Treasure of the Blue Whale

by Mayfield, Steven;

  “But we’ll still get a lot of money, right?” I asked. “There’s enough real ambergris to make everyone rich, isn’t there?”

  Miss Lizzie shook her head.

  “No,” she answered. “We’re not rich. Far from it.”

  I confess that Miss Lizzie’s revelation nearly made me swoon. It was as if hope was suddenly and inexorably draining from my body like blood from an open vein, a fluid level physically appreciable as it descended from forehead to chest to thighs to toes, indeed, a hemorrhaging of hope threatened to bleed me lifeless. I had entered the boathouse as a town hero, a Jack returning from his climb up the beanstalk with a golden egg. By the time the last of my essence had drained from me, I had become a goat, the boy with a whitish egg to share that was far from golden. Miss Lizzie knew me well and sensed my despair, pulling me into her embrace, my head against her bosom.

  “I’m sorry, my dear little man,” she said.

  We went back outside where I slumped against one of the dock pilings, while Miss Lizzie and Roger Johns explained what had happened.

  “No one checked inside the boathouse for the longest time because of the smell,” Mr. Johns told me. “A couple of weeks ago Angus was on duty and got curious. He went inside and found the ambergris egg. It’s amazing it didn’t float off. It was about a foot underwater, deep enough to wash under the doors. The rest of the ambergris—or what we thought was ambergris—had mostly dissolved.”

  “Angus woke us up,” Miss Lizzie revealed, “Fiona, Herb, Roger, and me…and we went to the Last Resort to get a look at one of Dinkle’s loan contracts.”

  I knew James Throckmorton had taken out a line of credit with the Boops, afterward making his way to Skitch Peterson’s car lot where he took a 1927 Olds off the master salesman’s hands. From Miss Lizzie and Mr. Johns, I learned that he had since been in the uneasy throes of buyer’s regret and wasn’t surprised by a middle-of-the-night knock on the door of his apartment above the bar. “I shoulda known better,” he’d said ruefully when apprised of Angus’s discovery. Afterward, he retrieved his credit agreement, handed it over to Mr. Judson, and then retired to the bar’s kitchen to make coffee.

  “Herb explained to us how Dinkle never had any intention of entering into a traditional loan arrangement,” Miss Lizzie disclosed. “The old scoundrel wrote the contracts with the specific intent of stealing everyone’s ambergris shares.” After reviewing James Throckmorton’s contract, Mr. Judson had dolefully deciphered the small print Fiona warned me about. “Any borrower failing to renew the terms of the contract in writing on or before ninety days is liable for the entire amount on the ninety-first day,” he’d told the small group. “That means their collateral is sacrificed.”

  “We didn’t know what to do,” Mr. Johns said. “Should we tell everyone the truth, that there was hardly any real ambergris? Should we tell Dinkle? It was a mess.”

  Miss Lizzie scowled. “It wasn’t a mess, Roger. It was a problem.”

  “But a big one.”

  Miss Lizzie aimed a narrow eye at the banker. She was a problem-solver by nature, whereas Mr. Johns, for all his likeability and waxy handsomeness, had a bit of hysterical teenager in him when confronted by turmoil. I liked him and knew him to be a stalwart fellow if accurate account balances were at stake. However, he could be a hand-wringer if the fish on the end of a ten-pound line was ten pounds and one ounce.

  “Roger, be quiet and let me finish the story,” Miss Lizzie said. She reiterated for me the provision that notice be given in writing. “Verbal notice results in default,” she said, her face grim.

  Their talk of defaults and liability and collateral were confusing to me and my expression likely reflected it. Miss Lizzie appreciated this, offering further explanation.

  “Here’s the thing, Connor,” she summarized. “If Dinkle discovers our ton of ambergris is really just a couple of pounds of the stuff, he’ll claim he was defrauded, that his borrowers knew their collateral was no good. He’ll be able to seize homes, businesses, cars, clothes, jewelry…You name it. Dinkle will take everything. He’ll financially ruin most of the town.”

  I didn’t understand how a piece of paper with an imprudent signature allowed Cyrus Dinkle to commit robbery. “Why not tell everyone except Mister Dinkle?” I asked. “People could return all the stuff they bought, get their money back, and pay him off.”

