What am I doing here? he wondered groggily.
He couldn’t quite remember what urge or motivation had inspired him to leave the warmth of the blankets in the upstairs bedroom. His chin drooped as the weight of his furry eyelids sank down over his bleary blue eyes. The light drone of a snore began to ooze through his nasal passages. He was on the verge of collapsing into a comatose heap on the tile floor when his ears picked up on a sound coming from the far side of the room—the almost imperceptible patter of tiny feet.
With a surprised grunt, Rupert pivoted his round rump toward the back wall of the kitchen. The scampering footsteps came to a sudden halt, as if the perpetrator had sensed Rupert’s presence.
Rupert listened intently for a long eerie moment, but the room was completely silent. Perhaps it had all been a dream, he thought drowsily.
Tiptoe. Tiptoe. Creeeeeeak.
Rupert’s head jerked up, this time his senses fully alert. He slunk across the kitchen, tracking the tiptoe-er to a twofoot section of faded wallpaper. He sniffed warily along the floor next to the bottom edge of the curling fabric that covered the wall, his nose sucking up the foreign scent.
The white wires of Rupert’s whiskers quivered as he analyzed the odor, trying to identify its source. The hair along his spine spiked with caution. You never knew what kind of critter might show up here in Uncle Oscar’s old living quarters. He had learned to expect the unexpected since he and his family moved into the apartment above the Green Vase.
The intruder wasn’t a frog. Of that, Rupert was certain. After their adventures last summer, he was now intimately familiar with an amphibian’s peculiar fragrance. No, this smell was staler, fustier—the aroma of one of San Francisco’s old rundown Victorian homes, laced with the slightest twist of cheese. He had come across this scent once or twice before . . .
Rupert suddenly puffed out an excited wheeze of recognition. He knew exactly what kind of animal was hiding behind that wall. After confirming his identification with a second snorkeling intake, he licked his lips, and his back end squirmed with excitement. It was a plain old vanilla house mouse. This was a creature even
he
could handle.
Rupert’s energetic snuffling spooked the mouse, and a torrent of panicked footsteps raced across the rough boards that formed the wall’s interior framing. Rupert followed the scurrying sound along the base of the wall, his own feet thundering heavily across the tiles of the kitchen floor until he skidded to a stop at the back corner of the room.
Another long pause descended upon the kitchen as the skittering sound again fell silent.
The mouse, Rupert deduced, was trapped. A successful capture, he thought with elation, was mere seconds away.
Rupert threw his entire moon-crazed body into extracting the mouse from its hiding place. He rolled over onto his side and attacked the wall, frantically scraping his claws against the corner of the frayed wallpaper. He worked to hook the sharp curve of his toenails beneath the curling edge of the fabric until finally, with a loud
rip
, he pulled back a small section of the paper. Eagerly, he swung a paw inside the hole—and immediately retracted it.
Rupert hunched his body against the tile floor, his blue eyes crossing as his nose pulsed in confusion. He had been wrong; somehow he had miscalculated. This was no ordinary mouse.
Cautiously, Rupert backed away from the hole as a tiny creature peeked out the opening. Rupert stared at the mouse, shaking his head in disbelief.
The mouse was completely bald. Its wrinkled skin was the flushed shade of a newborn baby. The thin flaps of its round, oversized ears were nearly translucent.
Other than the trembling whiskers attached to the pointed tip of its face, there was not a single hair on its entire body.
Chapter 1
A MAN ON A BICYCLE
AS DAWN BROKE
a few hours later, a white-haired man in a wrinkled linen suit pedaled a bicycle along the city’s waterfront Embarcadero. The first edges of the rising sun stretched across the water, coloring the bay a brilliant blue, splashing light across the rolling green hills that framed the opposite shore.
There’s nothing like a crisp spring morning in San Francisco, the man thought with an admiring glance at the surrounding city. Smiling, he tilted his head back and soaked up the wet ocean scent. “It’s good to be back,” he sighed contentedly.
