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.The book and headphones fell to the bed when he stood up and walked across the narrow room, about the size of the cell he had occupied for two days in La Guaira that time the Torpedoman, Gallego Neira, and he, fed up with eating fruit, had left the ship to buy fish to make a bouillabaisse.Neira had said, "Have a cup of coffee and wait for me, just fifteen minutes for a quickie and I'll be back." After a while they'd heard him call for help through the window, and had run inside and busted up the bar, busted everything— tables, bottles, and the ribs of the thug who'd taken the Galician's wallet.Captain don Madas Norena, mad as hell, had to get them out by bribing the Venezuelan police with a handful of dollars he then systematically deducted, down to the last penny, from their pay.Coy felt a tug of nostalgia, remembering all that.The mirror over the sink reflected his muscular shoulders and weary, unshaven face.He let the water run until it was good and cold and then splashed it over his face and the back of his neck, snorting and shaking his head like a dog in the rain.He toweled himself vigorously and stood for a while studying his face: strong nose, dark eyes, rugged features, as if he were scoring points in his favor.Zero, he concluded.This bird is not going to be feasting on a peach.He pulled the dresser drawer out and felt behind it until his fingers found the envelope where he kept his money.There wasn't much, and in the last few days it had dwindled dangerously.He stood rooted there for a moment, mulling over his idea, and finally he went to the closet and took out the bag containing his meager belongings: a few dog-eared books, his officer s bars, on which the gold was beginning to verge toward a mossy green, jazz tapes, a wallet-size photo album—the training ship Estrella del Sur, close to the wind, Torpedoman and Gallego Neira at the counter of a bar in Rotterdam, Coy himself wearing a first officer's stripes, leaning on the rail of the Isla Negra in New York harbor—and the wooden box in which he kept his sextant.It was a good sextant, a Weems & Plath with seven filters, black metal and a gilt arc, that Coy had bought in installments, beginning with his first salary after earning his navigator's certificate.Satellite positioning systems had sounded the death knell for that instrument, but any sailor worth his salt knew its reliability—as a guard against electronic failures— in establishing the latitude at midday, when the sun reached its highest point in the sky.Even at night, using a star low on the horizon, there were the nautical ephemerides, tables, and three minutes of calculations.In the same way that military men clean and coddle their weapons, Coy had kept the sextant free of saline corrosion and dirt over all those years, cleaning its mirrors and testing for possible lateral and index errors.Even now, without a ship beneath his feet, he often carried it on his walks along the coast, to sit on a rock with the horizon of the open sea before him and calculate angles.That custom dated from the time he was sailing as a student on the Monte Pequeno, his third ship if you counted the Estrella del Sur.Monte Pequeno was a 275,000-ton tanker owned by Enpetrol, and her captain, don Agustin de la Guerra, liked to solemnify the stroke of midday by inviting his officers to a tot of sherry after they and the young midshipmen had compared calculations made on the flying bridge, the captain with watch in hand and they shooting the sun's tangent on the horizon through the smoked niters of their instruments.He was a captain of the old school; a little behind the times but an excellent sailor from the days when large tankers steamed to the Persian Gulf in ballast through the Suez Canal and returned laden with cargo around Africa, past the Cape.Once he had thrown a steward down the ladder because he lacked respect.When the union complained, he replied that the steward was a lucky man, because a century and a half before he would have been hanged from the mainmast.On my ship, he had told Coy once, you're either in agreement with the captain or you keep your mouth shut.That was during a Christmas dinner in the Mediterranean, sailing into terrible weather—a hard, force 10 wind that obliged them to cut back the engines off Cape Bon.Coy, an apprentice seaman, had disagreed with some banal remark by the captain, who had thrown his napkin on the table and ordered Coy to stand watch outside, on the starboard flying bridge, where Coy passed the next four hours in darkness, whipped by the wind, rain, and spray breaking over the tanker
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