"I bring a message," the dwarf said.
"Well, you can stick it up your ass."
The dwarf's head moved slightly. You don't seem to hear what I'm saying, the gesture said.
"A message from Senor Palermo."
So that was it. A meeting of old acquaintances. The social club of seekers of lost ships was complete. That explained a few things, but muddied others. He breathed once, twice, and took a step toward his adversary, fist cocked again, ready to strike.
"Coy."
Suddenly Tanger stepped in front of him, blocking his way, and stared straight into his eyes. She was dead serious, hard as he'd never seen her. He opened his mouth to protest, but then just stood there with a stupid expression. A man in a fog. Indecisive, because she was touching his face the way someone tries to calm a raging animal, or a child that is beside itself. And over her shoulder, through the gold tips of her hair, he saw the melancholy dwarf closing the knife blade.
COY
didn't touch his beer. With his jacket over his shoulders, his hands in his pockets, and leaning back in his chair, he watched the man seated across from him drink. "I was thirsty," the man repeated.
They were on the way from the alley to the plaza, after Tanger had restrained Coy and he had finally yielded, mechanically, with the sensation of moving through a surreal mist. The melancholy dwarf had again smoothed his hair and straightened his clothing. Except for a slight rip in the upper pocket of his jacket, which he had discovered with pained eyes and an accusing look, he appeared respectable again, if a lirde eccentric, his own southern European and bizarrely English composite.
"I have a proposal from Senor Palermo. A reasonable proposal."
His Argentine accent was so strong it seemed affected. Horacio Kiskoros, he had said once the streams were back within their banks. Horacio Kiskoros, at your service. He'd said that with a nod of the head, and in a courteous tone completely free of irony, as he and Coy were getting their breath back. He expressed himself in the scrupulous and slightly anachronistic Spanish spoken by some Latin Americans, using words that on the eastern side of the Atlantic sounded old-fashioned. He had said "at your service" as he was checking his disordered clothes and adjusting the bow tie that had twisted to one side in his contortions. Beneath his jacket he was wearing strange suspenders with stripes that were white down the middle and blue on each side.
"Serior Palermo wishes to reach an accord."
Coy turned to Tanger. She had walked with them without saying a word. He was aware that she was avoiding looking at him, at the face she had touched for the first time only a few minutes before, perhaps to escape giving the inevitable explanations.
'An accord," Kiskoros reiterated, "with terms that are reasonable for everyone." He studied Coy and pointed toward his nose with his thumb to remind Coy of the scene at the Palace. "With no hard feelings."
"No reason to have an agreement with anyone about anything."
Tanger had spoken at last, as if her voice were filtered through ice cubes, Coy observed. She was looking directly into Kiskoros s sad, protruding eyes, her right hand resting on the table. The stainless-steel watch lent an unexpectedly masculine flavor to the long fingers with the short, rough nails.
"That is not what he believes," the Argentine replied. "He has access to resources you lade technical equipment, experience____ Money."
A waiter brought a platter of squid
a la romana
and fried roe, and the mdancholy dwarf said thank you with impeccable good manners.
'A lot of money," he repeated, examining the contents of the platter with interest.
'And what does he expect in return?"
Kiskoros had taken a fork and was delicately spearing a cirde of squid.
"You have done a lot of research." He chewed the mouthful with delight, but didn't speak until his mouth was empty. "You have valuable facts. Is that not true? Details that Senor Palermo has not as yet acquired. That has led him to believe that a partnership would be advantageous for both parties."
"I don't trust him," said Tanger.
"Nor does he trust you. You can work together."
"I don't even know what I'm looking for."
Kiskoros seemed to be hungry. He had tried the roe, and now returned to the squid between sips of beer. For an instant he half-turned, listening to the guitar music from the steps of the cathedral, then smiled, pleased.
"Perhaps you know more than you think you do," he said. "But those are details you should discuss with him. I am merely a messenger, as you are aware."
Coy, who until that point had not opened his mouth, spoke to Tanger.
"How long have you known this jerk?"
She took exactly three seconds to turn toward him. The hand on the table had closed into a fist. She lifted it slowly from the table and put it in her lap.
"For some time," she said calmly. "The first time Palermo threatened me, Kiskoros was with him."
"That is true," Kiskoros confirmed.
"He has been using him to pressure me."
"That too is true."
Coy ignored the Argentine. He was hanging on her words.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Tanger s sigh was audible.
"You agreed to play by my rules."
"What else haven't you told me?"
She stared at the table, and then at the plaza. Finally she turned toward Kiskoros again.
"What does Palermo propose?"
'A meeting." The Argentine looked at Coy before going on, and Coy thought he detected a gleam of irony in the frog eyes. "To negotiate. On terms you consider suitable. He is currently in his office in Gibraltar." He took a card from his pocket and pushed it across the table. "You can find him there."
