And there he was, staring at his coffee and wetting his lips with the gin and tonic—they didn't have Sapphire in the bar—the waitress had just set before him. Waiting for her to call. He hadn't moved all afternoon, and had eaten dinner there, a bit of overcooked beef and a bottle of mineral water. It was possible she might come in person, he thought, and that possibility made him keep an eye on the plaza, not to miss her approaching along calle de las Huertas, or any of the streets leading up from the Paseo del Prado.
Between the benches on the plaza, some beggars were talking loudly and passing around a bottle of wine. They had begged for money at the tables on the terraces and now were counting up the nights take. Three men, a woman, and a little dog. From the door of the Hotel Victoria, a guard costumed as RoboCop watched them like a hawk, hands crossed behind his back, legs spread apart, standing exactiy where he had ejected the female beggar shortly before. Chased off by RoboCop, she had zigzagged among the tables to where Coy was sitting. Give me something, friend, she'd said in a listless voice, staring straight ahead. Give me something. She was still young, he thought as he watched her counting the take with her buddies and the mongrel. Despite the blemished skin, the dirty blond hair and vacant eyes, there were traces of a former beauty in her well-defined lips, the curve of her jaw, her figure, and the red, chapped hands with long dirty fingernails. Terra firma rots people, he thought once again. It overpowers and devours them. He searched his own hands, resting on his thighs, for the first symptoms of aging that accompany the inevitable leprosy of city pollution, the deceptively solid ground beneath your feet, contact with people, air with the salt sucked out of it. I hope I find another ship soon, he told himself. I hope I find something that floats so I can climb aboard and be carried far away while there's still time. Before I contract the virus that corrodes hearts, disrupts their compass, and drives them rudderless onto a lee shore.
"There's a call for you."
He leapt from the chair with an alacrity that left the waitress wide-eyed and bounded down the hallway leading to the lobby. One, two... he counted to five before answering, to slow his pulse. Three, four, five. Hello. She was there, her calm, well-bred voice apologizing for calling so late. No, he replied, it wasn't late at all.
He'd been waiting for her call. Just a bite out on the terrace, and he was about to have his gin. As good a time as any, he insisted. Then a brief silence at the other end of the line. Coy laid a broad, square hand on the counter, contemplating its rough network of tendons, nerves, and short, strong, widespread fingers and waited for her to say something. She's relaxed on a sofa, he thought. She's sitting in a chair. Lying on a bed. She's dressed, she's naked, in her pajamas, in a nightgown. She's barefoot, with an open book in her lap, or she's watching TV She's lying on her back, or on her stomach, and the lamplight is picking up the gold of her freckled skin.
"I
have an idea," she said finally. "I have an idea that might interest you, a proposition. And I thought maybe you could come to my place. Now."
ONCE, sailing as third officer, Coy had crossed paths with a woman on a boat. The encounter lasted a couple of minutes, the exact time it took the yacht—she was aft, sunbathing—to pass the
Otago,
where Coy was standing on the flying bridge, looking out to sea. Along the deck he could hear a monotonous clanging as sailors hammered the hull to remove rust before going over it with coats of red lead and paint. The merchant ship was anchored between Malamocco and Punta Sabbioni. On the other side of the Lido the sun was brilliant on the Lagoon of Venice, and on the campanile and cupolas of San Marco three miles away. The tiled roofs of the city were shimmering in the light. A soft west wind was blowing at eight or ten knots, rippling the flat sea and swinging the bows of anchored ships toward the beaches dotted with umbrellas and multicolored cabanas. That same breeze brought the yacht from the canal, tacking to starboard with all the white elegance of her sails set aloft, slipping by the ship at a half cable's length from Coy. He needed his binoculars to see her better, to admire her sleek, varnished wood hull, the thrust of her bow, her rigging, and her brass gleaming in the sun. A man was at the helm, and behind him, near the taffrail, a woman sat reading a book He turned the binoculars on her. Her blond hair was knotted at the back at her neck, and something about her evoked the white-gowned women one could easily picture in that place, or on the French Riviera, at the turn of the century. Beautiful, indolent women protected by the broad brim of a hat or a parasol. Sphinxes who gazed at the sea through half-dosed eyes, or read, or just sat. Coy avidly focused the twin circles of the Zeiss lenses on that face, studying the tucked chin, the lowered eyes concentrating on the book In other times, he thought, men killed or squandered their fortunes and reputations for such women. He was curious about the person who might deserve that woman, and he swung his glasses to focus on the man at the wheel. He was facing in the other direction, however, and all Coy could make out was a short figure, gray hair, and bronzed skin. The yacht passed on by and, fearful of losing the last instants, Coy again focused on the woman. One second later she lifted her head and looked into the binoculars, at Coy, through the lenses and across that distance, straight into his eyes. She sent him a look that was neither fleeting nor lingering, neither curious nor indifferent. So serene and sure of herself she seemed almost inhuman. Coy wondered how many generations of women were necessary to produce that gaze. He lowered the binoculars, dazed by having observed her at such close range. Then he realized the woman was too far away to be looking at him, and the beam he had felt bore into his gut was nothing but a casual, distracted glance toward the anchored ship the yacht was leaving behind as she sailed into the Adriatic. Coy stood there, leaning against the bridge, watching her go. And when he held up the binoculars again, all he could see was the escutcheon and the name of the vessel painted in black letters on a strip of teak
Riddle.
