: one day it will be the last time. One day she will leave me, or we'll die, or I'll get old. One day she will walk out of my life, or I out of hers. One day I won't have anything but images to remember, and then one day I won't even be alive to reconstruct those images. One day it will all be erased, and maybe today is the last time. Which was why he was watching her closely as she climbed up the companionway and disappeared onto the deck, engraving every last detail in his memory. The last component in the image was the drop of semen that slid down the inside of a thigh, which, when it reached her knee, reflected the amber flash of a ray of sun. Then she was out of his field of vision, and Coy heard the splash of someone diving into the sea.

THEY spent that night anchored above the Dei Gloria. The needle of the wind gauge fluctuated indecisively atop the mast and the mirror-flat water reflected an intermittent spark from the Cabo de Palos lighthouse seven miles to the northeast. So many stars were out that the sky seemed right on top of the sea, so many it was actually difficult to see individual stars. Coy was sitting on the stern deck, studying them and tracing imaginary lines that would allow him to identify them. The summer triangle was beginning to rise in the southeast, and he could see tendrils of Berenice's hair, the last to disappear of all the spring constellations. To the east, bright above a landscape black as ink, the belt of the hunter Orion was very visible, and following a straight line from Aldebaran to him, above Canis Major, he saw light that had traveled eight years from Sirius, the most brilliant binary star in the heavens, there where the Milky Way trailed to the south toward the regions of the Swan and the Eagle. All that worid of light and mythic images moved slowly overhead, and he, as if in the center of a unique sphere, was part of its silence and infinite peace.

"You're not teaching me the names of the stars anymore, Coy."

He hadn't heard her until she was at his side. She sat close but not touching him, her feet on the stern steps.

"I've taught you all the ones I know."

Water splashed as she put her feet in the water. At regular intervals the flicker from the lighthouse affirmed the hazy outline of her shadow.

"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.

Coy veered sharply to avoid the pilot's launch approaching on the starboard beam, on its way to one of the tankers waiting off the Escombreras refinery. He had been distracted for a moment, and from the bow he could feel the inquisitive look of El Piloto. In truth he was thinking about Horacio Kiskoros. He could sense the dwarf's presence nearby. And he was thinking about Kiskoros's boss. With the emeralds on board, the curtain was about to fall on the last act, and Coy could not believe that Nino Palermo would allow the drama to end this way. He remembered the Gibraltar-ian's warnings, his determination not to be left out of the deal. And the bastard was someone who would carry out his threats. Coy looked at Tanger, still leaning against the companion, motionless, eyes turned in the direction they were heading. She did not seem worried, but far away, immersed in the green glow of her dream. Coy felt a growing uneasiness, as when the sea is calm and the sky clear but a black cloud appears on the horizon and the wind in the rigging rises suspiciously. With apprehension he scanned the gray mole where they would be docking. When it came to Palermo, the question was simply how and when.

The lebeche was blowing at a right angle to the mole, so Coy approached slighdy forward and a litde windward in the direction of its far end. At three lengths he put her dead center as the anchor manned by El Piloto fell into the water with a loud splash. When he felt it hold the bottom, Coy accelerated a little, turning the wheel as hard to starboard as he could, so the Carpanta would turn back over her anchor, with the stern to the berth. Then he set the wheel at straight, and reverse, and as he listened to the links of the anchor chain running out over the bow sheave, he backed, paying out chain toward the point of the mole. Within a half-length from the point he killed the motor, went to the stern, picked up the end of one of the lines tied to the cleats and jumped ashore to halt the gentle drift of the Carpanta toward the dock. While El Piloto took in a little chain to hold the boat in place at the other end. Coy secured the mooring line to one of the bollards—a small, rusted, antique gun sunk to the trunnions in concrete—then brought a second line to another. Now the sailboat was immobile, surrounded by old half-scrapped hulls and abandoned superstructures. Tanger was standing in the cockpit, and as her eyes met Coy's, he saw they were deadly serious. "It's over," he said.

Tanger didn't answer. She was staring into the distance, toward the other end of the mole, and Coy turned his head in the same direction to glance over his shoulder. There, sitting among the remains of a shattered lifeboat, looking at his watch as if congratulating himself for arriving punctually at a meticulously planned appointment, was Nino Palermo.

