The Simeon Chamber (8 page)

immeasurably worse—if they were authentic.

“I haven’t been entirely truthful with you, Jasper, in part because I was embarrassed. You see, this woman is trying to sell these documents to my friend at an exorbitant price, on the assurance that they are part of the Drake journal.” He paused and winked across the table at the Englishman. “Between you and me, I don’t think the woman knows shit from shinola, or else she’s just flat-ass trying to take my friend to the cleaners.”

The Englishman was still trying to unravel the idiom when Nick popped the question again.

“What do you know about it—the journal?”

“Well,” he stammered, “there are a number of theories concerning the fate of the journal.”

Holmes adjusted his glasses. “I

think the better reasoned view is that the book was seized by the French when Drake landed at Belle Isle near La Rochelle in France on his way back to England. According to some letters that were found in the archives in Seville, Drake is reputed to have stashed a quantity of gold and silver on the island, not sure that he would be welcomed back home by his monarch.” Holmes raised his heavy gray eyebrows and looked over the top of his bifocals at Nick. “You see, he’d created quite an embarrassment for the British Crown by sacking Spanish ships and towns in the New World, supposedly without the knowledge or approval of his queen.”

Nick breathed easier, sensing that Holmes’s speech had returned to the cadence of a lecture, and his interest, at least for the moment, to the abstractions of history.

Suddenly Nick looked at his watch.

“Damn! I have a seminar tomorrow morning and I have at least an hour of preparation to do to get ready.”

Jasper, sensing that he was about to see the last of the parchments, leaned heavily on the edge of one of the pages. “Well, you can leave these with me and I can have a translation for you in the morning.”

“No, I’m afraid I just can’t do that. My friend made me promise that I wouldn’t let them out of my sight. If anything happened to them he’d have to pay the woman’s asking price, and believe me, neither of us could raise the sum on our meager salaries, not unless you’ve got something going on the side.” Nick gave a nervous laugh.

“Well, if you want to stay it won’t take long.” Jasper’s tone conveyed the confidence of a rug merchant who, having rejected a final offer of purchase, was relegated to begging.

“I wish I could, but not tonight. I really have to get my materials together for the seminar.”

Avoiding further entreaties, Nick managed to tug the final page of parchment from under Jasper’s fingers and carefully placed them in his briefcase. “Perhaps we can finish it tomorrow night. I’ll give you a call.”

“Yes. Yes, please do.”

Quickly Nick made his way to the door. He was halfway to his car before he realized that he had never thanked Molly for dinner. But he would live with the regret. He had no desire to get near Jasper again with the parchments. 75

It was three in the morning by the time Nick finished interpreting the last line of the script.

Using the page already deciphered by Jasper, Nick had struggled to match up the letters and words of the translated text with the balance of the pages.

There were a few rough spots, but he had scribbled the substance of Drake’s message in a small notebook. He sat exhausted on the couch in the living room of his apartment and pieced the notes together. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the sentences began to take shape. The first three of the four pages were a laundry list of treasure seized by the crew of the Pelican, later christened the
Golden
Hinde, as it traveled a circuitous course from the Azores to the Caribbean and south along the coast of Patagonia, through the Strait of Magellan and up the Pacific coast of the Americas. Listed were a dazzling array of artworks, precious gems and metals—

four chains of solid gold, each three feet in length, a bag of pearls, two more bags of emeralds, fifteen barrels of silver bars, two large crates of gold bullion bars, twenty-two chests full of gold royals of plate and a crucifix of gold studded with emeralds. This special find Drake kept in his cabin in a locked cabinet along with an eagle of gold bearing a large emerald clutched in its talons. The bird he had plundered from a Spanish ship off the coast of Mexico. According to the manifest, Drake had taken many of the items listed from a Manila galleon as he sailed south from his exploration of the Oregon coast. It was a cruel irony for the Spanish and a stroke of good luck for Drake that two small ships adrift on a boundless ocean should come into contact off an uncharted coast. Drake captured the galleon, took her cargo and left the hapless Spaniards to sail south empty. The parchments confirmed the view of historians that Drake, contrary to the myth popularized in the movies and fiction, was merciful to his vanquished foes, never killing without cause or justification.