COY
was in no way intellectual. He read a lot, but only about the sea. Even so, he had spent his childhood among grandmothers, aunts, and cousins on the shores of another ancient, enclosed sea, in one of those Mediterranean cities where for thousands of years mourning-dad women garnered at dusk to talk in low tones and watch their men in silence. That had left him with a certain atavistic fatalism, a rational idea or two, and strong intuition. And now, feeing Tanger Soto, he thought about the woman on the yacht. After all, he said to himself, they might he one and the same, and men's lives always turn around a single woman, the one in whom all the women in the world are summed up, the vortex of all mysteries and the key to all answers. The one who employs silence like no other, perhaps because silence is a language she has spoken to perfection for centuries. The woman who possesses the knowing lucidity of luminous mornings, red sunsets, and cobalt-blue seas, one tempered with stoicism, infinite sadness, and a fatigue for which— Coy had this curious certainty—one lifetime is not enough. In addition, and above all else, you had to be female, a woman, to achieve that blend of boredom, wisdom, and weariness in your gaze. To demonstrate a shrewdness as keen as a steel blade, inimitable and born of the long genetic memory of countless ancestors stowed like booty in the holds of black, hollow ships, thighs bloodied amid smoking ruins and corpses, weaving and ripping out tapestries through countless winters, giving birth to men for new Troys and awaiting the return of exhausted heroes, of gods with feet of clay whom they at times loved, often feared, and nearly always, sooner or later, scorned.
"Would you like more ice?" she asked.
He shook his head. There are women, he concluded with a shiver of fear, who have that gaze from the day they're born. Who look at you the way she was looking at him that moment in the small sitting room whose windows were open to the Paseo Infanta Isabel and the illuminated brick-and-glass building of Atocha station. I am going to tell you a story, she had said as soon as she opened the door and led him to the sitting room, escorted by a shorthaired yellow Labrador that lay down close by, its dark, sad eyes fixed on Coy. I am going to tell you a story about shipwrecks and lost ships. I'm sure you like that kind of story, and you are not going to open your mouth until I finish telling it. You will not ask me whether it's real or invented, and you will sit quietly and drink tonic without gin, because I am sorry to inform you I don't have gin in my house, not Sapphire blue or any color. Afterward I will ask you three questions, and you may answer yes or no. Then I will let you ask me a question, just one, which will be enough for tonight, before you go back to the inn and to bed. That will be all. Do we have a deal?
Coy had answered without hesitation, a little surprised but with reasonable sangfroid. We have a deal. Then he sat down where she indicated, on a beige upholstered sofa. They were in a sitting room with white walls, a desk, a small Moorish-style table with a lamp on it, a television with a VCR, a pair of chairs, a framed photograph, a table with a computer next to a bookcase filled with books and papers, and a cabinet for tapes and CDs with speakers from which the voice of Pavarotti—or maybe it wasn't Pavarotti—issued, sounding something like Caruso. Coy read the spines of a few of the books:
Los jesuitas y el motin de Esquilache, Historia del arte y ciencia de navegar, Los ministros de Carlos in, Aplicaciones de Cartografica Historica, Mediterranean Spain Pilot, Espejos de una biblioteca, Navegantes y naufragios, Catologo de Cartograph Historica de Espana del Museo Naval, Derrotero de las costas de Espana en el Mediterraneo.
