Locked Rooms (9 page)

“No, sorry, don’t know them.”

“Look, I’m not out to cause them any trouble, I’m not with the government or anything—” (although surely he could hear that in my English accent?) “but they worked for my parents until ten years ago and I’d like to see that they get a small pension. You understand pension? Income? Money?”

“I understand pension,” he said. “We don’t know them.”

Stubbornly, I bypassed his authoritative stand and set the photograph on the table containing the largest number of diners, face up so they could all see the faces. “If anyone knows who these people are, could they leave a message for me at the St Francis? My name is Russell.”

The picture was gathered back into my hands before more than six or eight people could have looked on it, and I was ushered, politely but inexorably, out of the restaurant. I thanked the waiter who was shutting the door in my face, and stood in the damp alley, buttoning my coat against the sudden chill and feeling somewhat queasy with the unwonted amount of food in my belly.

I showed the picture at twenty-five or thirty other places, sometimes leaving my card, other times only able to say my name and that of the hotel before I was deposited on the pavement again. By that time I had exhausted the Chinese quarter, so I continued into the Italian quarter then worked my way back on either side of the main streets of Chinatown, but with no luck.

Sadly, I slipped the pretty frame back into my pocket and turned back down Grant, Chinatown’s high street. It was later than I had thought. Some of the shops were closing—the greengrocer’s wares had been depleted, the bookseller’s behind it was dark: Time to go.

According to Holmes’ map, going due west on the grid of streets from this, the northern section of the Chinese district, would lead directly to the house. Two streets over, I came to a cable-car, parked in the middle of the street as if waiting for me. Hesitantly, I climbed onto it, inserting myself amongst the homeward-bound office workers and shop-girls. The brakeman’s play on the bell, the shudder and rumble of the boxy vehicle and the constant sing of the underground cable that pulled it along the tracks, all teased out memories of childhood expeditions. Father’s outings were best, I remembered, for he permitted us to ride standing within arm’s reach of the posts, delirious with our daring. Mother, while she allowed us to ride outside, made us sit on the benches, while when Nanny was in charge we were forced to go inside, behind the steamed-up windows with the staid old ladies. Five streets up, the tracks turned north, and I jumped down from the quaint transport to watch it churn away, the cable singing through its slots.

How long had I lived here?

My body’s memory was saying:
Longer than you thought.

Connecting cable-cars rose up into Pacific Heights, but I continued on foot, caught in reverie. Names that shouldn’t have been familiar, but were: Larkin and Polk, the wide Van Ness—I paused, to flow across the busy street with the other pedestrians—and the quieter reaches of Franklin and Gough. There was a park over to my left, I knew without looking, and down the hill to my right was a place where cattle were brought, although I could not remember if I had actually seen them, or if it was merely a story told by my father. But I did know that had I remained on the cable-car, I would have come to a busy waterfront smelling peculiarly of fish and chocolate.

I had been here. I had walked these pavements with my hand in my nanny’s iron fist, and later with my adolescent head held high. I once had a friend in this house here, a friend named . . . Iris? No—Lily. Lily with the black hair that her mother insisted on curling, torturously and regularly, Lily with the red lips that always made her look as if she had been eating cherries. Lily with the dollhouse I had both scorned and secretly envied. She had moved away, to . . . where? Los Angeles, I thought, and as her farewell gift had given me—yes, the doll-family’s porcelain baby, the figure I had found in my bedroom that fit so nicely into the hand. We had sworn undying loyalty, Lily and I, and I had never written to her after the accident.

As I walked through the gathering dusk, with each beat of my heels on the pavement the neighbourhood came more alive around me. Here was where I had been terrified by a dog that had bared its teeth until driven away by a delivery boy. And the strange old woman here had owned a pet monkey, letting it out in a big cage on the porch where it flung itself about and screamed curses at passers-by. And next to her, the man with the parrots, two of them that competed with the monkey in screams, so that my mother thanked heaven that we did not live any nearer. And behind those lighted curtains, a child had died of the polio; there, a woman had been rushed to hospital when she had fallen down the stairs (and the whispers that followed, saying she was pushed—my first experience with criminality); at the now-boisterous house next door had lived a boy with pale green eyes who talked to himself and . . .

And then without warning the slow unfurling flower of my past was hacked away, with a sudden fast scuttle of feet behind me and an urgent shout that I should
Get down, get down!

I whirled, prepared for battle, but he was too close, and ploughed straight into my diaphragm with a sharp banging noise, driving all breath from my lungs and sending me flying backward. I struggled to do battle, in spite of a desperate lack of oxygen and the dizziness throbbing out from the back of my skull, but before I could so much as get my hands raised, my attacker was up and away. Completely confused, I fought to sit upright against the dizziness of the impact and the panic of no breath. After far too long, my compressed lungs finally remembered their function and, with a great whooping noise, sucked in several gallons of glorious cold night air.

