Chapter 8
Nerissa
The federal courthouse in Key West is a small white building on Simonton with a bad air conditioner and a security guard named Ruthie who has been there since the Reagan administration and knows everybody's business.
"You look nice," Ruthie said.
"I'm wearing my father's shoes."
"They're nice shoes."
"They're two sizes too big and I've got four pairs of socks on."
"Well," said Ruthie, waving me through, "then you're standing on something."
Ines Abarca had arrived two days early and had spent both of them in a rented conference room with the door shut, and when I finally met her properly she looked at me over the top of a legal pad and said:
"You're going to want to talk."
"That's a fair read."
"You're going to want to talk in the room. When Halloway calls you artisanal, or unfunded, or a hobbyist, and he will, three times minimum, because it's cheap and it works." She put her pen down. "You are going to sit there and you are going to let him."
"Why."
"Because a judge who has spent thirty years in Key West has met four hundred people who came into her courtroom with a boat and a dream and a grievance," Ines said.
"And the second you sound like one of them, you are one of them.
Your entire case is that you are a professional who was robbed. Professionals are boring. Be boring."
"I've never been boring in my life."
"I've read your emails," Ines said. "I'm aware. Try anyway."
Here is the thing nobody tells you about the climax of a treasure story.
It happens in a room with fluorescent lights and a stenographer, and it takes six hours, and at no point does anybody run.
Our side of the table: me, in a blazer I bought in 2016 for a funeral. Junho, in a shirt with a collar, sweating. A lawyer named Ines Abarca that Compass Salvage had put on a plane from Phoenix, who spoke four times all morning and each time it cost Meridian Deep something.
Torren sat in the second row behind us. Not at the table. He'd been very clear about that.
"I'm not a claimant," he'd said.
"You're crew."
"I'm a witness and a spectator and I take up too much room. Put Junho at the table. He needs it more."
Junho, who had spent five weeks not speaking to Pop and one week speaking to Pop and had aged about nine years in the process, sat at the table and did not fidget once.
Their side: Peter Halloway in linen with a better haircut, two associates, and a man in the back who never gave a name and never wrote anything down and left at lunch and did not come back.
I looked at that man twice.
That's the Gallery, I thought. That's what it looks like. It doesn't look like anything. It sits in the back and it leaves at lunch.
Halloway went first and he was good.
He put up their survey narrative — Meridian Deep as a well-capitalized professional operation, a research program running eighteen months, filings clean, methodology sound. He put up their conservation credentials. He put up a lab in Tampa.
He said the words unfunded and two-boat and artisanal about my company, and artisanal is the one that got me, because it's the polite version of toy.
Then Ines stood up.
"Your Honor, the claimant's survey product contains a fifty-meter void in the northwest quadrant of the mosaic."
Halloway's associate turned a page.
"Meridian Deep characterizes this as the boundary of their survey.
It is not a boundary." Ines put up my file.
Not a printout — the file, projected, with the metadata bar open.
"This is the raw sonar record from Kwon Salvage, dated April eleventh of last year.
At fourteen-oh-nine, a towfish cable fault terminates data acquisition.
It resumes at fourteen-thirty-one. The gap in the Kwon record and the gap in the Meridian Deep record are identical to the meter, in the same geographic position, at the same heading, with the same edge artifact from the same failing cable. "
She let that sit.
"A boundary is a decision," Ines said. "This is an injury. Two surveys do not sustain the same injury independently."
The judge — a woman about sixty named Ferrer with reading glasses she used as a pointer — wrote something down.
Then Delphine Broussard came up on the video link from New Orleans, and she was magnificent.
I want to say this plainly: I had never met that woman in my life. She had a floral scarf and a background full of books and she took Meridian Deep apart in twenty-two minutes with the manner of a woman describing a recipe.
The bell. The Cavite founder's mark. The name conflict. The absence of specie in the after hold. The chart laminate. The soldered case.
"Your Honor," she said, "the Meridian Deep filing describes this vessel as a treasure galleon and estimates recoverable value at between forty and ninety million dollars."
"That's their position, yes."
"That's not a position, Your Honor, that's a cover story.
