The Law of the Sea : A Legal Thriller

by Dave Gerard

  “And bronze lions were found at the site,” said Cindy. “That’s consistent with the known cargo of the Flor de la Mar.”

  “So what?” Remington said with a shrug. “You could have found those coins on any ship sailing in that day and age. And lions are hardly rare. They were a symbol of strength in the ancient world, as they are today.”

  Vijay and Harder exchanged glances. “Fine,” I said impatiently. “Manuel Roberto’s confession, then. That’s what led David Marcum, Lloyd Gunthum—and eventually, us—to the wreck. That proves beyond a doubt that the wreck is the Flor de la Mar.” Cindy nodded her agreement.

  “And how do you know that Roberto’s confession is true?” Remington challenged.

  “Because we found the ship!” Cindy said, exasperated. “It’s like Jack said. Roberto’s confession led us directly to the wreck. Ergo, it must be the Flor de la Mar. Plain and simple.” I nodded. Exactly right.

  “It led us to a wreck,” Remington corrected. “A wreck that no one had found before.”

  I was tired of the riddles. “I don’t get it,” I said, irritated. “Are you really saying that despite what everyone thinks, we didn’t find the Flor de la Mar?”

  Remington didn’t answer right away. Instead, he reached into his desk and took out a small tin. He opened it and withdrew some chewing tobacco, which he carefully placed into his mouth. Then he sat back and addressed us.

  “What do we know for certain?” he asked. This time, he answered his own question. “We know that a newly uncovered historical source claims that Alfonso de Albuquerque secretly diverted the Flor de la Mar for his own ends. This source claims that the ship didn’t really sink in the Strait of Malacca. Instead, it sank somewhere else, northwest of Sumatra. This story is contradicted by Albuquerque’s own account, as well as that of other eyewitnesses. What makes you so sure that it’s true?”

  “Because it is!” Cindy shouted. “Because we found the ship! And it’s not just us that thinks so. David Marcum thought so. Lloyd Gunthum thought so. Rockweiller Industries, Portugal, Malaysia, and all their experts think so. These are smart people, and they spent a lot of money on this. Why would they do that if they weren’t sure? Oh, and the whole global media is sure of it too. How do you explain that?” I was taken aback by her intensity. She seemed almost angry.

  Remington just gazed back at her calmly. Then he looked out the window for a little while. Finally, he turned back to us.

  “You know, I studied psychology as an undergraduate,” he said. “Before it was fashionable, like it is today.” Him and Kruckemeyer both, I thought. I didn’t know what that had to do with the Flor de la Mar, but I wasn’t about to interrupt him.

  “I decided it was mostly hogwash,” he continued, “and went into law instead. But I continue to use and apply some basic psychological principles in my work today.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like confirmation bias. That’s the tendency to search for, interpret, and process information in a way that confirms one’s own existing beliefs. Put another way, people believe what they want to believe.”

  I frowned but didn’t say anything.

  “Another psychological principle is social proof. That means when everyone else believes a thing, you are more likely to believe it too.”

  Cindy, Harder, Vijay, and I all looked at each other uncertainly. These principles sounded vaguely familiar. I had probably learned and forgotten them in psych 101.

  “Now,” said Remington, “apply those principles to our present situation. Rockweiller isn’t stupid. Not by any means. Nor are their lawyers, or their experts. But once this case took off, and the publicity began to spiral, they lost control.

  “The financial markets loved the find. Rockweiller’s stock price shot up as a result. Their CEO looked like a genius. The media loved it too. The sunken treasure. The deal with Portugal. The international intrigue. Rockweiller started to get swept along by the tide. They may have had doubts about what they had found. In fact, I’m sure they did. But who was going to air them? It was in everyone’s best interest for this wreck to be the Flor de la Mar.”

  “What about the lawyers?” I said. “Shouldn’t they have said something? Isn’t that their job?”

  Remington waved his hand dismissively. “Badden and Bock? Please. They were just as captive as Rockweiller was. Bock and all of his fancy experts were happy to egg this case on. They made a killing. Millions, at least. And as the case got bigger, it began to feed more people, and generate more bills. Other countries joined the fray, worried they were going to be left out. And it snowballed.”

  “What about the press?” Harder said. “They don’t have a vested interest.”

  “Don’t they?” Remington countered. “The press wants a story. They always have. Holy grail of treasures found, billions in gold at stake, that’s a story. No-name wreck stumbled upon by accident? Not so much. You know what old newspapermen say about the news? It’s just the hole between where the ads go. How many advertisements do you think the Flor de la Mar sold?”

