Treasure of the Blue Whale

by Mayfield, Steven;

  “I read about it in a medical journal. It’s lithium-rich,” Miss Lizzie told me when she dropped off the first batch, going on to unnecessarily report the findings of the scientific article in some detail. I tried to keep up, but Miss Lizzie had a habit of giving me credit for being smarter and more mature than I was, often expounding on politics I found incomprehensible or suggesting books to read I would consider daunting even now. It’s not a bad thing to overestimate a boy’s ability at a tender age to take in a jumble of facts and put them in proper order. It makes him expect more of himself. However, I suspect Miss Lizzie was more impressed with my ears than my intellect as I was willing to listen quietly at a time when too many men seemed determined put her in a place that made them feel better about their own shortcomings.

  “I’ve high hopes for this one, Connor,” she’d asserted in regard to the vegetable and seaweed mixture recommended in the medical journal. And after my mother had been on the new prescription for ten days such optimism seemed warranted. Ma’s behavior was now normal a good deal of the time, although she seemed a bit baffled by Alex and me. I suspect she felt as if she’d gone to sleep when Alex was a baby and I a four-year-old and woken to a pair of shaggy-haired boys who liked to wrestle in the living room, gulp milk directly from the bottle, and shout when a whisper would suffice.

  Ma was the town librarian before Dad left, but when her moods became too extreme, the library committee put her on a leave of absence. No one else in Tesoro understood the Dewey Decimal Classification, and readers were subsequently forced to use an honors system as Ma was too scattered or bedridden to man the big desk between the bookshelves. That’s why I was surprised when she made an announcement right after I told her about the line out the door of the town hall and the goofy-faced men signing whatever the Betty Boops put in front of them.

  “Maybe I’ll head down to the library for a while,” she said.

  I was disappointed. For years, Ma hadn’t left the house without Alex or me alongside. With folks flitting about town after signing their loan agreements, frantic to spend the money before Dinkle changed his mind, the scent of not-to-be-missed pandemonium was in the air and I wanted to witness it first-hand rather than be later regaled by Webb Garwood and his blowhard, big brother Tuck. Chaperoning Ma was not part of the plan.

  “Want me to take you?” I asked her with exactly the sort of enthusiasm you’d expect from someone who wanted, instead, to head over to Skitch Peterson’s car lot where there was a pretty good chance that the combination of Skitch’s rapacious desire to sell cars and most fellows’ ravenous appetites to buy them would result in some entertaining finger-pointing and profanity.

  Ma shook her head, smiling. “No, you run along. I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m serious, Ma. I’ll go with you.”

  She laughed. “I’ll be fine, you little old man,” she said. “You don’t have to take care of me.”

  I eyed her. Ma’s hair was neatly brushed, her gaze level. She seemed fine. Besides, I had just been given permission to be irresponsible.

  “Okay,” I said, trying hard not to sound relieved.

  I collared Alex and we met up with Webb, afterward hurrying across town to Peterson Autos. We climbed to a small rise overlooking the lot and took seats on an empty, table-sized cable spool PG&E workers had abandoned when they brought electricity to Tesoro a few years earlier. From there we watched as a fervently hearty Skitch Peterson greeted James Throckmorton, owner of the Last Resort Bar & Grill. James had signed his credit contract with little more than a glance at Chirpy Boop, unaffected by her physical charms and naked jaybird chatter on account of the heavy torch he’d been carrying for my mother since elementary school. James was a steady fellow and a town leader, who typically kept his head nearer his shoulders than his rear end. Nevertheless, he’d signed one of Dinkle’s credit agreements without fully reading the thing and then headed directly to Peterson Autos where Skitch manipulated him into consideration of the philosophical conundrum posed by a 1927 Oldsmobile versus a 1931 Ford. James thought he might buy both cars to avoid hurting Skitch’s feelings but came to his senses at the last minute when his father, old Axel, pointed out that he was not about to learn how to drive just because his damned fool son couldn’t make a decision. James didn’t need either car as he had a Chevy pickup used to transport spirits and soft drinks from San Rafael to Tesoro. Still, he bought the Olds, despite a twinge of reluctance he should have heeded, as you will see.