" Delphine took her glasses off. "There is no treasure.
I have reviewed everything recovered from this site and there is not one coin.
What is on that seabed is a documentary archive with no commercial market and enormous diplomatic value, and any competent maritime historian looking at their own filing would know that inside an hour.
Which means either their expert is incompetent, or their filing is misdescribed on purpose. "
Halloway objected.
Judge Ferrer said, "Overruled, I'd like to hear the rest of it," in a tone that made an associate close a laptop.
I testified before lunch and it lasted fifty minutes and I was, per instruction, boring.
Ines walked me through the transect program: dates, fuel logs, the equipment, the cable fault, the porcelain fragment, the chain of custody on every bag. It was the least interesting fifty minutes of my life and I could feel it working.
Then Halloway got up.
"Ms. Kwon, your vessel is forty-eight feet."
"Yes."
"Your operation has three crew."
"Yes."
"Your annual revenue last year was under ninety thousand dollars."
"Yes."
"How do you propose to conserve a site of this significance?"
And I nearly did it. I nearly stood up in my dead father's shoes and told a federal judge exactly how much I could do with ninety thousand dollars and three people.
I looked at Ines. Ines did not look back, which was itself instruction.
"I don't," I said.
Halloway blinked.
"I'm sorry?"
"I don't propose to conserve it," I said.
"I've never proposed to conserve it. It's in my filing on page eleven.
A site like this belongs in a consortium with proper labs and proper publication and proper conservators, and my company is a salvor, not a museum, and anybody who tells this court they can do both is selling something.
" I folded my hands. "My proposal is that I found it, I documented it, and I hand it to people who are better at the next part than I am.
That's the whole proposal. It's been the whole proposal since April. "
Judge Ferrer wrote something down and underlined it.
Halloway said he had no further questions, which was a lie, because he'd had eleven more on the page in front of him, and I could read them upside down.
They put their own diver up after lunch.
Danny Wexler. Twenty-nine years old, gray suit, hands that didn't know what to do without a regulator in them.
Halloway walked him through it: professional dive team, standard protocol, storm night, an unauthorized diver from the Kwon vessel who entered the water and interfered with rigged recovery equipment.
"And did you observe this individual cut your lift bags?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did he threaten you?"
"No, sir."
"Did he communicate with you?"
Wexler looked at the table.
"Mr. Wexler. Did he communicate with you?"
"He wrote on a slate," Wexler said.
"And what did the slate say?"
Behind me, I heard Torren shift once in his seat, and that was all.
"It said, 'No grid, you know,'" Wexler said.
The room got quiet.
"And what did you understand that to mean?" Halloway said, in the voice of a man who has stepped somewhere soft.
"I understood it to mean," Wexler said, "that we were about to lift a sealed artifact off a wreck site at night, in a storm, with no grid laid, no tags, no photogrammetry, and no context recording of any kind. Which is what we were about to do. I'd rigged it myself that afternoon."
"Mr. Wexler — "
"You asked what I understood it to mean," Wexler said.
Judge Ferrer took her glasses off.
"Mr. Wexler," she said. "Who instructed you to rig that case?"
Halloway stood up. Ines stood up faster. There was some noise.
Wexler said, over the top of it, in the voice of a man going off a high board:
"Your Honor, I'd like to talk to someone about the survey data too."
Pop went last.
He walked up there with a cane he'd started using in September and he sat down and gave his full legal name, which I had honestly never heard, and it turned out to be Hollis Everett Deaux, which broke something in me a little.
Halloway went at him hard on credibility, which was the only move available and was also a mistake, because there is no way to be cruel to a seventy-year-old dying man in a small room without everyone watching you do it.
"Mr. Deaux, you're testifying against a party you defrauded."
"I'm testifying against the man who paid me."
"You stole from your own employer."
"Yes, sir."
"You've admitted to a felony."
"Yes, sir."
"Why should this court believe anything you say?"
Pop looked at him for a while.
"Because I haven't got a reason to lie anymore," he said. "I'm dying, I've got no money, and the only person who'd have cared what people thought of me is sitting right there, and she already knows."
He didn't look at me when he said it. I appreciated that more than I can put down.
Then he told them.