A Statue for Jacob

by Peter Murphy

  ‘These put it beyond doubt. I found them while I was examining the phones. You’ll notice that the phones and the fax machine are the only items left untouched. This is why.’

  He held out his hand to let me see.

  ‘Listening devices?’ I asked.

  ‘Japanese, also state of the art, planted during the visit. This is something else I used to do when I worked for the government. But the devices were an afterthought. If all they wanted was to bug the office, they could have come and gone without leaving a trace. They were looking for something. The vandalism was meant to cover that up, throw us off the trail. Whether they found anything of interest, we don’t know. Kiah doesn’t know of anything they couldn’t have found out through the court filings or the press, but then again, we don’t know what they were looking for.’

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  Logically, it didn’t make sense. There was no way I would have given custody of the originals to Kiah, but these were the same people who thought that the Department of the Treasury was entitled to withhold its papers from other departments of the government, and saw themselves as the Treasury’s enforcers. Logic might not have come into it. They’d tried to infiltrate our building and the Claims Court, but they’d been denied by security. Here was a building they could just walk into. In their book, it must have seemed worth a try.

  ‘You know what they were looking for?’ Kiah asked.

  I smiled. ‘I know this has been a terrible day so far,’ I said, ‘but I think I might be able to brighten it up for you a little.’

  ‘I’m ready for that,’ Kiah whispered. She was close to tears.

  I had brought her copies of the documents with me. I opened my briefcase while Arlene cleared a space on her desk, and laid the documents out for them, side by side.

  ‘We found these yesterday in the Treasury building,’ I said. ‘I think this is what they were hoping to find – well, the originals anyway.’

  I stepped back and watched as the four of them crowded around and read, silently at first, and then with gasps. Samantha took a step backwards, a hand over her mouth. She started to cry. Kiah was breathing rapidly.

  ‘Are these for real?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘We’re sure they are,’ I replied. ‘You can see the originals any time you want. I’ve deposited them with the court – frankly, because we were afraid of something like this happening at our offices.’

  ‘That would suggest that you have suspects in mind,’ Powalski said.

  I nodded. ‘There’s a fake-cop outfit inside Treasury, calls itself the Internal Investigations Unit. They’ve been making our lives a misery ever since we began our search. Ellen and I didn’t trust them. They didn’t want to us to take the documents away, and in the end I had to smuggle them out of the building. We’re convinced that they were after the originals to do them some harm, and sure enough, they showed up at our offices last night demanding that we hand the documents back. When that didn’t work they tried to force their way into the courthouse, but fortunately the security guard saw them off.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Petrosian,’ Samantha said. ‘Thank you for bringing these to us.’

  I smiled. ‘You’re welcome.’

  Kiah reached into her purse and took out some pieces of paper torn from a yellow pad.

  ‘In return,’ she said, ‘I’d like to show you this. We found it in Pennsylvania. You can see the original, of course.’

  I began to read. It was a statement by someone called Isabel Hardwick, written in 1813, which rambled a bit and took some time to get to the point. But the point, once she got to it, was remarkable, especially given the documents we had found the previous day. According to Isabel Hardwick, Jacob van Eyck had entrusted her with twenty-two documents to take to his Brother, not named, in Philadelphia in 1810. The clear inference was that these documents were loan certificates, and that his Brother was to play some role in making sure that Jacob was repaid, presumably by delivering them to the Treasury in Washington. The value of the loans was not stated, but the significance of her statement was unmistakable. Isabel said she delivered twenty-two such documents to the Brother, while the anonymous writer said that he only delivered sixteen to the Treasury. But even with that discrepancy, there was a massive circumstantial case for believing that the anonymous letter-writer and the Brother were one and the same person. Kiah now held a huge piece of the puzzle in her hands.

  But she also had a disaster on her hands. She could easily spend the rest of her discovery time reconstructing her office and nothing more. I looked up. I knew instantly that she had reached the same conclusion I had. I decided what I was going to say next in an instant.

