Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  He turned his head to look at me. “Oh, good, it’s you. I feared it was some student making an awkward joke.”

  “Awkward because you’re not handsome?”

  “No, awkward because it’s not cool to be hit on by a student, even in jest.”

  “Had that experience of students hitting on you, have you?”

  “Not recently.”

  “I see.”

  We both laughed, and then, as I walked in and leaned the bike against the wall, I said, “You know that lawsuit I gave you to review? The one where Quinto Giordano is suing me?”

  “Uh-huh. Don’t you remember? I read it this morning and told you to hire a lawyer.”

  “Right. Well, here’s my question: Do you know either of the plaintiffs?”

  He sighed. “Only the Italian company, not Quinto.”

  “Don’t you think you should have told me that?”

  “Here’s the way it went down, Jenna. Last summer I spent a few weeks consulting for my old company on some pitches they’d received for investment. One of them was a pitch for investing in the recovery of deep-sea treasure. They were looking for twenty million, I think, to recover sunken treasure that had supposedly already been located on the ocean floor. The company pitching it was one of the plaintiffs in your suit—Altamira Società Recupero.”

  “How the hell could you not have mentioned that to me? Especially after you saw the lawsuit, in which that company is a plaintiff?”

  He sighed again. “The company I worked for signed a supertight confidentiality agreement that binds me, too. It precludes even mentioning the project or the names of those involved in it to anyone. It was very awkward to keep it from you, but I thought I needed to honor it.”

  “Can you at least tell me what you recommended?”

  He paused for a moment and pursed his lips. “I guess now that you know about my role in it I ought to tell you a tiny bit—although I really shouldn’t even now—but please don’t tell anyone I told you.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I recommended that they pass on it. Too risky, and it didn’t look like the people running the company had the right experience. I wrote up a memo and suggested that if the company could first raise a couple of million in additional money, use it to get better side-scan sonar of the actual ship on the bottom—the pictures they had could have been of almost anything—and bring some folks with more experience on board, it might be worth a relook later.”

  “Did you ever talk with Quinto or Primo about it?”

  “No, there was some other Italian guy—a good deal older—pitching it. I don’t recall his name off the top of my head. I’d have to see if I can find it.”

  “I looked that Italian company up on various databases and couldn’t find out anything about them.”

  “They’re a private investment company, and they try to stay beneath the radar.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me about the deal? That’s my area of expertise, you know.”

  “Jenna, please forgive me, but you’re an expert on the law of deep-sea salvage, not how to do it and make money from it. From an investment point of view, it was a nonstarter. If I’d thought it had any chance of success as an investment, then of course I would have tried to get permission to consult you. Jeez.”

  I was mollified, at least somewhat. And his story, if true, explained why Primo and Quinto knew who he was, but he didn’t know who they were. Or so it seemed. And then I remembered what Ronald Reagan had once said about the ballistic missile treaty: Trust, but verify.

  “Aldous, do you still have a copy of your memo? I’d like to see it.”

  “My client company probably considers it to be confidential, but since they didn’t invest, I don’t see any harm in showing you my report, redacted a bit maybe—but not the company’s proposal—as long as you don’t copy it and keep it confidential. I’ll dig it up and you can sit here and read it.”

  “If we get married, as you’ve suggested, will I be required to read important stuff only in your presence?”

  I knew that was a harsh and sarcastic thing to say. But I was really trying to answer the question in my head: if I had been in Aldous’s shoes, would I have withheld the information just because of a “tight” confidentiality agreement? How can you say you love someone and do that?

  I was about to express that exact thought when Aldous said, “Dear God, Jenna. You’re impossible. Let’s change the subject. Have you gotten a lawyer yet to defend you in the lawsuit?”

  I decided to skip the confrontation, at least for the moment, and said, “I talked to Robert Tarza, my old law partner, and I think he’ll pitch in from Paris, which is where he’s living. It’s not like I need to do anything on that front in the next day or two, and I can probably get someone here to work with him. And I’ve hired Oscar Quesana to be the interface with the police on Primo’s death.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “You know, Aldous, another option on the civil suit would be for you to represent me.”

  “Well, first, Jenna, because of my research, I would have a conflict doing anything involving the Italian company. But even if that weren’t a problem, I teach securities law and, when the associate dean makes me, first-year contracts. I wouldn’t have a clue what to do.”

  “We could ask for a conflict waiver—you were just a consultant. And you would know what you were doing if I were standing behind you, telling you what to do.”

  “I’d rather have you standing in front of me.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It was a clumsy attempt to compliment you about how great you look in Lycra.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, you do. Anyway, hire Robert Tarza.”

  “I’ll think about it some more. Right now, I need to get going.”

  I didn’t really need to get going, but I wanted to get away from Aldous and consider whether his story made any sense. I had been planning to show him the diary but decided that could wait. I did want to know where he’d be, though.

  “When are you going to Buffalo, Aldous?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Well, call me when you’re there.”

