He didn't see any warning flashes in the woman's eyes as he returned to her with a drink in each hand in the crowded Boadas bar. That was his third error of the night. There are no handbooks on lighthouses and perils and signals for navigating on land. No prescribed routes, no updated charts, no outlines of shoals measured in feet or fathoms, no markers at such and such a cape, no red, green, or yellow buoys, no conventions for boarding, no clear horizons for calculating latitude. On land you have to navigate by blind reckoning, and you are aware of reefs only when you hear their roar a cable's length from the bow, when you see darkness grow light in the froth of the sea breaking on a reef just below the surface. Or when you hear the unexpected rock—all sailors know there's one waiting for them somewhere—scraping the hull with a murderous screech that makes the bulkheads shudder, in that terrible moment when any man at the helm of a ship would rather be dead.
"You were quick," she said.
"I'm always quick in a bar."
She watched him with curiosity, amused, as he cleared a path through the people clustered around the bar with the decisiveness of a small, compact tugboat. He had ordered a Bombay Sapphire gin and tonic for himself and a dry martini for her, carrying them back with a skillful, pendular motion of his hands, without spilling a drop—a feat that deserved no little credit in the Boadas at that hour.
She looked at him through her glass, blue eyes very dark behind the crystal and the clean transparency of the martini.
"And what do you do in life, besides move well through bars, go to maritime auctions, and help defenseless women?"
"I'm a sailor."
'Ah."
'A sailor without a ship." 'Ah."
A half hour earlier, after the man with the gray ponytail climbed into the Audi, she had said "Thank you," and he had turned to look at her closely for the first time. Standing mere on the sidewalk, he reasoned that the easy part was behind him, that now it wasn't his move, but that of the woman whose thoughtful and vaguely surprised gaze was checking him over from head to toe, as if she were trying to catalogue him with one of the species of man she knew. There was nothing for him to do but try a modest, restrained smile, the same smile you give the captain when you sign on to a new ship, at that initial moment when words mean nothing and both parties know there will be time to sort things out. But for Coy the problem was precisely that he had no guarantee they would have the necessary time, that there was nothing to keep her from thanking him once more and marching off in the most natural way, disappearing forever. He bore the ten long seconds of scrutiny silently and motionlessly. LUF: Law of the Unzipped Fly. I hope to God it's zipped, he thought. He watched as she tilted her head to one side, just enough so the left side of her smooth blond hair, cut asymmetrically with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel, brushed her freckled cheek. After that, no smile, no words, she just walked slowly along the sidewalk, up the street, hands in the pockets of her suede jacket.
She was carrying a large leather shoulder bag that she tucked close to her side with her elbow. Her nose was not as pretty seen in profile. It was a little irregular, as if it had once been broken. That didn't diminish her attractiveness, Coy decided, it gave her a touch of unexpected toughness. She walked with her eyes to the ground and focused a little to the left, as if offering him the opportunity to occupy that space. Together they walked in silence, a certain distance apart, without exchanging glances or explanations or commentary, until she stopped at the corner, and Coy understood that this was the moment either for good-byes or for words. She held out a hand and he took it in his large, clumsy one, feeling a firm, bony grasp that belied the juvenile freckles and was more in line with the calm expression of her eyes, which he had finally decided were navy blue.
And then Coy spoke. He spoke with the spontaneous shyness that was his usual way with people he didn't know, bunching his shoulders with a simplicity and accompanying his words with a smile that, although he didn't know it, lighted his face and took the edge off his roughness. He spoke, touched his nose, and spoke again, with no idea whether someone was waiting for her somewhere, or whether she was from this city or from out of town. He said what he thought he had to say and then stood there, moving nervously and holding his breath, like a child who had just recited a lesson and was waiting, without much hope, for the teachers verdict. She looked him over for another ten seconds, and again tilted her head so that her hair brushed her cheek. And then she said yes, why not, she too felt like having a drink. They walked toward the Plaza de Cataluna, and then toward the Ramblas and calle Tallers. When he held the door of the Boadas for her he caught her aroma for the first time, vague and subtle, a scent that came not from cologne or perfume but from skin dotted in tones of gold, skin he imagined to be smooth and warm, with the texture of a peach. As they headed for the bar against the wall he noticed that all the men and women in the place looked first at her and then at him, and he wondered at how men and women always look first at a beautiful woman and then shift their gaze toward her companion in an inquiring way, to see who that fellow might be. As if to decide whether he deserves her, whether he's up to the test.
"AND what does a sailor without a ship do in Barcelona?"