A light breeze tufted the thin strands of hair combed across the man’s balding crown. Two days’ growth of saltand-pepper stubble covered the lower half of his face. A bristly crag of wild flyaway eyebrows dominated the facial landscape in between.
The linen suit jacket hung loosely from the man’s short round shoulders. The front buttons of the jacket were unfastened, exposing the frayed edges of a collared white shirt and the elderly paunch of his stomach.
An elastic strap secured around the man’s lower right shin prevented the cuff of his pants from being caught in the bike’s spinning gears. The cinched-up fabric revealed an ankle-high lace-up boot, whose scuffed toe pedaled a slow circular motion in coordination with its mate to propel the bike forward.
Brief scenes of the bay flashed in the open spaces between the piers as the bike’s wide tires squished against the pavement. Beyond the barrier of the once-bustling warehouses, squawking flocks of seagulls soared acrobatically through the sky, searching the shallow water for their next bite of breakfast. Farther out, the loaded platform of a container ship slid silently past the waking city, its hulking mass and thousand-foot length dwarfing the commuter ferries and sailboats that dotted the bay.
The man’s boots dropped to the sidewalk as he braked the bike at a crosswalk and waited for a signal light to halt the mixture of taxi and commuter traffic that had begun to fill the Embarcadero’s busy thoroughfare. He released his stubby fingers from one of the rubber grips fitted over the
U
-shaped handlebars and tapped the trigger of the centermounted bell. The chipper
ring
startled a gull from its perch atop a nearby trash can.
The bike was a single-speed cruiser, painted the same simmering orange red as the Golden Gate Bridge. Sparkling reflectors had been threaded into the spokes of the wheels; a large wire basket hung beneath the bell. Designed to maximize comfort over speed, the bike’s durable frame amply supported the rider’s bulky figure. At his age, he thought as he pushed off from the curb to cross the intersection, he really couldn’t do without the extra springs beneath the cushioned seat.
The man steered the bike, slowly but deliberately, along a sidewalk that tracked the outside perimeter of a tennis club’s high green fence. He was headed toward his old familiar haunting grounds. He felt like a pigeon, his course predetermined by an innate homing instinct.
It had been almost a year since his departure from Jackson Square, and he still looked back longingly on that previous life. While it had been a tough decision to leave his home of over forty years, he’d felt he had no other choice.
He had tried, at first, to hide himself in a different part of town, but he’d abandoned that strategy after only a few weeks. Despite its international stature, San Francisco was a little city, its center spanning a meager five-by-fivemile area. Both the risk of detection and the temptation to make contact had been far too great.
And so, he had reluctantly waved good-bye to his beloved Bay Area. He’d spent the past year traveling the globe, hoping that, over time, his adversaries would move on to other intrigues, perhaps even forget about him. He’d gone south—way, way south—eventually trekking to a rustic cabin in a Patagonian fishing village near the bottom tip of South America.
As the length of his absence neared a year, he’d started a slow migration home, gradually progressing north toward the bulge of the earth’s equator. For the last three months, he’d been secluded on a remote tropical island, browning his once pasty white skin into a rosy-cheeked tan, finishing off the last preparations for this trip to San Francisco.
Now, at last, here he was, enjoying this fine glorious morning, the culmination of years of planning finally coming to fruition. Long before his inevitable exile, he’d begun plotting his return.
Tucked into one of the man’s suit pockets was a deck of freshly printed business cards. He grinned to himself, thinking of how the gold lettering stood out against the dark green pieces of paper.
“Clement Samuels,” he said softly, testing out his new alias. “Clem. Yes, Clem. I like the sound of that.”
The bike rounded the last corner of the tennis courts and turned onto Jackson Street where the sun’s early glint revealed the serene start of a typical Friday morning. Clem scanned the row of high-end antique shops as his bike passed beneath the neatly trimmed trees that lined the sidewalk. He noted one or two establishments that had changed ownership over the course of the last year, but otherwise the scene looked almost exactly the same as the day he left it—the same, that is, until he reached the storefront of a three-story building in the middle of the block. Here, he thought, things were different.
