“No. He was always making that false claim.”
“How did you come to own the map?”
“Objection. Calls for a legal conclusion.”
“I inherited it from my grandfather.”
“Your father’s father?”
“No, my mother’s father.”
“What was his name?”
“Sven Johannsen.”
“Do you know how your grandfather came into possession of the map?”
“He found it in the Spanish state archive in Seville.”
Now we were getting somewhere.
“Doesn’t that mean the Spanish government owns it?”
“Objection, calls for a legal conclusion.”
“They might own the original, but our copy has had data added to it that show the exact location of the sunken treasure.”
“Do you know when your grandfather found the original?”
“I think it was in the early 1980s, but I’m not sure.”
It was worth a shot in the dark with a broad question that didn’t have any foundation.
“Do you know how he knew where to look for it?”
“Objection,” Stevens said, “no foundation. Assumes that his grandfather knew where to look for it.”
“Yes,” Quinto answered, “he did look, and my mother had told him where to look.”
“If you know, how did your mother know where he should look?”
“She’s a research librarian at the University of Pittsburgh, and her specialty is records in the Spanish state archive. She had a hunch, so she sent my grandfather to check it out.”
“Did your grandfather speak Spanish?”
“Yes.”
“Did he speak it well?”
“He said so.”
“How about your mother?”
“Yes, and she speaks it well.”
“Did your grandfather tell you what he found there?”
“Yes, he told me that he found records relating to the wreck of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Ayuda, which sank in 1641.”
“Did he tell you if he studied those records?”
“He said he did.”
“All right, then, let’s move on to what he found there.”
Jenna suddenly spoke up. “I hate to do this, but I really need a bathroom break. Too much coffee today, I’m afraid. Would that be okay?”
I looked over at Stevens, who nodded his assent.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s take ten.” I knew, of course, that Jenna was asking for a break because she had something to tell me.
CHAPTER 52
Jenna had the good sense to actually go off to the ladies’ room as we took our break, so it looked like her request had been legitimate. Not that any experienced litigator would have believed it. When Jenna returned, Oscar and I were hanging out in the hallway—we’d left the conference room to Quinto and Stevens—and the three of us ducked into an empty office down the hall.
“Listen,” Jenna said, “you can’t just move on to what Quinto’s grandfather supposedly found in the archive because what he’s saying about his going to Seville and doing research there is absurd. Documents from the mid-seventeenth century in that archive are in old Castilian handwritten script. Modern Spanish speakers can usually understand the words and the syntax, but they often can’t make out the handwriting. It’s like trying to read the handwriting of the people who wrote our Constitution, only much, much worse. Here, let me show you.”
She put her iPad down on the table, punched in some letters and numbers, then flipped it up where we could all see. The image of a crinkled document with a small chunk of paper missing on the left side appeared on the screen. “This,” she said, “is a document from the archive in Seville relating to the very ship Quinto’s talking about—the Nuestra Señora de Ayuda. Except it’s from 1599, so I don’t really know if it’s the same ship or a different ship with the same name.”
“Like you said,” Oscar remarked, “it’s really hard to read. I speak pretty good Spanish, and I can’t make out a single word of it.”
“Right,” Jenna responded. “A document like that, even if you were there in person, would be hard to make out.”
“What,” I asked, “does the document relate to?”
“Oh, it relates to the departure of a galleon of that name from the Guadalquivir River—the river that runs through Seville—to somewhere in the Spanish colonies in New Spain. That was their name, at that point, for the New World. It could be the same Nuestra Señora de Ayuda as was supposedly lost in 1641, although that would make it an awfully old ship. But I don’t know what the average service life of a Spanish galleon was.”
“So what’s your point for this depo?” Oscar asked.
“My point is that neither his grandfather nor his mother could have done this research alone. They would have needed an experienced archival researcher to help them.”
“How do you know,” I asked, “that such people even exist?”
“Because, Robert, I was there myself two summers ago. I got a grant to do some research in the archive in Seville about sunken ships that might have contained treasure and that haven’t been salvaged. For some ships they even have records of the salvage. It was background research for my law review article.”
“Well,” Oscar said, “it’s amazing there are such accurate records from so long ago.”
“The Spaniards,” Jenna said, “were the Germans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They wrote down everything.”
We went back into the conference room. Everyone refilled their coffee cups and I restarted the deposition.
“Mr. Giordano,” I resumed, “I’ll just remind you that you’re still under oath.”
“I understand.”
“Do you know if your grandfather had help in researching the records in Seville?”
“He told me he did.”
“Did he tell you what kind of help?”
“Yes, he told me he hired an archival researcher named Pedro Cabano.”
“Did you grandfather tell you what Mr. Cabano had done on his behalf?”
“Yes, he said he helped him look for the account of a survivor of the shipwreck of the Nuestra Señora de Ayuda.”
“Did he help your grandfather with anything else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did they find the survivor’s account?”
“Yes.”
