So far so good.
A moment later Amy reappeared. “Taking the helm.”
“Already?”
“You don’t waste time eating on a boat. I noticed you didn’t cook anything for yourself.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’ll take another espresso,” she said. “Before you do the dishes.”
Gideon swallowed his annoyance. Was this really the way they did things on a boat? Maybe he was just being sensitive. No matter, he was going to follow orders and remain pleasant. He went below and reached for some more coffee beans.
“On deck,” came a sharp voice from the intercom.
He came up. Amy pointed west. A low, dark line lay on the left-hand horizon.
“That’s the South American mainland,” she said. “As we go west we’re going to graze the coastline of the upper Guajira Peninsula of Colombia. My idea is to cruise along the shore — as the Greeks would have done, and the Irish after them — looking for whatever the Devil’s vomit might be. In the early days of sailing, before the compass, sailors kept within sight of shore whenever possible. So the vomit should be found along this coastline.”
“Looking for vomit. Great. Knock yourself out. By the way, what’s the next clue after that — number eight?”
Amy brought it up on her navigational computer. The picture showed nothing more than a flat line, rising into a second, sharp line, which pointed in turn toward a rounded line. The clue read: aquilonius.
“Aquilonius?” Gideon asked. “What does that mean?”
“‘Northerly.’ But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
The water had turned a dirty greenish brown. As the coastline loomed closer into view, he left the dishes half done and brought out the binoculars. A distant line of surf appeared in the glass: a long brown beach with a sea of sand dunes behind.
“That is one desolate coast,” he murmured.
“It’s one of the worst coastlines of the entire Caribbean — treacherous as anything. The offshore sandbars shift continuously.”
“I see a wreck. A big one.” His binoculars focused on the remains of what appeared to have been an enormous container ship, skeletonized and broken.
“According to the charts, that’s El Karina. There are wrecks all along this coast.”
“We’d better be careful.”
“The Turquesa draws only three feet and the hull is made of Kevlar. We’re not in much danger.”
Gideon said nothing. The queasiness was returning in force.
They moved into a course parallel to the coast, and Amy slowed to five knots. She kept clue seven displayed on her nav-computer.
“By the way,” Gideon said, “when I was looking at the weather just now it noted there’s a low pressure system developing east of the Cape Verde Islands. The long-term forecast says it might develop into a storm heading into the Caribbean.”
“This time of year, there’s always a low pressure system developing in that area. The vast majority of hurricanes trend north. Very few brush the coastline of Colombia.”
“Just thought you should know…Captain.”
She nodded. “Keep a sharp lookout for something that might resemble an inverted U — a cave, rock formation, anything.”
The coastline was low and featureless, but as they moved along it began to grow rockier, with headlands and black volcanic sea stacks rising up among the sandy wastes. The wind picked up, blowing hard from shore, carrying with it veils of orange sand that stained the water. The air smelled of dust, and as the sun rose the heat became intense. They continued creeping along at five knots, about five hundred yards offshore.
“These swells are bad,” Gideon said, trying to ignore his nausea. The slow speed made the motion worse.
“That’s because we’re in shoaling water.”
“How long is this coastline?”
“About sixty miles from here to Cabo de la Vela. Then it curves back south. I feel fairly confident the Devil’s vomit will be along here somewhere.”
Devil’s vomit. If the swells kept up, Gideon thought grimly, he’d have some vomit of his own to offer the coastline.
The day wore on as they cruised along the endless, barren coast. In one deep bay, sheltered by two headlands, they saw a large boat at anchor, streaked with rust. Gideon examined it through the binoculars.
“Lot of new electronics on that mast,” he said.
“Probably drug smugglers,” said Amy. “Too bad — I was hoping we could anchor in that bay for the night.”
Gideon continued examining the boat. “Looks like they see us.”
“Of course they see us. Let’s hope they’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
The sun was now setting into a scrim of blood-red sky, made hazy by dust. The wind grew even stronger, now blowing hard from the east. The brown sea was covered with whitecaps.
“There’s a headland called Punta Taroa about five miles ahead,” said Amy. “According to the chart, there’s a sheltered bay just behind that.”
Gideon could make out the headland: a massive pyramid of black rock pounded by surf, with a string of sand dunes running away from it inland, in the shelter of a serrated ridge. He looked for something that might resemble the U but could see nothing.
They rounded the point and — as shown on the chart — a shallow bay appeared, with a crescent of orange sand running up into ribbed dunes in fantastical shapes.
“It’s pretty exposed,” said Gideon, thinking of the drug smugglers.
“It’s the best we’re going to find. We’ll do a blackout and set four-hour watches.”
Amy brought the boat in behind the headland, moving slowly and examining the depth finder, the dual diesels rumbling.
“Here’s a good spot,” she called out.
She showed Gideon how to draw the pin on the anchor. In a narrow cove behind the immense rocky bluff, in twenty feet of water, she released it. It ran out and the boat swung around to face the wind, the anchor, as she put it, “setting nicely.” As she killed the engine, the sun dropped behind the dunes and, bloated and wavering, sank out of sight. A dull orange light enveloped everything.
Ten minutes later, as Gideon was airing a bottle of Malbec and whipping up a dinner of lobster risotto, he heard Amy on the intercom.
“Gideon? Go to the gun cabinet and fetch me my 1911. And grab a sidearm for yourself. We’ve got company.”
19
Respondeo ad quaestionem, ipsa pergamenta.
In his aerie high above the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, Glinn gazed from a plate-glass window that looked westward over the High Line park to the dark back of the Hudson River, reflecting the lights of Jersey City. It was just after three o’clock in the morning.
“I respond to the question, the page itself.” Ipsa pergamenta, the page itself…
Glinn had not studied Latin, but Brock had spent hours with him going over every possible meaning, submeaning, double meaning, and alliteration in each word of that sentence, parsing it with Talmudic intensity. To no avail. Now Glinn’s mind felt congested. He’d been chewing this over too long.
The page itself…
To clear his head, he took out another book of poetry: Wallace Stevens. He opened the book at random. The poem his eye settled on was titled “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.” The page itself, the thing itself. A nice coincidence.