Locked Rooms (21 page)

He shook off the distracting thought, and shifted the glass to one side.

Only to find, on a chair at the woman’s side, feet dangling and a book in her lap, his wife as a small child. Her blonde hair was a bird’s-nest of curls, and she was as utterly oblivious to her surroundings as ever she was when similarly bent over one of her Hebrew texts. His glass lingered here even longer before he tore it away and moved on.

The only indications of a younger sibling were the small tin cup and spoon piled with the other plates and a silver rattle discarded atop a sack of flour, although the closed tent door suggested a sleeping child within. Some days had clearly passed since the first photograph of the tent city—the wear on the grass alone told him that—and in that time, standards had relaxed somewhat, yet paradoxically others had asserted themselves. Thus, hats and even skirts had given way to head-ties and the occasional trousers, and drying laundry peeped from the tie-ropes as the distance between park (with its water supply and living quarters) and home (where laundry might be decently hung to dry) grew ever more onerous; however, at the same time the demarcations between one family’s quarters and the next had become more formalised: chairs lined up along the agreed-to boundaries, facing inward to the informal court-yard before each tent; one such division had even been neatly drawn with a line of white pebbles. “Streets” had formed themselves between the ranks of outdoor “drawing rooms”; children played there, a woman with a bucket of water walked away from the camera, and a man approached.

Holmes’ interest quickened again, and he moved the glass over the distant figure. What came into focus was a tall, light-haired man with a moustache, eerily familiar despite his gender. His spectacles caught the light, his bowler hat blurred slightly as he returned it to his head, having raised it to the woman with the bucket. The photographer must have called his subjects to attention in some manner because several faces were raised towards the lens, including that of the man trudging up the hill.

The blond man’s twill trousers were spattered with dark stains and one knee looked in need of mending. On his upper body he wore only a shirt, the collar missing, sleeves rolled up his forearms to reveal a clean bandage on one wrist. He appeared to hold himself erect by will alone, and Holmes did not need to see his face to know that it wore the look of a soldier in the trenches, the gaze both interior and far away. This man ached with fatigue and with the things he had witnessed, longed to collapse into sleep for a day and a night, yet equally clearly he was only here temporarily, for his shoulders were braced against the labours to come.

Speaking over his shoulder, Holmes said, “I should like to borrow one of these photographs, if I may? I shall take care to return it undamaged.”

“Certainly,” the old woman replied.

Only then did Holmes stand upright, taking the album back to the table to allow her to turn the remaining pages, none of which proved of any interest to him. He turned back to the picture showing Judith Russell, eased it out of its mounts, and laid it before the old woman.

“That is Judith Russell. What can you tell me about her?”

“A very fine young woman, full of spirit. English, she was—you’d have expected her to be one of those who found the conditions trying, who burst into tears and wrung their hands uselessly at the merest nothing. I remember, one silly young thing found lice in her son’s hair a few days after the fire, and collapsed into utter hysterics. And it was Mrs Russell with her fancy accent who put the girl back together again, getting her calm, sending for the barber, helping her boil the child’s bedding. Most of the families left fairly quickly, as soon as they could find other arrangements and store their valuables. Others moved in as soon as the tents went vacant, of course—persons whose homes were in areas less prosperous than Pacific Heights.” She laughed suddenly, her eyes sparkling. “I remember when a bevy of ladies of the evening from the Tenderloin arrived and began to set up . . . Well, they were not made welcome by the local residents, and were sent on their way. A pity, really, they were much more cheerful than my neighbours by that point.”

“Miss Adderley, do you recall any incident in particular, involving a strange man coming to the Russell tent?”

“There may have been any number—my tent was in a different area of the park, and after the first days I spent most of my time down in neighbourhoods that needed help, serving soup and distributing bread.”

“I understand,” he said, taking care not to show disappointment. However, she was not finished.

“There was a thing I heard about, walking one morning with some of the women down to where the bread was distributed. I am not absolutely certain that it concerned the Russells, you understand, but I believe it may have. It had happened the previous evening, three or four days after the earthquake itself, because the fire was out and the rain had just started. Might that have been the Sunday? Yes, I believe so. At first, the rains were welcome—we gathered it in buckets, the children ran about wildly, all we ladies washed our hair. But that evening, very early, everyone retreated inside their tents—what with the huge relief of knowing that the fires were at an end, and the blessedness of having shelter, and general exhaustion, this visitor came and found most everyone inside, so that he’d had to ask his way. He stopped at one tent, and the woman’s children were asleep so she stepped outside to answer him quietly. She said he was dressed like a tramp, all dirt and mismatched garments. However, that would have described most of us by that time, and underneath everything he seemed polite and nicely spoken, so when he asked where Charles Russell might be found, she directed him to the Russells’ tent and stood in her door-way to see that he found the right one.

