Locked Rooms (8 page)

“Your mother was the reader, then?”

“A rabbi’s daughter? Of course. Father used to say she was the brains in the family, but I think it was just that her intelligence was intellectual, his was practical. His mind grasped patterns—he could have been a superb chess player, if he didn’t find the game so tedious. He loved gadgets, bought a new motorcar every year and tinkered with it himself. He was . . .” I thought a moment for a word that distilled his essence. “He was strong.”

“And your mother?”

“Mother was . . . alive. She was dark and bright and very funny—she had a much quicker sense of humour than Father did, and the infectious giggle of a child. She was orderly—she didn’t mind if things were turned upside-down in the course of the day, but she liked to see them restored to their places eventually. She was a natural teacher, knew how to present things so they caught the imagination of a child. She taught us both Hebrew, through the Bible, and with me she used an analytical approach—how slight changes in grammar affect meaning, for example—whereas with my brother she concentrated on the mathematics. She and his maths tutor worked out a system for integrating math problems and Torah studies, using the Bible to build problems in calculus and such; I never did understand it. Looking back, she might have been worried that Levi would turn his back on his faith, and wanted to ensure that Torah was in his bones from early on.”

“Your brother was a brilliant boy, you told me.”

“Levi was a genius, an extraordinary mind.” I stared out over the water, white streaks appearing in the darkness as each wave peaked, then vanished with the crash of the surf. “He had three tutors. One for maths, one for Torah and Talmud, and one for everything else—he didn’t care for history and English, but he could memorise anything, which served the same purpose as actual learning as far as he was concerned. I hated him, sometimes. I loved him, too, but he tended to dominate life, rather. It was always lovely to get one of the parents to myself. So relaxed. Actually, I think my parents were almost frightened by him. Certainly daunted—I would catch my father looking at Levi sometimes, as if wondering what sort of creature this was in his house.”

I stood, brushing the sand from my skirt. “That’s about all I have of them, vague outlines coupled with specific incidents. But I believe you’d have liked them, Holmes. I’m very sorry you never had a chance to meet them.

“And now I think our driver may be getting nervous, that we’ve fallen into the sea.”

On Wednesday morning, I left Holmes at the front desk, puzzling the affable Mr Auberon with enquiries about glass-shops, and went to Norbert’s office. Before we got started on the day’s mountain of paperwork, I asked him about the Chinese couple employed on the property. He knew nothing about them, but said he would look into it. Then I asked how many sets of house keys he had.

“Just the one I gave you,” he answered. “I do have another complete set, but it’s down the Peninsula with my other papers. Do you wish me to have it sent up for you?”

“No, I just wondered. It appeared as if we’d had a visitor in the house recently.”

At that, the lawyer’s somewhat distracted air vanished and he sat upright, frowning. “A visitor? Oh, that is not good. The will clearly stipulates—”

“Yes, I remember. Tell me, you mentioned something about your elderly relative spotting someone about the place fairly recently. Would you perhaps recall when it was?”

“It must have been, oh, five or six weeks ago. Certainly well before the end of March—we send Miss Grimly a cheque the first of each month, and I do remember that April’s included a bonus. But she did see them, and called the police immediately, although they didn’t find anyone there. Most worrying. Is anything missing, or damaged?”

“No, nothing of the sort. They merely looked around, tracked some soil on the floor, may have burnt something in the fireplace—I take it the fireplaces were cleaned back in 1914?”

“Oh, certainly they would have been. We shall have to do something about the locks, I’m afraid—it just wouldn’t do to have some vagrant moving in and lighting fires. And perhaps the old lady is getting beyond the responsibility. But nothing was missing, you’re sure?”

“Not that I could see.”

And he nodded and stretched out his arm for the first of many files.

When I left, three and a half hours later, my mind was so taken up with balance sheets and legal language that I was at the street before I remembered, and turned back to the office. Norbert’s secretary looked up at my entrance.

“Sorry,” I told her, “I forgot to ask, has a letter come for me?”

“Nothing today, Miss Russell.”