  ‘Kiah, do you have any idea who this guy, the Brother, might have been?’

  ‘Not yet. We’re working on the theory that he was a Freemason, possibly someone who lived not too far away from the van Eyck family. Jacob was a Mason, so the use of the word “Brother” seems significant. We’re searching for the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania membership records of the time .’

  I took a deep breath.

  ‘I’ll call the FBI’s Philadelphia field office this afternoon,’ I volunteered. ‘It might take you guys days to get that information. They’ll get it in a day and fax it to me, and I’ll send it over to you. What then? You’ll pick out likely candidates and try to find out who their descendants are?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Send me the names when you have them,’ I offered. ‘I’ll have the FBI run their addresses and phone numbers for you.’

  Kiah took my hand.

  ‘Dave, I don’t know what to say. This is really above and beyond the call of duty. Why?’

  I looked back into the office, and stretched out my hand in the direction of the devastation.

  ‘This,’ I said. ‘I didn’t become a lawyer for this.’

  58

  In the Civil Division of Justice we don’t have much to do with crime, at least in the conventional sense of investigating and prosecuting criminals, but you run into FBI special agents all the time in the building, and most of us have our friends and acquaintances. Mine is Marty Resnik. I’d met Marty at a drinks party in the Criminal Division to welcome the new Deputy Attorney General three or four years before, and we’d hit it off immediately. We’d discovered that we came from much the same kind of social background. He had fought his way through to a degree, as I had, without much in the way of financial support, and he had married his college sweetheart, as I had. We’ve met for a beer every so often ever since. Marty has a great, self-deprecating sense of humor, and a very sharp mind. He’s easy to talk to, and you never have to tell him something twice. And he’s always ready to help if he can, even if it’s with something a little outside the usual scope of his duties. When I called him and told him what I needed to help Kiah, and why I needed it, he didn’t hesitate. He told me he would get on the phone to Philadelphia right away.

  That was all I had time to do when I arrived back at the office before being summoned into the Presence. Word had spread far and wide about what was going on inside Treasury, and the Attorney General was asking what the hell was going on over there, and why no one was listening to him. It was a fair question, and he had invited the van Eyck legal team – Maggie, Harry, Ellen and myself – to his office to explain it to him. At my level, visits to the office, with its elegant furnishings, were something of a rarity and always somewhat intimidating; it looked and felt every bit the centre of power it was. We told him as much as we knew, which wasn’t much. We knew there was a so-called Internal Investigation Unit which seemed to have an unhealthy interest in the search we were making, but as to who was behind it and what their motives were, we couldn’t even begin to speculate. Whoever they were, if they thought that they were protecting the government by trying to suppress evidence, they were naïve and badly mistaken. The Attorney already knew about their attempt
to frighten us into returning the documents, and about their late-night caper at the Claims Court, but no one had yet heard about what I’d seen at Kiah’s office. There hadn’t been time for me to tell them. When I described the scene in detail, there was a shocked silence in the office. The Attorney General, Henry Shilling – tall, African American, early sixties, with distinguished features and a massive head of silver hair – was a constitutional law professor at Yale, respected both as a renowned scholar and a true gentleman, and there was no mistaking the pained look that crossed his face.

  ‘Mr Petrosian, is there any evidence that it was these people from Treasury that broke into Miss Harmon’s office?’ he asked quietly, after some time.

  ‘No, sir,’ I replied. ‘But her investigator, Powalski, is a former CIA man. He says the kind of equipment they had, including the bugging devices, has “government” written all over it. And that’s before you consider how much of a coincidence it is that it happened last night when we know these Treasury people were roaming all over town trying to find the documents.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ the Attorney said. ‘But I can’t go to the President with nothing more than Mr Powalski’s unsubstantiated opinion, even if he’s right. You’re going to have to give me something more than that.’

