Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  “Which means?”

  “I have no candle in this funeral.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “Well,” she said, “in any case, I’ve talked to Señora Muñoz and gathered some documents for you to look at that I think you want. But first I need to explain some of our rules and procedures to you.”

  “Of course.”

  “First, you may bring only pencils, pens and paper in here. No markers or highlighters or scissors or sharp objects.”

  “I understand.”

  “If you want a document copied, please let me know, and I will have it copied for you. There is a small charge.” She handed me a price list.

  “We have eighty million documents here, divided into forty-three thousand files. They are well cataloged. Here is a guide in English to the various categories and systems.” She handed me another piece of paper and spent several minutes describing the catalog system they used.

  “Many of the documents we hold,” she said, “have been scanned and digitized. More important, many have been translated into contemporary Spanish, and some have been translated into English.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know that and I appreciate it. I looked at many before I came here.”

  “Good,” she replied. “Finally, I have gathered for you a set of documents relating to the Nuestra Señora de Ayuda, from the year 1638 onward. I assume you know it sank in 1641.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Okay, then. Just to be sure I have covered what you may want, I started the catalog search in 1630 and ended it in 1660, in case there were investigations of the sinking that took a long time.”

  “I really appreciate it.”

  “I’ve assigned you a spot at one of the desks.” She pointed to a wooden desk to the side of the room. “The documents are there for you to look through. Will you be attempting to translate them from the seventeenth-century Spanish?”

  “Yes, as best as my rusty modern Spanish will permit.”

  “I brought you something to help.” She handed me a book. “This is a guide to the paleography of seventeenth-century Spanish handwriting and abbreviations. Clerks at the House of Trade and in New Spain used abbreviations all the time, and they are one of the many aspects of Spanish handwriting from that century that give our readers great trouble. The vocabulary has not changed drastically over the years, but the handwriting, and especially the abbreviations, can sometimes make the text almost indecipherable to a modern reader.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll give it a try.”

  “There are other reference works along the walls,” she said. “Most are in Spanish, but a few are in English. Good luck with your research. We have offices around the corner. Please let me know if you need anything. And,” she added, “I forgot to mention, if you want to make any of your documents larger when you look at them, you can use the number on the document to see if we have digitized it, using,” she pointed, “the computers on the desktops.”

  Gabrielle had been standing quietly during the whole conversation. When Cristina had departed, she turned to me and said, “I’ll leave you for a couple of hours and then return. If you need to reach me before that, here is my cell phone number.” She handed me a piece of paper. “Good luck.” She said it with a tilt of the head and slightly raised eyebrows that I read as saying and you’ll need it.

  And I did. I spent the next two hours poring over the approximately eighty pieces of paper the archivists had left for me to review. In two hours, even with the help of the book on abbreviations, all I managed to decrypt was the fact that one page was a crew log that listed the shipboard jobs of what looked like fifty or sixty people. What most of the jobs were was utterly unclear to me. The other document I managed to interpret was a cargo manifest that seemed to list how many barrels of water the ship carried when it left port—it was unclear to me which port—in 1636.

  Gabrielle returned a couple of hours later and worked with the documents herself for a while. I sat and watched her. By the end of the afternoon she had made good progress and handed me rough translations of about a dozen documents. “If I work all day tomorrow,” she said, “I can probably get through most of the rest without much trouble. It’s closing time, though, so we really need to go. We can leave the docs here and they’ll still be here tomorrow.”

  “Would you join me for dinner this evening?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “Where are you staying?”

  “At the Alfonso XIII.”

  “I know a small restaurant near there, so you won’t get to bed too late. You’re probably still jet-lagged. It opens early by Spanish standards to accommodate tourists.”

  We walked to the restaurant and had a pleasant dinner, talking mostly about her decision to remain in Spain instead of returning to the United States. I gathered that she liked the diversity of the researchers who washed up at her door from all over the world, seeking the shadows of the past hidden among the archive’s eighty million documents—genealogists, treasure hunters, movie producers and historians, among many others.

  As we lingered over coffee, I said to her, “Well, there certainly weren’t any survivor reports in the documents you decoded today.”

  “No, but there are many more documents to look at tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know if I want a survivor account to be there or not.”

  “Don’t forget, as I told you this morning, if we don’t find it here, there are many more places in the world where it might be lurking.”

  “Speaking of lurking,” I said, “do you know an archivist named Pedro Cabano?”

  She stiffened slightly. “Yes, I know him. But I wouldn’t call him an archivist.”

  “What would you call him?”

  “A forger.”

  CHAPTER 66

  Week 2—Saturday evening/Sunday

  Seville

  As we waited for our check, Gabrielle went on to detail Cabano’s poor reputation among legitimate archivists and researchers—a reputation of shady dealings, including misleading treasure hunters who couldn’t read archaic Spanish, taking a stake in treasure hunts where the value of his services didn’t justify his cut and, in one infamous case, actually forging a document from the archive. He was also suspected of stealing archive documents, although that had never been proved, and he had been acquitted on the forgery charge.

