Locked Rooms (12 page)

“The driver gave me your address,” he said to Long. “How’s the shoulder?”

“It is nothing.”

“The doctor said you’d broken it last summer, along with a couple other bones.”

“That is true. They healed, this will too. I trust your wife is well?”

“She’s fine, thanks to you.” He simply stood there, leaving Long no option but to invite him in. The house, as always, was spotless, but having sat on the man’s leather sofa and drunk soup from the man’s gold-rimmed bowls, Long knew that the man would see nothing but the poverty.

But to his surprise, the man’s surveying glance betrayed no distaste. If anything, he seemed appreciative of the simple ink drawing on the wall, and of the soft quilt lying across the chair which Mah had laid over her husband’s legs before she left that morning.

“Would you care for tea?” Long offered.

“Thank you, I’d like a cup.” The man seemed curious at the pale beverage, which reminded Long that Westerners polluted their tea with sugar and the milk from cows’ udders.

“Would you like me to get some milk?” Long offered, wondering where on earth he would find the stuff in Chinatown.

But the man shook his head. “Don’t worry, I sometimes take it black.” And when he had taken a sip, he added, “Actually, this is nice without milk. Refreshing.” He drank the cup, accepted a second, and when it was cradled in his big hands, he got around to the reason for his presence.

“Mr Long,” he started, then paused. “Am I saying your name right?”

“Yes, that is fine,” Long reassured him, surprised. It was a question he’d never been asked before—and indeed, it was close enough, considering that the man’s tongue was unaccustomed to a tonal language.

The man nodded and went on. “My wife and I are responsible for your injury. She, not being native to these shores, has never fully realised how potentially treacherous the Pacific surf can be, and yesterday I neglected to renew my warnings. Had you not been there, had you not been willing to risk your life for hers, she would have drowned. I do accept that one cannot pay a man for acting a good Samaritan, but one can at least reimburse him for the losses he incurs.”

Long had no idea what a Samaritan was, good or otherwise, and a number of the other words were not in his vocabulary either, but his English was sufficient to follow his visitor’s general meaning. What was crystal clear, and of far greater importance, was that this stranger referred to Long, a person whose eyes and skin made him less than human to most of the city rulers, as a man, and moreover one whose dignity was a thing to be taken into consideration.

Unwittingly, Long’s chin came up and he met the pale eyes as one man to another.

“Sir,” the tall Westerner said, “I would like to offer you a job.”

It was the
Sir
more than anything else that clinched the deal.

Long came to work for the Russell family the following day, walking up the hills to the grand house each morning, descending home again to Chinatown in the afternoon. At first, his work was one-armed and somewhat pointless, but with the second healing of his collarbone, he took over responsibility for the grounds, and discovered in himself an unexpected quiet pleasure in working the earth and growing flowers and lettuces. Within the next year, Mah came as well, to work inside the house, helping in the kitchen and slowly absorbing this odd Western style of cooking. When the cook fled the city after the events of April 1906, Mah took over, and the Long family ran the Russell household, inside and out.

Unlike the Scots nanny, who had left the establishment soon after their arrival, the Longs never lived in the Pacific Heights house. The Russells offered, but did not press after the refusal, because both sides knew the problems the neighbours might raise. Instead, Long would clean his spade and tidy the walks, leaving the house in the afternoon so he might be home when young Tom was let out of school. Often as he walked, Long took with him some book or another that one of the Russells thought their gardener might enjoy. And during the periods when the Russells were away, in England or on the East Coast, one or the other of the Longs would go to the house every day, to be sure all was well.

When Tom went east to university in 1909, a Russell gift allowed him to take up somewhat more comfortable rooms than his parents alone could have provided. And when the deep aches that had settled into Long’s bones made his work in the garden more difficult, it was Russell money that kept the family from having to approach the usurious money-lenders of Chinatown to create the bookstore.

Theirs was a symbiotic relationship of two species, different yet alike, that might well have lingered into old age, but for a car going off a cliff, some miles south of San Francisco.

Chapter Eight

H
olmes reached out to refill Mr Long’s glass. The story had taken
nearly an hour in the telling, and now our guest sat forward with his drink clasped in his hands.

“That much I know, for a certainty. And it was necessary to tell you in detail so that you might understand the links between our families. It began with the rescue of a woman, but it was not simply a matter of rewarding a service.”

“I do see that,” I told him.