Coy got to his feet. He left his jacket on the back of his chair and, without looking at either of them, walked across the plaza in the direction of the cathedral steps. His brain was buzzing, and in a rage he squeezed his fists in his pockets. Without planning it, he ended up near the group of young people with the guitar. There were two girls and four boys, almost surely students. The one with the guitar was thin, with gypsy good looks and a cigarette smoldering at the corner of his mouth. One of the girls was following the beat of the music, swaying in place, her hand on his shoulder. The other focused on Coy, smiling, and handed him a bottle of beer. He took a drink, thanked her, and stood there, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. He then sat down on the steps. The guitarist was not accomplished, but the melody sounded fine at that hour of the night in the half-empty plaza, with the palm trees and the lights of the cathedral overhead. Coy stared at the ground. Tanger and Kiskoros had left the table in the bar and were approaching the plaza. She had Coy's jacket doubled over her arm. Sweet Jesus, he thought. I'm up to my neck in goddamn shit.
'A beautiful city," said Kiskoros, smiling at the young people. "It reminds me of Buenos Aires."
Tanger was silent, standing beside Coy. He did not get up.
"I believe you are a sailor, is mat not correct?" the melancholy dwarf asked. "I, too, was a sailor. The Argentine Navy. Retired CPO Horatio Kiskoros." His brow furrowed with nostalgia, as if listening to a distant, familiar sound he could not recapture. "I was also in the Malvinas, with the amphibious commandos."
"So what the hell are you doing so for from home?"
The melancholy in the protruding eyes intensified. He had slipped his hand into a pocket, exposing his suspenders, and suddenly Coy understood the significance of those blue and white stripes—the Argentine flag. The sonofabitch was wearing suspenders with the colors of the Argentine flag.
"Things changed in my beloved country."
He sat down beside Coy, but first he pulled up the legs of his trousers at the knee, carefully; to keep the crease sharp.
"Have you heard about the dirty war?"
Coy's lips twisted with sarcasm.
"Of course. The
tupamaro
terrorists and all that."
"The
montoneros,"
Kiskoros lectured, wagging a finger. "The
tupamaros
were in Uruguay."
Coy heard him sigh with emotion. Impossible to know if he lamented the whole thing or missed it.
"The fact is," he added after a moment, "that there was a war in Argentina, even though it wasn't official. Do you understand? I fulfilled my obligation. Some do not accept that."
"So why are you telling me?" Coy asked.
Kiskoros did not seem discouraged by Coy's hostility.
"I found it necessary to travel," he continued. 'And I have experience as a diver. I met Senor Palermo during the recovery efforts on the
Agamemnon,
Nelson's ship that went down in the River Plate."
Coy turned away rudely.
"I don't give a fart about your life."
The frog eyes blinked, injured
"Very well, senor. Just a little while ago, back in that alley, I was on the verge of killing you. I thought..." "So kill me, and blow it out your ass."
Kiskoros said nothing, mulling over the insult Coy stood up. Tanger was watching him. "He killed Zas," she said.
There was a long silence as Coy remembered the Labrador's warm breath on his arm. He could see—it had been only a week— his moist muzzle and loyal gaze. Then, darkly, came the image of the motionless dog on the rug, his glassy, half-open eyes. Something turned over inside him; he felt a strange anguish and he scanned the plaza uneasily, the lights of the cathedral and the street lamps. Beside him, the notes of the guitar seemed to be sliding down the steps. The girl who had smiled at him was kissing one of the boys. One of the young men set the beer bottle on the ground.
"Well, that's true." Kiskoros also got to his feet, brushing off his trousers. "And believe me, I regret that, senor. I am fond... Let me assure you. I am fond of domestic animals. Why, I have a Doberman of my own."
Thicker silence. The Argentinean assumed a circumspect expression.
"In my own way," he insisted, "I am still a military man. Do you understand? I had orders. And that included the senora's home."
He set his face in a sad rictus: accept responsibility; and all that. "Mendieta," he said suddenly. "My dog is named Mendieta." In the meantime, Coy's eyes went to the bottle, which was at his feet on the steps. For a second, he calculated the possibilities of shattering it over the other man's head. When he looked up he met the melancholy eyes of the Argentine.
"You seem to be a very impulsive man," said Kiskoros in an amiable tone. "That has its problems. The senora, on the other
hand, seems to have a more gentle character. Whatever the case, it is not a good thing for a lady to be wandering around this shady part of town. I recall an instance in Buenos Aires. A
montonera
killed two of my fellows when we went to look for her. That woman defended herself like a lioness, and we could only subdue her by throwing grenades. Then it turned out that she had a baby hidden under the bed__ "
He paused and clicked his tongue thoughtfully. Beneath his mustache was a mouth that may have been smiling.