According to the brief narrative contained in the parchments, after taking the Manila galleon Drake’s ship had sprung a leak and was in risk of foundering. The captain made haste to put in at the nearest safe harbor. It was this harbor that he christened his “Nova Albion.” Nick scrawled the translation in his small

notebook.

But it was the last entry of the four pages that raised the hair on the back of his neck. It was only five lines, and Nick read and reread it a dozen times. He stared at the words. The translation had to be wrong. He checked his notes and looked at the parchments again. There was no mistake.

Suddenly Nick comprehended the full impact of the message scratched on the pages. For the first time in four centuries human eyes had read the secret penned by the fiery English captain, and Nick knew that any search for Drake’s journal would have more than merely academic significance.

“Listen, Sam, we don’t have time for this. i have two trials in the next seven weeks and you should be developing new business. I think in the last year that we’ve humored your mother enough to last her a lifetime.” Pat’s eyes shimmered under the candlelight of the restaurant, her hands clasped, her elbows resting on the table, flanking a half-empty wineglass.

“Nick’s studying the documents now. I think they’re worth money …”

“Where have I heard that before?”

It was a low blow. Pat had never allowed him to forget the episode in Alleghany. Almost five years had passed, but she continued to cultivate the incident, freshening the embarrassment whenever the need arose, which occurred with more frequency as boredom caused Sam to stray increasingly from his practice.

Jorgensen had appeared at the office one afternoon with a friend from college. It was a dead-bang, money-in-the-bank sure thing. The friend’s family had ties in Alleghany dating to the 1850’s.

An old uncle knew the exact location of a strongbox filled with gold dust that had been stashed fifty years before by miners during a claim dispute. Without consulting Pat, Sam forked over fifteen hundred dollars of the firm’s money and formed a limited partnership. They dug for a week with backhoes through a dozen old claims in the tiny foothill community. When the money ran out, all they had to show for their trouble were forty-three empty holes. The holes soon began to fill —with surrounding buildings. By fall, three abandoned shacks, undermined by the man-made 79

craters and encouraged by heavy rains, collapsed. Bogardus learned to his dismay that in the back country of the Sierra Nevada the instincts for gold digging run deep. The termite-riddled hovels suddenly became “historic structures,” their owners demanding damages in six figures.

Pat’s irritation turned to ire when the first lawsuit arrived. As always, what was a crisis to Pat was a mere inconvenience to Sam. He tendered the suits to the firm’s malpractice insurance carrier. The company’s underwriter listened in stunned silence as Sam, in near-reverent tones, informed him of the loss. It seemed the law firm’s work in forming the limited partnership constituted a professional service. Contrite to the end, Sam owned up to his error in failing to secure waivers of liability from the Alleghany property owners.

After burning the phone lines between its home office in Minnesota and its lawyers in Los Angeles, the carrier grudgingly settled the claims, paying a dime on the dollar. The property owners fueled their fireplaces with lumber from the abandoned shacks as they counted their blessings in cold, hard cash. Two days later the carrier canceled the firm’s malpractice coverage, leaving Bogardus and Paterson “bare.” In the end Sam merely shrugged. After all, insurance coverage only encourages lawsuits. It was not a theory he wished to restate now as he gazed across the table into Pat’s icy stare.

“In case you’ve forgotten, we’re in the business of practicing law, not dealing in antiquities or half-baked treasure hunts. Give the papers back to the lady and tell her to find somebody else to listen to her story.”

But it wasn’t just Alleghany. Pat was jealous. Sam now knew that Angie had finally struck a responsive cord. The old lady had used Jennifer Davies to drive a wedge between him and Pat.

“What’s the problem? Are you saying I’m not carrying my load in the office?”

“You know better than that.” Her eyes narrowed. “There’s an old saying—it takes more than an ampersand to make a partnership. If we don’t get your mother out of the middle of our business 81

now it will never end. She’ll destroy the firm and you know it.”