  She had his address, but she said she’d be surprised if he agreed to talk to me. One of his techniques was to keep people who wanted to see him waiting for days or weeks so they’d think he was important and in demand.

  Gabrielle walked me back to my hotel. She promised to return to the archive in the morning—it was open on Sundays to registered researchers—and search herself for a survivor account from the Ayuda. We agreed to meet for lunch the next day, at the same place we had had dinner. We said good night, and she started to get into a cab. Right before the valet closed the cab’s door, she said, “By the way, he speaks fluent English, but with you he will probably pretend not to.”

  When I got back to my hotel room, it was almost noon in Los Angeles. I called Marbury Marfan and lucked out: the lawyer I wanted to speak with was in his office. He agreed to put together what I needed and fax it to me at my hotel. I reminded him to put it on A4-size paper, which is the standard size all over Europe.

  As I got into bed, I considered whether what I was about to do was legal. I concluded that it wasn’t clearly illegal and drifted into a sound sleep.

  When I woke up on Sunday morning, the document had arrived. At 10:00 A.M. I called Cabano’s number using the hotel’s phone system. I didn’t expect him to be in on a Sunday but thought I might as well give it a try. When he unexpectedly answered, I hung up. I put the document in my briefcase, grabbed a cab in front of the hotel and was at Cabano’s office, which was in the suburbs, in twenty minutes.

  I had somehow expected his office to be in a stuccoed, low-rise, classically Spanish building, decorated with bright tile work and surrounded b
y bougainvillea. Instead, it was in a four-story building that was clad in polished black glass surrounded on all sides by a blacktopped parking lot. Fortunately, there was no building security, so I was able to take the elevator directly to the top floor. I stepped off the elevator into a small lobby that faced four doors, one of which, 402, was Cabano’s. There was a button for a bell and I pushed it.

  A moment later a dark-complected man with slicked-back dark hair and wearing a bullfighter’s shirt and tight black pants opened the door.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Robert Tarza and I need to speak to you.”

  “No comprendo.”

  “Excuse me, señor, but I think you comprende quite well. You haven’t returned my calls and now I’m here, and I’m not leaving until we sit down and talk.”

  “You’re right, señor, I speak English, although not well. I am late for a meeting. You will need to call and make an appointment. I will see you possibly next Friday.”

  I clicked open my briefcase, extracted the document with a flourish and handed it to him. “This is the draft, in Spanish, of a lawsuit accusing you of conspiracy to defraud investors in connection with the treasure aboard the Nuestra Señora de Ayuda.”

  He started to page through it.

  “You see,” I said, “I’m a partner in a large international law firm based in Los Angeles. I have had this lawsuit drafted by our correspondent law firm in Madrid.” I named the largest firm in Madrid, which I had looked up on the Net that morning. “I suspect this is something that can be worked out if we can talk. Otherwise I’m going to have that suit filed here in Seville tomorrow morning when the court opens. And then we will talk in a different forum.”

  He stood reading the lawsuit, which impressed me. Most people would have read only the first page. The truth was, of course, that although Marbury Marfan did have a correspondent firm in Madrid, it was a different one that was much smaller. It was also the case that I had not talked to them. I had, instead, called a Spanish lawyer from our correspondent firm who was doing an exchange internship in Los Angeles for six months, told him the situation and asked him to draft up something that would be appropriate for a Spanish fraud lawsuit, naming Jenna as the plaintiff and Cabano as the defendant.

  He looked up from reading the suit. “You have the facts wrong, señor, but we will talk. Come in.” He opened the door wider and gestured me inside.

  The office was a single large room furnished with a black lacquer desk set on a pedestal, two leather guest chairs and a credenza holding cut-glass bottles filled with dark liquids I presumed were liqueurs. Beneath the credenza were long pullout drawers of the type that usually contain files. The walls of the room were hung all around with color photographs of jewelry encrusted with gold. I assumed they were pictures of treasure that had been recovered from the deep.

  I took one of the guest chairs without being asked. Cabano moved up the short step onto the pedestal, sat down in a tall-backed black leather desk chair and stared down at me. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I want the truth about certain things.”

  “Ask and we will see if I know the truth.”

  “Fine. I represent a young woman who is being sued by someone named Quinto Giordano. He claims she stole a treasure map from his brother that shows the exact location of a Manila galleon treasure ship called the Nuestra Señora de Ayuda. He also claims the location was found by using a survivor account that was found here in Seville, in the archive. We think there is no survivor account and that the map, if it really exists, is a fake.”

  As soon as I had finished speaking, I realized I had made a mistake.

  Cabano folded his hands in front of him and spoke. “The lawsuit says that this woman—Jenna James—is being sued for an investment, not for stealing a map.”