I reminded myself that the United States postal system was not the English one, and that a letter posted one afternoon might not generate an overnight response, even within the city limits.

Perhaps Dr Ginzberg was too busy to speak with an old patient? No, that I could not imagine. She might be out of town.

If I hadn’t heard from her by tomorrow, I decided, I would travel across town to her house and see if she was there. I wanted badly to see her, to let her know that I had done well, that I
was
well.

And perhaps to ask her how it was that a person could forget half her life.

At something of an impasse, I watched a trolley rattle past, considering my options. I could go to the house and join Holmes in his examination of the fireplace’s burnt papers. Or I could interview the old woman and her halfwit nephew across the street, to pin down the date of the March intruders. Or I could see what I could discover about Mah and Micah on my own, without waiting for Norbert.

I retraced my steps to the hotel for the photograph and for directions, then followed the route I had wandered in a daze three days before. Soon I was standing at the gates of Chinatown.

Chapter Five

S
an Francisco’s Chinatown had burnt to the ground in 1906; the
blaze had scoured the infamous district of its noxious cellars and by-ways—a part of my sense of dissonance two days before had been merely the change in stage sets, that the neighbourhood which had always borne a trace of lingering wickedness and the sensation of things scuttling out of sight was now a place of gaudy chop-suey restaurants and tourist gee-gaws. Why, the streets smelt more of spices and incense than they did of rotting fruit.

Not that the place looked artificial: The hotchpotch of buildings was so hung about with extraneous pavement stalls and the grime of use that a person had to look closely to note the uniformity of building materials and the relative lack of wear, to see that they were none of them old enough to have seen the century’s turn.

But the changes had not erased the essential nature of Chinatown. This was a place apart, a small, intricately crafted miniature city with rules and mores all its own. The air here was not the same as that outside of its borders; the people moved differently. The Chinatown of my childhood survived in glimpses—the joyous exoticism of curlicued buildings; the unlikely fragrances, sweet and sharp; the dancing script on buildings and signs; an old woman in silks mincing along on bound feet; a man wearing a pole across his shoulders to carry his baskets of fruit—but even the girls in dresses that matched my own and the men in lounge suits and felt hats walked and spoke as if they knew their place in this delicate, perfect machine that was Chinatown.

Now that I stood on the busy pavement, caught between a lantern store whose rafters were solid with its wares and a noisy poultry shop stacked high with cages of ducks, geese, and roosters, my idea simply to ask among the residents began to seem simplistic. The bustle and press of people, the sheer number of shops and buildings whose signs bore only Chinese characters, made it clear that, Western dress and English-speaking schools notwithstanding, this dozen or so blocks formed a city unto itself—small, yes, but it was easily conceivable that not everyone here knew everyone else.

I did not even know their names, since “Micah” was a highly unlikely appellation for a Chinese man and Mah could have been short for anything. All I had was a photograph, at least fifteen years old, and the likelihood that they were interested in the art, or science, or perhaps even religion, of balancing the energies of the earth’s dragons by the use of small bowls of water, mirrors, and plants.

It took conversations with three impatient shopkeepers to give me a name for this Oriental discipline:
fungshwei,
the fish-seller called it, shaking an octopus in my face, but no no, he didn’t know no-one, go down to bookstore, please go now he busy. So I left him to his eels and squiggly things and went past the barber shop and around the pavement-seller of small decorated cakes, stepping into the street to avoid hitting my head on a platoon of flattened ducks, in the direction that he had indicated, only what appeared to be a bookstore turned out to be some kind of apothecary, odorous and shadowy with an entire wall of drawers marked only by characters. Further down the street, a building with curlicued roofs that I took to be a temple was revealed as a telephone exchange, so I turned back, narrowly avoiding collision with a heavily laden silver tray of fragrant covered bowls, and made a more methodical search. The bookstore, which I had passed twice, was tucked behind a pavement greengrocer’s; I found it only by spotting a man coming out with a fresh newspaper in his hand.

