Treasure of the Blue Whale

by Mayfield, Steven;

  Angus dropped his shoulders and went on, his tone softened.

  “Besides, if ye ask me yer’re all better aff. Ye had yerselves a taste of the high life this summer, didn’t ye noo, and it seem to me tha’ most of ye got bloody tired of it. There’re only so many t’ings ye can buy, are there nae? Did any of it make ye happier than ye already were? Any of it wort’ more than wha’ ye already had right here in Tesoro? I doobt it. So, stop your belly-achin’. Go home. T’ank the good Lord tha’ ye have a roof o’er yer heeds when it rains and a breeze aff’n the sea when it’s hot. That’s more than a lot of folk have in these troubled times. Ye oughta be t’ankful for it, and those of ye who cannae see it need to clam the hell up!”

  Angus was out of breath and stopped talking, allowing silence to hold the floor for the second time that morning. Everyone in town knew he wasn’t shy with an opinion, but lengthy exposition was uncharacteristic for the old lighthouse keeper and no one was quite sure what to do. After Angus regained his breath, he rescued them.

  “Herbert,” he said, looking pointedly at Mr. Judson, “dinnae ye have more to tell these folk?”

  Mr. Judson had been a formidable litigator during his time in San Francisco, blistering opposing counsels or charming juries with oratory some compared to the legendary Clarence Darrow. However, Angus’s unexpected eloquence had taken him off-script and he hesitated, searching to again find his place in our little drama. It gave Milton Garwood enough time to ask the question the town lawyer had wanted someone to pose before the entire room was looking for a short rope and a high tree branch.

  “What about the stuff we bought?” Milton asked. “Do we have to pay Dinkle back?”

  For the first time that morning C. Herbert Judson smiled.

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “You put up your ambergris shares as security against ten thousand dollars, but nothing else was on the line. After foreclosure, the contracts make no provision for attaching other assets…your houses, businesses, and so forth. That’s a critical point. Dinkle could have laid claim to those things before you defaulted but not afterward. He accepted your collateral. Now that he’s foreclosed and confiscated it, his right to collect the money you borrowed has been abrogated.”

  Most in the room had hung in there with Mr. Judson until he dropped “abrogated” on them. Now, he looked out on a silent chorus of blank faces.

  “Think of it this way,” he explained. “Dinkle bought your shares for ten thousand dollars in a simple transaction. That means the collateral—your shares of the ambergris—is his. But it also means that the money, and whatever you purchased with it, is yours.”

  It took a few moments for this to sink in, but once it did, a peculiar thing happened. With the effect rippling across the room, the same folks who had shouted at C. Herbert Judson, the rest of the Ambergrisians, and each other now gazed about with the warm eyes and relaxed faces of those who have emerged from the confessional booth with unscalded skin and a fresh absolution slate to mark up. Amazingly, they seemed not disappointed but relieved.

  The fourth town meeting was never adjourned. It simply came apart, folks wandering off or breaking up into small groups to discuss the weather or the upcoming first day of school or the fortunes of the Cal football team set to begin its season on Saturday. No one noticed or even questioned that the men guarding the ambergris for the last several weeks had all been present at the meeting, leaving the boathouse unattended. It would remain unattended until early afternoon when Angus MacCallum unlocked the seaward doors and threw them open, allowing Cyrus Dinkle to see what 190 foreclosed lines of credit and almost two million dollars had bought him.

  Chapter Twenty-eight:

  Dinkle’s comeuppance

  Dinkle was furious when he discovered nothing more than our two-pound dinosaur egg in the boathouse, along with a stench equal to the odor of the bogus offer he’d foisted on the citizens of Tesoro. “The auld bastard damned near went aff his heed,” Angus McCallum later told me, chuckling with delight. “E’en moreso when I tells ‘im the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation went n’ pulled their offer aff’n the table.”

  Dinkle immediately ordered his man to drive him into the village where he called upon C. Herbert Judson at the lawyer’s office. Mr. Judson played his part well.

