"To do what?"
"Something. Give her time and there's no question she'd convince you of something."
They crossed the street, followed by El Piloto. Palermo never lost sight of the window, and once inside the door of the inn he again parted his pocket.
"Does she still have that cannon she had at Gibraltar?"
His stare was intense. The green eye resembled cold glass.
"I don't know. She may."
"Shit."
Palermo reflected, then turned to Coy, as if reconsidering his offer to talk with Tanger alone.
"She has her reasons," Coy pointed out.
The man from Gibraltar half-smiled, cornered on that point. "That's right. We all do." He motioned toward El Piloto, who was waiting behind them expectantly. "Even him." "Let me talk to her." Palermo thought about it briefly. ‘All right."
The night clerk of the inn said hello to Coy, confirming that the senora was upstairs and that she'd asked her to prepare the bill. They crossed through the lobby and went to the second floor, trying not to make any noise. Framed prints of ships lined the walls and a statue of the Virgen del Carmen filled a small niche. The door of Tanger's room opened directly onto the landing at the top of the stairs. It was closed. Coy reached it first, followed by Palermo. The hall carpet had deadened their footsteps.
"Good luck," Palermo whispered, his hand in his pocket. "You get five minutes."
Coy tried the doorknob, turning it without difficulty. It wasn't locked. As he turned the knob, he realized how pointless it all was. The absurdity of his being there. Rejected lover, deceived friend, swindled partner. In truth, he suddenly knew that when he looked at things rationally, he didn't have anything to say. She was about to leave, but in fact she had left long before, setting him adrift, and nothing he could say or do was going to change the course of things. As for the emeralds, he was used to thinking of them as a chimera far beyond reach; they hadn't mattered to him before, and they didn't matter now.
Tanger was the person she wanted to be. She wanted freedom of choice, and from the beginning he had known she would always be that way He had seen the old silver cup missing its handle and the snapshot of a young girl smiling in black and white. That was what was needed to understand that the word "betrayal" was out of place, regardless of what she did. In fact. Coy would have turned and walked away, walked past El Piloto and kept on walking to the Carpanta, with a stop at the nearest bar, had the door not already been opening. He felt no rancor, not even curiosity anymore. The door continued to open, revealing on the far wall the window overlooking the port, the half-packed suitcase on the table, the package of emeralds, and Tanger standing there in her dark-blue cotton skirt, white blouse, and sandals, her hair freshly washed, the asymmetrical tips still dripping water onto her shoulders. And her skin, freckled and tanned by the weeks of sea and sun, the navy-blue eyes wide with surprise, blued steel, metallic as the .357 magnum she had seized from the table when she heard the door open. Now Nino Palermo played his part in this series of betrayals. Without waiting the five minutes he'd promised, he slipped past Coy with the chrome and mother-of-pearl pistol glinting in one hand. Coy opened his mouth to shout "No! Stop!" That's enough, let's rewind this whole absurd story we've seen a thousand times at the movies, but her finger had already contracted and a white flash erupted at the level of Coy's hip, with a blast that reached him a millisecond after the impact below his ribs, a crack! that whirled him half around, throwing him against Palermo, who at that moment was firing back. This time the shot thundered close to Coy's ear, and he tried to throw a hand out to stop Palermo from firing a second time. But there was another flash behind him, and another roar shook the air, and Palermo leaped back as if jerked from behind, propelled toward the landing and down the stairs. It wasn't a bang! the way it sounds in films, but pumba, pumba, pumba, three times, very dose together, and now an infernal cloud of smoke filled the room, a harsh, acrid odor... and absolute silence. When Coy turned to look, Tanger wasn't there. He looked more closely and saw why she wasn't standing. She was lying on the floor on the other side of the table, blood pouring out in a brilliant red, thick, pulsing stream, staining her blouse and the floor. She lay there moving her lips, and all at once she seemed very young and very alone.
So this was when Coy walked out. It was a perfect night, with Polaris visible in its prescribed location, to the right and five times the distance of the line formed between Merak and Dubhe. He walked to the balustrade of the wall, and stood there, pressing his hand against the wound in his side. He had felt beneath his shirt and found that the rip in his flesh was superficial, and that he wasn't going to die this time. He counted five weak beats of his heart as he contemplated the dark port, the lights on the docks, and the reflection of the castles high on the mountains. And the bridge and lighted deck of the Felix von Luckner, about to cast off her lines. Tanger had spoken to him. Her lips were moving when he bent over her, as El Piloto tried to stop the hole in her breast through which life was escaping. She spoke so inaudibly that he had to lean close to understand what she was saying. It was too much effort for her to put words together; her voice grew weaker and weaker, and then faded as the crimson blood pooled beneath her body. Give me your hand. Coy, she had said. Give me your hand. You promised you wouldn't let me go alone. Her voice was silenced, and the remnants of her life seemed to have gathered in her wildly staring eyes, as if she saw before her a desolate, barren plain that held only horror. You swore, Coy. I'm afraid to go alone.
He did not give her his hand. She lay on the floor, like Zas on the rug of the apartment in Madrid. Thousands of years had gone by, but that was the one thing he could not forget. He watched her lips move a little more, pronouncing words he couldn't hear because he had got to his feet and was looking around with a dazed air. He saw the block of emeralds on the table, the black revolver on the floor, the red pool that kept spreading and spreading, and El Piloto's back, bent over Tanger. He walked across his own desolate plain as he went through the room and down the stairs, stepping past the corpse of Palermo, who was lying feet up and head down, his eyes neither open nor closed, the shark smile frozen on his face, and his blood running down the stairs to the feet of the terrified receptionist.
The night air sharpened his senses. Leaning against the wall he felt the blood from his wound running down his side. The clock in the city hall struck once, at which point the stern of the Felix van Luckner slowly began to move away from the wharf. Beneath the deck's halogen lamps he could see the first officer overseeing the sailors on the forecastle by the hawseholes. Two men—undoubtedly the pilot and the captain—were on the flying bridge, alert to the distance between the hull and the wharf.
He heard El Piloto's footsteps behind him, and felt him lean beside him against the balustrade.
"She's dead."
Coy said nothing. A police siren sounded in the distance, approaching from the city below. On the dock the last line had been cast off and the ship began to move away. Coy imagined the darkness of the bridge, the helmsman at his post, and the captain watching the last maneuvers as the bow pointed between the green and red signals at the mouth of the port. He could imagine the shadow of the pilot crawling down the rope ladder to the launch. Now the ship was picking up speed, slipping smoothly toward the black, open sea, its shimmering lights reflected in the wake. One last hoarse blast of her horn sounded a farewell.
"I held her hand," said El Piloto. "She thought it was you."
The police siren was closer now, and a flashing blue spark appeared at the end of the avenue. El Piloto lit a cigarette, and the flare of his lighter blinded Coy. When he opened his eyes, he could see that the Felix von Luckner was already in open water. He felt an intense longing as he watched her lights grow dim in the night. He could smell the coffee of the first watch, hear the captain's footsteps on the bridge, see the impassive face of the helmsman lit from below by the gyroscopic compass. He could feel the vibration of the engines below-decks, as the w
atch officer bent over the first nautical chart of the voyage, newly unfolded on the table to calculate a good course drawn with rulers, pencil, and a compass, on thick paper whose conventional signs represented a known and familiar world ruled by chronometers and sextants that allowed a man to keep his distance from land.
Oh God, he thought, I hope they let me go back to sea. I hope I find a good ship soon.
LA NAVATA, DECEMBER 1999
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