I pushed between the crates of strange knobbly dark objects on the one side and baskets of strange smooth light objects on the other, to enter a world that was comforting in its familiarity. Books of all sizes, colours, shapes, and languages stretched from floor to ceiling, riding in neat piles on central tables, filling the hands of the half dozen patrons, all of whom glanced up as I entered and watched me unabashedly for a while before their books pulled them back in. The front of the shop displayed newspapers, mostly Chinese although I saw two San Francisco English-language dailies as well as a week-old
New York Times.
Nothing from England, though.

“May I help you?” asked a voice in lightly accented English, with no trace of the pidgin dialect. I hadn’t noticed him before, as he had been standing behind a high desk, but now he rose up and seated himself on a stool. A Chinese man of about thirty, wearing a brown suit, flecked red tie, and wire-rimmed glasses much like those on my own nose.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. With the recent experience of harried and impatient shopkeepers in mind, I thought I had better pin the man down in a commercial transaction before asking questions about Chinese cooks and gardeners. “I understand there’s something called
fungshwei.
I’m probably not saying it right—it has to do with balancing energies in a room, or something?” I allowed my voice to rise into a question mark, to say that I was just a harmless white woman with money to spend on oddities that took her fancy.

“Fungshwei,”
he repeated, and I took note of his pronunciation. “You wish a book on it?”

“If you have one. In English,” I added with a self-deprecating grin. He responded to my silly-me attitude with a polite smile of his own, although something about it made me wonder if he wasn’t aware that my act was just that. But he turned on the stool, and I was deciding to place the smile under general Oriental inscrutability when he all but vanished behind the counter. I watched the top of his head go past, realising belatedly that the man was only an inch or two more than five feet high.

As he walked towards the back of the store, I saw that his gait was slightly uneven, a twist more than a limp, as if his spine had a kink in it. He tugged a wheeled library ladder from its recesses, allowing it to run along its tracks for about fifteen feet before stopping it to clamber up into the reaches of the shelves. He pulled out two volumes, came down, returned the ladder to its place, and came back to the desk with the books, laying them in front of me on the counter.

“I do not have any English books entirely about
fungshwei,
” he told me. “Both of these have chapters on the science. The one in this book is longer, with more examples, but it suffers from slight inaccuracies. The other is shorter, the English barely adequate, but the author knows what he is talking about.”

I looked over the offerings, finding among other things that the discipline was rendered as
feng shui,
and that the first book had clearly been written for an audience of Western ignoramuses and romantics. The second I found intelligible, if idiosyncratic; I placed it on the counter and told him I’d take it. His face did not change, but I felt as though I’d passed some sort of test.

When he had wrapped my purchase and given me my change, I pulled my mother’s small framed photograph out of my coat pocket and laid it where the book had been.

“I wonder if you know these people? They may also be interested in feng shui.”

Again, I could read no reaction on the man’s face. But I felt a brief beat of stillness before he leant forward, adjusting his spectacles to look at the photograph obediently. After a few seconds, he raised his eyes to mine. “You think I should know these people?”

“They lived in San Francisco, at least they did ten years ago. I knew them as Mah and Micah, although I don’t suppose those were their names. They used to work for my parents. I’m trying to locate them.”

He did not ask why, although I expected him to. I even had a story prepared, about a bequest in the will. Instead, he reached out and ran a curious finger down the frame.

“I found the picture on my mother’s dressing-table,” I said without thinking.

That time, he reacted. Only a quick glance at my face, and completely understandable—what kind of white woman would have a framed photograph of two Orientals on her dressing-table? But what could I say to that? I didn’t even know myself, although I did know that it was very like my mother to look past society’s restrictions.

When he sat upright, his face was once again polite and closed. “I am sorry, I do not think they live around here. But I will ask. How do I get in touch with you, should I find anything about them?”

I took out a visiting card and wrote on the back of it the address of the lawyer and, at a whim, the house itself. “I will only be in San Francisco a few days, but anything to the first address will be sent on to me, at any time.”