  “Apparently, their research didn’t stand up,” Mr. Judson told the old man. “The stuff doesn’t do what they originally thought it might. They’re not perfumers and had no interest after that.”

  He denied prior knowledge of the amount of ambergris in his boathouse.

  “All I know, Cyrus, is that there was a half-ton of something put in there. What happened afterward is as much a mystery to me as you.”

  Dinkle kept his anger at a simmer as he listened, determined to maintain his oft-pontificated assertion that business and personal matters slept in separate beds. Indeed, he seemed so cool and measured that Mr. Judson worried the old scoundrel might have caught enough of our lie’s scent to have already dug it up. That’s when our lawyer reminded the ex-gunrunner that he owned merely one-eighth of the egg in the boathouse given that he, Mr. Johns, Miss Lizzie, Fiona, Angus, and my mother had not signed the Boops’ loan agreements and James’s account had a zero balance. This raised the heat under Dinkle’s pot.

  “And what does one-eighth come to?” he demanded.

  “Probably five or six thousand dollars,” Mr. Judson answered. “More or less.”

  An estimated return of a few thousand dollars for the nearly two million doled out in unrecoverable loans turned Dinkle’s face dusky purple and provoked a spittle-laced, highly profane outburst. Mr. Judson later reported that the fiery invective—the old man adding exclamation points by pounding the lawyer’s desk until the diplomas on the wall threatened to rattle off—made him no longer doubt any of the homicidal rumors attached to the former Indian Territory trader’s shadowy past. About the time Mr. Judson began to seriously consider retrieving the pistol he kept in his desk drawer, Dinkle abruptly put a lid on his pot and stomped out of the office.

  The new owner of one-eighth of the town’s entire ambergris holding returned to his estate and spent several hours on the telephone with his various lawyers, including the damned fool who had failed to include an independent verification of collateral as part of the line of credit contracts. Dinkle, an unapologetic anti-Semite, fired him along with his two best attorneys, both of whom were blameless but happened to be Jewish. He then wrote up a pair of flyers and sent Yurievsky to post one at the town hall and the other on the kiosk at Fremont Park:

  Emergency town meeting tonight at 7 p.m.

  Attendance is MANDATORY!

  Yurievsky drove his employer into town for the meeting that evening and returned him to the estate after no one showed up. The next morning they went into San Francisco where Dinkle rehired the Jewish lawyers. The shameless bastard blamed them for their one-sided dust-up the previous day and then spent the next several hours in their office, freeing Yurievsky to visit City Hall. There, the ex-soldier pored over records in the thick logbooks, scribbling addresses onto a scrap of paper torn from one of the pages. That afternoon Yurievsky visited the sites, discovering either a warehouse or a vacant lot at all but one of the various locations, the last address on his list leading him to a house that rented rooms by the hour.

  Around four o’clock Yurievsky drove the Duesenberg across town to retrieve Chirpy Boop from the apartment she shared with the Russian Boop. The old man was staying in the city with a plan for the young woman to meet him in a suite at the Fairmont where she would help salve a loss of nearly two million dollars to the great unwashed of Tesoro. Yurievsky chauffeured Chirpy Boop to the hotel and then returned to the Financial District where he waited for his boss to emerge from a tall building on Market. They then drove up the steep hill that was California Street, sharing their route with a cable car crammed with eyeballing tourists, the curious out-of-towne
rs craning their necks for a better look at whatever tycoon or celebrity must certainly be occupying the back seat of such a magnificent machine. Dinkle ignored them, uttering not a word until the car rolled to a stop in front of the hotel.

  “Nine in morning,” he muttered before exiting the vehicle.

  Yurievsky had the rest of the evening off and took dinner at his favorite restaurant in Russian Hill. He liked Russian Hill even though the area was not named for the heritage of its live inhabitants but its dead ones, a Russian cemetery inspiring the designation. The restaurant, too, was not Russian but Italian. Yurievsky had little use for Italians, whom he viewed as noisy people. However, he could not deny their gifts for cooking and making wine, and the former soldier feasted on braciole alla barese with an excellent Brunello before retiring to a modest hotel a few blocks from the Fairmont.