She was sitting on a tall bar stool with her bag across her knees, her back against the wood bar that ran the length of the wall beneath framed photographs and bar souvenirs. She wore two small gold balls in her ears, and not a single ring on her fingers. Almost no make-up. At the open neck of her white shirt, which revealed hundreds of freckles, Coy caught the gleam of a silver chain.
"Wait," he said. Then he took a sip of gin and noticed that she was studying his old jacket, that she may have hesitated at the darker lines on his cuffs, where the missing stripes had been. "Wait for better times."
'A sailor ought to sail."
"Not everyone agrees."
"Did you do something bad?"
He nodded, with a sad half-smile. She opened her bag and took out a pack of English cigarettes. Her fingernails were short and wide, not carefully filed. She must have bitten her nails at one time, he was sure. Maybe she still did. One cigarette was left in the box, and she lit it with a match from a pack that bore the logo of a Belgian shipping line he was familiar with, Zee land. She protected the flame in the hollow of her hands in an almost masculine manner.
"Was it your fault?"
"Legally, yes. It happened on my watch." "You ran afoul of another ship?" "I touched bottom. A rock that wasn't on the charts." It was true. A sailor never said "I hit a rock," or "I ran aground." The common verb was "touched." I touched bottom, I touched the
dock. If you cut another ship in half and sank it in the midst of the Baltic fog, you said, "We touched a ship." At any rate, he noted that she had used the marine term "ran afoul," instead of "accident" or "collision." The cigarette pack was tying open on the bar and Coy looked at it—the head of a sailor framed by a life belt, and two ships. It had been a long time since he'd seen a pack of unfiltered Players, cigarettes he'd seen his whole lifetime. They weren't easy to find, and he hadn't known they were still producing them in the white cardboard box. It was funny that she was smoking that brand. The auction of naval memorabilia, the Urrutia, he himself. LAC: Law of Amazing Coincidences. "Do you know the story?"
He pointed to the box. She looked at it and then looked up.
"What story?"
"The one about Hero."
"Who's Hero?"
He told her. He told her about the name on the ribbon of the cap worn by the sailor with the blond beard, about his youthful years on the sailing ship that appeared on one side of the picture, and about the other ship, the ironclad that was his last berth. About how the elder Player and his sons had bought his portrait to put on their cigarette boxes. Then he sat while she smoked— the cigarette had been burning down between her fingers—and looked at it.
"That's a good story," she said after a while.
"It isn't mine. Domino Vitale tells that story to James Bond in Thunderball
. I sailed on a tanker that had all of Ian Fleming's novels."
He also remembered that the ship, the Palestine, had spent a month and a half blockaded in Ras Tanura, in the midst of an international crisis, with the planks of the deck burning beneath a vicious sun and the crew flat in their bunks, suffocated by heat and boredom. The Palestine was a bad luck ship, one of those where the men turn hostile and hate each other and lines get tangled. The chief engineer grumbled deliriously in a corner—they'd hidden the key to the bar but on the sly he was drinking methyl alcohol from the infirmary mixed with orange soda—and the first officer wouldn't speak to the captain, not even if the ship was about to run aground. Coy had had more than enough time to read those novels, and many more, on his floating prison during those interminable days when the scorching air that filtered in through the portholes made him gasp like a fish out of water, and every time he got out of his bunk he left the sweat-imprinted silhouette of his naked body on the dirty, wrinkled sheet. A Greek tanker three miles away had been hit by a bomb from an airplane, and for two days he could see the column of black smoke rising straight to the sky, and the glow that stained the horizon red and outlined the dark, vulnerable silhouettes of the anchored ships at night. During that time, he often woke up terrified, dreaming he was swimming in a sea of flames.
"Do you read much?"
"Some." Coy touched his nose. "I read some. But always about the sea."
"There are other interesting books."
"Could be. But those are the only ones that interest me."
The woman stared at him, and he shrugged his shoulders and rocked back and forth on his feet. They hadn't said a word about the guy with the gray ponytail, he realized, or about what she was doing there. He didn't even know her name.
THREE days later, Coy was lying in bed in his rented room in La Maritima, staring at a mildew stain on the ceiling while he listened to "Kind of Blue" on his Walkman. After "So What," in which the bass had been sliding sweetly, the trumpet of Miles Davis came in with his historic two-note solo—the second an octave lower than the first—and Coy, suspended in that empty space, was waiting for the liberating release, the unique percussion beat, the reverberation of the cymbal and the drumrolls smoothing the slow, inevitable, amazing path for the trumpet.
