Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  I knew, of course, what the problem was going to be. But I thought my brewing outrage, when it finally exploded, would be more effective if I pretended ignorance for the moment.

  “The problem is Primo Giordano’s death.”

  “I didn’t know that having a perfect record of student survival was a precondition to tenure,” I said, hoping the dean, who was sometimes slow on the uptake, wouldn’t miss the dripping sarcasm.

  “It’s not so much the fact that a student died, Jenna, as that the University of California is now being sued, along with you, for recovery of his missing map, which was last seen in your office.”

  “Assuming,” I said, “that there ever was a map and that it really is missing. Because neither I nor anyone else has ever actually seen it.”

  “Well, assuming or not assuming, there’s a lawsuit pending.”

  “So?”

  “Jenna, can’t you see the problem?”

  “Candidly, I can’t.”

  “If the university grants you tenure, and the lawsuit isn’t quickly settled, it’s the kind of thing that’s going to be all over the papers, the Internet and local TV. Student Death, Missing Treasure Map Linked to UCLA Prof is just too good to pass up.”

  “All right, so I’ll be the subject of news stories. I thought tenure was based on scholarly performance, teaching quality and community service.”

  “It is.”

  “Well, my scholarship is great, I won the student teaching award last year and in terms of community service, I’ve busted my butt on two different faculty committees.”

  “All true. But tenure always has some political element to it, even if it’s unspoken. If we were to deny tenure to a person of color, for example, it wouldn’t pass without comment.”

  “Which means what? That since I’m white, no one will give a shit if I’m denied tenure because of a baseless lawsuit connected in some bizarre way with a death that had nothing to do with me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  I had apparently raised my voice because several of the diners at nearby tables turned and looked at us.

  “Calm down, Jenna. What I’m trying to do here is to have a preliminary conversation with you about an awkward situation. And what’s awkward is that if you’re granted tenure in the face of unresolved allegations of stealing from a student, that’s going to cause a shit storm, to put it indelicately.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding. And of course it’s a situation that may quickly resolve itself and not affect your tenure at all. I’m just giving you a heads-up, okay?”

  “Like the heads-up you gave me that all was well, except that now all is not well?”

  “I guess. But I also came with a suggestion.”

  “Which is what?”

  Before he could offer his suggestion, Tiffany arrived with our English muffins and his orange juice and put them down on our table.

  “You guys need anything else?”

  “No,” we both said in unison.

  “Okay, then, you both have the greatest day.”

  As Tiffany moved off, I decided I needed to rein in my growing hostility—at least temporarily—to try to learn what I could about what was going on and then talk to Robert and Oscar and develop a strategy to deal with this development, too.

  “I’m sorry, Dean. This is all kind of unnerving. I mean, I’m still hurting from the bike accident, and now you’re suggesting my tenure might be in doubt. So I’m trying to take it all in, and I’m sorry if it’s made me a bit excitable.”

  “That’s understandable, Jenna. But my suggestion was only that you might consider deferring your tenure decision for a year. Lots of people do that, you know. You’re only in your fifth year of teaching, and you have a three-year contract at this point. So you could defer the decision by one or even two years and still be fine.”

  “I see. Have you discussed that possibility with anyone else?”

  “Yes, with two very senior members of the faculty.”

  “Did you bring it up or did they?”

  “They did.”

  “Was one of them Greta Broontz?”

  “I’d rather not say who it was.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “Take it any way you want. But speaking of Greta, I’m not telling you anything confidential in saying she’s been quite vocal about not being a fan of your scholarship.”

  “Yes, she’s told me that to my face. And since we’re discussing Greta, I called you about her yesterday afternoon and you didn’t return my call.”

  “Yes, and I know what that’s about. Greta came to see me yesterday, distraught that she had apparently failed to tell you she was coming to your class to evaluate your teaching for your tenure review. She thought she had e-mailed you.”

  “So that really was her assignment?”

  “Yes, of course. As you know, we do a teaching review for both the third-year review and the later tenure review.”

  “Well, that’s weird, because the last time, for my third-year teaching review, the e-mail scheduling the review came from the associate dean.”

  “It was just a mix-up all around, and everyone feels awful about it.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, I don’t, because while Greta was carrying out the ‘mistake,’ she was incredibly rude to me. And there was nothing mistake-ish about it.”

  “Greta has been having some personal issues, Jenna, and you should cut her a bit of slack.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some health issues, and I can’t say any more than that.”

  “So Greta gets to come and disrupt my class—and, in effect, disrespect me in front of my class—because she has some supposed secret health problem?”

  “Candidly, Jenna, Greta’s mistake—and it was a mistake—is just a blip on the problem. The larger problem is that up ’til now your critics have been a very small minority, but this whole brouhaha about Giordano will create an opening for them to try to gain some traction. Which is another reason to defer while you get the controversy behind you.”

  “It’s also a reason not to defer, since it gives them even more time to gain traction—whatever that means.”

