IT was about that time that I heard from them again. Tanger called me from El Pez Rojo, a restaurant at Cabo de Palos, to ask me about a technical problem that involved an error of half a mile of east longitude. I cleared up the question and inquired with interest as to their progress. She told me everything was going well, many thanks, and that I would be hearing from them. In fact, it was a couple of weeks before I had news of them, and when I did it was from the newspapers, leaving me to feel as stupid as nearly everyone else in this story. But I don't want to get ahead of myself. Tanger made the telephone call one noontime that found the Carpanta put up alongside the quay in that old fishing town converted into a tourist haven. The storm in the north Atlantic was still stationary, and the sun was shining on the southeast Iberian Peninsula. The needle of the barometer was high, without crossing over the dangerous vertical to the left, and that was, paradoxically, what had brought them to the small port that stretched around a wide black sand cove, dangerous because of the reefs just below the surface and presided over by the lighthouse tower rising high on a rock set out in the sea. That morning the heat had triggered the appearance of some anvil-shaped, gray, and threatening cumulo-nimbuses that were boiling higher by the minute. A wind of twelve to fifteen knots was blowing in the direction of those clouds, but Coy knew that if this cumulonimbus anvil kept building, by the time the gray mass was overhead strong squalls would be unleashed on the other side. A silent exchange of glances with El Piloto, whose squint in the same direction deepened the wrinkles around his eyes, was enough for the two sailors to understand one another. El Piloto brought the Carpanta's bow around to face Cabo de Palos. So there they were, on the whitewashed porch of the Pez Rojo, eating fried sardines and salad, and drinking red wine.
'A half a mile more," said Tanger, returning to her seat.
She sounded irritated. She picked up a sardine from the tray, looked at it a minute as if hoping to attribute some portion of responsibility to it, and threw it down with disgust.
"One damned half-mile more," she repeated.
From her lips, that "damned" was almost a curse. It was strange to hear her speak that way, and much stranger to see her lose control. Coy observed her with curiosity.
"It isn't all that serious," he said.
"It's another week."
Her hair was dirty and matted from saltwater, her skin shiny from too much sun and not enough soap and water. El Piloto and Coy, after several days without shaving, presented no better picture, and they were equally as sunburned and sweaty. They were all wearing jeans, faded T-shirts and sweatshirts, and sneakers, and signs of their days at sea were clear.
"One whole week," Tanger repeated. 'At least."
She stared somberly at the Carpanta, still lit by the sun and tied up below them at the Muelle de la Barra dock. The gray anvil was gradually darkening the cove, as if someone were slowly drawing a curtain that doused the sun's reflection on small white houses and cobalt-blue water. She's losing hope, Coy thought suddenly. After all this time and all this effort, she's beginning to accept the possibility of failure. Where we're searching now it's deeper, and that may mean that the wreck will be beyond our recovery even if we find it. On top of that, the time allotted for the search is running out, and so is her money. Now, for the first time since who knows when, she knows the feeling of doubt.
He looked at El Piloto. The sailor's gray eyes were silently seconding his conclusions. The adventure was beginning to verge on the absurd. All the data had been verified, but the main thing was missing—the sunken ship. No one doubted it was somewhere out there. From the slight elevation of the restaurant they may even have been looking at the very spot where the brigantine and the corsair had gone down. Maybe they had sailed several times above where it lay beneath yards of mud and sand. Maybe the whole effort had been nothing more than a series of errors, the first one being that hunting treasure was not compatible with lucid adult rationality.
"We have a mile and half still to explore," Coy said gently The minute he had spoken those words, he felt ridiculous. Him, giving a pep talk? The truth was, all he wanted to do was put off the final act. Put it off, before going back to being on his own, an orphan clinging to Queequeg's coffin. To the launch of the Dei Gloria.
"Right," she replied blankly.
Elbows on the table, hands crossed under her chin, she kept staring toward the cove. The gray anvil was above the Carpanta now, turning the sky black over its bare mast. The wind died, the sea flattened around the dock, and the sailboat's halyards and flag drooped limply. Then Coy watched as across the cove the reefs and rocks along the shore became streaked with white, lines of foam breaking as a darker color spread like an oil stain across the surface of the water. There was still sunlight on the restaurant porch when the first gust of wind rippled the water on the bay. On the Carpanta the flag suddenly stood straight out and the halyards cracked against the mast, jingling furiously as the boat tilted toward the quay, pushing hard against her fenders. The second gust was stronger, thirty-five knots at least, Coy calculated. The bay was filled with whitecaps and the wind howled, climbing the scale note by note around the hollow chimneys and eaves of the rooftops.