  While Skitch would have loved to hit an auto dealer’s daily double by selling two unneeded cars rather than just one, his disappointment was short-lived. Once folks began to wander over from the town hall with their brand-new Dinkle Company checkbooks, it became apparent that the number of buyers outweighed Skitch’s inventory. Before long, to the delight of Alex and Webb and me, fellows were frenetically skittering about the car lot like bugs on the surface of a mud puddle—shouting, waving their arms around, and behaving, in general, just as badly as we’d hoped when we showed up to watch. There were a couple of near fistfights, with one buyer locking himself inside the 1931 Ford James Throckmorton had spurned. Despite panting and sweating like a Sumo wrestler, the obstinate and very overweight fellow refused to open the windows, cracking one just enough for Skitch to insert the purchase papers. Once the car was his, the new owner seemed to go into a trance. Skitch and a few of his customers stood around for a while, analyzing the situation.

  “New car euphoria,” Skitch proposed. “Seen it a million times.”

  Eventually, the onlookers reached a consensus that the man had passed out and Miss Lizzie was called. She had James Throckmorton break one of the car’s windows in order to unlock the vehicle. Afterward, James and a few others hauled the patient into Skitch’s office. While Skitch called C. Herbert Judson to check out his liability in the matter, Miss Lizzie revived the fellow with smelling salts and a glass of water, afterward making clear her preference for heat and stupidity over bliss as the cause of the man’s swoon.

  After the excitement settled down, Miss Lizzie returned to her apothecary and the retail mayhem proceeded. By mid-afternoon Skitch had sold every auto on his lot, and that’s when another problem popped up—one that could not be blamed on heat, stupidity, or the ecstasy of new vehicle ownership; rather, it was a consequence of Skitch Peterson’s hornswoggling.

  Skitch had a practice of siphoning gas from an auto after he acquired it, leaving just enough in the tank for a new buyer to coast into the Sinclair station, a business he also owned. He then sold them new gas at a premium rate while unloading their old gas to a trucking outfit in Oakland. However, on the day of the Great Post-Boops Auto Sale, Skitch underestimated the excitement the event would generate and about half the new car owners eased up to the Sinclair station on fumes only to discover that the pumps had run dry. Milton Garwood then proved that Skitch wasn’t the only opportunist in town by offering to hitch his team of horses to any car with an empty gas tank and an owner willing to part with two bucks. He spent the rest of the day towing cars. That night, he counted his money, added it to the ten grand Dinkle had made available to him on credit, and then made a deposit to his regular account in a Hills Brothers coffee can kept hidden in his crawlspace. Afterward, Milton announced to his wife that he had always wanted to own a monkey and intended to buy one.

  Chapter Nine:

  Dinkle’s man

  There is a story inside my story, although I confess it has been dabbed with conjecture and a splash of rumor. It is the story of Dinkle’s man, Sergei Yurievsky, and I will tell it as I think he might.

  Despite sharing a surname with Prince Georgy Alexandrovich Yurievsky—uncle to the last tsar of Russia—Dinkle’s man was not a royal but the son of a minor Moscow government functionary, a pencil-pusher whose bloodline prohibited his only son from rising above the rank of sergeant in the Russian Imperial Army. In that respect Yurievsky was lucky, not that a sergeant needs lu
ck. I was in the army, too, and know that sergeants make their own luck. Nevertheless, he was a commoner and fortunate to be one in 1917, the year Russia finally grew tired of tsars and tsarinas. This is neither conjecture nor rumor. It is indisputable fact.

  It is a fact, as well, that in the early summer of 1934, Yurievsky spent most mornings in the garage of the Dinkle estate, washing the already spotless Duesenberg or tinkering with it. Indeed, about three weeks after Milton Garwood began monkey shopping, Yurievsky was preparing the car for his employer’s weekly trip to San Francisco. The morning was hot and not for the first time Yurievsky mourned the loss of the icy days and gray skies that had distinguished his native Russia from northern California. He mourned another loss as well: his past life with Olga and their daughter, Irina. He had first met Olga when she was only a bit older than Miss Littleleaf, the young woman in the village who ran the mercantile. Irina, the girl he had nicknamed Myshka—his little mouse—would now be the same age as the postmistress were she still alive.

  Dinkle’s man added polish to his rag and applied it to the fender of the Duesenberg. Something was going on in the village. Miss Littleleaf and the lawyer’s wife had been in the mercantile the previous day when he retrieved the old man’s mail. With his appearance, their eyes had widened, their voices becoming whispers. He was familiar with such behavior. The morning after the Mad Monk was killed, the whispers had followed Yurievsky wherever he went.

