Once his inspection was complete, he stepped back into the cool night air. Across the broad drive the porch was empty, the front door closed. Yurievsky smiled humorlessly. Despite the pistol and his bluster, Dinkle typically manifested courage in the form of foreclosures and leveraged buyouts. When younger, the old bounder had allegedly shot an unarmed man or two, but now assigned his fights to hirelings, mercenaries like Sergei Yurievsky.
The night was pleasant and Dinkle’s man decided to put off his boss until morning, instead walking the grounds. Autumn loomed ahead with Labor Day behind them, adding a hint of fog to the salty air as he glided between the buildings and out to the sandy crest overlooking the ocean. Afterward, he made his way back to the garage, retrieved a flashlight, and then hiked to the vineyard on the east side of the estate. There, he found a set of small footprints and followed them until they were joined by a second set. Yurievsky crouched for a closer look at the faint depressions, his eyes narrowed. The smaller footprints were the boy’s, but the others were larger. “Ne mladsij brat,” he said aloud in Russian. “Strannyj.” Not little brother…Odd.
Once satisfied the intruders had numbered only two, the former soldier returned to the main house. More than an hour had passed. Dinkle was now retired, but every light in the place remained on, the old bandit as fearful of the dark as a three-year-old child. Yurievsky climbed the steps to the mezzanine and went to his employer’s bedroom door. He put his ear against the smooth surface. From inside came the sounds of snuffling and snorting—his boss didn’t snore, rather he issued disgusting little noises as if blowing his nose into the pillow. Dinkle’s man chuckled, pondering how easy it would be to assassinate his employer. A man with so many enemies should not sleep this soundly, he thought.
Yurievsky returned to his quarters, changed into bedclothes, and slipped under the covers. He could not sleep, the boy’s intrusion on the same night Dinkle entertained the suspicious chemist too coincidental. Yurievsky did not believe in coincidences. Taken alone, the boy’s appearance might have been a prank. He might have broken into the house on a dare from his friends. But the rest of it—the too-handsome chemist, the startled faces of the village leaders at the town meeting, the unease of the young woman Irina might have become when he picked up the old man’s mail—these events were linked, Yurievsky thought, inextricably linked.
He had yet to share his misgivings with his employer. Dinkle would want proof and the former Russian soldier had none. He rose and relieved himself, then returned to bed and lay awake, staring at the dark ceiling. The villagers had put a guard at the marina to protect their treasure. But when he drove past the boathouse after dropping off the chemist at the Kittiwake Inn, their guard—the fidgety banker—was asleep.
One guard with millions at stake? Asleep?
It was another soft spot, the potato turning rotten before his eyes.
“The boathouse,” Yurievsky said aloud.
He turned on the lamp next to his bed and began to read from a thumbworn book: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The story of Myshkin—a man whose simplicity leads the book’s worldlier characters to assume he lacks intelligence and insight—was his favorite, and after reading only a few pages, Sergei Yurievsky rose and climbed back into his clothes.
Chapter Twenty-five:
Escape from Fort Buford
I awoke in a panic, my dreams populated by nightmares, each one the same. I was inside Dinkle’s mansion, unable to escape—never discovered and yet always on the verge of discovery, the threat of horrific punishment ever-present. I was grateful when it was time to climb from my bed and head for the Sinclair station to pick up that morning’s editions of the Chronicle. The damp, early morning air helped clear the dreams from my eyes, and by the time I reached Mr. Judson’s, they had been replaced by grudging acceptance of my foolishness. Had Dexter been unmasked, the Ambergrisians would have known soon enough, I told myself. Moreover, despite my reckless escapade, the loan contracts remained inside Dinkle’s safe and the idea that I could have murdered him was laughable. Thus, I had risked exposing the lot of us for no good reason. I had accomplished nothing.