  Mr. Johns sighed. “That’s the problem. They borrowed too much and most of it can’t be returned. There’s a Depression going on. Folks won’t be able to sell their stuff. There won’t be any buyers, not at retail prices anyway. They’d be lucky to get half of what they originally paid.”

  I thought about some of the purchases made over the summer and had to admit that the demand for disobedient monkeys, under-aged mail-order brides, and slightly used jeweled commodes was likely to be a meager one.

  “Maybe people could pay off what they owe a little at a time,” I offered. I knew Fiona ran tabs for her customers at the mercantile as did James Throckmorton at the Last Resort.

  “Without the ambergris money, people couldn’t afford to make payments on a loan balance of that size,” Miss Lizzie said. “Besides, we don’t want them to make payments.”

  “You don’t want people to pay back the money they owe? I don’t get it. You said they’d lose everything.”

  “We want Dinkle to call in the loans,” Miss Lizzie explained. “Think of it this way. If Dinkle doesn’t get paid, he takes his collateral—the ambergris—and the borrowers owe him nothing more. He thinks millions are there for the taking, but he’ll be stuck with whatever he can get for our little dinosaur egg…or at least his share of it. Those of us who didn’t borrow money from him get part of it, too.”

  I considered what Miss Lizzie and Mr. Johns had told me. It was a big secret in a small town, the sort of place where secrets are an endangered species.

  “Who knows about this?” I asked.

  “Just a few of us,” Miss Lizzie said. “Herb Judson and his wife, Fiona, James, Angus, Roger, me.” She smiled. “And now you.”

  “What about Coach Buford?” I asked. I thought his exclusion conspicuous, if not foolhardy. He was a notorious buttinski and had been known to evince some monumental toots over far less than being excluded from a secret this big. Miss Lizzie set me straight, making the face of someone who has bitten into a piece of uncooked liver.

  “Wally Buford never met a secret he wasn’t immediately willing to release into the wild,” Miss Lizzie said. “I’d sooner publish it on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle than tell him. As far as that goes, no one else needs to know. Especially those who borrowed money from Dinkle. As long as they believe there’s a thousand pounds of ambergris in this boathouse, they’re not lying. There’s no fraud on their part. Besides, the more people who know, the bigger the chance Dinkle will find out what he’s accepted as collateral.”

  According to Miss Lizzie and Mr. Johns, after the wee hours meeting at the Last Resort, the group had disbanded and five of the six participants went home. Angus returned to the boathouse to finish his guard tour. He was the only one required to remain awake, but none of them slept that night. The next morning the conspirators met at the boathouse. A new member had been added: Mrs. C. Herbert Judson.

  “She was involved with theater groups in San Francisco,” Miss Lizzie told me. “She knows a lot of actors. She knew one who might help us.”

  I should have been skeptical. After all, this was a matter comprised of contracts and figures, deadlines and defaults. We needed a lawyer like Mr. Judson or a banker like Mr. Johns to sort it out, not someone who pretended to be a lawyer or a banker. On the other hand, I had never met a real actor and must confess that the prospect rendered me a bit star-struck, able to repress the threat posed to the town by Dinkle in favor of an actor’s ability to rescue us.

  “Is he famous?” I asked. “Is he in moving
pictures?”

  Miss Lizzie shook her head. “No,” she answered. “He works on stage, in live theater. And he’s not famous. He’s hardly known at all. But that’s why he’s perfect. He’s more or less anonymous.”

  “So, he’s not in moving pictures?”

  “He’s been in one moving picture.”

  “Which one? Maybe I saw it. I would remember his name if I heard it. Tell me his name.”

  Miss Lizzie exchanged looks with Mr. Johns and then leveled gray eyes on me. “This is not to go any further, Connor. You tell no one. Not your brother, not your mother. No one. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “His name…at least the name he’ll use,” Miss Lizzie told me, “is Everson Dexter.”