“As soon as she heard the little girl scream, she knew what had happened, and she felt just terrible. Not to have warned the man first, you see. He’d very clearly been caught in a fire, possibly some sort of explosion—you know how a puff of burning gasoline can singe off eyelashes? Well, that’s what had happened to this poor fellow. Swollen eyes, raw-looking skin, and no hair at all, lashes, brows, and even the front part of his head that his hat didn’t cover. And he’d smeared some sort of white ointment on it as well—he startled this lady, so he must have scared the little Russell girl half to death. I can’t think . . . Why are you smiling?”

“My . . . client remembered what she called a ‘faceless man.’ I think you’ve just found him for me.”

“An apt description, I should think. We depend largely on hair for facial definition, do we not?”

“What about his beard?”

“I don’t know that she mentioned a beard. But then, lack of a beard is not as startling as a lack of eyebrows, is it?”

No, thought Holmes, but it would take severe burns indeed to prevent a man’s beard from growing in, and a man “all dirt and mismatched garments” would be unlikely to have visited a barber for a shave—to say nothing of submitting his burns to that degree of discomfort. Which would suggest that either the burns were recently acquired (and this was twenty-four hours after the fires were quenched), or that Russell’s “faceless man” was a person without much of a beard in the first place.

Miss Adderley had begun to flag. Her back was as straight as ever, but the creases beside her mouth were growing pronounced and she had interlaced her fingers as if to keep them from trembling. Any moment the maid would burst in and send him packing.

Best to be found already preparing to leave.

He slid the photograph carefully into his breast pocket. “I shall bring this back as soon as I’ve had it copied.”

“Take your time, Mr Holmes. And feel free to come back anytime. You will generally find me at home.”

“May I also ask, Miss Adderley, do you know of any other persons from the tent village who might still live in the city?”

“Off-hand, I can’t think of any,” she said, her voice quivering faintly with tiredness.

“Perhaps you’ll think of someone. If you do, a note to the St Francis will reach me.”

He rose and bent over her hand like a courtier, then walked across the quiet room to the door. It opened before he could lay his hand on the knob, but his departure was interrupted by the thin voice from behind him.

“She’s not your client, is she? Is she your wife, or your . . . ‘friend’?”

“Both,” Holmes told her.

The old eyes closed, and the withered lips curved up at the corners.

“Good,” she said.

Chapter Fourteen

H
olmes strode fast along the streets, the houses around him grow
ing obscure with dusk and incoming mist. A fog-horn had begun its periodic moan from the north and the passing motorcars had lit their head-lamps. He turned the corner, his eyes seeking out the jungle-shrouded house, expecting to see the windows dark and to find the doors locked tight: He’d been longer with Miss Adderley than he had intended.

However, the narrow window set into the front door glowed dully, and when he stood before it he could see the light coming from the back of the house. He tried the knob, and gave an approving grunt: At least she’d had the sense to lock it.

He rapped one knuckle onto the door and waited, long enough to be visited by a brief pulse of alarm. His hand was going out for the raucous bell when the light dimmed as Russell stepped into the door-way of her father’s library. She had, inevitably, a book in her hand, closed over one finger as she walked down the hall-way to work the bolts on the door.

“Hullo, Holmes. I thought you’d gone back to the hotel.”

“I rather hoped you might be interested in a meal.”

“Oh. Goodness,” she said, peering over his shoulder at the gathering darkness. “It’s later than I realised. Yes, I suppose I’m more or less finished here. Let me just get a couple of things.”

Holmes ran an analytic eye over the signs of her passage through her parents’ home: The drawer in the small inlaid table near the front door was ajar; the various decorative jars and boxes inhabiting the shelves in the morning room had all been disturbed, as well as the cubby-holes and drawers of her mother’s writing desk in the front window. The blotting-paper there had even been turned over, although the stack of glass plates containing the ashes he had found and mounted looked to be untouched. She’d even shifted the furniture, with every wooden foot resting to one side of its decade long dust shadow.

He raised an eyebrow of disapproval at her haphazard methods, and followed her to the library. There his eyebrow climbed again: The room was scrubbed clean and clear of dust-cloths; the rolled-up carpets were now more or less flat on the floor. On the low table across from the fireplace, between the two leather chairs, a rough fistful of flowers from the garden had been dropped into a graceful crystal vase. The chairs had been rubbed into a gleam, and a fire laid, but not lit; probably just as well, he was thinking when she noticed the direction of his gaze.