"I have to admit," said the hunter of sunken ships, "you've done good work"

The sun had just slipped behind San Julian, and shadows were lengthening in the ships' graveyard. Palermo had taken off his jacket and folded it carefully over one of the broken seats of the lifeboat, and he had turned the cuffs of his shirt back a couple of times, exposing the heavy watch on his left wrist. They formed an almost cordial-looking group, the five of them there beneath the bridge of the old packet, conversing like good friends. And the number was five, because in addition to Coy, Tanger, El Piloto, and Palermo himself, there was Horacio Kiskoros. In truth his presence was decisive, because had he not been among them it was unlikely that the conversation would have been conducted, as in fact it was, in such a civilized vein. An additional influence may have been the fact that for the occasion Kiskoros had exchanged his knife for a chrome pistol with a mother-of-pearl grip, a pretty little thing that might have appeared inoffensive had the inordinately large eye of its barrel not been pointed in the direction of the Carpanta's crew. At Coy in particular, for whose temperamental fits Kiskoros and Palermo seemed to harbor some resentment.

"I never thought you'd get it done," Palermo continued. "Really, you... My, my... Amateurs, eh? Well, you're really something. Well done, I swear to God. Well done."

He seemed sincere in his admiration. He bobbed his head to give emphasis to his words, shaking the gray ponytail and jingling the gold hanging around his neck. At times he turned to Kiskoros, calling on him as witness. Small, slicked-back hair, bandbox neat in his light checked jacket and bow tie, the Argentine seconded his boss while managing to keep an eye on Coy.

"You deserve a lot of credit," the treasure hunter continued, "for finding that ship. With the means at your disposal, it's really ... Well. I underestimated you, senora. And this sailor here, too." He smiled like a shark circling live bait. "I myself... God almighty! I couldn't have done it better."

Coy looked at El Piloto. The gray eyes were alert, with the fatalism of someone waiting for the right signal to act, one way or another; to throw himself on these guys, running the risk of taking a bullet, or stand there and watch the bullets come, waiting for someone to decide. You deal the cards, that look said. But Coy thought he'd got his friend in too deep already, so he slowly closed his eyelids. Play it cool. He watched El Piloto close his in turn, and when he looked back at Kiskoros, it was obvious that the dwarf had been observing them, and that the barrel of the pistol was tracing arcs that paralleled the movement of his eyes. The hero of the Malvinas, Coy decided, wasn't born yesterday.

"I'm afraid," Palermo concluded, "Deadman's Chest is taking over the operation."

Tanger stared at him impassively. Cold as a lemon snow cone, Coy could see. The iron of her eyes was darker and harder than ever. He wondered where she had hidden her revolver. Unfortunately, not on her. Not in those jeans and T-shirt. Pity.

"What operation?" she asked.

Coy watched with admiration. Palermo raised his hands a little, taking in the scene, the boat. He almost seemed to include the ocean.

"The recovery operation. I've been watching you through my binoculars the last two days, from the coast. You get the picture? And now we're partners."

"Partners in what?"

"Come on. What do you think? The ship. You've done your part— You've done it splendidly. Now... God almighty. This is a matter for professionals."

"We don't need any help from you. I told you that."

"You told me, that's true. But you're wrong. You do need me. Either I'm... God almighty. Either I'm in or I blow the whole thing for you and your two trained seals."

"That's no way to form a partnership."

"I understand your point of view. And believe me, I regret all this business with the pistol. But your gorilla..." He hooked his thumb at Coy. "Well, I swore he wasn't going to surprise me a third time. Nor does Horacio have very fond memories of the gentleman ..." Automatically he turned his bicolored eyes on Coy with a mixture of rancor and curiosity. 'A little too aggressive, don't you think? Too aggressive."

Kiskoros's mustache twisted into a smile that dripped vitriol. His sallow face still showed signs of the encounter at Aguilas beach, and it was perhaps for that reason that he seemed less sanguine than his boss. The pistol moved suggestively in his hand, and Palermo smiled at the gesture.

"You see." Again that sharklike expression. "He's dying to put a bullet in your belly."

