Locked Rooms (10 page)

Three sets of eyes and ears scanned the streets for gun-wielding lurkers, but we walked two streets down and caught a cab on Van Ness without mishap. At the hotel, we avoided the question of the dining room’s policies by simply whisking our guest past the desk and onto the lift; the operator did glance sideways at Mr Long, but his interest seemed to be more upon the small man’s bloody sleeve than on the shade of his skin.

“Russell, would you like to order up a dinner while I remove a quantity of grime from my finger-nails? I won’t be a moment,” Holmes said, and stepped into the suite’s bath-room. I consulted with Mr Long and then picked up the telephone and placed an order. When Holmes emerged, scrubbed and damp, he made for the collection of bottles which, in a shallow bow to the Volstead Act, the hotel had placed behind the doors of a side-board.

“What flavour of analgesic may I offer you, Mr Long? Despite the strictures of your Eighteenth Amendment, we appear to have brandy, gin, whiskey, the inimitable American bourbon—”

“The brandy would be fine,” our guest said, settling back a fraction into his chair. He took a healthy swallow, then took off his spectacles and cleaned them with a pristine white handkerchief. When they were back on his face, he seemed to relax, as if the cleaning exercise had clarified a decision as well.

“I hope you understand,” he said to me, “why I hesitated to respond to your questions this afternoon in the shop.”

“You wanted to think about it first.”

“Indeed. And also to see you, as it were,
in situ
rather than in my place of business. However, when I saw a man with a gun aimed at you, it decided me that you were on the side of the angels. May I ask, though: When I ran at you—for which I apologise; I hope it is understood that I did not intend to injure you?”

“You need not apologise for saving my life, Mr Long.”

“You are kind. However, when you turned to face me, it appeared as if you were assuming a position of the martial arts.”

“Yes, I have some training.”

“Interesting. And you, sir?”

“A discipline called
baritsu.
It’s Japanese, a style of—”

“I am familiar with it, although I would have thought that few Westerners were. Thank you, it was merely a point of curiosity.”

“Sir,” Holmes said, with an air of drawing the meeting to order. “You have no doubt spent considerable time on the question of your foster parents’ murder.”

“Oh yes, I have. And cast out a hundred lines of enquiry, with no result.”

“Yet you have never formulated a theory as to their deaths?” Holmes put it more as an accusation than a statement, and eyed him over the top of his glass.

The bookseller smiled. “I did not say that.”

“Aha!”

“Yes. However, until this good lady appeared in my store this afternoon, there seemed little I could do about it.”

“Wait, are you saying that I know anything about their deaths?” God, not another gap in my mind! Or was he saying—no, surely he couldn’t think that I, a fifteen-year-old girl, would have come to Chinatown with a gun to do away with the family servants. To say nothing of the fact that in February of 1915, I’d been in England, on the verge of meeting Sherlock Holmes.

“No, of course not. But I have come to wonder if the actions of your parents might not have, unwittingly and posthumously, contributed to the deaths of my own.”

Before I could summon speech from my dropped jaw, a rap at the door indicated the arrival of our meal. The distribution of linen and plates suspended conversation for a time, and the momentum of the actions and the odours from beneath the silver lids took us halfway through the meal. But eventually, I laid down my fork and said to the little man opposite me, “I think you need to explain how the Russell family brought killers to your door.”

“It is a complex puzzle,” he began, “and I do not have all of its parts. But I will fasten together the pieces that I have, and you can tell me what design you see.

“The earthquake was the centre, April the eighteenth, 1906. But the story of our two families had its beginnings a number of years before that. And, I believe, its endings.”

Chapter Seven

T
he man who would later be known as Micah by a family of mixed
American-English, Christian-Jewish heritage was nineteen years old when he sailed from China with a shipload of his countrymen in 1877. Mai Long Kwo was an educated boy with an unfortunate interest in politics and the more unfortunate habit of allowing his hot blood to speak up when he should not. His family scraped together the fare and prayed that, by the time he had earned enough to return, his nature would have cooled and the memories of the authorities would have faded.

Long Kwo, known to his employers as Mike Long, worked as a paid slave for twelve years on the railroad and the docks, sharing rooms with other men in houses that had neither plumbing nor gas lighting. But because he did not gamble or drink, because he worked hard and had learnt to keep his mouth shut, his money belt grew thick, and by 1890 he had migrated to San Francisco and sent home for a wife.

It was a difficult time for a man to send for a wife. Five years after Long had arrived, the American government had established what it called the Exclusion Act, which reduced the numbers of Oriental immigrants effectively to none; after eight years, there was no sign of the Act being loosened. In the 1890s, this meant that the only practical means of bringing in a Chinese woman was on a smuggler’s boat.