“And as you were young when you knew my parents, I did not think that you would have understood the ways in which they were something other than mere servants. I think your mother would not have spent hours discussing Chinese philosophy with her gardener, were she not aware that he was more than a man who could make plants grow. And your father would not have felt so free to lend him books, and later talk about them, were the things between them not more solid than a job and a payment.”

“I am grateful to you. I . . . I don’t remember a lot about my parents.”

“That would be true of any child who is not given the opportunity to know his or her parents as an adult.” The way he said this reminded me that he, too, had lost his mother and father—twice over, in fact.

“As I said,” he continued, “it is necessary to perceive the strength of the links between them in order to make sense of what happened in 1906. Although that, I fear, is precisely where my tale falls into thin ground.

“You may have been too young to remember, but the catastrophe of those first days after the earthquake was unimaginable. Block after block of buildings collapsed, often on top of those trying to rescue their belongings. Men and women wandered the streets, driven mad by shock or simply with no place to go, no possessions to guard. People would be trapped under rubble, and the fire would reach them before the rescuers could—more than one was shot, through mercy, to save them from burning alive. The police feared riot and disorder so much, it was ordered that any person caught looting would be shot on sight—with no suggestion as to how the soldier or policeman might tell if the person in his sights was a looter or a rightful home-owner. It was an absolute hell of irrational behaviour against a back-drop of flames and shattered brickwork.

“In that macabre and unearthly setting, something happened that involved your father and mine. And there my story falters, for I do not know its details, I could merely see the shape of the thing in the aftermath. I was fourteen at the time, no longer a child, not yet seen as a man. I was left with my mother as the fire grew near, to pack our goods and prepare to abandon the house. My father needed to go and see to the Russells, to make certain they—you—were alive and uninjured. A portion of the fire lay between us, so he did not know how long it would take him to work his way around it, but my mother urged him to go, insisted that we would be fine. He left at four o’clock on the Wednesday afternoon, and we did not see him until eight o’clock on Friday morning. In the forty hours he was gone, the fire reached and consumed Chinatown, driving us all to the edge of the sea. When he could finally return, he found all of Chinatown pressed between the docks and a wall of fire, the air thick with explosions and panic, everyone half suffocated from the smoke. I tell you these details to illustrate the urgency of the demands, to have kept him away from his responsibilities to us.

“He was near despair when he could not find us among the crowd, but a neighbour saw him and told him that we had already made our way to the Presidio, where the Army had permitted us an area to shelter, and provided food. He finally caught up with us there, and wept when he found us safe, saying over and over that he should never have left. He told us that your house was damaged but standing, that you were all living under canvas in a nearby park, that he had helped your father move some valuables. And that was essentially all he told us, that day or ever.

“But whatever it was he had done with, or for, your father, made him uneasy. One might almost say it haunted him.”

“What do you mean? Was he frightened?”

“Frightened,” Long repeated, considering the word. “It is difficult to imagine one’s father frightened. No, I don’t believe so. It was, rather, as if he had done something without considering the results, and reflection made him wonder if he had made the right choice. Or as if he had begun to suspect that what he had been asked to do actually concealed another purpose.”

“As if he no longer trusted my father?”

“Not your father, but as if some underlying question threatened to betray them both.” He shrugged, wincing at the motion. “It is difficult to put into words, a vague impression such as that.”

“But you can’t think what it was based upon? Was it something that happened to him, or that he saw, that he did?”

“Any of them. None.” His spectacles caught the light as he shook his head. “He would never talk about it.”

It was by now late, and I could see little sense in playing Twenty Questions with a man who could describe the object only by its outline. Holmes clearly felt the same, for he reached out to knock his pipe decisively into an ash-tray.

“Mr Long—” he began to say.

“There is one other thing,” Long interrupted, and Holmes obediently settled back. “Again I do not know what it means, but your father came to see mine in the middle of September 1914. Two weeks before he died. They talked for a long time, and when he left, my father was quiet, but somehow as if a burden had been lifted from him. And when they shook hands, they seemed friends again, as they had not for some time.”

“But you don’t know what they talked about.”

“They walked across to the park and sat on a bench, going silent whenever another person came near.”

“Well, thank you, Mr Long,” I said, wishing I did not feel so dissatisfied.

“If we think of any questions, Mr Long,” Holmes said, “may we call on you in your shop?”

“Either I will be there, or my assistant will know where I have gone.”

“Let me go downstairs with you and arrange a motor to take you back. It is late, and your arm clearly troubles you.”