  It had been eighteen years since Grand Duke Pavlovich enlisted Yurievsky—now Dinkle’s man—to be the lookout in a plot to assassinate Rasputin the Mad Monk. It had not gone well. Rasputin’s body had miraculously resisted the poison, and they’d been forced to shoot him, afterward pitching his body off the Bolshoi Petrovsky Bridge. The conspirators, except for Yurievsky, were officers. They were better equipped to order a job done than to actually do it. They bungled things. There was blood left on the bridge and a galosh. The body was not weighted and didn’t sink. Within hours the conspirators were exposed and caught: Usupov, Grand Duke Pavlovich, the fascist Purishkevich, Lieutenant Sukhotin, and the driver of their getaway car, Lazovert.

  Pavlovich was exiled to the Persian Front. He took his aide, Yurievsky, with him. Olga and four-year-old Irina remained behind in St. Petersburg, waving from the train platform, their figures slowly enshrouded in steam as the cars pulled away from the station. “Things will settle down and I’ll return,” Yurievsky assured his wife and daughter. But then came October and the Revolution. Yurievsky was inextricably linked to Pavlovich and the aristocracy. He could not return. One more letter came from Olga. It is chaos here, she wrote. We will try for Paris. If not, we will go east. And then they disappeared.

  After the Revolution and the end of the Great War, he went with Pavlovich to Paris and then London. They parted ways. Yurievsky heard that many Russians were in New York City. He booked passage, found one of the other conspirators—Lazovert, the doctor. “The Bolsheviks killed or exiled everyone even remotely connected to the Romanov’s,” Lazovert told him. Some were in America, but not Olga and Irina. “They might be in China,” the doctor thought, “…or Siberia.”

  For nearly twenty years Yurievsky had been searching: London, Paris, Istanbul, New York. He slipped back into Russia through its Georgian underbelly and followed breadcrumbs to Moscow and St. Petersburg before trekking eastward to Siberia and China. He met a great-niece to Grand Duke Mikhailovich in Harbin who thought she recognized the faces in the tattered photo. Shanghai, she thought, or perhaps Peking. His money was gone by then. He became a mercenary, serving first as a soldier and then an assassin for a Chinese warlord. He worked as an enforcer for a Filipino strongman, a bodyguard for a British businessman in Hong Kong.

  The years passed and he almost gave up. And then a whore in Macao thought one of the faces was familiar. “I once saw a woman who looked like the child in this photo,” she told him. “It was in Vladivostok. She wanted to go to Shanghai. She was a prostitute like me.” Eventually, Yurievsky followed the clues to San Francisco, where he answered an ad for a fellow who might combine the roles of valet, butler, and chauffeur into a single position. He was hired, and by the time our ambergris washed up on the beach, the former soldier had resided in the apartment over the garage of the Dinkle estate for almost six years, no longer Sergeant Sergei Yurievsky of the Russian Imperial Army but Dinkle’s man.

  Yurievsky finished polishing the Duesenberg and drove it to the front of the main house. The small white stones of the driveway crunched beneath the tires, the sound reminiscent of boots on crusted snow. The old man came out and crawled into the back seat, immediately burying his face in a newspaper. He was alone, for which Yurievsky was grateful. Dinkle was often accompanied by the two female vipers from San Francisco. One was Russian. She spoke little and always in English, as if ashamed of her native language. The other was such a chatterbox that it took great restraint for Yurievsky not to strangle her. This morning the two men would mercifully traverse the thirty miles to San Francisco without company or the exchange of a single word, sharing their affection for silence. They shared nothing else.

  Dinkle’s man steered the Duesenberg through the open gate of the estate and then along a narrow unpaved road. They traversed the mile to the main body of the village and then slowly drove past the dark-windowed bar & grill, the tourist shops, and the mercantile. Fiona Littleleaf stood outside her store. She lifted a hand as they passed. Dinkle ignored her, but Yurievsky glanced over and nodded, a formal and stylized gesture he had learned from Grand Duke Pavlovich, the nuanced movement both conveying respect and suggesting intimacy.

