“Yes, feathers ruffled, but not too much feathers, I think,” Yurievsky went on. “No jail for my Myshka. No jail for Mister Judson, for Mister Johns, for Miss Fryberg. For any of them.”
Yurievsky glanced at me and I am quite sure he winked.
“Boys stay with mother,” he added. “No reform school.”
Yurievsky poured more vodka but didn’t drink, instead holding the glass to the light, peering through it as if it were a prism. I instinctively looked up, expecting to see kaleidoscopic colors cast against the ceiling. It was as blank as Dinkle’s rapidly dissipating possibilities.
“Is not same for you, Dinkle,” Yurievsky said without looking at his boss. “You have many crimes to answer for…Many rat holes, many rats. Can you hide them all?”
He shifted his gaze from the vodka to his employer.
“If the villagers’ crime come out, I make your crimes come out, too.”
Yurievsky drank the vodka, afterward offering his boss a stony smile.
“Things end more bad for you than them, I think.”
I have never seen a wolverine in a trap, but suspect the snarl and futility on its face would mirror the expression Cyrus Dinkle exhibited as he considered what his man had said.
“You can’t make any of it stick,” he scowled. “Who will believe you? You’re a foreigner…a damned Russian. You’re nobody.”
For a few moments it seemed quite certain that Yurievsky was about to strangle his boss. The threat was not attended by the crowing and indignation of a duelist, as I am quite sure Sergei Yurievsky cared nothing about Dinkle’s opinion of him nor would he have found satisfaction in something as trivial as vengeance. No, had Yurievsky killed Dinkle, it would have represented a straight line—the shortest distance between two points—Dinkle’s recalcitrance efficiently and permanently addressed by murdering him. Mr. Judson saved the old scoundrel’s life.
“The sheriff may not believe Mister Yurievsky,” he said to Dinkle, “but he’ll believe me.”
Mr. Judson went on to suggest that enough suspicious documents from Dinkle had been run through his office to put a United States Attorney and the pencil-necked tightasses who made up the newly formed SEC in Washington D Almighty C in a considerable lather.
“What I know may not incur more than a fine, Cyrus, but it will be enough to get a search warrant for the rest of your records,” Mr. Judson asserted. “That will open a big door. You won’t be able to hide everything.”
He offered Yurievsky a tight-lipped smile.
“And I disagree with you about Mister Yurievsky. I think a jury will find him to be a most compelling witness.”
Dinkle listened to Mr. Judson with gritted teeth, his breathing coarse and angry. He was beaten, but like a junkyard dog on a chain, didn’t yet know that he couldn’t get loose.
“You can’t use what you know, Judson,” he barked. “I’m protected by attorney-client privilege.”
This time it was Mr. Judson’s turn to shrug.
“Attorney-client privilege isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Cyrus,” he said. “Neither is lawyering, for that matter. I’m prepared to give up both.”
And that was that. Dinkle crumpled like a cardboard box in the rain, retiring from the battlefield to the safety of his liquor cabinet. He poured himself a finger of scotch followed by two more, afterward moving to the bay window.
“You’re fired, Yurievsky,” he said, his gaze merging with a sea turned ironically golden by the low-hanging sun.
We waited for a time, watching the old man, then showed ourselves out. Yurievsky came along, Fiona’s arm linked in his. No one spoke at first. We stood in the driveway as the sun drifted toward the western horizon, splashing the sky in orange and rose. Inside Dinkle’s study the air had seemed heavy and stifling, but a light ocean breeze now cooled and refreshed us. I felt reborn. We all did. We had overthrown the king, and even though his land was not ours, his pride was safely tucked into our pockets.
We lingered there on the circular drive with its white stones and grassy border, none of us indicating any desire to leave. Fiona remained uncharacteristically discomposed, appraising her father as if he were something near and yet something very far away, as if he were the chauffeur of a flying saucer rather than Cyrus Dinkle’s Duesenberg. Suddenly, she stood on her toes, giving him a hug and then a kiss on the cheek, an overture that added unexpected color to his typically colorless complexion.
“Papa,” she said. “Oh, Papa.”
Yurievsky looked at her with the soft, haunted eyes I’d seen for the briefest moment inside Dinkle’s study.
“You have room at Kittiwake for me, Myshka, yes?” he said.
“Of course, there’s a room for you.”
Yurievsky nodded.
“I must get my things. You can help?”
“Yes. I’ll come with you.”
Fiona and her father headed toward the apartment above the garage. A quiet man, he spoke loudly enough for me to hear as they walked away.
“I make more than two words at a time, yes Myshka?”
Fiona laughed. “Yes, you did,” she said.
“So, you win bet with Miss Fryberg, yes?”
“Yes,” Fiona answered, her eyes still soft with wonder, “I win.”
