Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  “Don’t worry about that. Anyway, I’ve really got to go to bed now.”

  After Robert hung up, I called Oscar, but not before pouring myself a cup of coffee, which was now lukewarm. I needed it because Oscar wasn’t going to be happy with me.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Hi, Jenna, how’s it going?”

  “Fine. I just met with Julie. She admits she tore the sheet out of the diary, and it seems she came up to my office with Primo the day he died.”

  “You shouldn’t be investigating the facts yourself.”

  “I know, but I didn’t know if the opportunity to question her and get straight answers would arise again.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “Not much else. But I’m nervous that something more, something we don’t know about, is going on. Julie didn’t seem sufficiently rattled when I confronted her about tearing a page out of the diary. It’s like she knows something we don’t.”

  “I don’t think anything else is going on. I’ll call the DA and see what I can learn, but I think this is almost over as far as you’re concerned. They have no evidence against you.”

  After that I decided to take care of one piece of business and then take the rest of the day off and go for a bike ride.

  The piece of business was retrieving my car. The police had released it, albeit at an impound lot in another part of the city. I drove the Ferrari back to the rental office, returned it and then took a cab to the lot, where I retrieved the car. Except for some leftover fingerprint powder on the steering wheel, it seemed untouched. Then I drove back to the law school, tied my bike to the roof rack and went down to Santa Monica Beach.

  It was a glorious day at the beach, the temperature in the 60s. I parked, took my bike down and rode the bike path from Santa Monica to the wetlands of Playa del Rey, riding first by the medical marijuana shops, weight lifters, drum circles and vendors along the oceanfront walk in Venice, and then past the million-dollar beachfront condos on the Marina Peninsula. Then I rode back. All in all, it was about a fifteen-mile round-trip. By the time I finished I was sweaty, exhausted and feeling wonderful. I put the bike back on top of the car, drove home and treated myself to a steak dinner and a bottle of wine.

  Just as I was finishing my third glass of wine and telling myself that I wasn’t going to have another, Oscar called.

  “Hi, Jenna. I have good news.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I talked directly to the DA, and he said they are no longer looking at you. Their focus is on Quinto.”

  “That’s odd, since the diary entry that was torn out said it was Julie who had threatened Primo.”

  “Right, but don’t forget he doesn’t know that yet. It’s going to take them a couple of days to figure out that there’s a page missing and what was on it. The DA mentioned only that the diary makes reference to a threat by Quinto and also said they have other evidence pointing to him.”

  “Will it change things when they figure out that there’s a page missing and what’s on it?”

  “Only to give them two prime suspects instead of one. But frankly, my friend, if they’ve ruled you out, this is no longer our problem. The police are going to arrest whomever they’re going to arrest, and the DA will indict whomever he’s going to indict.”

  “They’ve ruled out Tommy, too?”

  “Apparently. But, again, this ain’t your problem no more.”

  “You think I’m out of it entirely?”

  “No. If they can’t arrange a plea bargain, you’ll probably be a witness. You’ll have to testify about Primo’s collapse, and maybe that Julie gave you the diary, so the chain of custody can be established.”

  “That’s great. Thank you, Oscar.”

  “Don’t mention it. I hope we’re going to be able to work together on something one of these days when neither you nor Robert is a possible defendant in a criminal matter.”

  “Me, too. And I want to take you to dinner sometime next week to celebrate.”

  “We’ll do it. Let’s talk on Monday and pick a date for that.”

  “Great. And again, thanks.”

  After the call ended, I sat and thought about how this would impact the civil suit. If Quinto was indicted, the lawsuit would no doubt quickly go away. If he wasn’t, the suit would just wend its way slowly through the courts like most civil suits. And since I didn’t have the map, it was hard to see how it could end with anything other than a victory for me. I decided not to worry about it and to have another glass of wine. I thought vaguely about calling Robert back and telling him not to bother to go on to Seville, to just come home. But since he was already in Madrid, that seemed silly. And he’d have a good time, so whatever.

  I spent Saturday and Sunday catching up on all the things I’d put on hold the last couple of weeks, including at least starting to think about the exams for my classes, which were due at the registrar’s by the end of next week. I slept well Sunday night—without putting the dresser in front of my bedroom door—not only because I was no longer a person of interest in Primo’s death but because when I got home I found that Tommy had taken all of his stuff and moved out. He had left his keys on the front desk, along with a note that said, “Thanks for nothing.”

  CHAPTER 64

  Robert Tarza

  Week 2—Saturday

  Seville, Spain

  It had taken me almost twenty hours to get to Madrid. I had left Los Angeles just before 6:00 A.M. on Thursday, changed planes in Miami late Thursday afternoon—there had been no seats left on non-stop flights—and then flown on to Madrid, where I had arrived early in the morning, Madrid time, on Friday.