  “I will. And the offer to stay at my place is still open. I’m going to give you my spare house key.” He reached into his desk drawer, extracted a brass key from the very back of the drawer and tossed it to me.

  I snagged it out of the air and put it in my purse. “I don’t think I’ll use it, but thanks.”

  “The entry code is the six digits of my birthday plus the number nine and the star key punched twice. I’ll tell the security service you might be coming.”

  As I headed for the door, he said, “You know, I hear Buffalo’s actually a great place.”

  I chose not to respond.

  CHAPTER 30

  I went back to my office, checked my e-mail—nothing of any consequence—then went to the copy room and copied the notebook. I figured if anyone saw me, I’d just say I was copying some notes I’d made when I was out on the treasure-hunting ship over the previous summer. If they asked about the vinyl gloves I was wearing—I had brought an extra pair with me—I’d say I was having some kind of hand treatment. Or something like that.

  As it was, no one came in while I was copying. When I got back to my office, I lifted the sign-up sheet off the wall—it still had Primo’s signature on it—and put it in a plastic bag, as Oscar had instructed. I would have to replace the sheet, but since I didn’t have office hours on Wednesdays, I could do that later.

  I had to get the original down to Oscar’s guy in Venice. I decided that, instead of biking back to my apartment and then driving to Venice to see Oscar’s guy, I’d just bike there. I checked Google Maps. It said that by bike it was nine miles and would take me about an hour. The ride would clear my head, and after I dropped off the packages, I would have dinner by myself at some small café by the shore and then take myself and my bike back to Westwood on a bus. The Santa Mon
ica buses all have bike racks on the front.

  I realized that my plan involved staying away from my apartment for as long as I could, and it was because I was still afraid. Maybe it was worth staying at Aldous’s after all. But I didn’t want to stay there until he was out of town.

  I put the three plastic bags—one with the original of the diary, one with the copy and one with the sign-up sheet—in a saddlebag on the side of the bike and carried the bike down the steps. I placed it in the street outside the law school, mounted and began to pedal away. Just as I was picking up speed, I noticed a man in a dark coat and a broad-brimmed hat that obscured his face walking along beside me. He had two dogs with him. Suddenly, the man gave the large dog a sharp kick on the side, and it ran into the street, directly in front of me. I swerved to avoid it and somehow managed, in the process, to hit the curb straight on. The bike stopped dead and I went flying over the handlebars. My shoulder hit the still-wet grass and skidded along until my head bonked the sidewalk with a distinctive sound. The world whorled and went dark.

  I woke up just as they were unloading me from the ambulance at the UCLA ER. I tried, feebly, to get up but found I was tethered to the gurney with leather straps. I heard the EMT say, “Take it easy, Professor, you had a bit of a spill, and it looks like you hit your head, although, fortunately, not very hard. All your vital signs are stable, and your color has come back. But the docs here are going to take a look at you just to be sure you’re okay.”

  “All right,” I said. “Where’s my bike?”

  “When we came to pick you up, someone from the law school was standing there—a tall guy who said he was also a law professor—and he said he’d keep it safe until you got back. He gave me his card to give you. It says his name is Aldous Hartleb. I’ll bring the card in to you after they get you settled in an exam room. Initially, he wanted to get into the ambulance with you, but we didn’t feel comfortable with that.”

  “No need for the card,” I said. “I know him well.”

  Shortly thereafter, they wheeled me into an exam room, where most of my clothes were removed. I was immediately surrounded by several doctors and nurses, who hooked me up to some sort of beeping machine, pushed and pulled at me, moved my arms and legs around and clucked and chatted among themselves in incomprehensible gibberish. Then someone else came and wheeled me to another room on another floor, where they did a CAT scan of my head and upper body, then took me back to the exam room and got me into a blue hospital gown.

  After a while I was alone in the little room. Just me and the machine to which I was tethered. I thought about trying to get up, but the rails on the narrow bed were up, and I couldn’t immediately figure out how to lower them. I fell asleep. When I woke up and cracked my eyes open, there was a doctor in the room looking at me. I realized with horror that it was Dr. Nightingale.

  “Well,” he said, “the bad news is that you’re pretty banged up, particularly your shoulder and your face, and you’re going to be black-and-blue in various places for a while. The good news is that you don’t appear to have any bleeding under your skull or any other sign of a severe concussion, and you don’t have any broken bones or, so far as we can tell, torn ligaments. So you’re lucky.”

  “When can I get out of here?”

  “We’ll discharge you just as soon as you can arrange for someone to pick you up. Is there someone you can call?”

  “Probably. Can I borrow your phone to make the call?”

  “Sure.” He handed it to me.

  I reached Aldous on his cell, and he told me he had rushed down to the hospital and was out in the waiting area because they wouldn’t let him in to see me.

  I handed the phone back to Dr. Nightingale. He wasn’t bad looking, really. And he was, for the moment, my only conduit to what had killed Primo. Perhaps I needed to follow my thoughts of the morning to their natural conclusion and accept his dinner invitation.

