The Last Map of Isla Verde

The man came down the pontoon at Marina Taina carrying a cardboard tube the way other men carry a rifle, with the strap slung diagonally across his chest and one hand laid flat on it, and I knew before he had said a word that he was going to try to pay me more than the boat was worth.

I was on the aft deck of Maeva, sitting with a coffee that had gone cold an hour earlier and a list of provisioning notes I had already memorised, because in April there is very little to do in Papeete except wait out the last of the rainy season and pretend the paperwork for next month's charters is urgent. The tradewinds had not settled yet. The lagoon had that flat, slightly greasy look it gets when the sky cannot decide, and a squall was building west over Moorea that would probably not reach us but would keep every yacht at Taina uneasy for the afternoon.

He stopped at the stern and read the name on the transom before he looked at me, which I appreciated. Most of them look at the boat or they look at the captain and never both.

"Captain Solis," he said. "Ridley Manning. We spoke by email."

I had him placed before he spoke. The email had been long, careful, and written in the register of a man who had been told once by an assistant how to write to a charter captain and had kept the template ever since. Four weeks, he had said. Flexible dates. A slow itinerary into the Tuamotus, followed bywhat he called a secondary leg, which was the kind of phrase I had learned to take seriously because it was always the part they wanted and had not yet earned.

"Come aboard," I said.

He stepped across the gap with more confidence than I expected. English, mid-forties, dressed in that way that expensive men dress when they are trying to look like they have not thought about it — linen shirt, cotton trousers, boat shoes that had seen a dock but not a deck. His hair had been cut in the last week in a city, and his watch was not the one he would have worn in the city. His hands were the only unhurried part of him. He sat where I pointed, set the tube across his knees, and did not open it.

I poured him coffee he did not ask for.

"I assume," he said, "you would like to see it."

"I would like to see why you came to me," I said, "which is not the same thing."

He accepted that, which I also appreciated. He drank his coffee the way a man does who has taught himself to drink coffee he doesn't like because he has been told it makes him look serious.

"I bought a chart at auction," he said. "In London. January. Bonhams. It was in a lot of hydrographic material from the wreck of an estate — Portuguese-Spanish family, two centuries of it, most of it junk. There was a folio in the bottom of the third box. The cataloguer had it down as a copyist's exercise, no provenance, no value. I paid ninety pounds for it."

"And now you think it's worth more."

"I know it's worth more. I had it examined. The paper is Genoese. The ink is iron gall. The projection is Mendoza-type, Spanish hydrographic service, correct for the decade. And there is a name on it that does not appear in any other document I have been able to find."

I waited. He was telling it the way he had rehearsed it, and I was