"You aren't serious," she said.
"You bet I'm serious."
He heard himself as if he were a stranger speaking, an enemy willing to toss everything overboard and say good-bye to Tanger forever. His problem was that the only way he could go along was by being towed. As when the Torpedoman began to break things, and Coy had no choice but to gulp air, grab the neck of a broken bottle, and prepare for a battle royal.
"Look," he added. "I can understand that I seem a little simple-
minded to you___ You may even take me for an imbecile. I'm not
much on land, it's true. Clumsy as a duck. But you mink I'm mentally retarded."
"You're here..."
"You know perfectly well why I'm here. But that isn't the question, and we can talk about that calmly another day if you want. In fact, I
hope
to be able to talk about it calmly another day. For the moment though, I'll limit myself to demanding that you tell me what I'm getting myself into."
"Demand?" She looked at him with sudden contempt. "Don't tell me what I should or shouldn't do. Every man I ever met wants to tell me what I must or I mustn't do."
She laughed quietly, humorlessly, as if exhausted, and Coy decided that she laughed with a European ennui. Something indefinable that had a lot to do with old whitewashed walls, churches with cracked frescoes, and black-clad women staring at the sea past grapevines and olive trees. Few North American women, he thought suddenly, could laugh like that.
"I'm not telling you what to do. I just want to know what you expect of me."
"I've offered you a job___ "
"Oh, shit. A job."
Saddened, he rocked on his toes as if he were on the deck of a ship and about to leap to land. Then he picked up his jacket and took a few steps toward the door, with Zas happily trotting at his heels. His soul turned to ice.
'A job," he repeated sarcastically.
She was standing between him and the window. He thought he saw another flash of fear in her eyes. Difficult to tell against the light.
"Maybe they think," she said, and she seemed to be choosing her words with care, "that it's about treasure and things like that. But it isn't a treasure, it's a secret. A secret that may not have any importance today, but that fascinates me. That's why I got into this."
"Who are
they?'
"I
don't know."
Coy took the last steps toward the door. His eyes paused for an instant on the small dented cup.
"It's been a pleasure knowing you." "Wait."
He had her complete attention. She reminded him, he concluded, of a gambler with mediocre cards, trying to calculate what the other player held.
"Don't go," she said after a moment. "You're bluffing."
Coy put on his jacket.
"Maybe. Try me." "I need you."
"There are sailors on every corner. And divers. Many as stupid as me."
"I need
you."
"Well, you know where I live. So it's up to you."
He opened the door slowly, with death in his heart. All the while, until he closed it behind him, he was hoping she would come take his arm, force him to look her in the eye, tell him anything to keep him from going. Hoping she would take his face in her hands and press her lips to his with a long, sincere kiss, after which, damn the Dalmatian and the melancholy dwarf! He would be willing to dive with her and her Captain Haddock and the devil himself to look for the
Unicorn
or the
Dei Gloria,
or the impossible dream. But she stood there with the golden light behind her, and did nothing and said nothing. Coy found himself going down the stairs, hearing the whimpering of Zas, who missed him. He went with a frightening void in his breast and his stomach, with his throat dry and an irritating tickle in his groin. With nausea that made him stop on the first landing, lean against the wall, and cover his mouth with trembling hands.
TERRA
firma, he concluded after long deliberation, was nothing more than a vast conspiracy determined to harass the sailor. It had underwater peaks that didn't show on the charts, and reefs, sandbars, and capes with treacherous shoals; and besides, it was peopled by a multitude of officials, customs officers, shipowners, port captains, police, judges, and women with freckles. Sunk in such gloomy thoughts, Coy wandered around Madrid all afternoon. Wandered like the wounded heroes of films and books, like Orson Welles in
Lady from. Shanghai,
like Gary Cooper in
The Wreck of the Mary Deare,
like Jim pursued from port to port by the ghost of the
Patna.