"I'd rather," Coy parried, "he saved it for the whoring mother...."

"Don't be crude," the Gibraltarian interrupted. He seemed truly scandalized. "Just because Horacio is pointing a pistol at you, that doesn't give you the right to insult him."

"I'm talking about your mother. The whoring mother who brought you into the world."

"Well. I confess that now I wouldn't mind shooting you myself. But the fact is... Well. That makes noise, you know?" It seemed as if Palermo was sincerely interested in having Coy understand. "Noise is bad for my business. Besides, it might upset the lady. And I'm tired of all this squabbling. All I want is to reach an agreement. For everyone to get his... Can we do that? End this thing peacefully?" Palermo had picked up his jacket and was inviting them to follow him. "Let's go get comfortable."

He set off toward the hull of the half-scrapped bulk carrier without turning to see whether they were following. Kiskoros simply flipped the barrel of the pistol, indicating the direction they should take. So Tanger, Coy, and El Piloto began walking behind Palermo. They didn't have their hands in the air, and the Argentine's attitude was not particularly threatening. But when they reached the foot of the ladder that led to the quarterdeck and Coy paused a moment, hesitating, and looked at El Piloto, in half a second Kiskoros was holding the pistol to Coy's head.

"You don't want to die young," he whispered very low, with intimations of the tango.

They crossed wet, ruined passageways with cables hanging from the ceilings and semi-dismantled bulkheads, and then down between oxidized floor plates and the bare thick strakes as they descended the companionway into a hold.

"Now we're going to have a long conversation," Palermo was saying. "We'll spend the night chatting, and in the morning we can... Yes. All go back there together. I have a boat with equipment waiting in Alicante. Deadman's Chest at your service. Absolute discretion. Guaranteed efficiency." He directed a mocking smile at Coy. "Oh, yes. My chauffeur is waiting there with the equipment. He sends his greetings."

"Go back? Where?" Coy asked.

Palermo laughed his canine snort.

"Don't ask stupid questions."

Coy stood with his mouth open. He looked at Tanger, who showed no expression at all.

"Is there another option?" she asked as if Palermo was selling encyclopedias door to door. Her voice sounded about five degrees below zero.

"Yes," Palermo replied as he switched on a flashlight. "But it would not be very pleasant for you. Watch your head. That's it. And put your feet here, please. Yes..." His voice rang hollow, echoing in the depths of the metal hold. "That option would be for Kiskoros to lock the three of you up here for an indefinite time "

He paused as he shone the flashlight on Tanger's feet to help her reach the bottom. The hold smelled of rusted iron and dirt mixed with the faint aromas of wood, grain, rotted fruit, and salt, cargoes it once held.

"Or," he added, "he can also put a bullet in your head."

Once everyone was down, with Kiskoros and his pistol trained on the three guests, the seeker of sunken ships used his gold Dupont to light the wick of a paraffin lamp that flared into a stingy red flame. Then he turned off his flashlight, hung his jacket on a hook, and put the lighter back in his pocket before smiling around at the assemblage.

"Move away from the ladder. Everyone over there toward the back. That's it. Make yourselves comfortable."

In that instant, Coy understood everything. He doesn't know, he told himself. This asshole and his dwarf still don't know that the emeralds are already on the Carpanta, and that none of this monkey business is necessary, because all he has to do is go pick them up. Again he looked at Tanger, amazed at her cool. She looked annoyed at most, the way she would at the window of an incompetent clerk, waiting to make a deposit. This is ending, he thought bitterly. I don't know how the hell it will end, but it's ending. And here I am still admiring the stuff that woman's made of.

"Now we will have our little talk," said Palermo.

Coy saw that Tanger was doing something strange: looking at her watch.

"I don't have time to talk," she said.

The man from Gibraltar seemed nonplussed. For a count of three he was mute with surprise. Then he smiled artificially.

"You don't say." The white teeth stood out in the greasy light of the paraffin lamp. "Well, I'm afraid..."

His expression changed. He was studying Tanger as if seeing her for the first time. Then he looked at Kiskoros, El Piloto, and finally at Coy.