Now everything was somber and fnghteningly gray, and Coy was happy to be sitting there eating fried sardines.
"How long will this last?" Tanger asked.
"Not long," said Coy. "An hour, maybe. Could be a little longer. It will be over by dark. It's just a summer storm."
"The heat," El Piloto added.
Coy looked at his friend, smiling inside. He feels as if he needs to console her too, he thought. After all, that's really what has brought us to this point, although El Piloto doesn't rationalize that kind of thing. Or at least I don't think he does. At that moment the sailor's eyes met Coy's. They were as tranquil and serene as always, and Coy had second thoughts. Maybe he does rationalize such things.
"Tomorrow we'll have to include that additional half mile," Tanger announced. "To forty-seven minutes west."
Coy didn't need a chart. He had 464 engraved on his brain from having studied it so long, and he knew the search area down to the last detail.
"Well, the good news," he said, "is that the depth decreases to between fifty-nine and seventy-nine feet on that side. Everything will go much easier."
"What's the bottom like?"
"Sand and rock, right, Piloto? With clumps of seaweed."
El Piloto nodded. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and stuck one in his mouth. Since Tanger was looking at him, he nodded again.
"There's more seaweed the closer you get to Cabo Negrete," he said. "But that area is clean. Rock and sand, like Coy says. With a little shingle where you find the green lobsters."
Tanger, who was taking a sip of wine, stopped, holding the glass to her lips, and focused on El Piloto.
"What is that about green lobsters?"
El Piloto was concentrating on lighting his cigarette. He made a vague gesture.
"Well, just that." Smoke escaped from between his fingers as he spoke. "Lobsters that are green. It's the only place you find them. Or used to. Nobody catches lobsters around here anymore."
Tanger had set her glass down. She placed it carefully on the cloth, as if afraid of spilling it. She was staring hard at El Piloto, who calmly wound up the wick in his lighter.
"Have you been there?"
"Sure. A long time ago. It was good for fishing when I was young."
Coy remembered something. His friend had told him once about North African lobsters with shells that were green rather than the usual dark red or brown speckled with white. That had been twenty or thirty years ago, when there were still langoustine, clams, tuna, and forty-five-pound groupers in those waters.
"They had a good flavor," El Piloto explained, "but the color put people off."
Tanger was following every word.
"Why? What color was that?"
'A kind of mossy green, very different from the red or bluish color of f
resh-caught lobsters, or that dark green of the African or American lobster." El Piloto may have smiled behind the tobacco smoke. "They weren't very appetizing, which is why the fishermen ate them themselves, or sold the tails already cooked."
"Do you remember the place?"
"Sure." Tanger's interest was beginning to make El Piloto uncomfortable. He used the excuse of drawing on his cigarette to take longer and longer pauses, and to look at Coy. "Cabo de Agua abeam and the headland of Junco Grande around ten degrees north."
"What's the depth?"
"Shallow. Sixty-some feet. Lobsters are usually in deeper waters, but mere were always a few around there."
"Did you dive there?" -
Again El Piloto glanced at Coy. Tell me where this is going, his eyes said. Coy turned his hands palm up—I don't have the least fucking idea.
"Those days we didn't have the diving equipment we have now," El Piloto answered finally. "Fishermen set out reed traps or trammel nets, and if they got lost they stayed below."
"Below," she repeated.
Then she was silent. After a pause, she reached for her glass of wine, but had to set it down because her hand was trembling. "What is it?" Coy asked.
He couldn't understand her mood or her trembling—nothing about Tanger's sudden interest in lobsters. It was one of the dishes on the menu, and he'd watched her pass over it without a flicker of interest.
She laughed. A strange, quiet laugh. A sort of chortle, unexpectedly sardonic, shaking her head as if enjoying a joke she'd just told. She put her hands to her temples—she might have been in sudden pain—and looked back toward the bay, now gray but lighter where choppy waves foamed under incessant bursts of wind. The filtered light outside accentuated the blued steel of her eyes. Absorbed. Or dazed.
"Lobsters," she murmured. "Green lobsters."