“I’ll tell you what. If you’re worried about losing money on the deal, I’ll compensate the firm for the time I spend on the Davies matter. Hour for hour I’ll pay the going rate. You won’t lose a thing.”

“It’s not the money and you know it,” she fumed.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s you. Losing interest in the firm, your practice and …”

Sam waited for her to complete the sentence. But she didn’t.

Three years earlier they would have fought until one of them walked away, driven by pride. Their pleasure would have come from later reconciliation. It was a measure of how far apart they had drifted that the argument merely blew itself out and in the end they found themselves still seated, staring across the small cocktail table.

“Let me play this one out. If the parchments turn out to be bogus, I’ll run a routine check on adoption records for the lady and send her on her way.”

Pat’s eyes filled with skepticism. She shook her head and with an exasperated grin finally gave a reluctant nod. She knew that she could never deliver an ultimatum and make it stick, not without running the risk of dissolving the partnership, which was not something she was willing to do, not if there were other alternatives.

“Tell me, what’s she like?”

“Who?”

“Let’s not be sly. Your client. Jennifer what’s-her-name.”

“What’s your interest?” Sam smiled.

“Purely proprietary.”

“I’m not sure that answers my question.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” She picked up the glass of wine and licked the rim with her tongue in a seductive gesture. “I just want to know how much of a fool you’re making out of yourself. After all it does reflect on the firm’s good will and its reputation.”

Given the doubts he was beginning to harbor about Davies and her story, Pat’s question was more perceptive than she could have guessed. But Sam had no desire to fuel the fire of opposition.

“What’s to say? She seems intelligent.

Don’t really know too much about her. She 83

lives over in the wine country, Napa County I believe. Apparently she’s adopted. Claims to be looking for her natural father who she thought was dead.”

Pat toyed with the stem of her glass as her eyes wandered toward the ceiling above Sam’s head.

“Why don’t we make it easy on ourselves and turn it over to Jake? It’d be worth it. You could get back to work and he could run down the information at half of our hourly rate. We might even make some money on it.”

“And I wouldn’t have to see Ms. Davies again until I handed her the final report from the investigator.”

“Exactly.” Pat smiled.

He returned the grin.

“Let me think about it.”

“Sure, I wouldn’t want to pressure you.” Sarcasm dripped from her words.

Sam felt the delicate touch of her high-heeled instep as she rubbed her foot against his calf under the table and reached for the bottle of wine to refill his glass.

Louis Davies was a distinguished man in his early sixties. The lonely wisps of hair remaining on his head had long since turned white and presented an elegant contrast to the tan furrows of his forehead. Half-frame spectacles drooped near the end of his nose as he scanned the pages of the local newspaper.

It was an evening ritual that hadn’t changed in twenty years.

The swinging kitchen door pushed open. Marguerite, the family maid, entered the room carrying a steaming plate. She set it on the table in front of the old man as he carefully folded the paper and placed it on the table.

“Tomorrow’s going to be busy,” said Louis.

“I’ll be tied up most of the day doing some bottling down in the shed.”

The old lady knew what went on in that shed.

As Davies grew older he had developed a fondness for tasting the fruits of his harvest. He would sit for hours with Charlie, the old man who supervised the bottling operations. Together they would sample the wines and talk of the old days in the valley, before the roads had become littered with commercial tasting rooms and bed-and-breakfast inns, when the labels had been owned by old

families; before the multinationals had moved in, before it was chic to make wine.

“I wonder if you could make me a bag lunch in the morning?”

“Certainly.” The maid’s voice carried a distinctive accent. Though she had lived in this country for more than thirty years and had taken pains to perfect her English, the Castilian trill could still be heard. Although she and Davies did not get along that well, Marguerite stayed on out of love and loyalty for Dorothy Davies.

“Where’s Jennifer tonight?” He looked up at her.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

Davies didn’t press the issue. He knew that since Jennifer had entered the household more than a year before he sensed friction between the two of them. It was natural that Marguerite would view the younger woman as a threat. Jennifer responded by spending increasing hours away from the house at her office in St. Helena.