I watched Mr. Judson as he flipped through his morning paper. Before I ran for my life across Dinkle’s lawn and through his vineyard, I had figured a hero’s welcome would be mine—the intrepid boy spy triumphantly returning with critical intelligence garnered from behind a drape in Cyrus Dinkle’s dining room. I had imagined delivering my account of the mission with nonchalance, allowing the deed to stand tall on its own, the requisite awe and admiration on its tail in no need of coaxing. Instead, I had returned empty-handed and nearly empty-bladdered. It was a sobering comeuppance and I resolved to keep the entire misadventure to myself, praying for Mei Ling to keep it buttoned up, as well. Then I nearly broke my resolution immediately after making it.
“How did it go with Dexter last night?” I asked Mr. Judson as he scanned the newspaper headlines, my clumsy effort to seem casual putting a wrinkle of consternation between his brows. His eyes narrowed and I suddenly felt like a perjurer on the stand about to be skewered via cross-examination. He studied me for a few moments and then went back to his paper.
“It went okay,” he answered. “Dexter did well.” He didn’t go on.
I finished my route and went to the mercantile. It was still early, but Mei Ling was there, sitting on the floor near the magazine rack, leafing through a movie rag with a picture of Jean Harlow on the front. The young Chinese girl had arrived in Tesoro dressed in a long patterned skirt, dark leggings, and a short quilted jacket—attire typical for girls in her region of China—but with Miss Lizzie’s help and a couple of trips to San Francisco, she now looked like a typical American teenager. Her jeans were rolled up to her knees, her snazzy saddle shoes casually scuffed, and her collared white shirt a bit oversized and untucked. She looked up at me, then smiled as if to tell me the second secret we’d shared was as safe as the first.
“Hi, Treasure Boy,” she said.
I needed to thank her after running off without a word the previous night. She had rescued me, propping a tire iron against the horn of the Duesenberg to create a diversion that masked my escape. Why had she followed me? How had she known I was in trouble, huddled under Dinkle’s desk and mere seconds from discovery? I later learned that curiosity explained the former and intuition the latter.
“Mei Ling—” I began.
She stopped me with a finger to her lips.
“Shhhh,” she whispered. “Shhhh, Treasure Boy.”
I nodded. Yes, she had saved me—repaying my kindness at the gazebo—and years later we would share the story of our foray onto the Dinkle estate with Mr. Judson, Miss Lizzie, and the rest. But Mei Ling was right. For now, it had to remain our secret.
As for Everson Dexter, his part in our play was over and later that day Mr. and Mrs. C. Herbert Judson shuttled him back to San Francisco. I worried Fiona might go with him, but she didn’t. “I was never in love with him, Connor,” she told me once I’d stopped pouting over their affair. “He’s an actor. He’s already in love with himself. There’s no room for anyone else.”
It appeared Tesoro was starting to get over Everson Dexter and the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation, as well. The buying frenzy and constant effort to shop had both sated and exhausted most people in town. “I never understood why some rich folks commit suicide,” Milton Garwood mused, “but I do now. They’re tired.” Of course, the fortune Milton and the rest thought firmly hooked on the end of their fishing line was about to reveal itself as seaweed, rather than sea bass, but they didn’t know it and remained weighted down by the onerous responsibility impending wealth had dumped on them. The formerly ascetic Tesoroans had occupied much of the summer struggling to spend the ten thousand dollars provided by Dinkle’s lines of credit, and with thousands more peeking over the fence, people frenetically leafed through the Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company catalogs; searche
d for places on shelves where they might wedge in more knick-knacks and doodads; and anguished over the inconveniences attending ocean cruises, European junkets, African safaris, and other trips rich folks had to make or risk coming off as country rubes to the city nabobs. Fortunately, a welcome distraction arose when Coach Wally forgot the combination for the vault doors on Fort Buford and was locked inside with his wife.
Even though his memory was the cause of their imprisonment, the coach blamed Judy. You see, as a security measure, he had refused to share the combination with her. “She can’t keep her big yapper shut,” he griped. “She’d give it to somebody and they’d blab it all over the place. Next thing you know our jeweled commode has somebody else’s behind on it.”
