Treasure of the Blue Whale

by Mayfield, Steven;

  Yurievsky’s head was suddenly filled with images: the too-handsome chemist, the startled village leaders, the boy who had no good reason to be there, and finally, Olga and Irina.

  Fear of me? No…fear of discovery.

  “Yes,” the former Russian soldier said, “he is coming.”

  Chapter Twenty-two:

  I enter the lair

  Following the adjournment of the third town meeting, I determined to sneak onto the Dinkle estate, something my friends and I had done many times. It had always been great sport for us, crawling up the dunes from the ocean side or picking our way through rows of grapevines on the acres bordering the town. To be sure, it was most often done after Dinkle’s man had driven his boss through the village on their way to San Francisco, but Alex and I had more than once explored the buildings when Dinkle was at home, once hiding directly under the bay window of his study and eavesdropping on a telephone conversation. This time would be different. This time when I entered the lair the wolf would be inside.

  I relished a chance to test my grit as Jim Hawkins had done with the pirates on Treasure Island, and as far as I was concerned, Mr. Johns had given me my marching orders. I was to be his fly on the wall, the spy who would secretly observe the meeting between Cyrus Dinkle and Everson Dexter, afterward reporting back to headquarters. Of course, I was a self-proclaimed spy. There were no marching orders, no headquarters. I was no more sanctioned than a stowaway. Mr. Johns had done nothing more than express idle curiosity. However, these were trifling details to a ten-year-old boy thirsting for adventure, and I wasn’t about to let them deter me.

  I considered taking Alex along as he had proven himself an adept cohort during previous forays onto Dinkle’s estate. Ultimately I rejected the idea, reasoning that one of us had to remain alive to help James take care of Ma. This might sound melodramatic, but Webb Garwood’s older brother Tuck insisted that Dinkle’s man kept an icebox on the estate filled with the body parts of boys. “He’s got him a compost pile, too, for the livers and lungs and whatnot he ain’t gonna eat,” Tuck claimed. It was an absurd notion, but I was ten and inclined to ignore the shortage of missing boys from our small village in favor of a scary story told over a midnight campfire by someone’s older brother.

  Dinkle’s estate occupied around one hundred acres, including a lengthy stretch of beach along the Pacific Ocean. Dunes protected the compound on the west with a few rolling acres of grapevines on the east and north. A stone wall had been erected along the southern exposure, the driveway in and out of the grounds guarded by an iron gate. Just inside the gate was a low building with six apartments—servants’ quarters unoccupied since the former Mrs. Dinkle took her leave. A circular drive led to the front entry of the main house, a huge edifice fashioned after the staid English country estates the old man admired. What had once been a stable—now a garage—was to the west of the mansion, set at a right angle with its rear face exposed to the evening sun. A large guesthouse was at the back of the property. It, too, was empty with only Dinkle, his man, and the occasional Boop in residence within the compound at night.

  My friends and I had explored the guesthouse and servants’ quarters from attic to crawlspace many times, slipping through an unlocked window and then skulking about the deserted rooms, pretending to be spies on a mission or commandos sent to kidnap a king. One window or another was predictably unsecured, although not always the same one. I speculated that the cook or one of the housekeepers were part of our game, rotating the means of entry to add mystery and adventure. Neither Dinkle nor his man seemed capable of such whimsy, and if captured, I figured to face the same fate as a fly on flypaper. And his man? If Tuck Garwood was right, the tall, spectral fellow subsisted on a diet of snake venom and slow children. Were a village boy to fall into his clutches we felt certain the doomed captive would be seasoned with basil and rosemary and eaten for dinner with a bottle of the bad wine Dinkle produced from the grapes on his estate.

  A few of my friends claimed to have breached the brick walls of the main house. I didn’t believe them. Within a perimeter of twenty yards around Dinkle’s manor, there was nary a bush nor tree nor unruly tuft of grass to provide cover. Alex and I had once made it as far as the recess beneath the bay window of the former gunrunner’s study, but only after sprinting across the lawn in full view of anyone looking out one of the mansion’s many windows, afterward crawling on our bellies along the foundation until we reached the ocean side of the house. My mission would require similar pluck. Even with Labor Day behind us, the eight o’clock dinner engagement predicted sufficient twilight to expose an intruder dashing across open ground. Night would have taken over by dinner’s end, and with the moon a modest crescent at quarter month, I knew escape would be easier.