  I stared at him. “What are you saying?” I asked. “Are you really telling us that this has all been a wild goose chase? That we never found the Flor de la Mar at all? You don’t believe that, surely?”

  “But why didn’t you say anything?” Cindy cried. “Have you thought this all along? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  I answered this time. “Because we have a vested interest too,” I said softly. “The more Rockweiller, Portugal, and Malaysia thought the ship was worth, the more they would pay to settle the case.”

  Remington nodded. “That’s right.”

  Then I seized on something. “But if that’s true…then how did we find the wreck from Roberto’s account? How do you explain that?” I said it challengingly, as if daring him to answer.

  “My guess is it was just a lucky coincidence,” said Remington. “Gunthum and Marcum searched a wide swath of ocean near the Nicobar Islands, on a well-traveled trade route between Malaysia and India. A lot of ships sank there. The chances of finding one, if you looked long enough, were relatively good.

  “Did you ever wonder why you didn’t find the ship near an island?” he continued. “Like Manuel Roberto’s account said? The wreck was halfway between Chowra and Batti Malv Islands. I checked the nautical charts. There was no land within sight of the wreck. So how could Roberto have made it to shore?”

  “Maybe the account was off,” said Cindy. “Or the maps were wrong. Or he got carried away by the storm.”

  “Maybe,” said Remington. “And of course, it’s unlikely that you would stumble across a ship with the particular cargo that this one had. But that is far more likely, in my opinion, than the possibility that this wreck is the long-lost Flor de la Mar.”

  “And the confession itself?” I heard myself ask.

  Remington shrugged. “I’d say it was a fake. Somebody forged it to discredit Albuquerque. He had no shortage of enemies. Or it could have been a sailor, or a priest. I really don’t know, and it’s a good question. But a deathbed confession, buried in the archives of Portugal? That no one has seen before, let alone corroborated? I don’t buy it. I’m not a big believer in conspiracy theories.

  “Mind you,” Remington said, “this is all just speculation on my part. Maybe the wreck really is that of the Flor de la Mar, and I’m wrong and everyone else is right. But you asked me what I think, and there it is.”

  After that, we sat there in dead silence for the longest time. I couldn’t think of what to say. Was it really possible that the wreck wasn’t the Flor de la Mar? That none of this had been real? I felt a sense of vertigo. As if the floor was shifting under my feet. As if the basic foundations of what I believed were suddenly being called into question. What had this all been about, then?

  Eventually, Cindy broke the silence. “If this isn’t the Flor de la Mar,” she asked in a small voice
, “then what happened to it?”

  Instead of answering immediately, Remington got up and walked over to his bookshelf. He carefully thumbed through a few volumes. Then he withdrew a book I knew well. It was the Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India. Remington sat down again, and opened the book to a place he had marked. Then he took out a slip of paper, which I recognized as a translation of one of the few other purported eyewitness accounts to the Flor de la Mar’s sinking.

  “I don’t know what happened to the Flor de la Mar,” Remington said. “That’s a question that has vexed archaeologists and treasure hunters for centuries. And I don’t pretend some country lawyer like me has the answer. But if you’d like, I can give you my best guess.”

  Remington then read aloud from the eyewitness account of the ship’s sinking. “The Flor de la Mar,r sunk in four fathoms of water. The ship had very high fore and aft castles. It is likely that the wreck was visible on the surface and that the locals could reach it easily. A hundred people were left on board, and most of the precious cargo was able to be saved. Everything that the water did not spoil was recovered…”

  Remington closed the book with the heavy sound of finality. “My guess is that what happened to the Flor de la Mar is exactly what Albuquerque and the other eyewitnesses said: it sank by the shore in the Strait of Malacca, in four fathoms of water.

  “Four fathoms of water is about twenty feet. What do you think happens when a billion dollars’ worth of gold and gems washes up under twenty feet of water by the beach? And the Portuguese all leave and sail home? I bet it took the locals a couple of weeks to recover most of it. The rest would have washed up over the years that followed.”

  “And the ship itself?” I asked.

  “You know the answer to that, Jack. The Flor de la Mar sank in the shallows. Not the deep ocean, like the Mercedes or the San Jose, where ships can be preserved for centuries. The Flor de la Mar was made of wood. It probably broke up in the time and tides a long time ago.”

  “Occam’s razor,” I said dully. “The simplest explanation is usually right.” Remington nodded.

  “So my best guess about what happened to the treasure of the Flor de la Mar?” Remington said, kicking his black cowboy boots on the table. “It was all salvaged and divvied up about five hundred years ago.”

  EPILOGUE

  We held a funeral for David Marcum in Houston. A lot of people turned out. Ashley didn’t know half of them. But they all knew her brother. It seemed that David had left a mark with his life, however short.