Of course, Coach Wally should have been more worried about his own yapper, given that he was by far the bigger gossip of the pair. Judy—who wasn’t shy to remind folks that she’d been second runner-up to Miss Stinson Beach of 1899—could be a snark, but she confined herself to pissy observations about Fiona Littleleaf’s preference for pants over dresses or Mrs. C. Herbert Judson’s “uppity” haute couture. And insofar as other people’s behinds were concerned, no one in Tesoro had indicated any interest in breaking into Fort Buford. There had been a couple of thwarted shop burglaries when the town was filled with prospectors, but the Ambergris Rush had ended by then, the Hoovervilles and outhouse squatters gone. Still, Coach Wally fretted that his jeweled commode was a target for kidnappers and had begun to lug it inside when he wasn’t enthroned on the thing.
As for Judy, the allure of lording one’s jeweled commode over people had faded for her, largely due to her husband’s delight in breaking wind while perched on it. She wanted to give it away or move it from the front porch to the back where the morning and afternoon breezes from the west would carry her husband’s discharges away from the house instead of into it. Coach Wally dug in his heels, and on the morning of the Fort Buford incident, decided to preside over his modest fiefdom from the living room inside the house rather than outside on the porch. Judy had imprudently prepared a dinner of franks and beans the previous evening and with the coach atop his now beloved commode, reading his paper, smoking a cigarette, and contentedly releasing toxic fallout, she pinched her nose shut and threatened to move her no-good, lazy bum of a brother in with them unless Coach Wally placed the toilet in the outhouse. This put the coach in a dither and he responded by leaping off the commode and into an argument with Judy, his side of it attended by a good deal of sputtering and arm-flinging. It was an impressive performance that eventually attracted the interest of a passer-by: Mr. Sprinkles.
The little monkey was puzzled at first but quickly figured out that the Bufords were having a dispute and slyly slipped through the wide-open vault door to take a bleacher seat on the jeweled commode. Succumbing to opportunity, he promptly defecated. Judy was an expert insofar as the aroma of her husband’s emissions was concerned and immediately recognized an alien fragrance permeating the Buford atmosphere. She held up a hand to silence her husband, her nose wrinkling as she traced the smell to their jeweled commode. Suddenly, she screamed and pointed.
“What the goddamned hell?” Coach Wally shouted, afterward charging across the room with a lot of arm-waving and cursing that he figured would send the monkey on his way. However, Mr. Sprinkles was not at all put off by his behavior; indeed, he seemed to find it seductive.
It turned out that Milton Garwood was a decent blacksmith and welder but not much of a monkey gynecologist, as the creature he’d named Mr. Sprinkles was actually a Miss Sprinkles. She was also in heat and began to flirtatiously shriek and spit and flit about the room, eventually roosting on one of three chandeliers the Bufords had purchased and hung with the idea that one would eventually grow on them, the others to be given to their successful insurance agent son in San Rafael who inexplicably had two living rooms. Miss Sprinkles’ obvious interest in mating with her husband unleashed an unexpected jealous streak in Judy and she retrieved a broom, using it to sweep the forsaken little thing off the chandelier and out the front entry. Coach Wally was right behind her and quickly slammed shut the heavy iron vault door. He levered the handle, spun the combination dial, and then ran to the rear door and did the same. About an hour later he felt an urge to use the outhouse and that’s when he and Judy discovered they were locked inside Fort Buford.
Since the day several weeks past when the doors and window bars were installed by the boys from Alameda Safes & Security, and despite his obsessive fear of jeweled commode thieves, the coach had only once engaged the vault tumblers for either door. Instead, he and Judy left the doors open like everyone else in Tesoro during hot weather, allowing cool ocean air to flow through the house. Thus, when he tried to unlock the rear vault door Coach Wally was merely guessing at the combination. He would later find a piece of paper taped to the bottom of his underwear drawer revealing the number sequence to be the anniversary of the Buford nuptials—07-09-01—a date the coach had been unable to remember for years. Hence, his effort to recall the combination to the lock on the vault door was a bit like picking lottery numbers and had the usual success of such an effort, which was, of course, no success at all.