  She went on, taking me back-stage for a play that would be staged for the edification of Mr. Cyrus Dinkle. I learned that there was no Allegheny Chemicals Corporation, no analyst named Everson Dexter. They were both fakes—part of a sham invented to counter Dinkle’s sham, the trickster being tricked. According to Miss Lizzie and Mr. Johns, if we could keep the old bandit in the dark about the ambergris in the boathouse until the ninety-first day of the loan contracts, the borrowers would default and he would take their shares. However, no one would have to pay back the $10,000 the ex-gunrunner had given them.

  “Do you understand?” Miss Lizzie asked me.

  I nodded. It was a poker game and the fictional Allegheny Chemicals Corporation and equally fictional Everson Dexter were parts of a bluff. Miss Lizzie and her fellow card sharks had outbid the legitimate perfumers, hoping they might fold before one or more of them sent a real analyst to Tesoro. It was a bluff that had to hold up for no more than one second past ninety days.

  Miss Lizzie solemnly reconfirmed that the only people in town aware of what was really inside C. Herbert Judson’s boathouse included she and Mr. Johns, Mr. and Mrs. Judson, Fiona Littleleaf, James Throckmorton, and Angus MacCallum. Now I knew, too. Among the eight of us, only James had signed a line of credit agreement, using it to buy the 1927 Olds that no longer graced his garage. Once apprised of the empty boathouse he had quietly sold the car in San Rafael at a small loss, dipped into his savings account at the Sonoma State Bank for the difference, and paid Dinkle. His line of credit balance was now zero. He was no longer encumbered. Thus, members of the unlikely cabal that dreamed up the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation and hatched the plan to bring the fictitious Everson Dexter to Tesoro owed not a penny to Cyrus Dinkle. They were not at risk. Nevertheless, they were about to imperil both their reputations and their freedom—not for themselves but for their friends and neighbors. It was an utterly dishonest act plotted by perhaps the most honest and honorable people I have ever known. It was also a conspiracy worthy of Arthur Conan Doyle or Robert Louis Stevenson.

  And I was to be part of it!

  Chapter Fifteen:

  The falcon spots the field mouse

  On my way to the boathouse I had encountered Dinkle’s man on the narrow, sand-and-gravel road linking Tesoro to his boss’s estate. We passed within feet of one another, but even from a distance I’d have recognized him by his military gait. He didn’t so much walk as march—head up, shoulders back, elbows locked as his arms swung like pendulums through precise arcs. He’d nodded at me, an elegant gesture that made me feel as if I should salute. I didn’t. Years later, when I was in uniform, such a response became instinctive. But in 1934 I was ten years old with armies and war and salutes far off. Hence, I merely lifted my chin, scarcely slowing as I pedaled on to the boathouse. Meanwhile, Dinkle’s man negotiated the last quarter mile to the mercantile and went inside, the bell dangling from the door handle announcing his entry. Fiona Littleleaf was behind the counter, sorting mail with her back to the door. She turned and greeted him with a smile.

  She is lovely, Yurievsky thought, a woman the Grand Duke might have pursued. He instinctively scowled. He had seen too many old men of the Russian Imperial Army, officers all, made silly by attempts to recapture their youth with someone’s niece or daughter. Yurievsky had no such inclinations. Olga might turn up one day, expecting faithfulness even after so many years. Should that miracle come about, he did not wish to disappoint his wife. She had suffered enough disappointment; left alone to raise Irina, his sweet Myshka, for months at a time when he was off soldiering, his returns marked by moodiness and troubled sleep.

  Fiona—the young woman Irina might have become—waited for him to approach the counter, framed by the cash register and a basket filled with pastries. She wore no makeup, and was quite beautiful despite little effort to make herself so. Yurievsky admired her disdain for pretension, her subtlety. It stood in sharp contrast to Dinkle’s Chirpy Boop, a woman who wore her carnality like jewelry. Behind the mercantile proprietor was a den of cubbyholes, the top row reachable by a ladder that slanted against the shelving. Most of the compartments were empty, a few filled with a letter or two. Names were below each box. Yurievsky recognized only a few. None would have recognized his name; indeed, the young mercantile proprietor, the lawyer, the tall midwife, and the crazy woman’s son were the only people in the village who spoke to him at all.

  “Good morning, Mister Yurievsky,” Fiona said.

  “Miss Littleleaf,” Yurievsky replied, his dignified manner worthy of a knight addressing his queen.