Now she was shivering, with a laugh too close to a sob. With a new attempt, she had spilled wine on the tablecloth. I hope she hasn't lost it, Coy thought with alarm. I hope all this shit hasn't pushed her over the edge, and instead of taking her back to the Dei Gloria we end up stopping by the loony bin. He dabbed at the wine with his napkin, then put a hand on her shoulder. He could feel her trembling.
"Calm down," he whispered.
"I am completely calm," she said. "I have never been more calm in my life."
"What the hell's going on?"
She had stopped laughing, or sobbing, or whatever she'd been doing, though her eyes were still on the ocean. Finally the shivering stopped. She sighed deeply and looked at El Piloto with a strange expression before leaning across the table and planting a kiss on the astounded sailor's face. She was smiling, radiant, when she turned back to Coy.
"That's where the Dei Gloria is! Where the green lobsters are."
RIPPLED sea, nearly flat, and a gentle breeze. Not a cloud in the sky. The Carpanta was rolling softly about two and a half miles off the coast, with her anchor chain falling straight down from the sheave. Cabo de Agua lay off the beam and Junco Grande ahead, ten degrees to the northeast. The sun wasn't high, but it burned into Coy's back when he bent down to check the pressure gauge on the cylinder: sixteen liters of compressed air, reserve above that, harness ready. He checked the valve and then fitted over it the regulator that would provide air at a pressure varying with the depth, compensating for increasing atmospheres on his body. Without that apparatus to equalize the internal pressure, a diver would be crushed, or would explode like a balloon filled with too much air. He opened the valve wide and then turned it back three-quarters. The mouthpiece was an old Nemrod; it smelled like rubber and talcum powder when he put it in his mouth to test it. Air circulated noisily through the membranes. Everything was in order.
'A half hour at sixty-five feet," El Piloto reminded him.
Coy nodded as he put on the neoprene vest, weight belt, and emergency life vest. Tanger was standing holding onto the backstay, watching in silence. She was wearing her black Olympic-style suit, fins, a diving mask, and a snorkel. She had spent most of the evening and part of the night explaining about the green lobsters.
She went over it backward and forward, questioning El Piloto exhaustively, making pen and paper sketches, and calculating distances and depths. Lobsters' shells, she had told them, have mimetic properties. As nature does with many other species, it provides those crustaceans with the ability to camouflage themselves as a means of defense. So they tend to adapt to their habitat. It had been proven that lobsters that live around sunken iron ships often acquire the rusty red hues of deteriorating metal plates. And the mossy green El Piloto had described coincided exactly with the color bronze acquires after long immersion in the sea.
"What bronze?" Coy had asked.
"The bronze of the guns."
Coy had his doubts. It all sounded too much like the Crab with the Golden Claws, or some other adventure. But they weren't living in a Tintin comic book. At least he wasn't.
"You said yourself, and we checked it carefully, that the Dei Gloria's guns were iron. There weren't any great quantities of bronze on board the brigantine."
Tanger's expression was tranquil and superior, as at other times when she seemed to imply that he hadn't zipped his fly, or that he was an idiot.
"That's right. The guns on the Dei Gloria were iron, but the Chergui's weren't. The xebec carried twelve guns—four six-pounders, eight four-pounders, and those four pedreros, remember? They had come from the Flamme, an old French corvette. And those twelve guns were bronze." She removed the plan of the xebec from the bulkhead and tossed it on the table in front of Coy. "That's in the documents Lucio Gamboa gave us in Cadiz. There are nearly fifteen tons of bronze down there."
Coy exchanged a look with El Piloto, who was merely listening, offering no objections. As for the rest, Tanger continued, it was obvious. The two ships had gone down in close proximity. Because of the explosion that finished the Chergui, it was likely that bits of the corsair were scattered around the main wreck. Since one of the components of the bronze guns was copper, the weapons had begun to take on that characteristic undersea coloration, which was then adopted by the lobsters that lived around the wreckage and in the mouths of the guns. There was an additional and very encouraging circumstance. The most important, really. If the lobsters had adopted the color of the bronze, that meant the area of dispersion was reasonably compact, and that the wreckage was not covered by mud or sand.