It took Long a while to find a smuggler who could be trusted with both money and wife, and a while longer for Long’s family to locate a bride they could afford for their distant son. What they came up with was Mah Wan, a young woman who looked frankly like a peasant: tall and strong, with unbound feet, a plain face, and a questionable horoscope. However, she was known to be a hard worker, and her father was willing to risk her on the high seas. She sailed for Gold Mountain, as the land was known, in the spring of 1891, arriving on the tail of a storm that left her and the other would-be immigrants more dead than alive. They came ashore on a moonlit night in pounding surf, heaved bodily into the small boats and rowed ashore.

One of Mah’s companions took one look at the dark figures standing on the beach and cried aloud, and would have dissolved into hysterics but for the hard slap one of the sailors delivered. Mah herself, filthy, terrified, and weak from seasickness, nonetheless managed to keep her spine straight and her feet underneath her.

The figures moved forward and began to divide up the immigrants—six women, four men. In seconds, it seemed, they were scattering, and Mah looked at the man who was left.

“Long Kwo?” she said hesitantly.

“Yes,” said a voice, “come now, we must get off the beach before we are seen.”

Obediently, she followed, stumbling over something on the invisible sand and nearly dropping the precious bundle she had guarded all this way. He stopped, and to her immense surprise took the bundle and seized her hand, guiding her to the road.

A half-hour’s walk brought them to a dark house. Long Kwo led her to the back door and knocked quietly. It opened, and a small person let them in. When the door was shut again, the person lit an oil lamp, and Mah saw that it was a woman—a white woman.

This peculiar figure led them to a room, handed Long Kwo the lamp, and walked away.

He put the lamp on the room’s shaky wooden table, then turned hesitantly to face his bride.

He saw a thin, pale woman as tall as he was, her hair marked by threads of premature grey, with more intelligence than most men would care for looking out of her dark eyes. She in turn saw a man a little rougher, and older, than she had been told to expect. He was wearing a Western-style suit, but it fit him ill; looking closely, she wondered if he could indeed read and write as she had been informed.

“There is hot water and a bath,” he told her. “And cold rice and tea, unless you wish American food. I don’t recommend it.”

“Thank you.”

“Tomorrow we will go to San Francisco, and you can have some proper food.”

“Hot water is better,” she said, and to her surprise, his face lit up.

“I thought you might want it. I remember all too clearly my own trip, and that wasn’t with smugglers.”

The next day, clean and dressed in the unfamiliar Western clothing he had brought for her, Mah and her bridegroom continued their illicit journey to the city. Before the day was out, Mah had seen his worth and been reassured. This man she was bound to was unfailingly polite to her. When he spoke to the white man who drove them in the man’s own tongue, the driver, like the woman the night before, understood without a problem. And when they climbed out of the closed truck, she was in a place where the people had familiar faces and the air smelt almost normal.

The rooms he took her to were clean, if sparsely furnished, and held a surprisingly large number of books in both Chinese and foreign writing. And he might appear rough, but he was in fact so gentle as to be almost shy, and she found herself telling him that she was able to read, a little, forgetting momentarily that her mother and father had been adamant that she was not to let slip the admission until the marriage had been legally formalised.

Both were relieved, and satisfied, and the two strangers set about forming a partnership.

There was much work to be had in San Francisco, if one did not mind sweat and dirt. The city was growing so fast it seemed to be tumbling over itself, and Long Kwo’s mastery of the white man’s language meant that he was often chosen to supervise the crews of workmen.

Mah was slower to learn English, but learn she did, and work she did. The money was steady. They bought a house, a building with a shop on the ground floor to give an income, and they made themselves a part of the tight community of Chinatown.

The only thing they did not have was a child.

After nine years of marriage, not one of Mah’s pregnancies had spent more than three months in her womb. She had been sad and angry at first, and frightened that her husband would put her away. But Long seemed honestly not to mind, and gradually she became resigned to their state.

And then in the closing weeks of the Western year 1899, a woman in their apartment building died, leaving her seven-year-old son an orphan in fact where before he had been one in practice. The woman had no relatives, and her dead husband, too, had been alone in this country, but still, had the boy been a more attractive proposition, he would have been welcomed in any of several homes. However, the child was small and bent, scrawny from neglect, and he looked at a person strangely—in part this was his habit of squinting, but also a sort of aloof manner, as if despite his unprepossessing exterior, he looked upon the adults around him and found them wanting.

But Mah rather liked the child. He was well mannered, other than the look of superiority, and intelligent. Which, she reflected, might account for the look as well.

They talked it over, went before the community association responsible for orphans, and offered the boy a home. Their friends argued with them, saying that there was something very wrong with the child, that the boy must have attracted the evil eye somehow, to be so consistently cursed, and that he would bring his disastrous heritage with him. Mah’s soft heart could be understood, but surely Long could see that the best place for the child was a nice anonymous orphanage? His friends’ arguments, however, fell on ears that had been deafened by the faint ring of hope in his wife’s voice. Long determined to go ahead; his friends and neighbours shook their heads, saying that his weakness for injured creatures would get him into trouble.