"Don't tell me that..." he murmured. "It isn't possible." He took a few steps, put one hand on the ladder, and looked up at the small rectangle of fading light in the hatchway. "No, it isn't possible," he repeated.

Again he turned to Tanger. His voice was so hoarse it didn't sound like him.

"Where are the emeralds? Where?"

"The emeralds don't concern you," said Tanger.

"Don't be stupid. You have them? Don't tell me you already have them! That's... God almighty!"

The treasure hunter burst out laughing, and this time, instead of snuffling like a weary dog, he let out a laugh that shook the iron of the bulkheads. An admiring, stupefied laugh.

"I take my hat off, word of honor. And I have to think Horacio

is taking his off, too. I'm so damn stupid I swear to you... How about that? Well done." He contemplated Tanger with intense curiosity. "My respects, sehora. Astonishingly well done."

He had pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket and was lighting one. The flame of the gas lighter dilated the pupil of the brown eye more than the green one. It was obvious he was giving himself time to think.

"I hope you won't take this the wrong way," he concluded, "but our partnership has just been dissolved."

He exhaled smoke slowly and regarded the three of them through half-closed eyes, as if trying to determine what to do with them. Coy realized, with desolate resignation, that the moment had come. That this was the point at which he would have to make decisions before others made them for him, and that whether or not they were his it was possible that a few minutes from now he would be sprawled face down with a hole in his chest. In any case, he shouldn't let that happen without testing his luck, without asking for another card. Hit me. Hit me again. LLC: Law of the Last Card. Until the hull is split open on the rocks or water covers the deck, you're still afloat.

"You can't win every time; you have to understand that," Palermo was commenting. 'And there are times you never win."

Coy exchanged a glance with El Piloto, and saw the same resigned decision. I'm with you. We'll meet in La Obrera and toss down a few rums. Or somewhere. As for Tanger, from this point on there was nothing he could do except make it easier for her to get up the ladder to the deck. After that, everyone had to swim for himself. In the end she would have to manage without his hand when her turn came in the dark. He was going to cast off long before that. He was going to do that right now, backed by El Piloto, who he knew was waiting, ready for the fight.

"Don't even think about it." Palermo had guessed his intention and shot a warning look at Kiskoros.

Coy calculated the distance separating him from the Argentine, his pulse pounding and his stomach hollow. Two yards was two bullets, and he didn't know whether with all the ballast in his body he could reach the dwarf, or what condition he would be in if he did. As for El Piloto, Coy was sure Palermo wasn't carrying a weapon, but when the moment came, neither El Piloto nor Palermo would be his concern anymore. Tanger had said it beside Zas's body: We all die alone.

"We've wasted too much time," Tanger said suddenly.

To everyone's stupefaction, she started walking toward the companionway as if she had decided to leave a boring social gathering, ignoring Kiskoros and his pistol. Palermo's hand, which at that moment was raising the cigarette to his lips to take a drag, froze in midair.

"Are you crazy? Don't you realize ... Wait!"

By now Tanger was at the foot of the companionway, hand on the rail, and there was no question that she was ready to take her leave. She had half turned and was looking around, ignoring Palermo, as if wondering whether she'd forgotten something.

"Stay right there or you'll regret it," said the Gibraltarian.

"Leave me alone."

Palermo raised the hand with the cigarette, motioning Kiskoros not to fire. The Argentine's face was a somber mask in the light of the paraffin lamp. Coy looked at El Piloto and got ready to make his move. Two yards, he remembered. Maybe, thanks to her, I can cover those two yards without getting shot.

"I swear..." Palermo was saying.

Suddenly the words stopped, and the cigarette dropped from his hand to the floor. And Coy, who was prepared to lunge forward, felt his muscles freeze. Kiskoros's pistol had described a precise semicircle and was now pointed at Palermo. Palermo was stuttering a few indistinguishable sounds, something in the vein of, What the hell are you doing? and What the fuck is going on? without completing a single word, and then he stood inanely staring at the cigarette smoldering between his feet, as if it might provide an explanation, before looking back toward the pistol, prepared to confirm that it was all a trick of his senses, and that the weapon was pointing in the right direction... But the black hole of the barrel was still on a line with the belly of the treasure hunter, and he was looking at each of them in turn—at Coy, El Piloto, and last Tanger. One by one, taking his time, as if waiting for someone to clarify in detail what this was all about. Then he turned to Kiskoros.