Chapter Thirty-two:
It all ends
In 1917, running from the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution, Irina Yurievsky survived the harrowing trek from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok with her mother, the pair of them traveling south and then east—always east, endlessly east—by train, car, wagon, and on foot, avoiding elements of the indiscriminately lethal Red and White Guards along the way. They arrived in Vladivostok without money, forcing Olga to temporarily join the world’s oldest profession. Her plan was for them to sail to Shanghai where they would seek refuge with the large White Russian contingent settled there. By March of 1918, she’d saved enough money to book passage on a steamer, but continued to cough up blood from tuberculosis contracted during their trek across Siberia. Olga never saw Shanghai, the tuberculosis taking her during the voyage to the bustling Chinese port.
Upon arrival, the now-orphaned six-year-old Irina was turned over to British missionaries, who promptly added her to a group of children bound for America and adoption. Once again, the little girl went east, arriving in San Francisco where Rosie and Roxy Littleleaf plucked her from a holding facility. They re-christened her Fiona Littleleaf and fabricated the tragic backstory of a dead cousin and his Bulgarian wife to preempt the sniping and mean-spirited speculation sure to be attached to a refugee from newly menacing Bolshevik Russia. The two women brought Fiona home to Tesoro, attributing her accent to their cousin’s fictitious wife. By then, the little girl had not seen her father since she was four years old and could no longer remember him.
It took years for Sergei Yurievsky to find his daughter. Following the lead obtained from the prostitute in Macao, he found his little Myshka in Tesoro. At first overjoyed, he then considered the life he’d led and the one she was leading. Fiona was happy and well. He was an enforcer and an assassin, someone she would find difficult to explain to her friends, to her adoptive aunts, or to a prospective husband. She was no longer Russian. She was an American without a hint of her native language in her speech. And she no longer knew or recognized the father who had been off soldiering for so much of their four short years together. And so Sergei Yurievsky remained anonymous to his daughter, taking a job with Cyrus Dinkle to be near her, satisfying himself with daily trips to the mercantile.
I got to know Yurievsky well in the years that followed. We became friends and he eventually told me about the rest: Grand Duke Pavlovich and the Mad Monk, the Chinese warlord and the Filipino strongman. He told me everything and this is why I have been able to share what he saw and heard and thought without actually being him. I promised to keep the darker parts of his story
between he, Fiona, and I until after he was gone. I kept that promise. My daughter, Mary, had to wait until she was eleven years old to hear everything about the treasure of the Blue Whale. She was the first, but there have been many others since—my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It’s grown into a big club. Mary, named after my mother, was one of the very few of its members to have known Yurievsky. She saw him as a child too often sees an old man—an oddity; the silent Russian who spent his days sitting in the parlor of the Kittiwake Inn or on its broad front porch. He was more than that. He was our savior.
Of course, Yurievsky never seriously considered betraying us. He sought only to protect his daughter once our ruse was unmasked, seeking answers that would allow him to lure Dinkle into a bigger trap than the one the ex-gunrunner had set for us. It was also an act of contrition. Yurievsky had committed heinous deeds at the behest of powerful men and believed the only way to atone was to bring one of them down—to send the wolf to the slaughter rather than the lambs. He carefully planned it all, yet never anticipated everything that might happen; he never realized until that last, fateful day in Dinkle’s study that his atonement would providentially award him the right to reclaim the daughter he cherished. It was a row of dominoes that began to fall when I discovered the ambergris on the beach, and for that he remained forever grateful to me.
Sergei Yurievsky never returned to the Dinkle estate nor did he leave Tesoro, taking a permanent room at Fiona’s Kittiwake Inn. He insisted on paying for it and seemed to have no shortage of funds as time went on, his knowledge of Dinkle’s affairs undoubtedly meriting a severance package as generous as it was reluctantly given. Dinkle hired a new man. The poor fellow quit after a month, the next one lasting a bit longer. There were many Dinkle’s men over the years that followed, none of Yurievsky’s replacements as stalwart as the tall Russian.
We sold our dinosaur egg—the real ambergris—to the Jean Patou company for $750 per ounce, far below what was expected on the day Angus and I discovered the mysterious mass on the beach. The Ambergrisians and Dinkle netted just over $2500 each. Alex and I went to college on our share. I’m not sure what the others did, although James built a house for us after he and Ma were married. Things in Tesoro otherwise returned to normal fairly quickly. I had learned that money does indeed change people, and that taking it away has a good chance of changing them back. And so it was for us. The avaricious frenzy that overtook our little village was soon replaced by the blissful vicissitudes of life in a small place. We arose, went about our business, went to bed, and then did it all over again. In between we had our share of birthday parties, weddings, funerals, ball games, school dances, Fourth of July celebrations, Christmases. We knew nearly everything about our neighbors and weren’t reluctant to share a rumor or two. We mostly liked each other.