  The next morning Yurievsky retrieved his boss and drove him back to Tesoro. The old man’s night had not gone well, his disposition more acerbic than usual. He repeatedly barked at Yurievsky during the trip, blaming him for traffic, potholes, and the annoying fly determined to homestead on the ex-gunrunner’s nose. Upon arrival at his seaside estate, Dinkle retreated to the study and spent the next several days there, dining from the refectory table and sleeping on an overstuffed leather sofa.

  While Dinkle brooded behind the closed door of his study, Yurievsky carried on. The Duesenberg was washed and polished, the grounds patrolled, the food trays set outside the door of the study and later retrieved, the sills and tabletops checked for dust the housekeepers had missed. Each day he walked to the village to retrieve Dinkle’s mail. At the mercantile and postal exchange the young woman Irina might have become continued to greet him by name, but did not further engage him in conversation as had once been her habit. There was repentance in the way she kept her chin down and her voice falsely cheerful. She was ashamed and Yurievsky wanted to comfort her, to lift the burden of guilt from her shoulders. You did what had to be done, he wanted to say. It was war and you were a soldier. You should be proud. You did what was necessary. I am a soldier as well. When the time comes I, too, will do what is necessary.

  Meanwhile, the servants’ tongues waggled non-stop. “Dinkle was bamboozled,” the cook and maids rehashed over and over, unable to mask the delight they felt at their boss’s comeuppance. Yurievsky disdained their lack of restraint. “Mister Dinkle signs your paychecks,” he reminded them, even though he understood their thirst for retribution. Dinkle treated the women as if they were insects with spatulas and dust mops. As the butler it was Yurievsky’s job to keep the staff in line, but he did not again reproach them. Let them cackle, he thought. Gossip is like smoke. It disappears on the wind. Only revenge is eternal. And true revenge was not a whisper but a dagger.

  Chapter Twenty-nine:

  It’s alive

  Following a summer of conspiracy and adventure, the time remaining before the first day of school was disappointingly commonplace. I awoke in the damp gossamer pink-gray of dawn, picked up my newspapers for delivery, sat with Mr. Judson on his porch swing for a few minutes, finished my route, and then stopped off at Fiona’s mercantile for some warm milk with a little coffee in it. There were no more after-midnight meetings; indeed, the Ambergrisians disbanded without further mention of the affair that had preoccupied us for so many weeks. “It’s best left behind us, Connor,” Miss Lizzie instructed when I tried to talk about it. Although she had no love for Dinkle our town medical officer seemed embarrassed, as did Fiona and James and Mr. Judson and Mr. Johns. Only Angus MacCallum was unremorseful. “Dinkle’s loaded the dice for more’n one game of craps,” he asserted. “It’s aboot time some’un rolled heavy sevens on ‘im.”

  James bought Ma an engagement ring, picking one with a sapphire—her favorite stone—rather than a diamond. They set aside a date in October for the wedding. Ma had already accepted his proposal, but James repeated it after dinner one night, proposing to Alex and me, as well. “Will you boys be my sons?” he asked after getting down on one knee. Alex and I thought it was pretty funny.

  Folks around town were in a bit of a daze. The road from middling to prosperity to ruin and back to middling had been a tumultuous one, much of it traversed in a single day that began with a passel of certified letters and ended with debt relief that rivaled any program President Roosevelt’s vaunted New Deal could offer. People behaved as if just awakened from a bad dream, staring blearily at the various knick-knacks and doodads populating their homes as if all the stuff had been crafted by elves and left on their doorsteps during the night. Some folks didn’t change much. Coach Wally recovered nicely from his brief flirtation with culpability and busied himself taking credit for hoodwinking Dinkle, while Milton Garwood was as misanthropic as ever, proving that some personalities are simply irreconcilable.