“Did they find more than one survivor’s account?”
“No.”
“Do you have a copy of the one they did find?”
“Yes.”
“Have you read it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have it with you?”
“No.”
“Please summarize for me what it says.”
Stevens spoke up. “Objection. Calls for confidential business information.”
“Mr. Giordano,” I said, “please go ahead and answer the question.”
“I’m going to instruct him,” Stevens said, “not to answer the question.”
“You know, Mr. Stevens, that that’s not a proper instruction. For one thing, ‘confidential business information’ isn’t a recognized privilege. And even if it were, the proper procedure is to suspend this deposition and go into court to seek a protective order.”
“Well,” Stevens said, “we can go argue about that in court later if you like, but Mr. Giordano is not answering that question today.”
I knew that I then had to ask Giordano a required follow-up question to make the dispute one a judge would consider ruling on.
“Mr. Giordano, are you going to follow your counsel’s instruction and refuse to answer my question?”
“Yes, I am.”
I made a note to come back to try later in the depo to find out more about the survivor’s account without trespassing on information they considered confidential.
“All right, let me move on, then. Have you ever met Mr. Cabano yourself?”
�
��No.”
“Do you have any contact information for Mr. Cabano?”
“No.”
“Do you know of any way to reach him?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“No.”
“If I went to Spain, do you know how I might find him?”
“No.”
I had the sense from Quinto’s body language and the slight smirk on his face that he indeed knew something about how to get in touch with Cabano but wasn’t about to volunteer it unless I asked him a question that, somehow, was exactly on the button. Which meant going into thorough mode. At times taking a deposition is like scrubbing the bottom of a pot you can’t see. For the pot, you have to use a pattern of swipes across the unseen bottom to try to get it all—back and forth one way and then the other, clockwise and counterclockwise, then diagonal and the other diagonal and so forth. In a depo you have to use a careful pattern of questions to scrub the bottom of the factual pot. Here I clearly hadn’t yet hit quite the right pattern of questions.
“Does your mother know Mr. Cabano?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does your mother have his contact information?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know if your mother put your grandfather in touch with Mr. Cabano?”
“I don’t know.”
I turned and looked at Jenna, who had been tapping on her keyboard, no doubt trying to find some reference to Cabano on the Internet. She shook her head in the negative. I could, at that point, have given up the pursuit and assumed we’d find him by other means, but since I might not get the chance to ask Quinto again under oath, I decided to spend a little more time trying to unearth what he was hiding.
“Mr. Giordano, have you been in contact with Mr. Cabano by any means, including e-mail or phone?”
“Objection, compound.” Stevens had decided to be difficult, but I decided not to argue about it.
“I’ll rephrase. By e-mail?”
“No.”
“By phone?”
“No.”
“By postal mail?”
“No.”
“By any other means?”
“No.”
I was more or less out of ways to ask about where I could find Mr. Cabano when Oscar slipped a note in front of me. I read it and then asked, “Do you know anyone else who, to your understanding, has been in contact with Mr. Cabano?”
“Yes.”
“And who would that be?”
Quinto smiled a very broad smile. “I believe that Professor Aldous Hartleb has been in touch with him.”
Jenna, who had been slouching in her chair, leaned over to me and said, “Ask for a break.”
“Mr. Stevens,” I said, “I need to confer with my client for a few minutes before we proceed. So let’s take another break.”
Stevens looked at Jenna. “Small bladder?”
“You know, Mr. Stevens,” Jenna said, “I should really report you to the State Bar for that sexist comment.”
“Go ahead. I don’t think there was the least thing sexist about it. Some people can’t drink the amount of coffee you drink without needing frequent breaks. If you think that fact has to do with gender, that’s your problem.”
I didn’t think we needed a spat in this depo, which had, so far, been fairly peaceable. “You know,” I said, “I have a proposal. How about we ask the court reporter to simply delete from the transcript everything after my request for a break? Is that agreeable, Mr. Stevens?”
“So stipulated.”
“Good. Madam Court Reporter, please leave the other repartee out of the transcript.”
“I will,” she said.
Whereupon Jenna, Oscar and I headed back to the empty office. This time we went there directly.
CHAPTER 53
After the three of us entered the empty office, I closed the door and said to Jenna, “So if I remember correctly, Aldous Hartleb is your boyfriend, right? The one on your suspect list.”
“Right.”
“Do you have any idea how he happened to be in touch with Cabano, the research guy?”
“I can make a good guess. Aldous told me that he did some work for an investment firm that was considering investing in a venture that was being put together to finance a search for the Ayuda. He did some of the due diligence on the deal. So I assume he talked to Cabano as part of that.”
“Did Aldous’s company,” Oscar asked, “invest?”
“No, they passed on it.”
“Well, then,” Oscar said, “let’s call Aldous up.”
“Right now?” Jenna asked.
“Why not? I assume you have his cell number.”
“He’s in Buffalo.”