The difference lay in the feet that no Rita Hayworth or
Marlow spoke to him, and he wandered unnoticed and silent among the crowd, hands in the pockets of his bluejacket, stopping at red lights and crossing on green, as insipid and gray as everyone else. He felt insecure, displaced, miserable. He walked on, desperately searching for the docks, for the port, where at least in the smell of the sea and splashing of water beneath iron hulls he would find the consolation of the familiar, and it took a while— when he stopped indecisively on the Plaza de las Cibeles without knowing what direction to take—to get it through his head that this huge and noisy city didn't have a port. That reality hit him with all the force of an unpleasant revelation, and he slowed, almost stumbled, so weak in the knees that he sat down on a bench across from the gate of a garden by which two soldiers with aigu-illettes, red berets, and rifles across their chests, observed him with suspicion. Later, when he resumed his walk and the sky in the west was beginning to grow red at the far end of the avenues, and then somber and gray on the opposite side of the city, silhouetting the buildings where the first lights were being turned on, his desolation gave way to a growing exasperation, a contained fury composed of contempt for the image pursuing him in the reflection of the shop windows, and of anger toward all the people brushing against him as they passed, crowding and pushing when he stopped at crosswalks, waving their arms idiotically as they babbled into their cell phones, blocking his way with their huge shopping bags, ambling erratically in front of him, and stopping to engage in conversation. Once or twice he returned the shoves, rabid with rage, and once the indignant expression of a pedestrian turned to confusion and surprise when he glimpsed Coy's rock-hard expression, the malicious, menacing look in eyes dark as death. Never in his life, not even the morning the investigating commission sentenced him to two years without a ship, had he felt such empathy with the pain of the Flying Dutchman.
An hour later he was drunk, without any insistence on Sapphire blue or any other color. He had gone into a bar near the Plaza de Santa Ana, and after pointing toward an old bottle of Centenario Terry that must have been sleeping the sleep of the just on that shelf for at least half a century, retired to a corner supplied with it and a glass. Having a cognac hangover is exactly like being poleaxed, the Torpedoman had said one time when he had dropped to his knees and vomited up his guts after having put away enough to speak knowingly on the subject. Prognosis: terminal. Once, in Puerto Limon, the Torpedoman had got soused on Duque de Alba and passed out on top of a tiny little whore who'd had to yell for help to move the two hundred pounds that were about to squeeze the life out of her. And later, when he awoke in his berth—they'd had to find a van to take him back to the ship —he spent three days lightening ballast in the form of bile, in between bouts of the cold sweats and begging at the top of his lungs for some friend to put him out of his misery. Coy didn't have anyone to pass out on top of that night, or a ship to go back to, or even friends to carry him—the Torpedoman was God knows where, and Gallego Neira had ruptured his liver and his spleen when he fell from the Jacob's ladder of a tanker a month after earning a pilot's spot in Santander. But Coy did the honors to his cognac, letting it slide down his throat again and again, until everything began to fade into the distance, and his tongue and hands and heart and groin stopped hurting, and Tanger Soto was just one more among the thousands of women who every day are born, live, and the in this wide, wide world, and he observed that the hand going and coming between the glass and the bottle was beginning to move in slow motion.
The bottle was half empty, just a little below the Plimsoll line, when Coy, calling on one last scintilla of good sense, stopped drinking and took a look around. Everything seemed to be listing badly, until he realized that his head was resting on the table and he was the one off plumb. Nothing more grotesque, he thought, than some jerk all alone getting smashed in public. Slowly, he got up and went outside. Trying to disguise his condition, he proceeded very carefully, shoulder touching the walls of buildings to help keep to a straight line and parallel to the curb. When he crossed the plaza, the air did him good. He stopped and sat down on a bench beneath the statue of Calderon de la Barca. From there, with the palms of his hands on his knees, Coy observed the people passing before his unfocused eyes. He saw the beggars who'd shared the wine bottle, the three men and a woman who had been sitting on the ground drinking with their little mutt the other day, watched by RoboCop from the door of the Hotel Victoria. He shook his head when a Moroccan from the Magreb offered him some hashish—a joints about the last thing I want, man—and finally, a little clearer of head, he started toward his lodging. Now that the Centenario Terry had been sufficiently diluted in his lungs, his urine, or wherever it might have made its way, things were a little less hazy. And as a consequence, he saw that the Dalmatian, that is, the guy from Barcelona with the gray ponytail and the one green and one brown eye, was sitting at a table in the bar, by the door, a glass of whisky in his hands, legs crossed, waiting for him.