  “You could look at it that way, but my years as dean tell me that once the lawsuit and the controversy surrounding it are gone, everything will calm down, you can get tenure—which would please me—and we can all get back to work.”

  “I see.”

  “Jenna, will you at least consider it?”

  “I will.”

  “And get back to me in the next couple of days? The Ad Hoc Tenure Committee will be issuing its confidential report soon, so if you’re going to defer, you need to do it promptly.”

  “Okay.”

  My calm okay had come via an enormous effort at self-control. Because I was, in fact, enormously angry; seething, really. What I actually wanted to do was reach across the table and twist his pointy nose, like something you might do to an enemy in middle school. I understood, intellectually, that on some level, he was just doing his job and was trying to be helpful, in his own distorted, ferrety way. So with a supreme effort of will, I had just buried those feelings—for the moment—and given him the wimpy response he was looking for.

  “One more thing,” he said. “Have you heard anything yet about the cause of Giordano’s death?”

  He had switched from my pending academic death to a real death; how appropriate. Well, how should I answer his actual question? I thought about it like this: all I’d heard was a confidential secondhand report that a preliminary analysis had identified a potentially toxic substance in a coffee stain on Primo’s shirt.

  “No, I haven’t heard anything. Have you?”

  “Haven’t heard a thing. And I understand that we won’t hear much until the coroner finishes his work.”

  “Let’s,” I said, “talk about something else.”

  He agreed, an
d we finished our English muffins in relative harmony. We talked about UCLA football and whether the Bruin statue was adequately protected this year against vandals.

  On my drive back to the law school, I left a message for Oscar, asking him to set up a conference call or an in-person meeting between him, Robert and me. Things were clearly spinning out of control, and I was spinning out of control. I needed to do something about it. Something very aggressive.

  CHAPTER 37

  I arrived at my classroom to teach my Law of Sunken Treasure seminar a little earlier than usual, with about ten minutes to go before the start of the class. I stood at the podium, looked out at the still mostly empty seats and thought about the fact that I was still pissed off. I wondered if anyone could see that my jaw was clenched.

  I loved teaching at UCLA, and I had been looking forward to getting tenure. Not because tenure meant that I would have a job for life but because it was an accomplishment that didn’t measure success by how good I was at screwing over the people on the other side of a lawsuit. I could own tenure as a pure reward for my hard work, teaching and scholarship over the last four years. Now it was all bizarrely threatened through no fault of my own, and I was going to have to return, at least for a while, to the dog-eat-dog world of litigation. It made me both sad and angry at the same time.

  “Professor? Could I talk with you for a moment?”

  It was Julie, standing in front of the podium. I’d been so lost in thought I hadn’t noticed her approach.

  I looked up at the clock. “We don’t have long before the class starts. Can we talk afterward?”

  “Sure. I wanted to find out if you read the diary.”

  “I did, and I’ve got some questions about it. But let’s talk afterward, okay?”

  “Works for me.”

  As I watched her move back to her seat in the first row, one of the thoughts that went through my mind was that Julie wasn’t on my list of people who might be out to kill me. But she was certainly on the list of people who might have been out to kill Primo. Maybe I should be making two lists. Maybe they were somehow related.

  By 9:00 A.M. most of the rest of the students had taken their seats. I flipped a switch and projected on the screen, as usual, the image of a ship. This time it was the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción. Once everyone was settled in, their notebook computers popped open in front of them, I aimed the beam of my laser pointer at the ship and asked, “Anyone know what type of ship that is?”

  The only hand up was Julie’s. I gestured toward her in the symbol that means, in classrooms everywhere, “Go ahead and answer.”

  “It’s huge,” she said, “so I’m gonna guess it’s one of the Manila galleons we read about early in the course.”

  “Please remind your classmates what they were.”

  “They took silver and gold from western Mexico out to the Philippines, where it was traded for porcelains, spices and other trade goods from China. Then the ships brought all that stuff back to Mexico on a return voyage so it could be shipped on to Spain.”

  “Right. And the ship was huge. In addition to its cargo, it could carry a thousand passengers and crew. What do you suppose happened to it, Julie?”

  “Well, since it’s up on the screen in this class, I’m guessing it sank somewhere because somehow or other…the crew screwed up.” She smiled a broad smile, no doubt pleased to remind me that she’d taken my civil procedure course when she was a first year and was still in on the joke.

  “Good guess, although it may not have been the crew’s fault. In any case, it crashed on the rocks on the coast of Saipan in 1638. What do you think happened after that?”

  “If it was close to shore, the cargo was probably salvaged.”

  “It was, or at least most of it was. The Spanish were such meticulous record keepers that we could actually visit the archive in Spain and find out precisely what was salvaged and what its value was, even though the salvage happened almost four hundred years ago.”

  I looked out toward the back row, where Crawford Phillips was in his usual seat, chin on his chest, clearly struggling to stay awake and losing the battle. “Crawford,” I asked, “how many shipwrecks do you think there are on this planet?”