The pressure to shop was gone, but rather than reclaim the usual inclination for those without money to covet things that require quite a bit of it, townsfolk were overwhelmed with guilt. Even though Dinkle richly deserved to be cheated, my neighbors were eventually ashamed to have been part of it, their remorse spilling over in the form of pies and cakes left on the flat-topped gate pillars outside Dinkle’s estate. A few folks tried to get inside the walls for a face-to-face apology but were turned away; hence the avalanche of letters that began to fill up Dinkle’s mailbox at the postal exchange. The written apologies were heartfelt and quite lengthy in some cases. A few included pictures of the old man obviously drawn by a child. Then items began to show up on his lawn.
The unsolicited offerings were small things at first—a faux-gilded picture frame, a set of oven cozies, a small toy tractor. Then the dam broke and each morning the old bandit awoke to a new collection of haphazardly distributed items: clothes, sofas, sideboards, dishware, radios, chandeliers, used automobiles, innumerable teak miniatures, about a hundred glass cats, a few doorstops shaped like whales, a broken, newfangled electric toaster, a pair of genuinely fake rare documents, a coupon good for two vault doors with matching window bars, and a single, slightly used commode with a jeweled seat cover. It was the monkey named Miss Sprinkles leashed to the commode that finally did it for Dinkle. He placed the following notice in the Tesoro Town Crier.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Those who left their ill-gotten goods on my lawn with the idea that I either desire such things or have any interest in paying to have them removed need to get it through their thick skulls that I have neither need of your deceit-coated spoils nor interest in spending my hard-earned money to have them hauled off. Therefore, please come get your blasted rubbish and be quick about it. God has lent a watchful eye and a long memory to the mischief that has transpired over the summer and will, on Judgment Day, provide the appropriate comeuppances you all richly deserve—Cyrus Dinkle
The full-page notice appeared in the paper the week before Thanksgiving, hitting doorsteps on a Thursday afternoon. By the following Monday, Dinkle’s lawn was clear.
So many years have passed since Angus MacCallum had me believing I’d discovered a treasure on the beach. Yet, I confess more easily recalling that summer and those people than what I had for breakfast this morning. One might think the lost treasure haunts me. It doesn’t. There were other treasures discovered in the sometimes languid, sometimes exciting days of that long-ago season. I was rich and then I wasn’t. I shared in a great secret and a conspiracy. I learned how to sail a boat and about sex. I met a real actor. I snuck into Cyrus Dinkle’s house and stole his letter opener. I almost went to jail. I loved Fiona Littleleaf. I found a father. And, best of all, Ma came back to Alex and me from whatever dark place had held her.
As a boy I had no understanding of death. As a young man I ignored it. The middle of life made me fearful of its end. But now, at ninety-one years old and the only one left from that time, I welcome death, not because of infirmity or lost will, but because it is possible that a reunion is waiting for me in the beyond. And if so—if I once again meet Miss Lizzie and Fiona and Angus MacCallum and Roger Johns the Banker and Mr. and Mrs. C. Herbert Judson and Mei Ling and James and Ma and Alex and Sergei Yurievsky—if I have a chance to rejoin my wife Marjory and those wonderful people, it will be fun to see everyone again. I have big plans should it happen.
We’ll start the day early, riding bikes along my old paper route. We’ll stop for a while to sit on Mr. and Mrs. C. Herbert Judson’s porch swing and talk, then head off to Fiona’s mercantile for a scone and a cup of warm milk with a little coffee in it, waving at Miss Lizzie and Mei Ling when we pass their house. Next, we’ll beachcomb below the lighthouse in search of driftwood Angus can whittle into mermaids. In the afternoon we’ll have a look at Fort Buford and then mosey over to Milton Garwood’s to see if Miss Sprinkles has learned how to play the harmonica. Evening will bring a picnic in Fremont Park followed by a town meeting where, if we’re lucky, Milton Garwood and Angus MacCallum will have a shouting match. When Mr. Johns finally gavels the meeting to a close we’ll linger outside and walk home slowly, sitting on someone’s porch to rehash all the things that might have been done better if we were in charge.
The night will lengthen, and eventually, we’ll get around to telling old stories—the tales of that summer of 1934—and we’ll talk about it over and over, remembering the treasure we found. We’ll recall who found it and how it was found, how we strove to protect it and how it was lost, nevertheless. We’ll marvel that a swindler like Dinkle could be swindled and wonder what became of Everson Dexter. And by the time we decide to call it a night we’ll realize that the boathouse down at the marina is not empty; that it was never empty—that, inside, something of untold value still floats and bobs on the surface of the water. And if we listen closely we’ll hear Angus MacCallum’s voice calling out, too, his words filled with excitement and hope. “Cannae ye understand?” he’ll say. “It’s treasure, laddie…Treasure! Ye’ve foond a bloody treasure!”
Mayfield, Steven;, Treasure of the Blue Whale
Treasure of the Blue Whale Page 23