My brother Alex was the first to discover the Bufords’ predicament. Riding past the house on his bicycle he heard the coach and his wife call out for help. He took a shot at freeing them, fiddling with the combination dial for a few minutes, then rode to Miss Lizzie’s clinic and apothecary.
“Coach and his wife are locked inside their house,” he told her.
“Good,” Miss Lizzie said. “We should call a town meeting…Get some business done without an interruption.”
I don’t doubt Miss Lizzie would have been happy to leave Coach Wally locked up for a while, but her sense of duty and Alex’s puzzled expression won out over poetic justice.
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go free up the old poop.”
Miss Lizzie hung a back in an hour sign on the door of her pharmacy and they headed over to Fort Buford where they were met by a crowd nearly as large as the one gathered together earlier in the summer for the premiere appearance of the coach’s jeweled commode. I was there with my friend Webb Garwood. People were tossing jokes at Coach Wally like peanuts thrown at a cage full of chimpanzees and the coach was not happy. Typically, he enjoyed a spotlight and was the last man in Tesoro inclined take a dim view of an audience. However, when folks started peering through the windows with their fingers wrapped around the iron bars, he took umbrage. He not only resented people taking advantage of the situation to view real, live Bufords in their natural habitat, but he also had a full bladder and the business part of the franks and beans poised in bomb’s away position. He took a Mason jar into the bedroom closet to appease his angry bladder, but he had no answer for the distress provoked by the franks and beans other than to fill the air with flatulence that could have been used to execute condemned men at nearby San Quentin.
While Judy was less intestinally effusive, she was also about to have water spill over the dam when she decided to close the curtains and put a chamber pot in the jeweled commode. In a rare display of chivalry Coach Wally retired to the bedroom, allowing his wife to go first, a fortunate decision for her as the coach used his turn to noisily make an offering that threatened to rival the massive blob of ambergris I’d found on the beach more than three months earlier. I was outside one of the curtained windows when this happened. Webb and my friends and I howled with laughter, afterward sending forth a chorus of simulated fart sounds even the adults in the crowd found amusing. Meanwhile, Miss Lizzie sent for Milton Garwood who was not only the town misanthrope but also its only blacksmith and welder. Milton showed up with a torch and a small cylinder and that’s when the negotiation began.
It seemed that Milton had had an eye on the Bufords’ jeweled commode since it first arrived and saw their quandary as an opportunity to acquire it for the cost of a few cents worth of acetylen
e.
“This is extortion,” Coach Wally bellowed from inside a front porch window when Milton offered to cut through one of the vault doors in exchange for the jeweled commode. “Tell him, Miss Lizzie.”
“I’m no lawyer, Wally,” Miss Lizzie said, winking at Alex and me. “I can give you something to tone down that gas, but you’ll have to consult Herb Judson about legal matters.”
“Never mind,” Coach Wally snapped. “I already know the answer. You can’t hold us in here for ransom, Milton. I don’t need no lawyer to tell me that it’s illegal, unconstitutional, and downright despicable.”
“I ain’t holding you in nowhere,” Milton countered. “You locked your own selves in there. It ain’t my responsibility to get you out for nothing.”
“Just give him the commode, Wally,” Judy pleaded.
“I’ll be damned if I’ll give in to that conniving son of a goat herder,” Wally snapped. “I’ll die in here first.”
“We’re dying in here now,” Judy retorted. “Give him the commode.”
“No!”
“Give it to him.”
“No!”
“Wally, give him the commode.”
“No!”
Judy Buford had been teaching fourth grade at Tesoro Elementary School for nearly thirty years. She was generally thought to possess the proper combination of primness and prudery expected of a schoolmarm and was a good teacher for the most part. As I have previously pointed out, she had some peculiar ideas about sex and pregnancy that resulted in considerable eye-opening once her former students were faced with the real things. However, she had never been less than lady-like nor indicated any potential to be profane or bellicose until that moment.
Treasure of the Blue Whale Page 18