  To get out for the evening, I concocted a fiction for Ma about crabbing with Webb Garwood. “Don’t wait up,” I told her. “I’ll be late.” Most mothers would have wrung the truth out of me in seconds, but Ma was still new to the job after several years in the throes of madness. She was susceptible to a decently told lie, particularly with James unintentionally abetting my duplicity. He now had dinner with us every evening, with he and Ma afterward getting googly-eyed over one another, something that made them quite proficient at courting but rank amateurs as parents. Once they married Ma and James became a competent team, but on the night I broke into Dinkle’s stronghold, Alex was the only one in our house with any suspicions.

  “Where are you going?” he asked as I pulled on my sneakers.

  “I told you. Crabbing with Webb.”

  “You’re lying. Where are you really going? I want to go.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because. You’re not invited. You can’t go. Now shut up.”

  Alex rarely argued and didn’t this time, although he displayed a rare bit of cheek. “Prick,” he said. Had he known what would happen that night, my little brother might have chosen a different word: Fool.

  With no further protest from Alex, I exited our cottage and made my way across town, passing Miss Lizzie’s house along the way. Mei Ling was on the front porch, curled into a wicker settee, her omnipresent stack of movie magazines nearby. I waved and she giggled in reply, holding a finger to her lips as if to tell me that our secret at the gazebo remained just ours. Afterward, I crossed the Tesoro city limit and then veered north for a distance before slipping into the grapevines that bordered Dinkle’s mansion on the east. By 7:45 p.m.—fifteen minutes before the scheduled dinner with Everson Dexter—I was successfully hidden in the last row of grapevines nearest the house, searching for a grim face in one of the dark windows across the lawn.

  About two minutes before eight o’clock, the Duesenberg passed through the gated entry and cruised up the circular drive. Yurievsky was at the wheel with a silhouetted figure in the back seat—Everson Dexter, his solid chin, straight nose, and flop of perfectly tousled hair making him easily identifiable. The car swept around the first curve in the driveway and approached the house, disappearing after it cleared the edge of the mansion. This was my chance. I knew Dinkle would come outside to greet his guest the way he figured English dukes and German barons and other fellows with oversized, under-populated houses did it. Yurievsky would then move the Duesenberg to the garage before re-entering the mansion. That left only the cook to worry about and I felt confident that her employer’s exacting snobbery would keep her attention on her saucepans and roaster; hence, she’d be unlikely to see me when I emerged from the vineyard and dashed across the lawn. I heard the thud of the Duesenberg’s door as it was closed and rose.

  The next few seconds were thrilling as I raced across the lawn in full view of anyone looking out one of the east-facing windows. There was no shout of alarm, no sharp report from a well-aimed rifle. I reached the house and threw myself against the concrete foundation, pushing my back into it as if doing so might help me blend into its coo
l gray surface. I then had a few moments of near-hysterical regret. It had taken mere seconds to breach the distance between the safety of the vineyard and my unnervingly exposed position next to the house. I knew it would take only a few more to re-trace my steps, and I suddenly wanted to make for the vineyard, disappear within its leafy vines, and then hike back to the village. No one had to know I’d made it no further than the cold unforgiving wall at my back. No one had to know I’d lost my nerve.

  Although I dropped out of college to enlist in 1942, intent on achieving glory, the U.S. Army thought it better to arm me with a pen rather than a rifle. I wrote for Stars & Stripes and never made it into combat. Alex was not so lucky. He became a Navy pilot and was killed in 1951, his jet shot down in Korea. I’ve since viewed war as a folly incited by fellows who have run out of ideas. However, I still harbor admiration and perverse envy for the boys who rise up and charge into the withering fire of enemy guns. Such men have a chance to show what they’re made of. As a boy and a young man, I wondered if I could do what they did. I always wanted to believe I could, that I wouldn’t turn tail and run. I wouldn’t retreat now, of course, but at my age it’s not hard to give up the rest of your life. Not so easy at nineteen or twenty. Or at ten years old. For what it’s worth, even with nothing higher than a blade of grass to hide my position and my heart drumming in my ears, I didn’t run away the night I snuck onto Dinkle’s estate.