  I hadn’t wanted to go immediately to bed—I like to get on local time as soon as possible—so I arranged an early check-in at a hotel near the railroad station, dumped my bags, and, despite my fatigue, spent Friday walking around Madrid. I had spent a semester abroad in Madrid during college, but I hadn’t been back since. Spain had changed. When I was there in the late 1960s, it was still a dark, dreary, largely charmless place under the boot of Franco. In what seemed like no time, it had been transformed into a modern country with, at least in Madrid, the hustle and bustle of New York City. Well, okay, it hadn’t been no time. It had been forty-four years.

  I went to bed mid-evening on Friday, right after a phone call from Jenna in which she chided me about missing something in Quinto’s deposition. Then I got up on Saturday morning and took the early high-speed train to Seville. It took only two-and-a-half hours, and I was at my hotel—the Hotel Alfonso XIII, which Tess said was the only place to stay in Seville—by 10:00 A.M. The Alfonso was a five-star luxury hotel in the historic center of the city. My room wasn’t ready for check in so I left my bags with the valet, obtained a map and a tourist brochure from the concierge and headed out to find the one thing in Seville that I’d always wanted to see—the sarcophagus that held the body, or what was left of it, of Christopher Columbus.

  I knew that his tomb was in the Seville Cathedral, which was only about a fifteen-minute walk from my hotel. I found the cathedral easily and then the tomb, which was just inside the front entrance. It consisted of an elaborate sarcophagus, held aloft by four allegorical figures representing the four kingdoms of Spain during Columbus’s lifetime. I stopped and looked at it—stared, really—for a couple of minutes. After that I strolled into the cathedral’s interior courtyard, the Patio de los Naranjos—the Orange Court—a beautiful space filled with orange trees and with elaborate Moorish tile work all around.

  My next stop was the General Archive of the Indies, which was across the street from the cathedral. It was much larger than I had expected and covered the entirety of a huge city block. I’ve never been much into architecture, but with its red and white stonework, its rectangular windows marching in rows all around the building and its pointed stone towers at each corner, the archive looked vaguely Italianate to me. However, the small booklet the concierge had given me said, when I consulted it, that the building�
�s style was in fact referred to as Spanish Renaissance, and that while the red stuff was stonework, the white stuff was stucco. My mistake was particularly embarrassing since I had long lived in a city that’s filled with houses made of stucco. I hoped no one would give me an exam asking me to distinguish between the two architectural styles.

  After I had circumnavigated the entire building, I spotted the Café de los Archivos, at which I had agreed to meet my professional archive expert, Gabrielle Muñoz, whom I had contacted via e-mail, introduced by a professor of Spanish literature at UCLA. The café was a small place, with a few tables inside and two wooden ones with matched wooden chairs placed on the sidewalk out front, sheltered by a white awning. The outside walls were covered with colorful tiles.

  When I walked up, a woman matching Gabrielle’s self-description—tall, blonde and middle-aged—was sitting at one of the sidewalk tables. She was wearing a stylish blood-red dress. I approached the table, and she stood up and said, “You must be Robert Tarza.”

  “I am,” I said, “and you must be Gabrielle Muñoz.”

  We shook hands, sat down and she said, “Welcome to Seville, Señor Tarza.”

  “Thank you. But please call me Robert.”

  “Okay, please call me Gabrielle.”

  “Are you fluent in English, Gabrielle? If not, I could try out my rusty Spanish.”

  She laughed. “I’m quite fluent. I was born and grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

  “Oh. So we can proceed in English.”

  “Yes, certainly. But before we talk, let’s order some coffee.”

  The waiter appeared, and we ordered coffee and some pastries. When the waiter had departed, she said, “May I ask you a direct question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you a treasure hunter?”

  “Not exactly. Why?”

  “Well, in your e-mail you asked me to arrange for you to look in the archive at some records of a specific seventeenth-century ship—the Nuestra Señora de Ayuda. But you didn’t say you were looking for information about how to find it, only for crew memoirs.”

  “Correct.”

  “That usually would sound like a genealogical project—someone looking to flesh out a long-ago ancestor. Or maybe a history thesis. But in preparing for your visit, I noticed that the particular ship you mentioned sank, and supposedly close to shore. That usually spells treasure hunters, who come here a lot.”

  “It could be a doctoral history project,” I said.

  She smiled. “If you’ll excuse me, you’re a bit old to be pursuing a PhD.”

  “Sometimes I feel old. But now that I’m here, I’ll tell you in more detail what I’m after.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “A client of mine is being sued for allegedly stealing a copy of an old Spanish map that shows the exact location of that ship, the Nuestra Señora de Ayuda.”

  “How could such an old map show an exact location?”

  “It doesn’t. The story is that within the last couple of years someone added data to the copy of the map that lists, by latitude and longitude, the exact location of the ship on the ocean bottom.” I figured there was no point in telling her about the two different maps, with supposedly different information on them.

  “I see. How did they figure that out?”

  “The location was supposedly deduced from a survivor account suggesting that the ship sank somewhere other than the place where it was assumed to have gone down. An assumption that has been around for almost four hundred years.”

  “Where did people originally think it sank?” she asked.

  “Close to shore.”

  “Well, whether it was close to shore or not, why do you need to see the survivor account—if there is one?”

  “Because I think the whole thing is a giant fraud. I don’t think there is such a survivor account.”