Long protested that it was but a short walk, but Holmes would not be swayed. He retrieved our guest’s hat, standing at the ready should the man have any difficulty rising from his chair. He did not, although as Holmes had said, the wounded arm gave all indications of paining him. By way of support, Long gingerly worked his hand into the pocket of his jacket, but when he had done so, he paused, and drew the hand laboriously out again. In his fingers was a paper-wrapped object the shape of a very short cigar, secured in neatly tied twine, which he held out to me.

“In the turmoil of the past few hours, I forgot to give this to you. My father said that it was an object precious to your mother, and removed it for safe-keeping, lest vandals take it.”

I turned the object over in my hands and saw, in a precise, spidery hand:

Inside the paper lay the front door’s mezuzah.

Whatever Long saw in my face caused him to take a half-step forward as if to grasp my arm, but he wavered, and instead merely asked, “I hope my father’s actions did not create problems for you. He seemed to think it was a kind of household god, perhaps not literally but—”

“No,” I said, my hand closing tightly around the cool metal. “It’s fine. I’m very glad to find it safe. Thank you.”

I felt Holmes’ sharp gaze on me, but I did not look at him. He caught up his own hat and stick to accompany our guest out, so I was not surprised when he did not return for the better part of an hour, approximately the time it would take to make a slow and thoughtful foot trip back from Chinatown.

When he came in, he found me where he had left me, curled on the sofa with the mezuzah in my hand. When he had shed his outer garments at the door, he came and sat down beside me, taking my hand—not, as I thought at first, in a gesture of affection, but in order to prise my fingers away from the object. The palm of my hand was dented red with the shape of it, my fingers stiff. He examined it curiously before laying it on the low table before the sofa, then reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief.

I blew my nose noisily and drew an uneven breath. “I never had a chance to say good-bye to them. Not before they died, not even at their funerals, since they had to be buried before I got out of hospital. Dr Ginzberg took me to their grave site, but I was so full of drugs at the time, it made no impression on me.

“It’s the . . . unfinished quality of their deaths that is hard to set aside.”

“Yes.” There was an odd intonation to the monosyllable, almost as if he had asked a question: Yes, and . . . ?

“What do you mean, ‘yes’?”

His grey eyes, inches away, drilled into mine, his expression—his entire body—radiating an intensity I could not understand. He did not answer, just waited.

I shook my head wearily. “Holmes, you apparently believe you see something I am missing entirely. If you want me to react to it, you’re just going to have to tell me.”

“Your parents died in October 1914.”

“And my brother, yes.”

“And you were either in hospital or under your doctor’s supervision until you came to England in the early weeks of 1915.”

“Yes.”

“Your parents’ cook and gardener—ex-gardener—were murdered in February 1915.”

“According to Mr Long.”

“Your house sits vacant for ten years, then is broken into in late March, approximately the time you would have been here had we not stopped in Japan. And within forty-eight hours of your return to San Francisco, someone is shooting at you.”

“Or at Mr Long. Or simply at a Chinese man who dared to venture from his assigned territory.”

I might not have been speaking, for all the impression my voice made on his inexorable push towards his ultimate point. “And during the earthquake and fire of 1906, some experience troubled a brave and loyal servant into a change of heart towards his employer.”

“Holmes, please, I really am too tired for this.”

“Within two months of that event, your father’s will was given an addendum to ensure that the house be left untouched by anyone other than family members for a minimum of twenty years.”

“So?” I demanded, driven to rudeness.

“And finally, your emotional turmoil over the unfinished nature of your family’s death has led to a series of disturbing dreams.”

“Damn it, Holmes, I’m going to bed.”

“The evidence is clear, yet you refuse to see it,” he mused. “Fascinating.”

“See what?” I finally couldn’t bear it another moment, and blew up at him. “Holmes, for Christ sake, I’m absolutely exhausted, I have bruises coming up all along my shoulders and skull, and my head is pounding so hard I’m going to have trouble seeing my face in the bath-room looking-glass, and you persist in playing guessing games with me. Well, you’ll just have to do it in my absence.” I stood up and stalked into the bath-room, where I ran a high, hot bath and immersed myself in it for a very long time. Holmes was asleep when I came out; at any rate, he did not stir.

For the brief, dull, businesslike venture that I had expected of our trip to San Francisco, it had already proved remarkably eventful. Even before we arrived, dreams had been pounding at the door of my mind; in the three days since the ship had docked on Monday morning, I had been arrested, confronted with a bucket-load of oddities, seen the evidence of a house-breaking, met a large slice of my past, been attacked on the street, and had a serious argument with my husband.