He thought of himself as nearly illiterate in music, but he loved jazz, its insolence and ingenuity. He had fallen in love with it during long watches on the bridge, when he was sailing as third officer aboard the Fedallah, a fruit carrier of the Zoe line whose first officer, a Galician they called Gallego Neira, had the five tapes of the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. They included musicians from Scott Joplin and Bix Beiderbecke to Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, passing through Armstrong, Ellington, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and others. Hours and hours of jazz with a cup of coffee in his hands, nights beneath the stars huddled on the flying bridge, staring at the sea. The chief engineer, Gorostiola, who came from Bilbao and was better known as the Tucuman Torpedoman, was another passionate fan of that music, and the three of them—later they went on together to the Tashtego, a sister ship in the Zoe line—had shared jazz and friendship for six years, following the quadrangular route the Fedallah. cut as she carried cargoes of fruit and grain between Spain, the Caribbean, northern Europe, and the southern United States. That was a happy time in Coy's life.
From the floor below came the sound of the radio belonging to the landlady's daughter, who usually stayed up late studying. She was a sullen, graceless girl at whom he smiled courteously without ever receiving a greeting or a look in return. La Maritima had been a bathhouse—built in 1844 it said above the door facing the calle Arc del Teatre—and was later converted into a cheap rooming house for sailors. It straddled a rise between the old port and the Chinese quarter, and no doubt the girl's mother, a hard-faced woman with dyed red hair, had alerted the girl from an early age to the inherent dangers of her clientele, rough unscrupulous men who collected women in every port, hitting land with a raging thirst for alcohol, drugs, and more or less virgin girls.
Through the window, and blending with the jazz on his Walkman, he could hear every note of Noel Soto singing "Noche de samba en Puerto Esparia." Coy turned up the volume. He was naked except for his shorts; on his stomach, open and face down, lay the Spanish edition of Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander. His mind, however, was miles away from the nautical feats of Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin. The stain on the ceiling resembled the outline of a coast, complete with capes and coves, and Coy followed an imaginary course between two extremes of the yellowish sea on the smooth ceiling.
It was raining when they left the Boadas. A fine rain slicked the asphalt and sidewalks with glimmering lights and misted halos around automobile headlights. She didn't seem to care that her suede jacket was getting wet, and they walked along the central paseo between newspaper kiosks and flower stands just beginning to close. A mime, stoic beneath the drizzle trickling down the white paint on his petrified face, followed passers-by with sad eyes after she bent down to leave a coin in his top hat. She walked on exactly as before, a little ahead of him and looking to her left, as if leaving to Coy the choice of occupying that space or discreetly fading away. He stole a glance at the hard profile behind smooth hair that rippled as she walked, and the dark-blue eyes occasionally turned toward him as the prelude to a thoughtful look or a smile.
There weren't many people in the Schilling. Again he ordered a Sapphire gin and tonic and she settled for tonic alone. Eva, the Brazilian waitress, poured their drinks while staring at Coy's companion, then arched an eyebrow toward him, drumming on the counter with the same long green-polished fingernails that had been conscientiously digging into his naked back three dawns before. But Coy ran his hand over his wet hair and smiled his inalterable smile, very sweet and tranquil, until the waitress muttered "bastard," smiled in return, and even refused to charge for his drink. Coy and the woman sat at a table facing the large mirror reflecting rows of bottles along the wall. There they continued their intermittent conversation. She was not talkative; at this point she had told him only that she worked in a museum. Five minutes later he learned that it was the Museo Naval in Madrid. He deduced that she had studied history, and that someone, maybe her father, was career military. He didn't know whether that had anything to do with her well-brought-up-girl look. He had also glimpsed a contained strength, an internal, discreet self-confidence that he found intimidating.
Coy did not bring up the guy with the gray ponytail until later, when they were walking beneath the arcades on the Plaza Real. She had confirmed that the Urrutia was a valuable if not unique piece, but it wasn't clear whether she had acquired it for the museum or for herself. It's an important maritime atlas, she commented evasively when he alluded to the scene on Calle Consell de Cent, and there's always someone who's interested in that kind of thing. Collectors, she had added after a minute. People like that. Then she dipped her head a little and asked what his life was like in Barcelona, making it obvious that she wanted to change the subject. Coy told her about La Maritima, about his walks through the port, and about the sunny mornings on the terrace of the Universal bar opposite the headquarters of the Merchant Marine, where he could sit for three or four hours with a book and his Walkman for the price of a beer. He also told her about the long weeks he had ahead of him, about the frustration of finding himself ashore, without work and money. At that moment he thought he saw, at the far end of the arcade, the short, mustached individual with the gelled hair and checked jacket who had been at the auction house that evening. He watched him a minute to be sure, and turned to the girl to ask whether she had recognized him too, but her eyes were empty of expression, as if she'd noticed nothing in particular.