Free The Nautical Chart by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page A

before responding.
    "I came to see you."
    She did not seem surprised or curious for that matter. She was wearing the light wool jacket, and before they left her office she had knotted a silk scarf of autumnal colors around her neck. Half turning, Coy observed her impassive face.
    "Why?" was all she asked.
    "I don't know."
    They walked on a bit in silence. Finally they stopped before a stall piled with detective novels strewn about like flotsam washed up on a beach. Coy's eyes slid over the worn volumes without paying much attention: Agatha Christie, George Harmon Coxe, Ellery Queen, Leslie Charteris. Tanger picked up a copy of She Was a Lady, looked at it absently, and put it back.
    "You're mad" she said.
    They walked on. People were strolling among the stands, picking up books, leafing through them. The booksellers kept a sharp eye on them from behind their counters or standing in the doorways of the booms. Most were wearing overcoats, jerseys, or pea coats, their skin tanned by years in the sun and wind, like sailors in some impossible port, stranded among reefs of paper and ink. Some were reading, unaware of passers-by, sitting among mountains of used books. Two young sellers greeted Tanger, who answered them by name. Hello, Alberto. See you, Boris. A boy with a hussar's locks and a checked shirt was playing the flute, and she placed a coin in the cap at his feet, just as Coy had seen her do on the Ramblas, when she'd stopped before the mime whose white-face was streaked by the rain.
    "I come by here every day on my way home. Isn't it strange what happens with old books? They choose you. They reach out to their, buyer—Hello, here I am, take me with you. It's as if they were alive."
    A few steps farther on she paused to look at The Alexandria Quartet, four volumes with tattered covers, marked down. "Have you read Durrell?" she asked.
    Coy shook his head. He'd never seen any of these books. North American, he supposed. Or English.
    "Is there anything about the sea in them?" he asked, more to be courteous than out of interest.
    "No, not that I know. Although Alexandria is still a port."
    Coy had been mere, and he didn't recall anything special. Heat, days of dead air, derricks, stevedores lying prostrate in the shade of the containers, filthy water lapping between the hull and the dock, and cockroaches you stepped on as you came ashore at night. A port like any other, except when wind from the south carried clouds of reddish dust that sifted into everything. Nothing to justify four volumes. Tanger touched the first with her finger, and he read the tide: Justine.
    "Every intelligent woman I know," she said, "has at some time wanted to be Justine."
    Coy looked at the book with a perplexed expression, wondering if he ought to buy it, and if the bookseller would make him buy all four. The books mat had caught his attention were others nearby; The Death Ship, by one B. Traven, and the Bounty trilogy, Mutiny on the Bounty, Men against the Sea, and Pitcairn's bland, all in a single volume. But she was moving on. He saw her smile again, take a few more steps, and distractedly leaf through another mistreated paperback. The Good Soldier, he read. Ford Madox Ford did sound familiar, because he had collaborated with Joseph Conrad on The Inheritors. Finally Tanger whirled around and looked at him, hard.
    "You're mad," she repeated.
    He touched his nose and said nothing.
    "You don't know me," she added a moment later, a hint of harshness in her voice. "You know nothing at all about me."
    Curiously, Coy didn't feel intimidated or out of place. He had come to see her, doing what he thought he had to do. He would have given anything to be an elegant man, easy with words and with something to offer, even if just enough money to buy the four volumes of the Quartet and take her to dinner that night in an expensive restaurant, calling her Justine or whatever she wanted him to call her. But that wasn't the case. So he kept quiet, and stood there