  I took a minute to reclaim my momentarily dislodged gumption and then crept along the outer wall of the house, staying below the window sills. Halfway to the rear of the mansion was a set of French doors with panels of leaded glass. Just outside them was a small, unfenced flagstone patio with a table and one chair. I reached the doors and tested a handle. It turned and I slipped into the house.

  Inside, I found a room brightly lit by a massive cut-glass chandelier. The place was otherwise a mismatched homage to wood: polished oak floors, cherry window-paning on the ceiling, a fireplace with a huge mahogany surround adorned with baroque carvings, a ponderous Brazilian rosewood dining table and chairs, a teak sideboard. Rather than a centerpiece, the table displayed a small sculpture of a naked, bearded man with impressive genitals. About twelve inches tall, the fellow held a cluster of grapes close to one ear. I noted two place settings at the table as voices sounded in the outer corridor.

  Characters in books and moving pictures frequently hide behind drapes, eavesdropping as I intended to do, or leaping out to accuse a villain or save a damsel. Such a ploy had seemed entirely plausible to me until I tried it during one of our overnighters with Miss Lizzie. Alex and I had snuck from our beds and gone to the parlor where we hid behind the window drapes while Miss Lizzie listened to the New York Metropolitan Opera broadcast on her wireless. We thought ourselves great sneaks, but sibilant giggling and our toes beneath the lower hem of the curtains quickly gave us away. “I’m thinking about beating the dust out of those drapes with a broom handle. I sure hope no one is behind them,” Miss Lizzie had called out, sending Alex and I scuttling back to bed. Afterward, I concluded that any success literature had attached to hiding behind window coverings was a contrivance of some writer’s overactive imagination. Unfortunately, with the voices suddenly louder I realized that Cyrus Dinkle’s dining room offered nothing I might hide in, under, or behind other than the heavy drapes framing the French doors.

  The door leading to the dining room began to open inward and I was suddenly overwhelmed with images of a boy like me on a platter, seasoned with ginger and thyme, an apple jammed into my mouth. I wanted to abandon my mission, slip out the way I’d entered, and return to the village where I would lie to my friends about what really happened at Dinkle’s estate. Then I thought about the advice given me by Mr. Judson. “Be a man people can count on,” he’d told me.

  I slipped behind one of the drapes.

  

  The first hour of dinner conversation between Cyrus Dinkle and Everson Dexter was memorable for being completely unmemorable. From my hiding spot behind a drape made of thick velvet and smelling vaguely of mildew, I could only hear them but doubt I’d have learned much more had I been sitting in the middle of the table alongside the naked, bearded man. I expected Dexter to chatter like a sixteen-year-old girl, but he was a much better actor than I allowed and proved to be as boring as one would hope an analyst from the Allegheny Chemicals Corporation might be. Dinkle was no slouch when it came to being dull. He spoke not proverbially, but literally, about the price of tea in China—its impact on the Chinese economy and how it fit into the dispute between the Communists and some outfit called the Kuomintang, and how it didn’t much matter anyway because war was coming given that the Japanese were already in Manchuria and all. As an adult I would have been impressed with Dinkle’s worldliness and insight. However, at ten years old he nearly put me to sleep. Fortunately, the former gunrunner mercifully got to the point before I nodded off and spilled into the room.

  “So, Mister Dexter, this analysis you’re conducting,” the old man began. “It’s working out? The material is genuine?”

  “Ninety percent pure,” Dexter answered.

  “And your company is paying almost three thousand per ounce?”

  “That’s the current bid.”

  “That’s a hefty investment for a private company. They must be well capitalized.”

  “I’m a chemist, not an accountant,” Dexter said. “I presume Mister Bell knows what he’s doing.”