Seated, my hands holding a head that threatened to fly off, I heard footsteps approach again. They seemed too slow to be threatening, so I simply sat and took pleasure in the act of breathing. A hand came into my vision, holding a pair of glasses; my glasses. I took them, straightened them on my nose, and squinted up.

Not very far up. The man was short. And Chinese.

“You’re the bookseller.” My head hurt, raised like that, so I allowed it to fall back into my supporting hands.

“I am. Are you all right?”

“I will be. What the hell did you do that for?”

“A man across the street was aiming a pistol at you. I feared that if I merely yelled, you would turn to see and he would hit you.”

I reflected that I was probably the only woman in San Francisco who, if she heard someone yell
Get down!
might actually obey first and look around to ask questions later—unless, of course, the swift approach of footsteps took precedence. Still, he had no way of knowing that.

“That was a shot I heard?” The impact of shoulder to diaphragm had come simultaneously with the bang, creating a more direct link in my mind than in fact there was. I craned my neck again, trying to see him. He was holding his left shoulder, casually but firmly.

“God, you’re hit,” I exclaimed.

“An insignificant wound, I believe. If you can walk, perhaps we should do so.”

With the impetus of someone else’s blood to drive me, I staggered to my feet, stifling curses as my head swam and pounded.

By this time, three other men had come onto the street from their houses, all of them with the look of soldiers about them—men who would perceive instantly the difference between a motorcar’s back-fire and the sound of a handgun. The nearest came to where the bookseller and I stood, and asked, “Ma’am, is this fellow bothering you?”

“Oh, no, this fellow has just saved my skin, thank you. And at the cost of his own. Mister . . . I’m sorry,” I said to my rescuer, “I don’t know your name.”

He flung at me a series of Oriental syllables that found no foothold in my rattled brain, but I decided that here was not the place for proper introductions. “Yes,” I said vaguely, and looked around me, trying to remember which way my house lay. “Down here, I think. We’ll see if we can find some bandages that the mice haven’t nested in.”

Leaving three men to stare at our retreating backs, Mr Whosit and I made our wavering way up the street and around the corner to the familiar jungle-backed wall. Luckily, Holmes had left the drive gate open; in fact, he was standing in the front door-way, watching us approach.

“A bit of first aid, Holmes,” I greeted him with. “Mr Something here took a bullet for me, and needs patching up. I could use a couple of aspirin for my head-ache. And I seem to have lost another hat.”

“Why does it not surprise me that the sound of a pistol would herald the arrival of my wife,” Holmes drawled, and stood away from the door so we could enter.

Chapter Six

H
olmes had better luck with the bookseller’s name, and was soon
addressing the small man as Mr Long, which when I heard it caused a somewhat light-headed giggle to try to surface. I suppressed it firmly—he wasn’t that tiny, really, just far from Long—and focussed on the tasks at hand.

We were sitting in the kitchen, bright lights pulsating off the white walls, as Holmes methodically assisted our guest in removing enough of his upper garments to allow treatment. He seemed uncomfortable with my presence, so I closed my eyes against the glare.

“Clever of you to get the power on, Holmes.”

“It was simply a matter of locating the mains,” he said. “The power company had not shut it off, just the caretaker.”

“What about the water and gas?”

“I rang both companies from the watch-dog’s telephone.”

“Was Miss Grimly reassured to find you were a respectable English gentleman?” I asked.

“She telephoned to Mr Norbert’s offices before she would allow me past the threshold; her nephew stood at the ready with a baseball bat.”

“And did she have anything to offer on our intruders?”

A moment of silence served to remind me of our visitor, whose presence I had forgotten. To cover my mistake, I went on. “I took the photograph around Chinatown and must have asked a hundred or more citizens, none of whom recognised the two people. Or said they didn’t. Although I had a very fine if somewhat
recherché
meal in a tiny cellar café haunted entirely by Orientals, and asked them to ring the hotel if they had any information for me.” My brain, slowly subsiding into its proper setting, finally emitted an original idea, and I opened my eyes to squint at Mr Long. “One of the people whom I questioned was this gentleman, who runs a bookshop that sells, among other things, volumes on the Chinese art of feng shui. I trust I am pronouncing it correctly?” I asked. Mr Long nodded fractionally, then stifled a wince at Holmes’ ministrations; I continued. “However, he has yet to tell me what he is doing rescuing me from assassins on my doorstep.”