  She cocked her head, offering a wry expression.

  “When will you start calling me Fiona?”

  Yurievsky shrugged. “Perhaps tomorrow,” he said.

  She laughed. “I’m going to hold you to it.”

  Fiona turned away to retrieve Dinkle’s mail from one of the open cubicles. Unlike the villagers’ boxes, there was a good deal of mail for the old man: business envelopes with impressively embossed return addresses, a couple of thick Manila packets. She took a few moments to bind the correspondence with twine, uncharacteristically prattling as she did so. “Big goings on around here these days,” she finished up, handing over the bundle. “I imagine you’ve heard about the letter we received from back east.”

  “I did.”

  “They’ve offered so much money. It’s hard to believe.”

  Yurievsky didn’t answer. It was part of the game they played. Fiona tried to pull words from him; he resisted. She offered him pastries; he declined. She teased; he allowed merely a smile. An outsider might have thought her too kind for such a stone-faced fellow, but there was lightheartedness and familiarity in their exchanges, even affection. Yurievsky had once played similar games with Irina, always ending with his daughter’s arms around him, her lips pressed against his cheek, her whisper in his ear: “Ya ochen’ lyublyu tebya, Papa.” I love you ever so much, Papa.

  His response had been equally scripted: “I ya tebya, moya sladkaya Myshka.” And I, you, my sweet little mouse.

  Fiona suddenly interrupted his thoughts.

  “I bet Miss Lizzie I could get more than two words at a time out of you, Mister Yurievsky,” she said.

  Yurievsky took Dinkle’s mail from her outstretched hand, the unmistakable trace of a smile gracing his lips.

  “You lose,” he said.

  He turned to go, her laughter trailing him.

  “See you tomorrow,” she called out as he opened the door and stepped into the sunlight.

  Yurievsky headed back toward the estate, unable to shake the feeling that something was amiss. Fiona’s demeanor had been too breezy, too casual. A woman typically efficient with words, her idle chatter was unusual, the pitch of her voice too high, the flow of words too rapid. Indeed, her behavior had seemed altogether affected; perhaps calculated. Yurievsky had a nose for such things. One of his previous employers—a notable Manila gangster—had more than once sent him to gather information from someone not inclined to provide it. The unfortunate fellows always began with lies but ended up telling Yurievsky the truth. Their voices, like Fiona’s, had been high-pitched, words tumblin
g from their lips, their attempts at nonchalance exposing them as liars. The young mercantile proprietor and postmistress had not told him a lie, but there had been artifice in her manner and his curiosity was piqued. Worse, he was suspicious and Yurievsky did not want to be suspicious of her. He had spent decades at the mercy of his suspicions. There had been little peace attending such vigilance and he wanted desperately to believe that Fiona Littleleaf was guileless, a true innocent.

  Yurievsky approached the gated entry to the estate and stopped. To the west, he could hear the waves of the Pacific Ocean as they slammed onto the beach at high tide. The sound was comforting, and for a moment, he was convinced that his suspicion was unwarranted. At the same time, a falcon dove earthward from overhead, sweeping close to the ground and then soaring upward, a field mouse in its beak, the poor thing’s tail whipping about like a streamer. Yurievsky sighed. She has something to hide, he thought, the nervous pitch and rhythm of Fiona’s voice too fresh a memory. Something she wants hidden from me…and from Dinkle.

  Chapter Sixteen:

  James Throckmorton makes his play

  Axel Throckmorton’s mail-order bride, Mei Ling, did not go back to China but remained with Miss Lizzie. Our long-time town medical officer could well afford to feed another mouth, but Axel felt obligated to provide a small measure of financial support and gave Mei Ling two dollars in nickels each week. “I gotta keep her happy. She’s evidence in my lawsuit against the sonuvabitch who sold her to me,” he told people. Axel was an honest man who never cheated at cards, watered down the whiskey bottles at the Last Resort, or concocted a whopper unrelated to the size of a fish. However, his two dollars per week were less a legal strategy than a way to ease the guilt he felt for spiriting Mei Ling across an ocean in anticipation of marriage only to be confronted by an intended older than one of the Pliocene-era moon snail fossils we occasionally found on our town beach.