"May I ask what the fuck you think you're doing?"

The Argentine did not change expression, elegant and fastidious as ever, not moving a hair, with the chrome and mother-of-pearl pistol in his right hand, his diminutive silhouette projected onto the bulkhead by the torch. His face was not that of an evil man, or a traitor or lunatic. Very decorous, very calm, with his slicked-back hair and his mustache, looking more dwarfish, more tango-world Buenos Aires, and more melancholy than ever, confronting his boss. Or, by all indications, his ex-boss.

Palermo again looked down the row, but this time he stopped on Tanger.

"Someone... God almighty. Can anyone tell me what's going on here?"

Coy was asking himself the same question, aware of a strange hollow feeling in his stomach. Tanger hadn't moved from the foot of the companionway, her hand still on the railing. Slowly it dawned on him: this wasn't a ruse, she was actually going to leave.

"What is happening," she said very slowly "is that here is where we all say good-bye."

The void inside Coy spread to his legs. His blood, if in fact it was circulating, must have been moving so slowly that his pulse was imperceptible. Without realizing what he was doing, he gradually slumped down, until he was sitting on his haunches with his back against the bulkhead.

"Why, you sonofabitching..." Palermo spit out.

He was looking at Kiskoros as if hypnotized. The reality had finally set in. And the more his legs trembled, the more contorted his face became.

"You're working for her," he said.

He seemed more astounded than indignant, as if the first thing to be denounced was his own stupidity. Still silent and unmoving, Kiskoros let the pistol pointed at the Gibraltarian confirm that view.

"For how long?" Palermo wanted to know.

He had asked Tanger, who in the reddish light of the torch seemed about to disappear in the shadows. Coy saw her make a vague gesture, as if the date the Argentine had decided to turn coat was of no importance. Again she consulted her watch.

"Give me eight hours," she said to Kiskoros in a neutral tone.

He nodded, his vigil of Palermo never relaxing, but when El Piloto made a casual movement the pistol moved and covered him as well. The sailor looked at Coy, stupefied, and Coy shrugged. The line dividing the two sides had really been clear to him for some time. On his haunches in the corner he was examining his feelings. To his surprise, he wasn't experiencing anger or bitterness, but rather the materialization of a certainty he had often sensed but ignored, like a current of icy water that penetrates the heart and begins to solidify in layer after layer of frost. It had all been there, he realized. It had all been clear from the beginning, in depth readings, coastlines, shoals, and reefs marked on the strange nautical chart of recent weeks. She had given him the information that should have prepared him, but he hadn't known how—or hadn't wanted—to interpret the signs. Now it was night, with a lee shore, and nothing was going to get him out of this.

"Tell me one thing," he said, crouched against the bulkhead, unaware of the others, his words for Tanger alone. "Tell me just one thing."

He asked with a calm that surprised even him. Tanger, who had started up the steps, stopped and turned toward him. 'All right, one," she conceded.

Perhaps I owe you at least one answer, the gesture said. I've paid you in other ways, sailor. But maybe I owe you that. Then I will walk up this companionway, and everything will follow its course, and we will be at peace.

Coy pointed to Kiskoros.

"Was he already working for you when he killed Zas?"

She didn't answer, merely stared at him. The dancing light of the paraffin lamp cast dark shadows on her freckled skin. She turned, as if to leave without answering him, but then seemed to change her mind.

"Do you have the answer to the riddle of the knights and the knaves?"

"Yes," he admitted. "There are no knights on the island. Everyone lies."

Tanger considered that for an instant. He had never seen her smile such a strange smile.

'It may be that you arrived on the island too late."

Then she went up the stairs and vanished into the shadows. Coy knew that he had already lived that scene. A ray of sun and a drop of amber, he remembered. He saw Kiskoros's pistol, Palermo's desolate expression, and El Piloto s taciturn immobility before he again rested his head against the iron bulkhead. Now his certainty and his loneliness were so intense they seemed perfect. Maybe, he reflected, he was wrong after all, and the line between knights and knaves wasn't all that dear. Maybe, in her own way she had been whispering the truth all the time.

