Free The Nautical Chart by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page B

with all the openness he could muster, at once sincere and neutral, almost shy. It wasn't much, but it was everything.
    "You don't have any right to show up like this. To stand there
    with that good-little-boy face___ I already thanked you for what
    you did in Barcelona. What do you want me to do now? Take you home like one of these books?"
    "Sirens," he said suddenly.
    She looked at him with surprise.
    "What about sirens?"
    Coy lifted his hands and let them drop.
    "I don't know. They sang, Homer said. They called to the sailors, isn't that right? And the sailors couldn't help themselves."
    "Because they were idiots. They ran right onto the reefs, destroying their ships."
    "I've been there." Coy's expression had darkened. "I've been on the reefs, and I don't have a ship. It will be some time before I have one again, and now I don't have anything better to do."
    She turned toward him brusquely, opening her mouth as if to say something disagreeable. Her eyes sparked aggressively. That lasted a moment, and in that space of time Coy mentally said so long to her freckled skin and to the whole crazy daydream mat had led him to her. Maybe he should have bought that book about Justine, he thought sadly. But at least you gave it a shot, sailor. Too bad about the sextant. Then he gathered himself. I'll smile. I'll smile in any case, say what she will, until she tells me to go to hell. At least that will be the last thing she'll remember about me. I'd like to smile like her boss, that commander with his shiny buttons. I hope my smile doesn't come off too edgy.
    "For the love of God," she said. "You're not even handsome."
    Ill
    The Lost Ship

    You can do everything right, strictly according to procedure, on the ocean, and it'll still kill you, but if you're a good navigator, at least you'll know where you were when you died. JUSTINSCOTT ,
    The Shipkilkr

    He detested coffee. He had drunk thousands of hot and cold cups in endless pre-dawn watches, during difficult or decisive maneuvers, in dead hours between loading and unloading in ports, in times of boredom, tension, or danger, but he disliked that bitter taste so much that he could bear it only when cut with milk and sugar. In truth, he used it as a stimulant, the way others take a drink or light a cigarette. He hadn't smoked for a long time. As for drinking, only rarely had he tasted alcohol on board a ship, and on land he never went past the Plimsoll mark, his cargo line of a couple of Sapphire gins. He drank deliberately and conscientiously only when the circumstances, the company, or the place called for massive doses. In those cases, like most of the sailors he knew, he was capable of ingesting extraordinary quantities of anything within reach, with consequences that entailed husbands guarding their wives' virtue, police maintaining public order, and nightclub bouncers making sure that clients toed the line and didn't leave before paying.
    That was not the case tonight. The ports, the sea, and the rest of his previous life seemed far from the table near the door of an inn on the Plaza de Santa Ana, where he was sitting watching people strolling on the sidewalk or chatting on the bar terraces. He had asked for a gin and tonic to erase the taste of the syrupy cup of coffee before him—he always spilled it clumsily when he stirred— and was leaning back in his chair, hands jammed into his jacket pockets, legs stretched out beneath the table. He was tired, but he was putting off going to bed. I'll call you, she'd said. I'll call you tonight or tomorrow. Let me think a little. Tanger had an appointment she couldn't break that afternoon, and a dinner date in the evening, so he would have to wait to see her again. That was what she told him at noon, after he had walked with her to the intersection of Alfonso XII and Paseo Infanta Isabel; and she said good-bye right there, not letting him see her to her door. She offered the strong hand he remembered so well, in a vigorous handshake. Coy