“I bet his cell works even in a place like Buffalo. Let’s do it.” Oscar pointed to the speakerphone that sat on the desk, the surface otherwise bare.
Jenna picked up the handset and punched in a number on the keypad. Even though she was holding the handset to her ear and hadn’t activated the speaker, I could hear the call ringing on the other end. Just as I thought it would go to voice mail, I heard a voice answer, although I couldn’t make out what was said. Then Jenna spoke.
“Hi, Aldous, it’s Jenna.”
She listened for a moment, then said, “No, nothing’s wrong. I’m calling about something specific. We’re taking the depo of Quinto Giordano today, and something’s come up that you might be able to help us with. I’m here with my lawyers, Oscar Quesana and Robert Tarza. Can I put you on speakerphone?”
Jenna put the handset back into its cradle and pushed the speakerphone button. “Can you hear us, Aldous?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Good. Hey, I don’t think you’ve met Oscar or Robert, so let me introduce them.”
Which she did, and, in the usual awkward dance of introductions on the telephone, we all “met.”
“Aldous,” Jenna said, “when you were doing the due diligence on the Ayuda deal, did you talk to a researcher in Seville?”
“If I tell you the answer to that, can I be sure no one will let on that I’m the one who told you?”
Jenna looked around at me and Oscar.
“Aldous, this is Robert Tarza,” I said. “I promise you your name won’t be mentioned.”
“Okay, then,” Aldous said. “I sure did talk to someone. His name was Cabano. Hard guy to forget. Very slick.”
“What did you talk with him about?”
“I was following up on a document that referred to a search in the Spanish archive made by Mr. X and Mr. Y, or maybe only one of them. It wasn’t clear. I now assume those were code names used for Quinto and Primo. In any case, whichever one of them did the search had supposedly used Cabano to help look for a key document in the archive. Cabano himself actually found the document, or at least that’s what I understood.”
“Do you recall,” Oscar asked, “what document it was?”
“Uh, yeah, I do. But the company I was working for signed a confidentiality agreement, and I’m bound by it. So I really can’t tell you. But”—he chuckled—“if you were to take my deposition, I’d have to tell you, wouldn’t I?”
“Right,” Oscar said, “but if we noticed your deposition, I’m sure they’d go to court and try to get some sort of order to prevent you from answering that question. Anyway, Quinto has already told us it was a survivor account, and Primo told Jenna the same thing before he died. So that piece of confidential info is already out of the bag. Can you add anything to it?”
“I don’t think I should.”
I broke in. “Aldous, this is Robert again. I’m the one who’s taking the depo today, and at this point what I most want to know is how we can get in touch with Cabano.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. Finally, Aldous said, “I suppose I can tell you that without violating the confidentiality agreement. But all I have is his cell number, or at least what it was last summer. I don’t have an addr
ess or an e-mail.”
“That would be a great start,” I said.
“Okay, let me dig it out of my database.” After a few seconds, Aldous came back on and gave us the number.
“Thanks, Aldous,” I said. “Is there anything else you can share with us that might be helpful?”
“I’m afraid not. It was a pretty tight confidentiality agreement and, you know, I’d like not to be dragged into this thing.”
“Understood,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome. Sorry I can’t be more forthcoming.”
“Oh, I understand. By the way, what are you doing in Buffalo?”
“Looking for a job. Jenna can bring you up to date on that.”
“Okay, well, have a good day.”
“You, too. Hey, Jenna, can you pick up for a moment, honey?”
“Sure.” Jenna picked up the handset, which caused the speakerphone to go off.
They talked for a few moments while Oscar and I chatted about other things.
Finally, I heard Jenna say, “Talk to you soon. ’Bye.”
After she hung up, I looked over at her. “He’s looking for a new job in Buffalo?”
“Yep.”
Oscar had been drumming his fingers on the desktop. “Jenna, if I understand correctly, and please forgive me for being so direct, you sleep with Aldous, right?”
“Sometimes. Yes.”
“Well, maybe you can get more out of him via a little pillow talk.”
“I can try, but Aldous isn’t a talker in those circumstances. He prefers…”
“Never mind,” I interrupted. “I’m sure we can all imagine what he prefers.” I was famous for being something of a prude, and living in France hadn’t really changed me on that score. “Let’s leave it, Jenna, that you’ll give it a try if the situation presents itself. In the meantime, now we have Cabano’s phone number, so we ought to be able to talk to him ourselves if we play it right.”
CHAPTER 54
On my way back to the depo, I headed to the men’s room. Stevens was standing at one of the two urinals. I went to the second one, which was right next to the first. For a while the two of us just stood there in silence, doing our respective thing. As I stared at the wall, I thought to myself that it wasn’t unheard of for male lawyers to conduct serious business in that setting. I had no idea what the deal was in women’s bathrooms. Did they talk stall to stall? In any case, apparently nothing was going to happen this time, and I wasn’t about to initiate any conversation.
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