“I was going to warm it up in here, but then it occurred to me that I ought to have the chimneys looked to first. I wouldn’t want to smoke up the place.”

“Or burn it down.”

She looked ill at the thought, although Holmes was beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be for the best: The polished chairs and laid fire, the child’s gift of flowers, suggested that she was becoming more interested in re-creating her past than she was in recalling it. He held the door for her until, reluctantly, she pulled herself away from her father’s laden desk and joined him in the hall-way. He helped her into her coat, handed her the hat and gloves from the stand, and waited while she locked the door behind them.

“You want to go to your Italian friend again, Holmes?”

“No, I’ve spent rather enough time there. I suggest we investigate the culinary exotica of Chinatown.”

Wordlessly, she turned towards Grant Avenue. They walked the evening pavements, out of the heights and across the busy thoroughfare of Van Ness, climbing again and then dropping down into the bright lights and lurid colours of the Chinese district, where the gathering mist pulled like gauze across the street-lamps and coloured lanterns.

All the way, she said not a word and kept her hands in the pockets of her coat, making no effort to take his arm. This in itself did not concern Holmes, but that she also kept her eyes on the pavement did. She appeared oblivious to threat, as if the shooting seventy-two hours earlier had happened to another woman in another place. With another person, he might have thought that she was leaving the necessities of defence to him, but she was not that person.

He felt like seizing her by the shoulders and shaking her.

Or like giving her a hard shock in a less physical manner. But he could not decide if the shock he had in mind would clarify matters for her, or only make them worse. As with any blow, once delivered it could not be retracted; and so he kept his silence, although his eyes never ceased from probing the dim, fog-soft streets around them.

Halfway down the bright cacophony of Grant Avenue, Holmes touched her elbow. “Mr Long appears both fully recovered and at his till,” he noted. “Shall we invite him to join us?”

They were, indeed, before the greengrocer’s stand, with the door to Long’s bookstore open to reveal the owner making change for a customer, moving his arm with no apparent distress. Without waiting for her approval, Holmes stepped around the displays of
bok choy
and flat Oriental peas to stick his head inside of the door. The conversation went on for two or three minutes, and then he emerged, touching her elbow again with one hand and indicating the street with the other.

“He’ll join us in half an hour, we can have a drink while we wait.”

He led her down the street to a building whose entrance was encrusted with carved dragons highlighted in gilt. Just inside the door was a tiny old woman all in black holding a clutch of large red leather menus to her breast, braced foursquare as if to guard the virtue of a granddaughter. Holmes delivered the message that they were friends of Mr Tom Long, who would be joining them in half an hour. The glittering black eyes scowled up at them, and then she turned and stumped away into what proved to be a large, warm, comfortable-looking restaurant peopled entirely by Chinese. She seated them at a table that was not visible from the front windows yet in close proximity to both front and kitchen doors, dropped two of the menus on the table, and hurried back to her post. Holmes held Russell’s chair, then took the one beside her. She opened the menu, glanced at its pages, and closed it again. It was in Chinese.

“Are you up to a cocktail,” he asked solicitously, “or would you prefer to stick to wine?”

“I’m fine,” she automatically protested. “A gin and tonic would be good.”

He ordered for them both. When their drinks were before them, she inflicted a dose of spirits onto her mistreated insides, then set down her glass sharply and announced, “I’m going down to the Lodge tomorrow.”

He arranged a look of mild surprise on his face. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“I don’t know, but I think it’s necessary.”

“Do you wish me to come?”

“I telephoned to Flo this morning, and she’d like to go—her friend Donny will drive us. We’ll be back on Wednesday; there’s some museum opening Donny wants to attend.”

“Hm,” he grunted. “I’d have thought you’d want to drive yourself.” Russell disliked being driven anywhere.

“I’m sure he’ll let me have the wheel part of the time,” she said, although Holmes, having seen the lad’s pride in that gaudy motor, had his doubts.

“How many people know of your plans?”

She fixed him with a glare. “Holmes, I know you think I’m being particularly stupid lately, but give me some credit. Neither of them know precisely where the place is, although I had to tell them roughly where we were heading. And I asked them to keep it quiet—I said I didn’t want anyone else to know, because they’d want to join us and make it more of a bash than I wanted.”

“‘Bash.’”

“You know what I mean.”

“Of course.”

“I hope you don’t mind. That I’m abandoning you here,” she said, belatedly concerned for his welfare.