"There are women who are very macho, I assure you," he continued "Although later, things went soft in ESMA. You know what I'm referring to." He analyzed Coy carefully. "No, I don't think you do.
Regio.
Cool. It may be better that way."
Coy's eyes met Tanger's, but she wasn't seeing him, as if she had just contemplated distant horrors. Within seconds, coming back to herself, her eyes seemed to focus on reality, though a vacant darkness remained. She pressed Coy's jacket to her breast, as if suddenly she felt cold.
"ESMA," she said, "was the Escuela de Mecanica de la Armada.... The Navy's torture center during the military dictatorship."
"True," Kiskoros conceded, gazing around with a distracted air. "I fear some ill-informed fools refer to it in that manner."
SHELLY
Manne on the brushes had softly introduced "Man in Love," and Eddie Heywood was launching into the first solo at the piano. Standing bare-chested at the open window of his room in the Hotel de Francia y Paris, in his mind Coy leaped ahead to another phrase of the melody. He was wearing headphones, and when he heard the expected passage, he nodded in time to the music. Three floors below, the small plaza was in shadow. The two large central street lamps had been turned off, the foliage of the orange trees was dark, and the awning of the Cafe Parisien was rolled up. Everything seemed deserted, but Coy wondered if Horacio Kiskoros was still hanging around. In real life the bad guys take a rest too, he thought. In real life things don't happen the way they do in novels and films. Maybe now the Argentine was snoring like a buzz saw in some hotel or boarding-house close by, with those suspenders carefully draped over a clothes rack. Dreaming of happy times of sausage, 348 Corrientes, and 1,500-volt currents in the cellars of ESMA.
Pum-pum, pum. The second solo was ending, and Coy expectantly awaited the entrance of the third: the tenor sax of Coleman Hawkins, which was the best thing on that cut, with its half time and quick time and strong-light, and corresponding rhythmic surprises when that cadence was broken with the expected unexpectedness. "Man in Love." He had just thought about the title, and that made him smile into the shadows of the plaza before he glanced up to the ceiling. Tanger was there, on the fourth floor, in the room right above his. Maybe she was sleeping, maybe not. Perhaps she was awake at the window like him, or sitting at the table with her notes, reviewing the information she'd been given by Lucio Gamboa. Going over the pros and cons of Nino Palermo's proposal.
They'd talked earlier. A long discussion after Horacio Kiskoros said good-bye and
"hasta la vista"
in a way that would have sounded friendly to someone who didn't know of his past what Coy now knew. As the two of them departed, Kiskoros watched them from those deceptive, sad little frog eyes, and when they left the plaza he was still in the same place, standing in front of the cathedral like a harmless nocturnal tourist. Coy looked back, and then up to read the name of the street they were on—calle de la Compania. In this city, he told himself, everything was signs and symbols and markers, exactly like those on a nautical chart. The difference was that the ones having to do with the sea were much more precise, with their colored shoals and scales for miles in the margins as opposed to timeless stone, supposedly accidental meetings, and plaques with unique street names. He didn't doubt that signs and dangers were visible to the eye in the city's streets and alleys, just as on printed charts, but here there were no codes to interpret them.
"Calle de la Compania, a street named after the Society of Jesus," she'd said when she saw the name. "This is where the Jesuits' school of navigation stood."
She never said anything casually, so Coy scanned the area, the old building on the left, the decaying house of Gravina on the right. He suspected that later, for some reason or other, he would need to remember something about this place. They walked for a while, slowly climbing toward the Plaza de las Flores. Twice he turned toward Tanger, but she kept walking, expressionless, eyes straight ahead, purse tight to her ribs, tips of hair brushing the stubborn chin and mouth rhythmically, until he took her arm and made her stop. To his surprise, she didn't protest, and there she was, so close, after she'd whirled to face him, almost as if she had been waiting for an excuse.
"Kiskoros, at Nino Palermo's instigation, has been watching me for quite a while," she volunteered. "He is an evil and dangerous man."
She paused, as if wondering whether there was something more she should say.
"Earlier, at the Guardiamarinas arch," she added, "I was afraid for you."
She said it straight out, with no emotion. And afterward was again silent, looking over Coy's shoulder in the direction of the plaza, the closed flower kiosks and post office, the outdoor tables of the corner cafes where the last customers of the long day lingered.
"Ever since he came with Palermo to see me," she concluded, "that man has been my nightmare."
She wasn't asking for sympathy, and maybe Coy couldn't help feeling sorry for her for that very reason. There was something childlike, he decided, in that obstinate adultness, in the poise with which she faced the consequences of her adventure. Again the silver cup. Again the framed snapshot. The girl within the protective arm of the man no longer around, the vulnerability of the eyes laughing from the threshold of a time when all dreams were possible. He recognized her in spite of everything. Or, to be more exact, the more time he spent with her, the more of her he recognized.