ALL things considered, betrayal held a unique pleasure for the victim. He dug into the wound, relishing his own agony. And like jealousy, betrayal could be more intensely savored by the one who suffered its consequences than by the one responsible for it. There was something perversely gratifying in the strange moral liberation that came from being betrayed, or in the painful memory of noting the warnings, the perfidious satisfaction of confirming suspicions. Coy, who had just discovered all this, thought about a lot of things that night, sitting beside El Piloto and Nino Palermo with his back against the bulkhead in the hold of the half-scrapped bulk carrier, and facing the pistol of Horatio Kiskoros.

"It's a question of patience," the Argentine commented. 'As a compatriot poet of mine said: With the dawn, every thief is with his aged mother."

Nearly an hour had passed. When his former boss had stopped insulting him and reproaching him for his deceit, the hero of the Malvinas had relaxed a little, and perhaps in memory of old times he had revealed a few confidences, speaking in a low voice, aided by the torch, the place, and the long wait. It wasn't, Coy decided, that he was so loquacious, but that like everyone else he had a certain need to justify himself. They learned how when Kiskoros had taken Palermo's first message to Tanger, she had changed the panorama of his loyalties with admirable skill and convincing reflection during a long conversation—man to man, Kiskoros emphasized—in which she expounded the mutual advantages of their working together. Palermo would be out of the picture, and thirty percent of the profits would go to the Argentine, if he agreed to act as a double agent. Because, as Kiskoros pointed out, life was a trade-off, et cetera, et cetera. And most of all, because hard cash is hard cash. Not to mention the fact that she was a real lady. She reminded him of another rebel he had met, in 1976, in the barrio silvered by the moon of ESMA. After a week of the electric prod, they still hadn't got her real name out of her. Coy had no trouble imagining the scene. The military mustache of ex-CPO Kiskoros twisted in a grimace of nostalgia, and the stench of singed flesh mixed with the aroma of beefsteak around the corner at La Costan-era, and the music of Viejo Almacen, and the girls of calle Florida. Cajhe Florida was how it came out in Kiskoros s Buenos Aires accent, as he stretched his suspenders mournfully. But that—he interrupted himself, not without effort—was another story. So, going back to Tanger—such a lady, he insisted—every time Nino Palermo sent him to watch her or put pressure on her, he actually passed on information. Beginning to end; subject, verb, object. And that included Barcelona, Madrid, Cadiz, Gibraltar, and Cartagena. Tanger always knew how dose they were, and Kiskoros was punctually informed of every step she took with Coy. Well, nearly every step, he qualified delicately. As for Palermo, his assassin— supposedly his assassin—had kept him drugged with partial information, until the man from Gibraltar, fed up with pampas tunes, decided to take a look for himself. That very nearly threw a wrench into the works, but fortunately for Tanger the emeralds were already on board the Carpanta. Kiskoros had no choice but to ride along with Palermo. The difference was that now instead of Coy and El Piloto being alone in the hold, the treasure hunter was keeping them company. Three birds with one stone. Although, in that respect, Kiskoros was sure he would not have to throw it.

"This won’t end here," said Palermo. "I will find you wherever Goddammit. Wherever you go. I will find her and I will find

you."

Kiskoros did not seem to be overly concerned.

"The lady is totally in control, and she knows how to take care of herself," he replied. 'And I plan to be far away. I may go back to my country—wrinkled and weary, as the tango says—and buy myself an estancia in Rio Gallegos."

"Why does she want eight hours?"

"Obvious. To put the emeralds in a safe place."

'And leave you holding the bag."

"No." Kiskoros denied with the barrel of the pistol. "Our arrangement is clear. She needs me." "That bitch doesn't need anyone."

The Argentine jumped to his feet, frowning. His bulging eyes shot sparks at Palermo.

"Don't talk about her like that."

The seeker of sunken ships stood staring at Kiskoros as if he were a green Martian.

"Don't shit me, Horacio. Don't... Come on. Don't tell me she's brainwashed you too."

"Shut up."

"This is a very serious matter."