  I heard the sound of liquid being poured. Dinkle was filling their glasses with wine produced from his own grapes. He had spent a fortune cultivating the land, but the wine he bottled was much like him—sour and overbearing.

  “We bottle this wine on the estate,” Dinkle said. “I’m a bit of oenologist.” He chuckled, although it sounded less like laughter than a mouse being swallowed alive. “I guess that makes me a chemist, too,” he added.

  This was a lie. Dinkle occasionally drew a glass from the barrel, but knew less about wine-making than Mr. Sprinkles.

  “Perhaps you could share some details of your analysis with me?” Dinkle went on. “One chemist to another, don’t you know.”

  It seemed an innocent request and yet filled me with dread. Had Dinkle nosed his way past Everson Dexter’s false storefront? Could he see the vacant lot behind it? I recalled Mr. Judson’s warning. Dinkle might be too savvy to be taken in, he’d said. No matter how convincing the charlatan. Now it seemed our town lawyer’s concern was imminently in danger of being realized.

  For a few moments, I seriously considered darting from behind the curtain, taking up one of the table knives, and driving it into Cyrus Dinkle’s cold, black heart. Then, Dexter began to speak and I realized that my worry was misplaced. Dinkle was no chemist and Everson Dexter was intuitive enough to appreciate it. Moreover, I later learned that our imposter had many times appeared on stage with an ancient, once highly regarded thespian whose ability to learn his lines had given way to a combination of senility and pre-performance vodka. The dotty fellow was prone to long strings of ad-libbed verse as he struggled to make his way back to an actual script, forcing his cast-mates to extemporize. Among them, Dexter had become particularly adept at such improvisations and now put his experience to good use, filling the air with a mishmash of “covalent anions” and “double-bonded aromatic rings” and “phenols” and “phenolates” and “ethers” and “ethylenes” and “distillations” and “activated sludge processes” and “molarities” and “oxidations” and a nearly endless list of things that only came in moles or parts per million. It was a preposterous panoply of chemistry gobbledygook but proved effective. Dinkle was quickly bored, and after listening to Dexter’s poppycock for only a few minutes, he launched into a soliloquy on the dismal state of affairs in Washington D Almighty C and how George Washington would have done better than President Roosevelt.

  It was a nice segue-way into a discussion of rare documents—Dinkle’s p
oint, of course, being that he had a pair of them and Dexter didn’t. Dinkle called for his man to retrieve the Washington letters from his study and afterward held the floor for thirty minutes before full bladders sent both men to separate lavatories. They returned a few minutes later and their exchange signaled an evening near its end.

  “I’ve enjoyed our time together,” Dexter said. “Especially the dinner. The cuisine in the village is rather unimaginative as I’m sure you know. Please extend my compliments to your chef.”

  When Dinkle answered his voice was gruff. He had yet to acquire the information that had prompted the dinner invitation and the effort to do so had stripped away whatever civility he was capable of mustering.

  “I don’t have a chef,” he growled. “I have a cook. She receives adequate pay that I’m sure she finds preferable to compliments.”

  “No doubt,” Dexter replied. He seemed unaffected by his host’s curt manner and remained silent as if awaiting the cue for his next line. The moment of silence became several and I tipped my head forward far enough to catch a reflection of the two men in one of the dark glass panels of the door. As I watched, Dinkle filled his glass with wine and then held it up to the light as if inspecting the facets of a diamond.

  “My man will drive you back to the village,” he said without looking at his guest. “I’ll expect a copy of your report by tomorrow noon.”

  This is when Everson Dexter proved to be worth whatever the Ambergrisians had agreed to pay him. Drawing back his shoulders, he cocked his head defiantly in the way of a browbeaten clerk who’s suddenly come across a stiff backbone and a clear picture of what his son-of-a-bitch boss can do with his damned job. It was a posture both dismissive and surprisingly manly.

  “Once again, thank you for your hospitality, Mister Dinkle,” Dexter said, his voice unyielding. “However, as you are not a shareholder in the village enterprise I cannot provide you with the report without their permission. Perhaps you should ask them for it.”