There were numerous references to cartography, shipwrecks, and navigation. There were also novels and literature in general: Dinesen, Lampedusa, Nabokov, Durrell—the
Quartet
fellow from Moyano hill—something titled
Green Fire
by Peter William Rainer, Joseph Conrad's
The Mirror of the Sea,
and a number of others. Coy had not read one of those books, with the exception of the Conrad. His eye lighted on a book in English that had the same title as a movie—
The Maltese Falcon.
It was an old dog-eared copy, and on its yellow cover were a black falcon and a woman's hand holding coins and jewels.
"It's a first edition," Tanger said when she saw him pause at that title. "Published in the United States on Valentine's Day, 1930, at the price of two dollars."
Coy touched the book. "By Dashiell Hammett," it said on the cover. "Author of
The Dain Curse."
"I saw the movie."
"Of course you saw it. Everyone's seen it." Tanger pointed to a shelf. "Sam Spade is the reason I became unfaithful to Captain Haddock."
On a shelf a little apart from the other books, was what looked like a complete set of
The Adventures of Tintin.
Beside the cloth spines of those tall, slim volumes he saw a small, dented silver cup and a postcard. He recognized the port of Antwerp, with the cathedral in the distance. The cup was missing a handle.
"Did you read those when you were a boy?"
He was still looking at the silver cup. "Junior Swimming Championship, 19..." It was difficult to read the date.
"No," he said. "I recognize them, and I think I may have looked through one. A meteor falls into the ocean."
"The Shooting Star."
"That must have been it."
The apartment was not luxurious, but it was nicer than average, with good-quality leather cushions, tasteful curtains at the two windows overlooking the street, and a good painting on the wall. It was an antique oil in an oval frame, a landscape with a river and a pretty good ship—even though, in his opinion, she was not carrying enough sail for that river and that wind. The kitchen, from which she'd brought the ice and tonic and a couple of glasses, seemed clean and bright; he could see a microwave, a refrigerator, and a table and stools of dark wood. She was dressed in a light cotton sweater in place of the morning's blouse, and she had slipped out of her shoes. Her black-stockinged feet moved noiselessly, like those of a ballerina, with the Lab tagging along. People don't learn to move like that, Coy thought. You move or you don't move, one way or the other. A woman sits, talks, walks, tilts her head, or lights a cigarette in a certain way. Some things you learn, some you don't. No one can surpass predetermined limits, try as she may, if she doesn't have it inside. Predetermined behavior, gestures, and manners.
"Do you know anything about shipwrecks?"
The question changed his line of thought, and he smothered a laugh in his glass.
"I've never actually been shipwrecked, if that's what you mean. But give me time."
She frowned, ignoring the sarcasm.
"I'm talking about ancient shipwrecks." She kept looking into his eyes. "About ships that went down a long time ago."
He touched his nose before answering. Not much. He'd read things, of course. And dived at some of the sites. He also knew the kinds of stories sailors often tell among themselves.
"Have you ever heard of the
Dei Gloria?'
He searched his memory. It wasn't a name that was familiar to him.
"A ten-gun merchant ship," she added. "She went down off the southeast coast of Spain on February 4,1767."
Coy set his glass on the low table, and the movement caused the dog to come lick his hand.
"Here, Zas," said Tanger. "Don't be a pest."
The dog didn't move a hair. He stood right by Coy, licking him and barking, and she thought it necessary to apologize. Actually the dog wasn't hers, she said. He belonged to her roommate, but because of a job her friend had moved to another city two months before. Tanger had inherited her half of the apartment, and Zas.
"It's fine," Coy intervened. "I like dogs."
It was true. Especially hunting dogs, which tended to be loyal and quiet. As a child he had owned a red setter that had the same loyal eyes as this dog, and there had also been a mongrel that had come aboard the
Daggpo IV
in Malaga, staying on until he was swept overboard near Cape Bojador. Coy absentmindedly rubbed Zas behind the ears, and the dog leaned into his hand, happily wagging his tail.