The bookseller stirred. “I have to say, Miss Russell, that your display of English—do they call it ‘phlegm’?—is most impressive. I would have thought most young ladies would display more of a reaction to such an attack. Unless you think, sir, that she is suffering from a concussion?”

Holmes snorted. “Her brain wouldn’t dare. No, the only time Russell becomes upset is when those near and dear to her are threatened.”

“Is this—eh!” Long grunted.

“Sorry,” Holmes muttered, and pulled more gently at the shirt.

“Is this common among the English?”

“Russell is not common among anyone. Good, it’s merely winged you in passing—no permanent damage, I shouldn’t think. Do you suppose there are any bandages in the house, Russell?”

“They would be either in the cabinet in my parents’ bath-room, or in the nursery. Do you want me to go?”

“You sit.”

So I sat, as his stride went up the stairs, and a few minutes later came down again. His search was successful, even to the presence of a bottle of Merthiolate. He sniffed it, then painted away at the bookseller’s seeping upper arm, wrapping a length of gauze around the whole and tying it off in a neat bow. He handed Mr Long back his shirt, but carried the coat over to the sink, turning on the taps with an air of experiment. Nothing.

“I can’t even offer to salvage your coat from the bloodstains,” he apologised.

“That is of no importance,” the bookseller said, gingerly inserting his arm into the ruined sleeve. Holmes moved to assist him, and between the two of them they got the man clothed without too much discomfort. The small man moved his shoulder experimentally, testing the limits of comfort, then turned to me.

“I am pleased that I could, as you say, rescue you from your assassins, but I cannot claim I came here with any such intention. No, I came to speak with you about your photograph, and as I paced the sidewalks in indecision, you came around the corner and the man with the gun showed himself. Pure felicitous accident. May I ask, are assassins a commonplace in your life?”

I might have returned his earlier question aimed at me, for his own demonstration of phlegmatic behaviour made me wonder if it was his own nature, Orientals in general, or a result of living in San Francisco, which after all was not so very far removed from its Wild West roots. But it was difficult to know how to answer his question, so I decided to consider it rhetorical rather than requiring an answer. Instead, I asked, “Why were you coming to speak with me?”

“The photograph you showed me. It is of my parents.”

“Ah,” Holmes said, and reached for his pipe.

“Mah and Micah were your mother and father?” I asked, with a dubious glance at the length of the man’s legs.

“‘Mah and Micah,’” Mr Long repeated with a faraway look on his face. “I had forgotten that. They adopted me when I was seven years old, and my mother died. As it happened, I was their only child. Their actual names were Mai Long Kwo and Mah Long Wan. They worked for your parents as gardener and cook, beginning in 1902. I did not know your mother had a photograph of them on her bureau. I suppose I should not have been surprised, for this was one of the few things my mother saved from the Fire, and it resided near the place she had her house gods.” He drew from his inner coat pocket a portrait in a simple black wooden mounting, handing it to me. Smaller and set in a different frame, it was otherwise the same family portrait that lay buried in a drawer in Sussex: tall, blond American father, a secret smile under his trim moustaches; smaller, darker English mother, her eyes dancing as if she was about to burst into laughter; lanky blonde twelve-year-old with smudged spectacles, every inch of her shouting her impatience with the entire exercise; intense, dark-haired boy of perhaps seven, looking at the camera as if he intended to pull it apart to see how it worked.

I handed it back to him. “Where are your parents now?”

“They are dead.” He put the photograph into his pocket, seeming to spend considerable attention getting it settled, then raised his face to mine. “Murdered.”

A tingle of shock ran down my legs, and I was aware of Holmes coming to point, the pipe frozen in his hand.

“Tell us,” I said.

“It was during the New Year celebrations of 1915—our New Year, not that of the West, which is some weeks earlier. I was not here. I was at medical school in Chicago, and Western universities do not recognise the celebrations of other calendars. They were both in the store—but I should explain first.

“The previous spring, your parents had made them a loan of money to start a business. My father had begun to find the physical demands of gardening increasingly difficult, and when he admitted as much to your mother, instead of merely dismissing him as most people in her situation would have done, she asked him what he intended to do. He trusted her enough to tell her his dream of running a bookstore, although their savings would mean they would begin with little more than a cart on the street. Medical school is expensive. But your mother would not hear of it, and insisted that they find a space large enough for a proper store, and that they could repay her over time.”

He smiled in reminiscence. “Your mother was a most strong-willed woman. She would, as the saying goes, not take no for an answer, and even refused to sign formal loan papers, saying that if she were to drop dead suddenly, my father should consider it her thanks for the years of pleasure she had received from his work in the garden. And as it happened, my parents had recently seen a sign go up for a new shop-space, and eyed it wistfully.