COY heard a splash and saw that Tanger was no longer by the backstay. She had jumped into the water and swum around the stern of the Carpanta, wearing her mask and respirator. She wasn't going to dive with him but wait at the surface, watching the bubbles to keep track of his location. The radius within which he planned to explore was difficult to maintain while tethered to the sailboat with a safety line. Coy readied himself, knife on his right calf, depth meter and watch on one wrist and compass on the other, then went to the edge of the stern step. Sitting with his feet in the water, he put on the fins, spit onto the glass of his mask, and put it on after rinsing it in the sea. He lifted his arms so El Piloto could place the cylinder of compressed air on his back, and tightened the straps and put the mouthpiece in his mouth. Air whistled in his ears as it circulated through the regulator. He turned on one side, protecting the glass of his mask with his hand, and fell backward into the sea.
THE water was very cold, too cold for the time of year. Maps of the currents indicated a gentle flow from northeast to southwest, with a difference of five or six degrees compared to the general temperature of the water. Coy felt his skin contract with the unpleasant sensation of cold water beneath his neoprene vest; it would take a few minutes to warm to his body temperature. He took a couple of slow, deep breaths to test the regulator. With his head half out of the water he could see El Piloto standing there over the stern of the Carpanta. He sank down a little, looking around at the blue panorama surrounding him. Near the surface, with the sun's rays lighting the clear, quiet water, there was good visibility. About thirty feet, he
calculated. He could see the black keel of the Carpanta, with its rudder turned to port and the chain of the anchor descending vertically into the depths. Tanger was swimming nearby, with gentle thrusts of her orange plastic fins. Putting her out of his mind, he concentrated on what he was doing. He looked down to where the blue became darker and more intense, verified the position of the hands on his watch, and began the slow descent toward the bottom. The sound of the air as he breathed through the regulator was deafening, and when the needle of the depth gauge showed fifteen feet, he stopped and pinched his nose beneath the mask, to adapt to the increased pressure on his ears. As he did that, he raised the mask, relieved, and saw bubbles rising from his last exhalation. The sun had turned the surface of the sea into a ceiling of shimmering silver. The black hull of the Carpanta was overhead. Tanger had dived to swim slightly above him, and was looking at him through her mask, her blond hair floating in the water, her slim legs, extended by the fins, treading slowly to maintain her depth near Coy. When he breathed again, another plume of bubbles ascended toward her, and she waved her hand in salute. Then Coy looked down and continued his slow descent through a blue sphere that closed above his head, darkening as he neared the bottom. He made a second stop to compensate for the pressure when the gauge marked forty-six feet. Now the water was a translucid sphere that extinguished all colors but green. He was at that intermediate point where divers, with no point of reference, can become disoriented and suddenly find themselves contemplating bubbles that seem to be falling rather than rising; only logic, if in fact they retain that, reminds them that a bubble of air always rises upward. But he hadn't yet reached that extreme. Shapes began to emerge from the darkness on the floor beneath him, and moments later Coy fell very slowly onto a bed of pale, cold sand near a thick meadow of sea anemones, posidonias, and tall, grasslike seaweed enlivened by darting schools of ghostly fish. The depth meter indicated sixty feet. Coy looked around him through the half-light. Vision was good, and the mild current cleared the water. Within a radius of sixteen to twenty-three feet he could easily make out a landscape of starfish, empty seashells, large spade-shaped bivalves standing upright in the sand, and, marking the boundaries of the submarine meadow, ridges of stone with rudimentary coral formations. Small microorganisms floated past him, pulled by the current. He knew that if he turned on his light, color would return to all those monotone objects magnified through the shatterproof glass of his mask. He breathed deliberately several times, trying to adapt his lungs to the pressure and to oxygenate his blood, and checked his bearings on the compass. His plan was to move fifty or seventy feet to the south and then trace a circle around the Carpanta's anchor, which was to the north, behind him. He began to swim slowly, with gentle movements of his legs and fins, hands at his sides, about a yard above the bottom. His eyes searched the sand, alert for the slightest sign of something buried beneath it—although the bronze guns, Tanger had insisted, had to be exposed. He swam to the edge of the meadow and peered into the seaweed and undulating blades. If there was anything in that thicket it was going to be difficult to find, so he decided to continue exploring the area of bare sand which, though it seemed flat, actually descended in a gentle slope to the southwest, as he confirmed with the depth meter and compass. He was inhaling and exhaling every five seconds, and the sound of air was interspersed with intervals of absolute silence. He concentrated on moving slowly, reducing his physical effort to a minimum. The slower the breathing rhythm, the less air consumption and fatigue, went the old divers' rule, and the more available reserves. And this was going to take a while. With lobsters or without them, this was like looking for a needle in a haystack.