  Maggie raised an eyebrow.

  ‘To the President, sir?’

  ‘Well, yes, to the President. If this is coming from another department of government, there’s something rotten in the State of Denmark, as Shakespeare might say. Something’s gotten way out of line; it’s going to hurt the government in this litigation and it could hurt the government in a wider sense. The consequences could be very serious, and the President needs to know about it. The problem is, I don’t know what to tell him.’

  Dave,’ Maggie asked, ‘has Miss Harmon called in the police?’

  ‘I’m sure she has. I understand her wanting to let Powalski take a look first, but she would need a police report for insurance purposes, if nothing else.’

  Maggie looked at the Attorney.

  ‘Sir, I would advise that you ask the Director of the FBI to take over the investigation from the local police, and send a couple of agents over to Miss Harmon’s office as soon as he can before they start dismantling the crime scene.’

  Shilling nodded. ‘I agree. Let’s call Miss Harmon now and ask her not to disturb anything until the Bureau can get their forensic people in to take a look.’

  Maggie got to her feet and headed for the door. ‘Give me five minutes, sir.’

  ‘All set, sir,’ she said, as she returned. ‘The police hadn’t got round to it yet – apparently they had a busy night – so the Bureau will talk to the Chief and call his people off. The Bureau will deal with it from this point on. If there’s some governmental involvement here, they’ll find it.’

  ‘Is Miss Harmon happy with that?’

  ‘Very much so, sir.’

  ‘Good,’ the Attorney replied. ‘Now, would someone please tell me where we’re going with this case?’

  ‘Sir?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘If I recall rightly,’ Shilling said, ‘I received a memorandum just after this case was filed, assuring me that it was covered by the statute of limitations, and that it would be gone in a week or two. Now I’m hearing that, not only has the case not gone away, but we’ve discovered some documents that give the plaintiffs reason to believe they might hit us for quite a large sum of money. That’s something else that will get the President’s attention, and before I have to explain myself to him, I’d like to know where we stand.’

  ‘Harry has a better handle on the detail than I do,’ Maggie said sweetly.

  Harry looked at me. ‘I’ll ask Dave to feel free to butt in, too,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care who butts in,’ Shilling said, ‘as long as someone tells me what’s going on.’

  ‘The judge hasn’t ruled on the statute of limitations yet, sir,’ Harry began. ‘That hearing’s coming up in a couple of weeks. It’s our belief that we have a solid legal case, and that Judge Morrow will go with us, and that even if he doesn’t go with us, the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court will.’

  ‘If our case is as solid as you say,’ the Attorney asked, ‘why hasn’t the judge ruled already? What’s taking him so long?’

  Harry looked at me.

  ‘We think he’s just being careful,’ I replied.

  ‘Careful? In what sense, careful?’

  ‘Well, sir, this is a high-profile case, there are potentially some constitutional issues, and potentially, it’s worth a lot of money.’

  ‘Constitutional issues? I thought you said we had a solid case?’

  ‘We do, sir. But the plaintiffs have raised some arguments around an article of the Constitution. We don’t believe these arguments have merit, but the judge has to consider them, and you can’t blame him for being careful. Whichever way he decides, this case is going further, and it could well end up in the Supreme Court. He’s caught in the spotlight.’

  The Attorney nodded.

  ‘OK. But how do you square that with the judge making a discovery order? What does it matter what evidence there may be if the case is time-barred? He’s putting the cart before the horse, isn’t he? If the case is barred, there’s no point in discovery. It sounds to me like the judge doesn’t find our case quite as solid as you do.’

  ‘That’s something we didn’t understand at the time either, sir,’ Harry said. ‘On the face of it, it doesn’t make sense to allow discovery with our motion for summary judgment pending.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘Yes, sir, and we agree. It’s our view that the judge wants to get a feel for whether the case has any merit. It’s not logical, but we think he will be more inclined to throw it out himself if the plaintiffs have no evidence. It’s a high-profile case, and he would be finding against a potential American hero who’s never been recognised, so if there’s nothing to the claim, it makes it easier. On the other hand, if the case seems to have some merit, he might think about letting it go to trial and leaving it to the Court of Appeals to sort out the law.’