  “Dr. Nightingale, I’m grateful to you for taking care of me tonight, and I realize that I’ve been kind of rude to you in the last couple of days. If it’s still open, I’d like to accept your dinner invitation.”

  He smiled. “Good, but I don’t think it’s ethical for me to finalize a dinner with you until you’re no longer a patient here. So call me if you still want to do it when you wake up tomorrow morning, okay?”

  “Okay, I will.”

  “I’ll go and sign your discharge papers. Be sure to arrange a follow-up with your personal physician tomorrow. If you begin to experience a bad headache or other symptoms, please return here immediately. And it’s probably best to avoid driving for the next day or two.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you have any Tylenol at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’re probably not very sore right now, but you’ll likely be really sore tomorrow, and maybe even more so the next day. Tylenol should do the trick, but if you need something stronger, call the hospital pharmacy. I’ll leave a script there for you.”

  Shortly thereafter, I was discharged. I shed my blue, open-backed hospital gown, put my slightly abraded Lycra back on—the only clothing I had—and went out to the waiting area to find Aldous. The Lycra did look a little incongruous in that setting. Aldous was sitting in a chair, reading something on his iPad. He got up, picked something up off the floor, walked over and handed it to me. “I put your bike in my office before I came down here, but I brought this. I thought you might want it.” It was the saddlebag from my bike.

  “Oh, thank God. I was worried that had been lost.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Well, can you drive me to Venice?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s in it on the way there.”

  He looked at me. “You know, I’d like to give you a hug, but it looks like that might hurt.”

  “Yeah, probably best to avoid it for now.”

  We left the ER and went out to get into Aldous’s red VW Bug, which he had left with the valet. I decided I needed to start trusting people more, and that Aldous was a good place to start. On a certain level, it was crazy, because he’d withheld the information about the Italian company from me. But on another level, after thinking about it, I concluded I would probably have done the same thing if faced with a tight confidentiality agreement.

  Making him my lawyer for the day—so what I said to him would be privileged—I told him about the diary and pretty much everything else I had discovered. He made no comment, just kind of grunted.

  Then I asked him the question that had been bugging me, but that had seemed so paranoid I’d hesitated to ask it.

  “Aldous, did you see my accident?”

  “Yes. I was looking out the window when it happened.”

  “Did some guy intentionally push that dog into the road in front of me? A guy in a big black coat with his hat pulled down over his face?”

  He laughed. “I saw the accident, and you misinterpreted what you saw. That guy walking along was old Professor Sikorsko. He’s a retired chemistry prof. He was out walking his little dog when the bigger dog—a stray, I guess—started bothering the little one. Sikorsko smacked the big dog on the side to make him go away, and it ran out into the road in front of you. He felt terrible about it.”

  “But not terrible enough to come to the hospital and see how I was.”

  “He’s like ninety years old.”

  “Oh, okay. I just had to ask.”

  “I understand.”

  When we got to Venice, I went up to a large brown door at the designated address, lifted the brass knocker and let it fall against the metal kick plate. A small man with a handlebar mustache and a shaved head opened the door and looked at me.

  “I’m Jenna James. I have some things for you. Oscar Quesana told me you’d be expecting me. He also told me to ask your name so I wouldn’t give these things to the wrong person.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Right. I’m John Smith.”

  That was the right n
ame.

  “Just a minute,” he said, and closed the door. A couple of minutes later the door opened again and, still standing in the doorway, he gave me a clipboard with a sheet of white lined paper on it. He also handed me a pen. “Please list the name and description of what you’re leaving, one item to a line. Then date and initial each entry.”

  I put the clipboard against the doorjamb, so I’d have something to steady it while I wrote, and filled the items in as requested. Then I handed it back to him.

  “Thanks,” he said and closed the door in my face.

  Aldous had parked around the corner. I walked there and got back in the car.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Let’s just say the guy wasn’t exactly charming.”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly what forensic examiners do, but I’ve never imagined them as the life of the party.”

  “Let’s go to dinner, Aldous. I’m starving. And maybe you can tell me what I need to know about staying at your house.” I had decided that while I wasn’t committed to staying there, it was good to have the option, just in case.

  CHAPTER 31

  Robert Tarza

  Week 1—Wednesday

  Paris, 10:00 P.M.

  In my gathering old age I had taken to going to bed early, at least during the week. Tess usually stayed up reading or watching TV or old movies. She had a particular affinity for Monty Python movies, although I was never sure whether she really, truly got all of the jokes.

  I had put down my copy of Le Monde, which I admit I could only read with a French-English dictionary close at hand, and was already drifting off when the phone rang. Tess would get it, I knew, and, in any case, hardly anyone ever called me at her place. My friends always called my cell.

  I put the pillow over my head. After a few rings it stopped, and I fell back asleep. Then I heard Tess calling me from the other room. “Robert, wake up. It is your friend Oscar.”