  “So you’re looking not to find something?”

  “Something like that.”

  “As a professional archivist, I can tell you that failing to find it here doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

  “How so?”

  “Because the system in the sixteen hundreds was that officials in New Spain, as Mexico was called at the time, were supposed to make two copies of everything and send one to the House of Trade—the Casa de Contratación—in Seville. The House of Trade controlled all Spanish trade with the Americas and demanded detailed records of everything that was brought to Mexico from the Philippines by the Manila galleons, and records of everything brought back on the return voyage.”

  “I sense a but coming.”

  “But not absolutely every piece of paper got sent here—there was a lot of fraud and corruption. Some things that actually were sent got lost, a few might be misfiled—there are tens of millions of pages of documents here—and some may have ended up in other archives.”

  “Which ones?”

  “You could always try Mexico.”

  “Yet it would most likely be here?”

  “Yes, and there is one other possibility.”

  “Which is?”

  “Spanish sailors of the seventeenth century had a fairly high rate of literacy, particularly if they were ships’ masters. So a survivor account might have been a personal diary or something of that nature and wouldn’t have ended up in an official archive at all.”

  “Where would it have gone instead?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows? Into a sea trunk? Stored by the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren and then forgotten? Sold? Centuries-old documents still turn up in antique stores here on occasion.”

  Our coffee came and we sipped it for a while, and nibbled at sweet rolls while chatting about her career and how she had become a permanent expatriate and a freelance archivist.

  Finally, she said, “I’ve done what I think your e-mails requested. I’ve talked to the archivists at the General Archive and told them you wanted to see documents related to the Manila galleon Nuestra Señora de Ayuda, particularly for the years 1638 and onward. They will have pulled those out for you, and I have asked for an archivist, Cristina Ruiz, who speaks excellent English, to assist you.”

  “Great.”

  “You’ve also reserved more of my time for tomorrow. What do you have in mind for me to do?”

  “I was hoping you would help me research this whole issue. Today I’m going to try to plow through some of the documents myself. I know it sounds odd, but if I try myself, even if I fail, I’ll have a better understanding of what you do as an expert. That will make it easier for me to explain this to others back in the United States in a litigation setting.”

  “I see. Interesting. But again, you’re expecting not to find a survivor account.”

  “Correct.”

  “What will you do if there is one?”

  CHAPTER 65

  I didn’t really know what would happen if I found a survivor account from the sinking of the Ayuda. I didn’t expect to find one, so I hadn’t worried about it, and I was still determined not to worry about it.

  After we finished our coffee, Gabrielle took me over to the archive. We walked up the few steps that led to the entrance, a rather plain rectangular doorway with the name—Archivo General de Indias—appearing above it in understated script. When I entered I was overwhelmed. The outside of the building is certainly monumental, but not really anything to write home about. The entry hall, by contrast, is a startlingly beautiful room floored in polished polychrome marble. The ceiling is a high, vaulted arch decorated with elaborate, stark white carvings. Down the connecting hallways there is still more marble, laid down in a red-and-black checkerboard. The hallways are lined with tall, walnut-framed bookcases containing what look like hundreds, if not thousands, of bound volumes, presumably archival materials.

  “Impressed?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Blown away. This place practically shouts, ‘I was built by a world empire at its height. Cost was no object.’”

  “Not far o
ff,” she said. “It was started in 1583 as a place for merchants to meet—the cathedral authorities had become unhappy about their gathering every day in the Orange Court to do business—and completed in 1646.”

  “I wonder if it had a cost overrun,” I said.

  She laughed. “No doubt, but the king who authorized it was no longer alive when it was finished, so possibly no one noticed. But let me take you now to the reading room. I’ve made special arrangements for the archivist to meet us there.”

  “Is it on the second floor?” I asked, pointing to the marble staircase leading upward.

  “No, the reading room and research facilities are in a building next door called la Cilla. We can reach it through a tunnel.”

  We went down a flight, walked through the tunnel, went up a flight and emerged into a room that looked much like a utilitarian reading room in any other archive or library. It had large wooden desks designed to hold six to eight readers at a time, comfortable-looking cloth swivel chairs in blue and, of course, a zillion computers sitting on the desks. Far from the opulence of the archive itself, the room was lit by overhead fluorescents.

  Waiting for us was a dark-haired woman I judged to be in her forties, who was introduced to me as Cristina Ruiz.

  “I am pleased to meet you, Señor Tarza,” Cristina said.

  “And I’m pleased to meet you,” I responded, “and appreciate your help.”

  “I am curious, is Tarza a Spanish name?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s Basque. It was originally Istarza but was changed at some point.”

  There was a small, awkward silence. I had, of course, touched my finger to a live wire of current politics in Spain, since at least some Basques were seeking their independence from Spain. I broke the silence by adding, “But only one of my eight great-grandparents was Basque and, as they say in my country, ‘I have no dog in this fight.’”

  “That’s a nice expression,” Cristina said. “In Spanish, I think we would say, ‘Nadie me da vela en este entierro.’”