  “There is an error in the drafting, then. I don’t speak Spanish very well, particularly legal Spanish, so I didn’t review the paperwork.”

  He quirked his lips in a sideways smile. “I think this lawsuit is a very clever fake, and you used it to get through my door. I think it will not be filed.”

  I shrugged.

  “You are silent, and I think that means you agree.”

  “Take it any way you want. I am through your door, and I think you should answer my questions. Is there a survivor account? Is there a map?”

  “I suppose there is no harm in answering. You have come a long way to get the answers, and the answers do me no harm. I signed a confidentiality agreement, but they have not paid me, so it is nothing. But I am being impolite. Would you like something to drink?”

  “No thank you.”

  “All right. First, there is a survivor account. You will not find it easily in the archive because it is misfiled.”

  “I have someone looking for it.”

  “Who?”

  “Gabrielle Muñoz.”

  “Ah, she is very good. She will maybe find it. We shall see.”

  “What does the survivor account say?”

  “I will show you a copy.” He got up, stepped down from the pedestal and walked toward the credenza. He opened one of the long file drawers, bent down and extracted a folder. He stood back up, took a document from the folder and handed it to me.

  “This is a copy of the survivor story, or at least the big part of it.”

  I looked at the document. It was in the same archaic handwriting I had seen the day before in the archive. Which meant I could make out only a word or two of it.

  “What does it say?”

  “It is written by the navigator of the ship, who survived the disaster.” Cabano was standing behind me. He reached over my shoulder and pointed to two words on the page. There is his name, Francisco de Alba.”

  “What else does the document say?”

  Cabano walked back to his desk and sat down again in his chair. “He gives the latitude of the ship when it sank, he estimates the longitude—probably very poorly, because they could not measure it well back then from a ship. And he says how many days he drifted before he came to Catalina Island.”

  “How many days was that?”

  “Ah, there is the thing. The document is at that point smeared. Most people, if they read it, think it is the number 2 there.” He pointed at a spot on the page. “They think it says two days. But I asked the original document to be examined with an X-ray scanner, and it says 20 days, not 2.”

  “Which implies what?”

  “If you look at the records from other ships in that area at the time, and weather records from people who lived farther south, you can very roughly estimate the wind speed and water currents and how many kilometers he drifted until he found land.”

  “What about his own estimate of longitude?”

  “You can compare it and you find his own estimate was probably off. That the ship sank at least one hundred kilometers farther west than he estimated.”

  I looked again at the document. “I see that there’s no document number on this. The ones in the archive I looked at yesterday all had document numbers.”

  “I have taken away the number from the copy so a person cannot find it without the work of finding it.”

  “So there is no map, there’s just a survivor account?”

  “Is there a map from 1641? No. Is there a map from now? Anyone can make a map now and put on it the latitude and longitude.”

  “Do you have a map from now?”

  “No.”

  I realized I wasn’t doing a great job of getting the facts, because, really, he was leading the discussion. I needed to regroup.

  “Señor Cabano, may I use the restroom?”

  “Of course. I will give you the key and point you the way.”

  CHAPTER 67

  Week 2—Sunday

  Seville

  When I returned from the restroom, I decided to try to take control of the conversation and get to what I most wanted to know: Had the brothers actually done the work needed to find the Ayuda, or were they still at the stage o
f just raising money to find it?

  To my surprise, when I got back to the office, Cabano had moved from behind his desk to the other guest chair. He had a map of some kind in his lap. I sat down where I had been sitting before, and he said, “I want to show you something,” and then spread out the map so I could see it. It was a map of the California coast.

  I realized he was again taking charge but decided to let it roll.

  “If you look here,” he said, pointing to Santa Catalina Island, “someone who came from a shipwreck to the west and drifted for two days and landed on Catalina came from not too far away.” He pointed to a spot not very far off the western shore of Catalina. “But if he drifted twenty days, then he came from way out here”—he tapped his finger on a spot much farther out into the ocean.

  “What about latitude?”

  “They knew how to calculate latitude in 1641. They were not so bad at it. And Francisco, he was the navigator. But even if you are mostly right in 1641, without GPS you are not exact. You may be off, north or south, by one hundred kilometers.”

  “Can you search that much ocean?” I asked. “With so much error in both latitude and longitude?”

  “Yes, if you have much money.”

  “How much?”

  He shrugged. “Twenty million euros?”

  “Why so expensive? Don’t you just run multiple sonar scans across the ocean floor until you find it?”

  “Even with the most good side-scan sonar, you must drag your sonar arrays over much ocean bottom because your latitude and longitude, they are not precise. You must search thousands of square kilometers.”

  “Isn’t it just a question of having enough time?”

  He sat silent a moment, clearly trying to figure out how to explain the difficulty to me. Finally, he said, “In your briefcase do you have a flashlight?”

  “Actually, I do. I always carry one.”

  “Please may I have it?”

  I opened the briefcase, extracted the flashlight and handed it to him.