He accepted the card, and inclined his head slightly. “I wish you luck, miss.”

As I went out of the shop, I noticed a small mirror, located so low on a wall that only the proprietor would see it. And I wondered if, somewhere in the back of the store, lay a bowl of water and a small pot-plant.

Another waiter scurried past on his delivery, and as his heavy-laden tray trailed across before me, it emitted odours that tugged at me in a way I had all but forgotten. The hot breath of chilli pepper, the comforting aroma of fresh rice—for the first time in weeks, food had appeal. As I lingered on the pavement, waiting for the waiter to return, my mouth actually watered.

I had to wait for some time, jostled by black-clad women smelling of incense and spices, blue-clad men bearing the odours of laundry and labour, and bright, bobbed young things graced with the perfumes of the downtown shops, all of them intent on the greengrocer’s peculiarly shaped wares, the impossibly long green beans and aubergines the size of eggs. Eventually, however, the young man reappeared, the tray tucked easily under one arm, a cigarette dangling from his lip, exchanging greetings with the people near the stall. I fell into step behind him; when he turned down a narrow alleyway and stepped down into a door-way, I did not hesitate to follow.

Once inside, however, I was not so sure of myself, for this was clearly not a restaurant that catered to outsider trade. A dozen Chinese people holding chop-sticks in their hands turned to see this exotic invader, and I offered them an uncomfortable smile, looking around for my unwitting guide. One of the customers called something in a loud voice, and the man popped out from a door-way, his eyebrows going up when he saw me.

“You like something?” he asked.

“Luncheon, if you’re serving,” I said.

“Sure, sure,” he said, to my relief. “No problem, here, sit here.”

He dashed a clean white cloth over the surface of a corner table, and pulled out the chair. “You need menu?”

Even if it was in English, I probably would not have been able to make much sense of it. Instead, I told him, “Why don’t you just bring me something you think I’d—No, make that something you like yourself.” Heaven only knows what pallid version of his native cuisine he might deem suitable for a white woman. Then I added, “Just nothing with pork or shrimp, please.”

It was only when he had taken himself through the door and was carrying on a full-voiced and unintelligible conversation with the cook that the belated thought occurred: Chinese people were rumoured to enjoy eating dog, and rat.

I told myself not to be squeamish, and fingered the pair of chopsticks lying beside my plate, feeling the eyes of the other diners on me.

My food arrived quickly, although the earlier patrons were still waiting for theirs. One of them, a boy of perhaps fourteen, said something to his two older companions. All three watched me reach for the thin bamboo sticks.

They seemed more amused than disappointed when this white person’s clumsiness with the chop-sticks did not come to pass—I had just spent three weeks in Japan, eating with sticks slicker and more delicate than these, and the skill had not deserted me in crossing the ocean. I grinned at the boy, cautiously seized and lifted a scrap of what appeared to be chicken, and held it out to him for a moment before slipping it into my mouth. He grinned back, and then frowned and said something to his companions.

Having been through this before, I knew what was puzzling them: I was using the chop-sticks in my left hand. I held up the empty sticks, clicked them together, and then bent over the rest of my meal.

The dishes contained neither dog nor rat, so far as I could tell. The soup held a tangle of chicken’s feet, by no means the strangest foodstuff I had been faced with in recent months. The waiter watched surreptitiously until he had seen me suck the flesh from the bones in one quick between-the-teeth motion, then smiled widely. The other bowls appeared to be largely vegetable, although his English got us no further than the aubergine, which he called by the American name, “eggplant.” One dish was hot enough to bring sweat to my face, the second was heavy with garlic and tiny black beans, the third both tangy and sweet.

I paid, slid a generous tip beneath the side of my plate, and was halfway out of the door before I recalled my reasons for coming to Chinatown. With the experience of the impatient shopkeepers in mind, I hesitated briefly before I ducked back into the warm, fragrant room. The waiter again greeted me with raised eyebrows. When I took out the framed photograph and explained what I wanted, the eyebrows went down and the face closed. He handed it back to me with scarcely a glance.