  It wasn’t long before people figured out what had happened along with a pretty strong suspicion that the Ambergrisians, and not Coach Wally Buford, had somehow made it happen. They must have been profoundly grateful, but no thanks were offered lest their gratitude be translated by Dinkle and his lawyers into evidence against the folks who had saved their bacon. Like Miss Lizzie, I think they wanted to leave the body buried rather than reinvigorate it with talk, only to have a Frankenstein monster then terrorizing the countryside. As it turned out, the body was neither buried nor dead. Far from it.

  

  On the afternoon of the ninety-seventh day after Angus McCallum and I had raced for the ambergris on the beach, a grizzled private investigator with scuffed shoes and body odor attended a matinee at the Curran Theater on San Francisco’s Geary Street. The play was Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O’Neill. He left at the end of Scene I, in which the character of “Richard Miller, an idealistic seventeen-year-old,” was introduced. Inhabiting the role was an actor somewhat long in the tooth for a teenager. The next morning—the ninety-eighth day—Dinkle called for Yurievsky to join him in his study. The P.I. was there, too. The rumpled detective had showered for the meeting with his client and now reeked of fleabag hotel soap and cigarette smoke. Dinkle was still working on his breakfast.

  “Have a seat,” he said to Yurievsky as he slathered butter onto a wedge of toast. When his valet remained standing Dinkle stopped buttering.

  “I said, ‘Have a seat,’” he repeated, with a frown, the knife poised over his toast.

  “I will stand.”

  Dinkle tolerated Yurievsky’s occasional insubordination and even less occasional disdain because the tall Russian was dependably useful and as loyal as one criminal can be to another. But Dinkle was also afraid of his manservant and did not want anyone to know it. He glanced nervously at the private investigator. The fellow’s eyes were directed at the floor, his face expressionless—fulfilling his duty to impassively deliver embarrassing news to people who detested being embarrassed. He’s good at it, Yurievsky thought as Dinkle shifted his gaze back to his valet and chauffeur, fashioning the same expression a Roman emperor might offer a condemned gladiator. It was a look the old man frequently employed to figuratively remove a fellow’s testicles during a negotiation and usually worked well. However, it had no effect on Yurievsky, the tall Russian’s icy demeanor transiently evoking in Dinkle a feeling that the gladiator was about to climb the parapet, a sword in hand, his own thumb downturned. For a moment, the old man was clearly unsettled. The voices of the maids chattering in the foyer outside the study door rescued him, breaking the awkward silence.

  Dinkle returned his attention to his toast, adding more butter and then jam. At the same time, he spoke to the P.I. without looking at him.

  “You can go,” he said.

  After the rumpled detective was gone, Dinkle went on.

  “I need you to deliver this to Judson,” he said to Yurievsky, holding up an envelope. “I want it to go only to him and you must wait until he opens it. You follow?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you
to pay attention to his pipe. He’ll stick it in his mouth to read what I’m sending. After he’s done reading, I want to know if he lights it.”

  “I understand.”

  “That’s his tell,” Dinkle added. “If he’s part of this he won’t light the pipe.”

  Yurievsky took the envelope. It was sealed, the address side blank.

  “The pipe,” Dinkle reminded him. “Don’t forget.”

  “I understand.”

  Yurievsky exited the mansion, first retrieving a second blank envelope from the office supplies closet adjacent to the pantry. The day had begun overcast, but sun now threatened to dissolve the clouds and he removed his coat as he began the mile-long hike to the village. He walked quickly to the end of the circular drive, through the gated opening with its massive brick stanchions, and on to where Dinkle’s grapevines began, their near-harvest green leaves gently undulating with the light breeze. Once blocked from the mansion’s view by the vines, he stopped, opened the envelope, and examined its contents. Afterward, he placed the document inside the second envelope, sealed it, and went on, his pace perhaps less brisk than usual. There was no reason to hurry. The pheasants had been flushed. All the potato’s soft spots were at last exposed.