The Nautical Chart by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page A

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.

    COYwas 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