“In the end, they accepted your mother’s offer, and put up the money for the space that week. My father retired his aching knees from your garden to his shop, and began to order books and build shelves. He worked slowly, because he wanted the place to be perfectly balanced in itself. He wanted it beautiful.

“And then in early October came your family’s tragic accident.” He did not say he was sorry, did not mouth any platitudes, he merely made the statement. I thought, however, that he was in fact sorry, that he grieved for my parents alongside his own. I found myself liking him for his reticence.

“There was, as you may imagine, considerable discussion between my parents as to the status of the money. Your mother had been definite, but neither of my parents felt comfortable with the situation. And you, the sole survivor and heir, were not only a child but in the hospital as well, and clearly in no condition to make any decisions. In the end, my father went to the old lawyer who was handling your parents’ affairs, and explained as best he could. The lawyer seemed more confused than anything else. There are men who require pieces of paper to give their world order, and cannot deal with the lack. In fairness, I believe the man had spent so much of the previous eight years wrestling with the lack of documentation in legal affairs following the Fire, that he simply could not face one more such problem, particularly when it involved such a—to him—paltry sum. In the end, he actually shouted at my father, saying that if Mrs Russell wanted to throw her money away on a pair of . . . Chinese people and not even make mention of the fact in the will, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. And he invited my father to leave, rather rudely.”

His smile was a wintry thing now. “You may not be aware that even today my people, when they venture outside Chinatown, risk being set upon and beaten by drunks and young men. They throw rocks at us as if we were stray dogs. Ten years ago it was far worse. I suppose my father was fortunate not to be dragged away by the police as a common thief.

“In any case, during my visit home over the Christmas holidays we debated the problem, and in the end, decided to let the situation stand. My parents would continue with their plans for the bookstore, with my mother working there now as well. They thought that opening immediately after New Year’s, which came in the middle of February, would prove auspicious. During the celebrations, they worked late at night to finish the preparations, shelve the books, arrange the furniture.

“No one heard the gun-shots. If they did, no doubt they would have taken them for fire-crackers. Only the following afternoon did it occur to the grocer next door that the bookshop was strangely quiet. He went to see, found the door unlocked, and discovered my parents in the back, dead.

“When the news reached me in Chicago, I left my studies and came home. And I have been here ever since.”

“And the police?” Holmes asked.

The dark, folded eyes behind the lenses regarded him with gentle pity. “The murder of two elderly Chinese servants, in Chinatown? The incident made less of an impression than the police chief’s missing budgerigar.”

Holmes nodded, then asked, “After you took over the bookshop, were there any threats or . . . attempts against you?”

“None. Whatever my parents were killed for, it was not the store itself.”

“Had they any valuables?”

“My father, unlike many men his age, was progressive when it came to money. He put his into a nearby bank that was beginning to take Chinese customers—the Bank of Italy, it was called. My father was very impressed with the actions of its owner, Mr Giannini, who went through the fires of hell, very nearly literally, in preserving the savings of his depositors during the days after the earthquake. So no, there was no store of gold under the mattress, no rare painting or Ming vase a collector would desire. No book worth more than a few dollars. And his bill-fold was in his pocket, untouched.”

I spoke up hesitantly. “What about the Tongs? I’ve heard they are ruthless against those who stand against them.”

“That is true, unfortunately, but unless it was a thing that came up in the few short weeks after I returned to Chicago, no point of conflict had been raised. My father paid what could be called his ‘association fees.’ And when I opened the doors of the bookshop, I was never approached for more than I owed.”

“So the murder was because of something they were, or had, or knew,” Holmes mused. “But you never caught a trace of what that might have been?”

“The life of the city closed over them as if they had never been,” the bookseller told us.

After a minute, Holmes rose and stepped out of the back door to slap his pipe out on the stones. He came back inside, locking the door as he spoke over his shoulder.

“Russell here has very clearly indulged in a pleasantly exotic meal, but I for one have not taken sustenance since a cup of tepid American tea provided by our watch-dogs some hours ago, and a supply of soap and water would not go amiss. Mr Long, would you care to join us in dinner and further conversation?”

“At your hotel?” the bookseller asked, sounding dubious.

“Certainly, unless you have to be back to your shop.”

“My assistant will have closed up, but I don’t know that I . . .” His voice drifted off.

“We can find you another coat,” Holmes said.

“Holmes, I don’t think that’s the problem,” I said. “The St Francis may have certain . . . exclusionary policies.”

“Ah. Well, if they do, we’ll take him to our rooms and have our supper brought up. Come, we can do nothing more here at the moment.”