With spectacles, the boy’s squint went away; with affection and stability, the superior gaze faded. Nothing much could be done about the boy’s stature and crooked back, although good food, corrective shoes, and a regimen of traditional exercises helped, but in the end, it did not matter. He was very bright, and with a little luck and a lot of planning, he might not have to depend on manual labour for a living.

School was easy enough, for the teachers in the Chinese school appreciated a student who did his work and more. And with care, the family savings would stretch to teacher-training college, and the boy would teach others, not carry loads like his adoptive father or scrub floors and iron shirts like his mother.

Four years later, the gods decided to intervene in the family fortunes.

Divine whim being by its nature both capricious and deceptive, the intervention began with catastrophe. One foggy morning in June 1902, when Long was working with a gang of brick-layers on the third story of a new building, the prophecy concerning his disastrous susceptibility to small, weak creatures was fulfilled. For some reason, a mother cat had decided to shift her litter during the night. And since cats, like ants, have a habit of tracing an impossibly labyrinthine path to their goal, this one had wound her way up some planks, dropped into a half-finished chimney, and come to a rest inside a wall that was due to be bricked in that day. The man with the brick in one hand and a laden trowel in the other had heard the rustle and faint mewing sound, and paused to peer in.

No one particularly wanted to leave the cats inside the wall, but stopping work to dig them out risked getting them all fired. The brick-layer went on with his job, but slowly, sending his hod-carrier to fetch Long who, while not exactly a boss, had a margin more authority than the man with the brick in his hand.

Long came, and saw that, short of tearing down the previous day’s work, the only way to reach the litter was from the scaffolding on the outside of the building. And being the tallest man on the crew, his long arms were the clear candidates for the rescue operation.

Mother and two kits were soon in a burlap sack. He was stretching for the third, fingers out and brushing the tantalising softness that was hissing furiously from a niche just beyond his reach, when the board of the precarious scaffolding jerked, trembled for a moment, then slid with a sickening airiness into space. Arms flung out to catch at the framework of lashed-together boards scrabbled briefly at the fog-slick surfaces, then gave way, clawing a path through the intervening structure until Long finally smashed down on a surface that did not give. He lay on his back, staring up at the faraway faces of his horrified coworkers, at the slowing sway of the traitorous scaffolding, at the grey of the sky above, wondering if this was what the transition into death was like.

He waited for the shock of injury to drift away into the afterlife, but it did not. And then he heard the yowl of the mother cat, fighting her terrified way out of the bag, and somehow the noise told him that no, he was not yet dead.

The fall hadn’t killed him, miraculously enough, or even crippled him. It hadn’t snapped his spine or crushed his skull or ruptured some vital inner organ. It had dislocated three fingers and broken six bones—both those of his left forearm, one in his right ankle, two ribs, and his left collarbone—but the healer who pressed the expensive herbs on Mah assured them that he would heal.

And he did, slowly, although it was a month before he could hook a pair of crutches under his arms and hobble from one side of the apartment to the other. And two months before his leg enabled him to negotiate the stairs and stand on the street again.

Mah worked all the hours she could, and twelve-year-old Tom, strong despite his stature and the twist in his spine, was hired by the downstairs grocer to make deliveries all that summer. Still they went into debt to the money-lender. When the school year started up again, Tom demanded to keep working for the greengrocer, but Long was even more adamant that the boy needed to be in school, and his edict carried. Tom did work after school and on the weekends, but only on condition that his homework got done as well.

In October, Long began to look for employment, but building crews wanted the able-bodied and offices the formally educated. He picked up a few hours a week keeping the grocer’s accounts, and tutored some men in English, but it was not enough. The money-lenders bit deep, and deeper.

The rains came, and if California in November was not as cold as China had been, nonetheless the air in an underheated apartment chilled the bones, especially bones that had been broken eighteen weeks before. On the days he did not have work, Long often walked, with an idea that he was building his strength. He also kept his eye out for potential jobs, along the docks or in the industrial edges of the town, although he was wary about the shopping centre, and avoided the residential areas assiduously: A forty-four-year-old man with a gimpy leg would be easy prey for a gang of toughs.

One Saturday in late November, Tom came upstairs from the greengrocer’s and told his father that he had been asked to deliver a crate of exotic vegetables clear the other end of the city, all the way out at the western shore. The boy was both excited and apprehensive about the lengthy expedition, and Long offered to accompany him. In fact, he even convinced the grocer to throw in a second cross-town street-car fare, to ensure that the produce would arrive without mishap. The month before, another, older delivery boy had been set upon by a gang of white boys, leaving the fruit he had been carrying crushed and worthless. Even limping, Long’s presence might serve to deter the vandals.