  Ashley donated a big part of her settlement proceeds to charity. One of the biggest recipients was the Houston Legal Aid clinic. With the new funds, the clinic was able to hire more attorneys and move to nicer offices downtown. Ashley herself went back to school at the university in San Marcos. To study psychology.

  Two of the new attorneys hired by the legal aid clinic were Harder and myself. Judge Graves held a disciplinary hearing on our conduct. He didn’t disbar us, but he suspended us from practicing law for pay for one year. He also ordered us to do no less than one thousand hours of community service each. In his order, Graves wrote that while our actions had uncovered a far greater crime, that didn’t change the law. Graves said he had he a duty to punish us to uphold the ethics rules and deter such conduct in the future. But the sentence was lenient, and less than I’d feared. It could have been worse.

  I was happy to have some time off from corporate work. Harder and I set up shop in adjacent offices at the legal aid clinic and gave legal advice every day to those who needed it. The new offices that Ashley had financed were bright, airy, and (of course) modern, and we enjoyed a prime view of the Houston skyline. Cindy and Vijay would come down to the clinic on Fridays to help out, followed by what became a traditional weekly happy hour at Sushi King. Cindy and Vijay both stayed on at HH&K, and regaled us with the latest stories about Kruckemeyer, who was as crotchety as ever.

  John Remington continued to practice law unabated. His next case was a massive trade secret trial involving the alleged theft of intellectual property from U.S. technology companies by China. Remington’s expert witness in the case was Professor Jacob Schnizzel.

  Lloyd Gunthum was charged with murder by federal prosecutors. They charged the crew too, as accessories or for lying under oath. Most pled guilty. Lloyd Gunthum fought it and went to trial, maintaining that he had acted in self-defense. A jury of his peers disagreed, and Gunthum was unanimously convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

  Kathleen Loudamire resigned from Badden & Bock and became an ethics professor at a small law school in Florida. She wrote a textbook and won some teaching awards, and eventually got tenure. I didn’t keep track of what happened to Quinto, Adipose or the other Badden & Bock associates.

  Zachary Bock avoided disbarment or any criminal charges for his role in covering up Marcum’s death. He mounted a no-holds-barred legal defense, arguing that he had acted properly under the ethics rules. Bock hired a former federal judge in New York and a respected ethics professor from Harvard to represent him, and got off by the skin of his teeth. But he was forced out of Badden & Bock by the scandal. He landed at some other New York megafirm the next day.

  We never found David Marcum’s contract for the Flor de la Mar. I thought about it sometimes, and wondered where he had kept it, and whether it had existed at all.

  Two years after the lawsuit ended, Rockweiller Industries still had no definitive proof that the wreck found near the Nicobar Islands was that of the Flor de la Mar. In a short press release, Rockweiller announced that it was temporarily suspending salvage operations due to “various factors.” The statement did not disclose the value of what was recovered, or say when operations would resume.

  Rockweiller later instituted a private arbitration proceeding to try and claw back the money it paid to David Marcum’s estate. It charged fraud, misrepresentation, and tortious interference with contract. The arbitrator threw out the case under the anti-claw back provision that Remington had inserted into the settlement agreement. The arbitrator further ordered Rockweiller to pay all of the Marcum estate’s attorney’s fees for defending the claw back action.

  As for me, I bought a new car, and finally furnished my apartment. Otherwise, I haven’t spent much of my money. I’m dating Ashley Marcum, and I haven’t fucked it up yet.

  Jacob Schnizzel gave me the model of the Flor de la Mar that he had in his office. He added a gold plaque, which the whole team from HH&K signed as a parting gift. I keep it on a shelf at the clinic.

  Sometimes I look up at it, and my mind drifts across the seas and the centuries. I think about Alfonso de Albuquerque, scion of the Portuguese Empire. About Malacca, and the blood and treasure that was taken when it fell. I think of the modern-day battle waged in the Texas courts, a more civilized kind of warfare, but fought by warriors no less fierce.

  Most of all, I think about the ship itself. About the many people that sought it over the years, and those who claimed to have found it. Remington was probably right about the Flor de la Mar, I knew. That it had broken up in the sea, and that its contents were scavenged long ago. It was the most logical explanation.

  But a splinter of doubt remains in my mind. I think about all of the wild theories out there. The inaccuracies of the old charts, with their ancient rivers and lost kingdoms. The vastness of the ocean, and the unexplained disappearances in the Strait of Malacca. I think about whether someone might find the wreck one day. Or whether someone already had. And so from time to time I look up at the model and wonder. What really happened to the Flor de la Mar?

  THE END