He suppressed the caress vibrating on his fingertips, and pointed with that hand to the bar behind her. Los Gallegos Chico, it was called. Domestic wines, good coffee, outside food allowed— all that was advertised on placards on the door and in the window. The word "liquors" was enough for Coy, and he realized that she needed a drink as much as he. So they went in. Elbows on the zinc counter, he ordered a gin and tonic for himself—he saw no shade of blue anywhere—and, without asking, a second for her. Gin gleamed moistly on her lips when she looked at him and recounted in minute detail Palermo's first visit, relaxed and friendly, and later a second visit, this time with the cards face up, the pressures and threats seasoned by the sinister presence of Kiskoros. Palermo had wanted to be sure she would recognize the Argentine, that she would know his story and not forget his face, so that when he was standing under her window, walking down the street, or in her bad dreams, she would always think hard about the intrigue she was getting herself into. So she would learn, the treasure hunter had said, that bad little girls cannot walk through the forest with impunity, without exposing themselves to dangerous encounters.
"That's what he said." A vague, somewhat bitter smile hardened her expression. "Dangerous encounters."
At that moment, Coy, who was listening and drinking in silence, interrupted to ask why she hadn't gone to the police. She laughed quietly, a muted laugh, slightly hoarse, as filled with disdain as it was devoid of humor. "The fact is," she said, "I am a bad little girl. I tried to put one over on Palermo, and as for the museum, I'm working on my own. If you haven't picked that up by now you're more naive than I thought."
"I'm not naive," he said, uncomfortable, twirling the cold glass.
"I agree." She gazed into his eyes, her lips not smiling but less hard. "You aren't."
She barely tasted her drink It's late, she said, after looking at her watch. Coy tossed down his gin, signaled a waiter, and left a bill on the table. One of his last, he confirmed disconsolately.
"They'll pay for what they've done," he said.
He didn't have the remotest idea of how he could execute that statement, or what he could do to help, but he thought it was the right thing to say. Such sayingp exist, he thought. Soothing phrases, consoling words, cliches that you hear in films and read in novels, and that have their value in real life. He glanced at her, afraid she might be scoffing at him, but she was holding her head to one side, absorbed in her own thoughts.
"
I
don't care whether they pay or not. This is a horse race, you understand. The only thing that matters to me is to get mere before they do."
IT
was almost time for the sax. Tanger was like jazz, Coy decided. A melody line with unexpected variations. She evolved constantly around an apparently fixed concept, like a thematic structure of AABA, but closely following those evolutions required a consistent attention that definitely did not exclude surprise. Suddenly he would hear AABACBA, and a secondary theme would emerge that no one had imagined was there. The only way to follow was to improvise, wherever it might lead. Follow without a score. Courageously. Blindly.
A nearby clock on the plaza struck three. Coy heard it, muffled by the headphones and the music, and finally came the sax of Hawkins, the third solo that tied together all the lines of the tune. He listened with half-closed eyes, calmed by the cadence of familiar notes, soothed by the repetition of the expected. Now Tanger was in the melody, altering its delicate structure. He lost the thread, and an instant later he clicked off the Walkman and held the headphones in his hand, frustrated. For a moment he thought he heard footsteps overhead, just as the crew of the
Pequod
heard the sound of the bone leg as their captain played over his obsessions alone at night on deck. He stood there alert, waiting, then he threw the Walkman onto the unmade bed with irritation. That didn't follow; it brazenly mixed genres. His Melville phase, like the preceding one, the Stevenson phase, had been left behind long ago. Theoretically, Coy was very clearly in his Conrad phase, and all heroes authorized to move through that terrain were weary heroes, more or less lucid, aware of the danger of dreaming when at the helm. Men stranded in resignation and boredom, from whose restless dreams had vanished the endless processions of whales swimming two by two, escorting in their midst a ghost hooded like a snow-capped mountain.
And yet the conditional
yes
at the gate of the oracle of Delphi, whom Coy knew from Melville, but which that author had taken in turn from other books Coy hadn't read, still echoed in the air, a storm playing the harp in the rigging, even after the sea closes over the pinioned albatross and the flag, and the
Rachel
rescues another orphan. All at once, to his great surprise, Coy discovered that literary or life phases, call them what you will, are never neatly closed, and that although the heroes have lost their innocence and are too exhausted to believe in ghost ships and sunken treasure, the sea is unchanging, filled with its own memory. It's all the same to the sea if men lose their faith in adventure, in the hunt, in sunken ships and treasure. The enigmas and the stories the sea holds have a life of their own, they are sufficient unto themselves, and will be there forever. And that is why, until the very last instant, there will always be men and women who question the sperm whale as it turns its head toward the sun and dies.