Long Knives (30 page)

CHAPTER 67

Week 2—Sunday

Seville

W
hen 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 of 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.

He walked back to his desk, opened one of the side drawers and took out a ball of white string. He cut off three or four feet of string and tied one end to the pop-up ring at the top of the flashlight.

“If someone tells you a diamond ring is lost on a football field”—I knew he was seeing in his own mind a soccer field instead of a real, American football field, but it didn’t matter—“and tells you to find the ring on a black night with the flashlight only, how long will it take?”

“Many hours.”

“Now think instead you must hold the flashlight on a string ten thousand feet long and you must search the football field this way.” He started walking very slowly around the room, holding the top of the string level with his head and letting the flashlight dangle on the other end, a few inches above the floor. “Now how long?”

“Longer.”

“Now think that you may not look with your eyes, but with only a small lens, three centimeters wide, next to the flashlight. How long?”

“Even longer.”

“Now think that on the field there is not only a diamond ring but many bottle tops and other shiny things. Now how long?”

“I see your point. It could take next to forever.”

“
Precisamente
. You need, in the end, many people, much expensive equipment, very good GPS and luck.”

“Why luck?”

“Because on the ocean bottom there are many things. Rocks. Old ships. Dead whales. Sand bars. They are like the bottle tops. All can look like the ship you look for. A very old ship that is covered much with sand.”

“Did the boys ever raise the money to look?”

“No, but they pretend they did, and they pretend that they have found the
Ayuda
. But they have not. It is a fraud to make money.”

“How does that work?”

“Señor, if you take money from people and tell them you are taking your boat and looking to recover gold from the bottom of the sea, how will those people know if you truly knew where it was or if you truly went to sea to look?”

“I guess they won’t. What would you do instead?”

“You will rent the boat. You will hire the crew. You will sail off. You will go to another port. You will drink with your crew for many, many days. You will pay them something. You will return weeks later. You will—”

I interrupted him. “Tell your investors you tried hard but found nothing.”

“
S
í
. And take the money that remains to you from the investors and leave.”

“Too bad, so sad,” I said.

“What does this mean?”

“It’s a way of saying tough shit.”

“Ah, I see. I will need to remember this phrase.”

“Did you talk to a man named Aldous Hartleb?”

“Yes.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him more or less the truth.”

“Which part of the truth was
more
?”

“That there is no real map. And that they did not find the exact location of the ship.”

“What part of the truth did you not tell him?”

“The part that I cannot tell you.” He grinned.

“Can you give me a hint?”

“Perhaps there are in the archive other documents that are helpful to find this ship.”

I decided he was simply fishing to be paid to do more research and moved on.

“Why did you tell him any of the truth?”

“He was with big investors. I did not wish to end with a lawsuit like the one you brought this morning. Except not fake.”

“There is no map at all?”

“The boys have found is my guess some old map of the time. But it is worthless, because you must place on this map the information about where is the ship.” He shrugged his shoulders and tossed his hands in the air, as if what he was saying was so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning.

“Information about longitude and latitude?”

“Yes, yes. This is what they did. Numbers they made up.”

“And the map?”

He shrugged again. “Found in the archive? Bought here in the antique store? Bought on the Internet?”

I had learned what I came to learn and decided to end the interview.

“You have been most helpful, señor, and now I must go. May I have my fake lawsuit back?”

“With pleasure,” he said. “But before you go, I must also ask, how are the boys?”

“One of them is dead.”

“How did he die?”

“He was poisoned.”

“This is sad. Which one?”

“Primo.”

“Did Quinto kill him?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Why do you think Quinto is the one who killed him?”

“Primo was the nice boy. Quinto was not so nice.”

“What is not nice about Quinto, Señor Cabano?”

“He is mean.”

“Did Quinto threaten Primo?”

“The two, they always threatened each other. It meant nothing.”

“Well, again, I don’t know yet who killed Primo. But I suppose it’s at least possible that Quinto did it.”

“I now must go,” he said. “To a meeting. Do you want a copy of the document? I have many copies.”

“Yes.”

He went back to the drawer in the credenza, opened it, took out a different folder and extracted a piece of paper from it. He sat down again in the other guest chair and handed the document to me.

“You have a lot of them,” I said.

“When the boys tried to sell this investment, they sent many people to visit me for this document.”

“Can I see the original?”

“It is still in the archive, of course.”

“How do I know, señor, that this document is not a forgery? That there is nothing at all in the archive?”

He shot out of his chair and threw his arms in the air. “
Dios mio
! I cannot believe this
calumnia
—I do not know the word in English—is still said.”

“Slander, I think you mean.”

“Yes, slander. Because they are not true, these things people say. These other researchers, they are jealous because I find things they cannot.”

“Slander is hard to deal with.”

“Did Gabrielle say this to you?”

There was no point in getting Gabrielle in trouble. “No.”

He walked to the door of his office and stood there. “I must go, Señor Tarza, and so must you.”

I put the document he had given me in my briefcase, stood up and walked to the door. I extended my hand. He looked at it as if it was a dead fish, and it seemed for a second that he was going to decline to shake. Then he apparently thought better of it, put out his own hand and shook mine.

“
Adi
ó
s
, Señor Tarza,” he said.

“
Adi
ó
s
, Señor Cabano.”

I took the elevator down to the lobby and realized on exiting the building that I hadn’t called a cab. I spotted a bus stop nearby and decided to try the bus. Eventually one came along, and I asked the driver, in my still rusty Spanish, if it went to the
centro de la ciudad
—downtown. It did. I got on and slowly made my way back to my hotel.