"
TAKE
my word for it," the man concluded. "They want us to take them to bed. That is, they want us to want to take them to bed. But most of all they want us to pay for it. With our money, our freedom, our mind... In their world, believe me, there's no such word as
gratis."
He was sitting there, whisky in hand, as if he owned the place, and Coy was sitting across from him, listening. He had stopped being surprised a long time ago, and was taking it in with interest now, an untouched glass of tonic, ice, and lemon in front of him.
The cognac was still slipping smoothly through his blood. From time to time the Dalmatian rattled the ice in his glass, regarded the contents pensively, then lifted it to his lips and took a sip before continuing his monologue. Coy had confirmed that the man's Spanish did have a touch of a foreign accent—say Andalusian overlaid with British.
'And let me tell you something. When one of them decides to bully her way forward, there's no one... I'm here to tell you. When they finally come to a decision, whatever it is, they're hard as steel. I swear to you. I've seen them lie____ God almighty. I swear I've seen them lie... right there on my own pillow, talk to their husband on the phone... lie in cold blood. Incredible."
Next door there was a store that sold mannequins, and occasionally Coy glanced toward the window. Naked bodies in assorted postures—sitting, standing, men and women with no genital identity, some with wigs, others whose craniums were bare, synthetic flesh gleaming in the strong lights. Several severed heads smiled on a shelf. The female dummies had breasts with jutting nipples. A window dresser with a sense of humor, affecting prudery, an accidental or conscious classical reference, had positioned the arm of one of the mannequins modestly across its breasts and placed the other hand to cover its supposed sex. Venus rising directly from her shell, the transvestite Pris Nexus 6 in
Blade Runner.
"Has
she been on your pillow, then?"
The Dalmatian looked at Coy almost reproachfully. His hair was clean and combed straight back, fastened with black elastic. His shirt was white, with a button-down collar he was wearing open, without a tie. Tan, but not excessively so. Impeccable shoes, comfortable, good leather. The expensive, heavy gold watch on the left wrist. Gold rings. Very carefully manicured fingernails. Another ring on the little finger of the right hand, wide, also gold. Gold chains visible at the neck, with medallions and an antique Spanish doubloon. Gold cuff links flashing at the wrist. This guy, thought Coy, looks like a Carrier display case. You could cast a couple of ingots with what he had on.
"No___ Of course not!" The Dalmatian seemed sincerely scandalized. "I don't know why you say that. My relationship with
her..."
He stopped as if the connection, whatever it might be, was obvious. A second later he must have realized that it wasn't, because he rattled the ice in his glass and, this time without taking a sip, brought Coy up to date on the story. At least, he brought him up to date on his version of the story. He was, after all, Nino Palermo, and that gave his tale only relative value. But this individual was the one person who seemed willing to tell Coy anything. He had no source for another, more authentic version, and he doubted very much that he ever would. So he sat very still, attentive, turning his eyes toward the window with the mannequins only when his tablemate fixed first the green, and then the brown, eye on him for too long a time—an uncomfortable ocular duality to sit across from. So he learned that Nino Palermo was the owner of Deadman's Chest, an enterprise devoted to recovering sunken ships and maritime salvage with a home base in Gibraltar. Maybe Coy, since Palermo understood that he was a sailor, had heard of Deadman's Chest when they were working on refloating the
Punta Europa,
a ferry that had sunk the year before in the bay of Algeciras with fifty passengers on board? Or—he added after a brief pause—at the time of the recovery of the
San Esteban,
a galleon carrying a cargo of Mexican silver salvaged five years ago in the Florida Keys? Or perhaps the most recent case, a Roman shipload of statues and pottery off Ifach rock, at Calpe?
At that point, Coy spoke aloud the words "treasure hunter," and the other man smiled broadly enough to show a tooth or two at the side of his mouth before saying, yes, in a way. Though this matter of treasure was a relative concept, according to, and how....