Kiskoros took one step forward. The pistol was pointing direcdy at the head of his former boss.

"I told you to shut up. She is a total lady."

Ignoring the gun, the treasure hunter shot Coy a sarcastic glance.

"You have to admit," he said, "that skirt has.. .Well. Lots of appeal. Roping in you and your friend, I suppose, wasn't too hard. As for me... God almighty. That's a little tougher. But sucking up to this sonofabitch Horacio... You know? That's a piece of work."

He sighed, respectful. Then he reached for his jacket and took out his pack of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth and said thoughtfully, "I'm beginning to think she actually deserves the emeralds."

He looked for his lighter, absorbed in his thoughts. Then he smiled mockingly.

"We're idiots, all of us."

"Don't include me," Kiskoros demanded.

'All right. I take it back. These two guys and I are dumb. You're the idiot."

At that moment, the siren of a boat entering the inlet pierced the bulkhead—a hoarse, brief blast from the bridge warning a smaller vessel to clear the lane. And, as if that one toot were the culmination of a long process of reflection that had consumed Coy for the last hour—in reality, he had been thinking about it unconsciously much longer—he saw the rest of the game laid out in its entirety. He saw it in such dear detail that he almost blurted it out. Every one of the dues, suspicions, and questions he had been aware of during the last few days took on meaning. The part Kiskoros was playing at that moment, the eight hours, the selection of this hold as a temporary jail, all of it could be explained in few words. Tanger was getting ready to abandon the island, and they, betrayed knaves, were being left behind.

"She's leaving," Coy said in a loud voice.

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.

WE 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.

THE 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.

He did not give her his hand. She lay on the floor, like Zas on the rug of the apartment in Madrid. Thousands of years had gone by, but that was the one thing he could not forget. He watched her lips move a little more, pronouncing words he couldn't hear because he had got to his feet and was looking around with a dazed air. He saw the block of emeralds on the table, the black revolver on the floor, the red pool that kept spreading and spreading, and El Piloto's back, bent over Tanger. He walked across his own desolate plain as he went through the room and down the stairs, stepping past the corpse of Palermo, who was lying feet up and head down, his eyes neither open nor closed, the shark smile frozen on his face, and his blood running down the stairs to the feet of the terrified receptionist.

The night air sharpened his senses. Leaning against the wall he felt the blood from his wound running down his side. The clock in the city hall struck once, at which point the stern of the Felix van Luckner slowly began to move away from the wharf. Beneath the deck's halogen lamps he could see the first officer overseeing the sailors on the forecastle by the hawseholes. Two men—undoubtedly the pilot and the captain—were on the flying bridge, alert to the distance between the hull and the wharf.

He heard El Piloto's footsteps behind him, and felt him lean beside him against the balustrade.

"She's dead."

Coy said nothing. A police siren sounded in the distance, approaching from the city below. On the dock the last line had been cast off and the ship began to move away. Coy imagined the darkness of the bridge, the helmsman at his post, and the captain watching the last maneuvers as the bow pointed between the green and red signals at the mouth of the port. He could imagine the shadow of the pilot crawling down the rope ladder to the launch. Now the ship was picking up speed, slipping smoothly toward the black, open sea, its shimmering lights reflected in the wake. One last hoarse blast of her horn sounded a farewell.

"I held her hand," said El Piloto. "She thought it was you."

The police siren was closer now, and a flashing blue spark appeared at the end of the avenue. El Piloto lit a cigarette, and the flare of his lighter blinded Coy. When he opened his eyes, he could see that the Felix von Luckner was already in open water. He felt an intense longing as he watched her lights grow dim in the night. He could smell the coffee of the first watch, hear the captain's footsteps on the bridge, see the impassive face of the helmsman lit from below by the gyroscopic compass. He could feel the vibration of the engines below-decks, as the watch officer bent over the first nautical chart of the voyage, newly unfolded on the table to calculate a good course drawn with rulers, pencil, and a compass, on thick paper whose conventional signs represented a known and familiar world ruled by chronometers and sextants that allowed a man to keep his distance from land.

Oh God, he thought, I hope they let me go back to sea. I hope I find a good ship soon.

LA NAVATA, DECEMBER 1999