In my hotel room I studied the document Cabano had given me. I could no more know if it was a forgery than I could be sure my own birth certificate was real, even with its fancy seal. Perhaps Gabrielle would be able to tell.

CHAPTER 68

A
t lunch Gabrielle reported that she had been able to find only a few documents about the
Ayuda
in the period from 1638 to 1648, the time frame she and I had agreed upon for her initial search. They were mostly crew manifests, records of port calls and a cargo manifest for the ship’s outbound trip from Mexico to Manila in 1640. But she had found no cargo manifest for the return trip to Acapulco. She said there was also a brief report to the House of Trade that the ship had sunk in 1641 on its return voyage, but that it contained no details.

She handed me a thin folder of documents. “These are copies of what I’ve found so far, although I still have more work to do.”

“Did you,” I asked, “find anything resembling a survivor account?”

“No, nothing.”

“Perhaps not surprising,” I said.

“Did you see Cabano?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “he agreed to see me.”

“I’m surprised.”

“I tricked him, Gabrielle.”

“Congratulations. He deserves to be tricked himself from time to time.”

“I don’t feel good about it, actually, but it worked. In any case, he gave me this document, which is supposedly a survivor account by the navigator of the
Ayuda
.” I handed it to her.

She studied the document for several minutes, and I could tell she was attempting to read it, slowly interpreting the archaic handwriting. After a while she handed it back to me. “I would have to spend much more time with it, but it seems to be an account by the navigator of drifting for two days after the
Ayuda
sank. It’s dated in 1641. It says he was dying of thirst and hunger by the time his small raft made land. He thanks God and Our Lady, by which I assume he means Our Lady of Guadalupe, for his survival.”

“Is there a smudge next to the number
2
?”

“Let me see it again.”

I handed it back to her.

“There’s a small black spot next to the number. I wouldn’t call it a smudge. Why?”

“He says that if you X-ray it, you can see that it actually says that he drifted for twenty days, not two.”

She snorted through her nose. “Excuse my French, but bullshit. The man who wrote this document—even assuming it’s real—says he was floating on some kind of raft he roped together from timbers of the ship, or at least I think that’s what it says. The word he uses is archaic, but I think it’s a word that means raft. I’ll have to look it up. So if that’s correct, he wouldn’t have had any food or water, or not very much, anyway.”

“And after twenty days,” I said, “with no food or water, exposed in the open ocean, he would have been dead.”

“Yes, or as people like to say around here,
precisamente
.”

Just then, in an odd coincidence, the waiter brought the food we had ordered, along with a large bottle of water, and we ate for a while and talked of other things. Then I brought the conversation back to the document.

“So you don’t trust the document I got from Cabano?”

“No, and even if it does say twenty days if you use an X-ray, the document doesn’t have an archive catalog number on it.”

“He said he removed the catalog number from the copies he made so no one else could find it because it was misfiled. And still is, I guess.”

“Did he say in what section or folder it was misfiled?”

“No, but I didn’t ask him.”

“Well, there are a couple of logical possibilities where such a misfiling might take place, and I’ll look in those folders, but I think it’s likely a lie. After all, there are eighty million pieces of paper over there. So saying it was misfiled, without anything more, is like saying a boat is on the ocean.”

“I know. But let me ask you, does the archive keep a record of who checks out which documents when?”

“Yes, but those records are strictly private.”

“Are they so private you can’t ask a friend to let you have a look?”

“Europeans take privacy restrictions much more seriously than Americans. If I were even to ask, I might lose my privileges at the archive.”

“Well, if you think of any way to find that out without putting your livelihood on the line, please let me know.”

“I will.”

“You know, Gabrielle, there’s one thing that bothers me about the idea that that document is a forgery.”

“Which is?”

“Well, if you were going to forge a document that suggested someone had drifted on the ocean for twenty days so you could later use the forgery to point to the supposed location of a fake shipwreck site, why would you write in the wrong number of drift days—two—and then have to argue that your fake document really says twenty days?”

“I have no idea,” she said, “but it’s an interesting point.”

“And what’s more,” I said, “if you were going to say he drifted for twenty days and lived, why would you put the guy on a roped-together raft with no food or water?”

“Again, I don’t know.”

When we had finished lunch, Gabrielle asked, “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m thinking of going off the grid for a couple of days.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“When I was a young associate in my law firm, I was burned-out after a big trial and took an actual vacation of two whole weeks. I went to Greece with no hotel reservations. I just hopped from island to island as the mood moved me. There were no cell phones and no Internet, and because I had no fixed itinerary, there was no way for anyone to reach me. I loved it.”

“And now?”

“I can be reached every minute of every day in three or four different ways. It’s like living in a digital blizzard.”

“I don’t think there’s a lot you can do about that.”

“Well, I think I’ve found out what I came to Seville to find out, so I’m going to call a colleague in Los Angeles, tell him what I’ve learned and fax him the supposed survivor document.”

“And then?”

“Then I’m going to take the train to Madrid, check into a small hotel, turn off my cell phone and my computer and not turn either one back on until I get to Los Angeles.”

“Which will be when?”

“I reserved a seat on an early afternoon plane on Wednesday that will get me into LA late afternoon LA time that same day. I’ll have two full days to myself in Madrid. Maybe I’ll go to the Prado. Or maybe I won’t. Who knows?”