  On hearing his name, his head jerked up. “I’m sorry, Professor. Could you repeat the question?”

  “Late night, Crawford?”

  “Uh, yeah. Studying ’til late.”

  There was a collective guffaw.

  “Well, whatever you were doing last night, the question was, how many shipwrecks do you think there are on this planet?”

  “Since the beginning of time?”

  “Yes, since men first sailed the seas.”

  “I’m guessing hundreds of thousands.”

  “Actually, the current estimate is three million. But where are most of them, Crawford?”

  “Close to shore.”

  “Why?”

  “Because in ancient times most trade was coastal, so ships mostly hugged the shore. And shores and harbors are the most dangerous places for ships. That’s where all the rocks and reefs are. A lot of fog, too.”

  “Good answer. Now let me turn to the really interesting thing. If we went to the Spanish archive in Seville right now, we could find detailed records of all the Manila galleons that ever went missing. We could discover their names and whether they were on their outbound or inbound voyages. We could find out what their cargoes were and their value at the time. We could learn their expected routes and the approximate dates they sank. There’d be a lot of them. During the two hundred fifty years that the Manila galleons plied the seas, more than fifty of them disappeared without a trace and are presumably on the bottom of the ocean.”

  I stopped looking at Crawford so he could go back to sleep and swept my gaze across the other students. “If the galleons didn’t sink within sight of shore,” I asked, “could we salvage them?”

  The woman who sat to Julie’s right, Consuelo Hernandez, answered. “Depends on how close they were when they sank. But if they sank really far offshore, we probably couldn’t find them to salvage. There was no radio communication and usually no survivors, so they’re just out there on the bottom somewhere in the thousands of miles between Mexico and the Philippines.”

  “How many mile are we talking about, Consuelo?”

  “Something like eight thousand.”

  “Right. And so the main problem for treasure hunters goes something like this: if a ship sank near shore, it’s probably already been salvaged. If it’s not near shore, but is within two hundred miles of the shore, it’s difficult. Sovereign countries claim that area within their exclusive economic zone. So as with the Edmund Fitzgerald, you’d need to get a permit and share the prize with some government.”

  “But the government,” Crawford piped up without being called on, “did nothing to deserve any part of the prize. No matter which government we’re talking about.” Crawford had demonstrated during the course of the seminar that he was something of a free marketeer.

  “Crawford, I don’t know about that, but I see that the idea of governmental regulation has awakened you.”

  “I wasn’t asleep.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, in any case you could make some arguments on behalf of a sovereign state’s right to a share of the treasure. But, in any case, if you can find a ship that’s salvageable with current technology, you’re much better off finding one that’s well beyond the two-hundred-mile limit, so national salvage laws won’t apply unless…well, unless what, Crawford?”

  “Unless it’s a warship.”

  “Right. Assuming you can find it with precision. Because there may be billions of dollars in gold and silver out there somewhere in the ocean depths, but unless you can find it, until the oceans are drained it’s just going to stay there, sovereign rights or no sovereign rights.”

  We went from there into a discussion of the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes case in Florida, in which Odyssey Marine Exploration salvaged a half-billion
dollars in gold from a ship that sank off the Strait of Gibraltar in 1804. But the Spanish government got it all in the end because it proved to a court’s satisfaction that, even though the ship was carrying cargo, it was also a Spanish warship, and governments never abandon their claims to warships. Most of the students found it horribly unfair.

  As soon as the class ended, Julie approached me once again. “You said you had some questions about the diary?”

  “I do. But let’s walk back toward my office so we can have a little privacy, plus we need to clear out of here before the next class comes in. Better yet, let’s go sit in the little courtyard out back. I have something very specific I want to ask you.”

  CHAPTER 38

  We walked down the hall, then out of the double glass doors to the patio and sat down across from one another at one of the square white metal tables that dot the big concrete tiles. It’s a pretty space, called the Shapiro Courtyard after its donors, with red-brick buildings on two sides. The trees that shade it are neither young nor old, but date from the time the courtyard was added, back in the 1990s. The day had turned warm, and I would have loved to just sit there and soak up the sun. But Julie was looking expectantly at me, so even though she had approached me to discuss the diary, it was clear that I was going to have to kick off the conversation.

  “Julie, some of the things I want to ask you are kind of personal, and you should feel free not to answer. Normally, I don’t pry into the private lives of my students.”

  “I’m okay with it. I wouldn’t have given you the diary if I weren’t. What do you want to know?”

  “When you were living with Primo, did Quinto live there, too?”

  “Yes. He had the second, smaller bedroom. But he wasn’t there all the time. Maybe only three nights a week, and never on weekends. I don’t know where he went the other nights. I tried to ask him a few times, but he wouldn’t answer. He always changed the subject.”

  “Primo’s diary says Quinto threatened to kill him. Do you know anything about that?”