Spanish way, Ee-res.
The bones from the dig are in Iris’s car trunk,’ Dr Parker said. ‘I can sign custody of them back over to you after lunch if you like.’
Whit saw the waitress approaching for the drink order keep her smile frozen in place at the mention of bones.
‘He’s really not a maniac,’ Whit told her.
‘The day is young,’ Iris Dominguez said. She had a beautiful voice, soft but forceful, and a cool, unfussy elegance. Whit liked her immediately. They ordered hamburgers and onion rings, Parker asking for a Salty Dog, Iris and Whit ordering beers.
‘So you want to know about the coins and you’re bribing us with lunch.’ Parker scooped a tortilla chip with salsa and popped it into his mouth.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Why not just ask the sheriff’s office?’
‘I could. But I’m not popular with law enforcement right now. I just insulted the FBI.’
Iris Dominguez raised an eyebrow.
Parker laughed. ‘And why did you think that was productive?’
‘I’ll see if it gets the results I want,’ Whit said. ‘Plus, I wanted to thank you and Dr Dominguez for your help.’ He smiled at Iris. ‘You identified the relics. That was extremely helpful to me.’
‘You’re welcome. You’ve made my weekend interesting.’
The waitress arrived with their drinks; Parker licked the salt from the glass rim, sucked down half the grapefruit juice and vodka in a hard swallow.
Dr Dominguez waited until the waitress had departed. ‘Okay. What do you know about coins?’
‘They don’t stay in my pocket long enough,’ Whit said.
‘Let me give you a quick primer. These kinds of coins weren’t treated like how we treat quarters and pennies and dimes. They were created to make it easy to move massive amounts of wealth from Mexico to Spain. They might be struck in Mexico, shipped, and then immediately melted down in Europe.’ She sipped at her beer. ‘These are called milled bust coins, the last produced Spanish colonial coins. The gold coins come in denominations of eight, four, two and one escudo. The silvers are reales. Obviously the gold coins are worth more.’ She dug in her purse, pulled out a file of photos. ‘I took some pictures of the coins, nice big blowups so I can show you why these coins are particularly unusual.’ She spread the photos out, one group to one side, the other by Parker’s dwindling cocktail.
‘These all have a typical reverse side,’ she said. ‘See the pillars and shield? Typical of many Spanish colonial coins. And these have double rosettes under the pillars. Very unusual.’ She pulled the other section of photos into the center of the table. ‘The obverse sides of the coins often have either a monarch’s shield – like British paper money having the queen on it – or a design of the emperor’s head, which you can see these have. Most of these are Ferdinand VII. Don’t you think he had a weak chin?’ She pointed with a pencil tip.
‘Yes,’ Whit said.
Iris flipped the picture back over to the pillars, to the letters encircling the design. ‘You see the Mo? That means Monteblanco. Next, that’s the denomination – this is an eight escudo; and next are the initials of the assayer. Here that’s ET, Esteban Torres, the official of the Monteblanco mint. The other side has a date… Here, this coin was minted in 1819. Monteblanco was at that time the newest Mexican mint. Just opened. Freshly minted, you could say.’
‘Iris doesn’t get out enough,’ Parker said. ‘Does it show?’
‘I think you’re brilliant,’ Whit said.
She smiled and Parker said, ‘Hey.’
Just friends, Whit thought, right.
Iris tapped the photos with her fingernail. ‘So I dove into the historical archives, called a professor friend of mine in Mexico City to run some local checks down there for me. A large cache of the original silver and gold coins minted at Monteblanco – with this unusual double-rosette design – was being shipped to Spain right after being minted, aboard a schooner called Santa Barbara. But according to the records, Santa Barbara was lost at sea in March of 1820, somewhere south of Cuba.’
‘I see,’ Whit said again. 1820. Jean Laffite’s time. His heart neared his throat. This would make Jason Salinger’s day.
‘But the records of the time indicate that the weather was fair throughout that time in the Caribbean. So Santa Barbara probably didn’t fall victim to a Gulf storm.’
Whit cleared his throat. ‘I will embarrass myself a little now. But what if the coins were buried, as part of a treasure?’
‘Yeah, I didn’t tell Iris that part,’ Parker said. ‘I didn’t want to influence her data.’
‘You couldn’t have,’ Iris said dryly, ‘You’re talking about the locks. The latches I identified. They’re from the same period as the coins. You think the coins were originally buried with those relics and skeletons?’
Whit lowered his voice, leaned forward. ‘Yes, I do. I think Jean Laffite took Santa Barbara as his last prize, and he had no time to take and bank it under a false name in New Orleans. He was forced out of Galveston in the spring of 1820. Navies from Britain, Spain, and the US would have been hunting him in the Gulf. He had no base to hide, nowhere to run.’
‘So you think he buried the Santa Barbara stash, hoping to reestablish later,’ Iris said.
‘He just never got reestablished,’ Whit said. ‘Is this too big of a jump?’
Iris Dominguez sipped at her beer. ‘The coins have to have been somewhere for the past one hundred eighty years. They’re worn but not from human handling.’
He thought of Lucy, her claim the coins were Patch’s. ‘You don’t think they’ve been in a collection all these years?’
‘No, Judge, considering what else you’ve discovered, I don’t think so.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Oh my God, the historical significance. Enormous. An actual buried pirate treasure.’
Whit’s throat felt dry. ‘More valuable than the monetary significance?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll see if I can locate a copy of the manifest from Santa Barbara from the archives. See how much gold and silver it carried – but even manifests didn’t always represent an accurate count. There was a lot of corruption, theft in the financial system then. Sometimes up to forty percent of the treasure on a ship wouldn’t even be on the manifest, to minimize taxes. And the Monteblanco mint was destroyed in a peasant uprising in 1822. Coins from Monteblanco are exceedingly rare.’
‘It could be quite large, then.’
‘It could be millions, Whit. The accounts of Santa Barbara I found also mentioned that the ship carried a noted Colombian emerald. No emeralds in Mexico – it’s not a gem-rich geography – but lots of incredible emeralds out of Colombia. This one was particularly noteworthy. The Catholic priests nicknamed it the Devil’s Eye.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ Whit said. He thought of Claudia’s story of Danny Laffite’s demands. ‘The archives in Mexico. Do they have any information on this emerald they could send to me?’
‘I’ll ask,’ Dr Dominguez said.
‘Judge, what is it? What’s wrong?’ Dr Parker asked.
‘You don’t happen to know the value of the emerald, do you?’
‘I should imagine it to be worth a few million. And of course, if it’s become Laffite’s treasure, and it’s provable, then the value probably triples,’ Dr Dominguez said.
‘Iris,’ Whit said, ‘can you help me find out how someone might try to sell this Devil’s Eye? Or these coins?’
‘Sure.’ She shook her head in pleased amazement. ‘Actual pirate treasure.’
‘Actual pirates,’ Parker said. ‘Can I keep those bones for a while? They just got way more interesting to me. They must have been the unlucky bastards who helped Laffite bury the treasure, then got killed for their trouble. Dead men tell no tales and so on.’
‘So you’re the famous Whit.’ Ben Vaughn sat on the edge of the hospital bed, dressed in loose khakis and a T-shirt.
‘I didn’t know I was famous.’
‘To Claudia and the FBI. Claudia thinks the world of you.’ He didn’t say what the FBI thought.