  ‘And to take the fallout for doing down an American hero?’

  ‘Exactly, sir. We can’t see any other reason why he would go the way he has.’

  The Attorney took a deep breath and released it sharply.

  ‘All right. Now I want to know what our exposure is if we happen to lose on this solid question of law. If the case goes to trial and we lose, what are we looking at?’

  Harry and I looked at Ellen. She had developed a range of theories about our potential exposure after studying the loan certificates.

  ‘Well, sir,’ she said, ‘when the case began, the plaintiffs alleged that Jacob van Eyck had loaned the government about 450,000 dollars, value at the time, in 1778, which at six per cent compound over almost 250 years would produce an astronomical total, somewhere in the region of 670 billion dollars.’

  ‘Lord have mercy,’ Shilling whispered.

  ‘Yes, sir. But the state of the evidence doesn’t support that. The evidence available now suggests that Jacob entrusted twenty-two loan certificates to a friend, and the friend delivered sixteen of those certificates to the Treasury with a request for repayment. We don’t know why he only delivered sixteen, and we don’t know the total amount in question. We only have three of them, and the total for those three comes to about 15,000 dollars, which with interest comes to a mere twenty-two billion dollars or so.’

  ‘Oh, well I guess that’s OK, then,’ Shilling commented.

  ‘Yes, sir, but I’m afraid that’s not the whole story.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘I believe Miss Harmon will argue that she has a case for repayment either of sixteen or twenty-two certificates.’

  ‘How would she argue that, for heaven’s sake, if she doesn�
�t even have them?’

  ‘She will argue that there’s a strong circumstantial case for the existence of those certificates, and for the fact that they were properly presented to the Treasury at some point for repayment. There’s a clear link between Jacob and his friend who wrote the letter we have. What she doesn’t know is the total value of all sixteen or twenty-two loan certificates. I’d expect her to argue that the Court should assume an average amount per certificate based on the ones we do have. That average is about 5,000 dollars.’

  ‘That’s a pretty dicey assumption, Ellen,’ Harry objected.

  ‘Maybe. We could argue for a much lower assumption. The reality is, we have no idea what the judge would do. But if she succeeded in that argument, sixteen with interest would run to about 119 billion dollars; and twenty-two would run to 164 billion dollars, give or take.’

  ‘I don’t think the judge would go with that,’ Harry said. ‘It’s too speculative.’

  ‘Maybe, and there is some basis for challenging those calculations,’ she added. ‘The plaintiffs seem to have made certain assumptions I’m not sure are valid: for example, that the interest would be credited annually, and that the six per cent compound rate continues to apply right up to the present time. In fact, Congress placed some limits on the recoverable amount subsequently, which would reduce the recovery considerably. I’m looking into that now, but it’s complicated and I don’t have a complete analysis yet.’

  She paused for effect.

  ‘But any way you look at it, it’s going to be a large number – a very large number.’

  ‘She has another problem, too,’ Harry said. ‘She has to prove that the government didn’t repay Jacob van Eyck.’

  ‘That won’t be a problem,’ I intervened. ‘The interest would have been far less then, obviously, but he would still have been owed a large amount by the standards of those days, and if the government had repaid that kind of money, we would have a record of it.’

  ‘It’s their burden of proof,’ Harry insisted.

  I shook my head. ‘Judge Morrow won’t see it that way. Besides, Kiah can prove that Jacob van Eyck went from being a very rich man to being a very poor man in a very short space of time, just when Washington’s army was being resupplied at Valley Forge. That’s too much of a coincidence. Any judge is likely to find that if Jacob did make these loans, we never repaid him.’