  They drove on to the city where he dropped off his employer in front of a building on Market Street. The old man went inside and Yurievsky drove to Fisherman’s Wharf where he bought a bold coffee from one of the street vendors and then sat on a splintered dock, watching the sea lions bellow. He figured the old man wouldn’t need him for at least two hours, free time the tall Russian might previously have used to visit three or four Barbary coast whorehouses along a section of Pacific Avenue between Chinatown and North Beach. It had been a routine part of his early days in San Francisco, a time when he had yet to become Dinkle’s man. The women in the houses had enthusiastically accepted his money, both curious and grateful that he desired merely answers. Each time he had stepped into one of the stale, carnally decorated parlors, he’d prayed that he might find Olga; prayed perhaps harder that he wouldn’t.

  He no longer visited the houses, the women quickly learning that fabricated clues and real ones paid the same. Nevertheless, Yurievsky had yet to give up. He might yet uncover a new trail—perhaps with the old man’s help. Dinkle’s tendrils were long and reached dark places. Perhaps, Yurievsky mused as one of the sea lions issued a great bark and then slipped off the dock and into the water. Perhaps.

  Chapter Ten:

  The Zenith Stratosphere, a monkey, and a jeweled commode

  After the Great Post-Boops Auto Sale and Gasoline Scam, Milton Garwood’s monkey aspirations were temporarily confounded as he wasn’t sure how to go about purchasing one. He first consulted the Montgomery Ward catalog. It proved to be woefully monkey-deficient as did Sears, Roebuck and Company, a lapse in customer service that might have put him in a sour mood had he not run across an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle for the new Zenith Stratosphere Model 1000Z, the finest radio of its day and one that saw a mere 350 models roll off the production line. Temporarily placing his monkey shopping on hold Milton determined to acquire one of Stratospheres as quickly as possible, figuring he would blast the speakers at peak volume to make sure everyone in town knew he had it.

  “It ain’t just a radio,” he claimed to a group of fellows loitering around at the Last Resort. “It’s both a work of art and a workhorse…More than four feet high with a wood veneer cabinet, walnut inlay, top-notch speakers, and fifty watts of output. It’ll cost me seven hundred fifty dollars, but mark my words, by 1950 that radio will
be worth twice that if not more.”

  Milton didn’t have a radio; indeed, he knew nothing about them despite his regurgitation of the Stratosphere’s ad copy. He’d only listened to a couple of programs—Death Valley Days and The Jack Benny Show—favorites of neighbor C. Herbert Judson, who made a habit of leaving his den window open most evenings. However, Milton had reached the sixth decade of his life and was beginning to wonder if it had all been worth it. He figured a Stratosphere could provide exactly the sort of testimonial that would shout, “Milton Garwood was here,” to those unimpressed with his years of service as the town blacksmith and welder. Not long thereafter Angus MacCallum popped a hole in Milton’s crankcase by opining that no radio was worth seven hundred fifty dollars as a person could buy an entire house in a dustbowl state like Oklahoma for the exact same amount. “Besides, we git a radio signal here in Tesoro aboot a quarter of the time, if that. Yer wastin’ your money, Garwood. I’d nae be doin’ it if I were ye,” he told Milton.

  I have previously established that no one, in general, could tell Milton Garwood what to do and Angus MacCallum, specifically, was not invited to advise him what he should do. However, as Angus was a prudent penny-pincher of some renown, Milton was uneasy enough to seek out an alternative vendor who might mitigate his investment risk. After checking around it turned out that Skitch Peterson knew a fellow in Oakland with some fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck contacts who thought he might lay his hands on a Stratosphere for five hundred dollars plus ten percent for his trouble. So, Milton convinced James Throckmorton to test out his recently purchased 1927 Olds with a trip to Oakland where our town blacksmith vetted the discounter, determining that he seemed legitimate. James later reported that the man had heavily pomaded hair, a tonsorial feature most in Tesoro equated with disingenuousness. However, Milton had the Stratosphere bit in his teeth by then and wrote the fellow a check from his line of credit for the full amount. That was the last he heard in regard to both the check, which was cashed, and the black-market Zenith Stratosphere Model 1000Z, which was never delivered. From that day forward Milton Garwood began each morning by driving his buckboard and its team of horses to the street fronting Skitch’s house, waiting until the horses had dropped their business on Skitch’s lawn jockey before moving on. The swindle also leap-frogged “New Monkey” back to the top of Milton’s wish list.