Clem hopped off the bike and leaned it against the nearest tree. He rubbed a kink in his lower back as he stared at the exterior of the Green Vase antiques shop.
He’d been aware of the initial renovations the new occupant had made to the front of the building. The crumbling facade and cracked glass windows had been torn out, replaced with a wall of crisp red bricks that ran beneath a new row of windowpanes. Several of the glass panels were embedded with the image of a slender green vase.
Stroking his chin absentmindedly, Clem surveyed the glass door that hung in the entrance. Curling wrought iron strips complemented the gold script that announced the name of the store and its current proprietor.
A pleased smile crossed the stubbled surface of his face as he reflected on the woman now in charge of the antiques shop. A mop of dark brown hair hung down past her shoulders. The thick heavy locks often slipped forward over the plastic frames of her bifocal glasses, partially obscuring her face. A painfully shy soul in her mid-thirties who kept mostly to herself, the woman and her two cats had moved into the apartment above the store not long after his escape from Jackson Square.
“Little accountant,” he murmured to himself as he shifted his attention to the interior of the Green Vase. “What have you been up to?”
Clem craned his neck, trying to see into the rear of the showroom. The once dusty space was now spotlessly clean. The wooden floorboards had been scrubbed, sanded, and refinished; the interior walls gleamed with a fresh coat of paint. The previously crowded collection of Gold Rush– era antiques had been winnowed down to a select few pieces, each one shined, polished, and laid out on a display table or bookcase for easy viewing.
Clem grunted and arched his scraggly eyebrows. The place looked almost respectable. A worried knot stitched through his abdomen. What had she done with the rest of the store’s contents? He hoped she hadn’t thrown anything away. Or worse, he thought with growing alarm, sold any important pieces.
Feeling somewhat discomforted, Clem turned away from the window and directed his gaze toward Jackson Street. He had brought himself up to date with the current configuration of the neighborhood. That was all well and good, but it wasn’t what he’d come back for.
He had always been more interested in this area’s past than its present. Squinting his eyes, he imagined away the street signs, the fancy cars—all the modern-day trappings of luxury and convenience that San Francisco’s current citizens took for granted. He created, instead, his own mental image of Jackson Square as it might have looked in the 1850s during the height of the California Gold Rush.
Despite the splendid spring sunshine, the street would have been a sea of mud, the soil still saturated from the torrential downpours of the winter months. Areas of recent landfill, like the place where he stood, were particularly treacherous, laced with sinkholes that were deep enough, according to some reports, to bury a horse neck-deep.
A weary line of recently arrived immigrants, all of them men, tromped across Clem’s vision. The group wobbled and weaved on the slick wooden clapboards that bordered the muddy road, struggling to maintain their balance, their internal equilibrium thrown off from weeks of cramped ocean travel.
The men had met one another on the steamer they’d boarded on the west coast of Panama, a destination they’d reached after taking separate ships down from New York and crossing the jungle of the Isthmus on foot. After chugging through the Golden Gate for the approach to San Francisco, the men had disembarked several hundred yards offshore. That was as close as the large ship could maneuver to the city; a blockade of listing and half-capsized boats made it too dangerous to come closer. The captains and crews of these abandoned vessels had left behind the seafaring life for the goldfields of the Sierras.
A rowboat ferried the new arrivals to a network of elongated piers that stretched out over the water. After a long hike across the precarious wooden walkways, the men finally found their first solid footing on the streets of Jackson Square, known during the Gold Rush–era as the Barbary Coast.
Clem walked his imaginary characters past the entrance to the building that now housed the Green Vase. The stale scents of beer and whiskey emanated from its makeshift saloon. He watched with a chuckle as a female catcall drew the men’s attention.
The youngest of the group blushed and quickly turned away, almost dropping the small worn satchel that contained the entirety of his earthly belongings. His fellow travelers, however, were unembarrassed to show their interest. A brutish fellow with a tobacco-stained beard stopped and leered through the doorway. His grubby hand reached into his pocket to dig out the last two coins that had survived the hazardous and expensive trip to California.