“He worked for the president when Bert was running a mining concern in China. The president called Dillman his bloodhound because he could find minerals everywhere.” Mercer didn’t point out that minerals were everywhere. “He credited Dillman with finding lodes of ore that the Chinese had overlooked for centuries. Dillman would go off prospecting for months at a time without telling anyone where he was going. The president was in his early twenties at this time, young to be given such responsibility, and he said that Mike Dillman was younger still, not yet out of his teens.
“President Hoover said that his protégé was as much an anthropologist as he was a geologist, and would use local lore to help find interesting rock samples. That is what took him so far to the south that he ended up in Waziristan, as it was known at the time. On this particular trip he was accompanied by a young Frenchman who’d been sent to the Orient by his family to avoid a scandal back home. They had some connections in Peking or Tianjin or some such. Anyway, as the president implied when he told me the story, the Frenchman had a particular predilection that wasn’t appreciated back home even if they did call it ‘Gay Paris.’ ”
“Ah.” Mercer’s eyebrow went up. “Was Dillman…?”
“I’m sure I don’t have the faintest idea, but the two of them did find something on that trip and they had a bit of a falling-out over it. The Frenchman left Asia soon after they returned to the capital. Not long after that came the Boxer Rebellion and the Hoovers left China for Australia. Dillman went off on his own at that time. No one realized the potential of the few crystals Dillman returned with until many years later, when the president was donating a lot of his possessions. A crate of old geological samples went to a scientist friend at Carnegie Mellon University. President Hoover said after the fact that it was mostly samples of copper ore, recovered from several mines he had worked, and this had something to do with stopping the crystals buried in the crate from showing their true selves. It was the friend at Carnegie who went on to discover all the odd phenomena and actually coined the name electricium.”
“So that’s how and where Abe got his sample,” Mercer said, more to himself than for her benefit. She made an inquiring gesture as if he should elaborate, but he shook it off and said, “Please, go on.”
She asked first if he wanted cream or sugar, and when Mercer demurred she handed him a ceramic mug of strong black coffee. After the swill he’d had back in the school gymnasium, this was just what he needed. His body had no idea what time of the day or night it was, so he was awake by force of will alone.
“When President Hoover realized the importance of what had been in his collection all those years, he reached out to his old friend Mike Dillman one more time and asked that he return to the cave where he had first discovered the crystals, to bring back the rest.”
The emergency radio cut to static, and Roni fiddled with it until the newscasters were audible again. She added with a dark tone, “It was only later that the president learned Dillman had called upon the Frenchman to help, not realizing this was supposed to have been a secret.”
“Do you know the Frenchman’s name?”
“No. I was told it once or twice, but I can’t recall, and the president forbade me from writing any of this down.”
Mercer hid his disappointment. Knowing that could open up other avenues for investigation. “Please, continue.”
“The Frenchman refused to return to Waziristan, or so he claimed, and Dillman went off to recover the rest of the electricium by himself. Just so you know, this would have been in January of 1937 when he left California, where he worked as an assayer.”
“And they discovered the mineral at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. That was 1900, right?”
“Well done. Yes.”
“So Dillman was no longer a young man?”
“He wasn’t, but President Hoover had a way about him that almost compelled people to drop everything they were doing and help him. That was why he is credited with saving Belgium from famine during World War One, and it was his idea to distribute food across Europe after the Second World War. When he asked you for something you did it, because it was invariably the right thing to do. In this country, history has not been kind to him, because he is falsely blamed for the Depression, but internationally he remains one of the most respected presidents this nation has ever produced. He was a great man, Mr. Mercer. Even in his golden years he was so…”—she sought the right word—“well, compelling.”
“Mike Dillman,” Mercer prompted when she became lost in her memories for a few seconds.
“Yes. Mike Dillman. He returned to what is now Afghanistan and recovered the rest of the crystals from the cave. He managed to cable a report from Rawalpindi once he was safely back in civilization. I remember President Hoover telling me that Dillman said there was a dead body in the cave that hadn’t been there on his first sojourn.”
That made the corpse of the mystic Mercer had seen much newer than he’d lied to Jordan about.
“His next cable came from Calcutta, on the eastern side of the Indian subcontinent. He informed President Hoover that men had tried to rob him of the crystals several times since his return from the tribal areas. He believed they were agents of the Frenchman and said that they had managed to trick him out of a single shard before he realized their nefarious intent.”
Roni gave a soft sad smile of remembrance. “Those were President Hoover’s exact words. I can still hear his voice in my head. Sorry. When you reach my age all you have is arthritis and memories.”
“My eightysomething friend Harry says an enlarged prostate, too, but that doesn’t apply here.”
She chuckled. “I was going to add ‘and boobs down to your knees.’ I should meet this friend of yours.”
“He’ll feel the same when I tell him about you.”
She went back to her story while Mercer’s coffee went cold and forgotten in his cup and the rain continued to fall. “Dillman managed to stay one step ahead of these dark agents as he hopscotched his way ever eastward by tramp steamer, sailboat, and whatever native craft he could beg a ride on. But by Dillman’s own admission to President Hoover, it was a race back to the States that he was going to lose. His health was failing, and the Frenchman seemed to have bought thugs in every country from India to the Philippines. Every time Dillman tried to book passage on a legitimate steamship, corrupt agents informed the Frenchman’s proxies. In Singapore Mr. Dillman had to shoot his way off a San Francisco — bound ship and leap over the side several miles from the nearest land. Through cables, President Hoover urged him to find an American consulate or embassy, but Dillman had begun to crack under the pressure of the pursuit and was too paranoid to turn to strangers. By this point he was hiding in the city of Rabaul on Papua New Guinea, and wrote that there were men roaming the streets looking for him. Unknowingly, though, he had put himself in the perfect place. The president came up with an idea to end the chase once and for all, and he called in a favor from George Putnam.”
“Who is?”
“I’ll tell you in a second because the end of this story is going to knock your socks off.” The old woman chuckled knowingly.
“Like everyone else, Putnam couldn’t resist the former president’s request and he in turn allowed President Hoover to contact his wife. Dillman was given a new final destination, and he agreed to turn over the crystals once he got there. He managed to steal a sailboat and sailed it south to the town of Lae, where on the morning of July second Putnam’s wife sent a note back to her husband informing him that the package had been delivered the night before.”