“Not in the least. I have plenty to keep me busy.”

“Your Paganini research?”

“Actually, it’s proving quite intriguing. Do you know, there is a theory that Paganini was commissioned by the Duke of . . .” but between the alcohol and her own concerns, she soon stopped listening. Which was precisely what he had intended.

When the drink was half gone and her eyes had begun to glaze with boredom, he dropped the diversion and told her, “I believe I’ve identified your faceless man.” Then he corrected himself. “Not identified, perhaps, although I’ve got a lead on him.”

She stared, picked up the glass and gulped down the second half, coughed a while, then, eyes watering, asked,
“What?”

“The faceless man of your second dream. I found an elderly woman who spent some time in the park following the earthquake, and remembered your family. She also gave me the tale of a man coming to the tent city the day the rains began, which was the Sunday, who’d had his facial hair scorched off and wore some white ointment on his skin. Probably zinc oxide,” Holmes noted.

“Ointment,” she repeated, and reached for her empty glass. Holmes raised a finger to the waiter for another.

“The chap was looking for your father. He went to your tent, and his appearance frightened you. Miss Adderley’s informant remembered your shrieks.”

“My God.”

The shock—or reverence—of the phrase was tempered by the effects of alcohol on an empty stomach. She seemed scarcely to be listening as Holmes described the old lady and her establishment, the aged butler and his protective granddaughter. He did not tell her about the photograph in his breast pocket, judging that its introduction would drain any rationality from the remainder of the evening. Other than that omission, he piled every conceivable detail into the narrative, until the sheer complexity and the second drink allowed her to attain a degree of distance from his revelation.

She interrupted his description of the old lady’s shoes. “So two of the dreams depict actual events. First the earthquake, then an event shortly afterward.”

“So it would appear.”

“That would suggest that the third also refers to a concrete event. That there is an actual hidden room somewhere that I know about.”

“Of that I would not be so certain.”

“Why not?”

“The three do not run in precise parallel. The first two have powerful emotional overtones, yet the third is emotionally neutral, or even mildly reassuring. Of the first pair, the only element that changes is the description of the flying objects, but with the third, change itself is the constant factor—the details of the rooms are different each time; the only similarity in them is that only you know where the hidden apartment is to be found, only you have the key.”

“Which I don’t,” she retorted angrily. “Holmes, I tore that place apart today, attic to cellar, and didn’t find so much as an out-of-the-way broom closet. I’d have to take a wrecking hammer to it to find any more.”

He nodded: Having measured the rooms scrupulously on Wednesday morning, he would have been astonished had she found any hidden spaces larger than a few inches wide. “When you discover the dream’s message,” he told her, “I believe it will be, as it were, out of the corner of your eye, not through use of a sledge hammer and crow-bar. Ah, here comes Mr Long.”

The bookseller was being led through the room by the entrance crone, but his progress was uneven, as one table after another called its greeting and caused him to detour to shake a hand here and exchange a word there. Half the people in the restaurant seemed to know him; all greeted the small man with affection and respect. Even the elderly door-guard seemed to be smiling when they finally reached the table.

He shook hands with the only two Caucasians in the place, then turned to the old woman and began a vigorous conversation. They were joined after a minute by the waiter and, shortly afterwards, by one of the cooks from the kitchen. The discussion escalated into an apparent argument, voices climbing and gestures becoming ever wilder—Long ticking off points on his fingers, the cook’s face twisting in incredulity. Then it ended as abruptly as it had begun. Waiter, woman, and cook all turned on their heels and set off in separate directions, leaving Long to sit down, looking pleased.

“What did that concern?” Holmes asked.

“That? Just dinner.”

“Dinner? They weren’t asking that you remove us?”

“My goodness, why would they want that? No, we just had to settle the menu. I needed to reassure them that you did not require a slab of beef and boiled potatoes, but to assert that you did not eat pork or shellfish. I recall hearing of this religious peculiarity of your mother’s, Miss Russell, and thought perhaps it was yours as well.”

“That was very thoughtful of you,” she said.

“Not at all,” he responded, but he looked pleased as he shook out his linen table napkin and draped it across his lap. “So, have you two been busy since we met? I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to look at the feng shui book?”

“I have, actually,” she replied, dredging up intellect from the muddying effects of drink. “It presents an interesting theory of geomancy, but I have to say, it leaves out a great deal of the
practicum.
I had understood that feng shui includes the idea that a building’s . . . energies can be influenced by the judicial placement of certain items. Water, plants, mirrors and the like.”

“That is true,” Long said, “although its precepts are used not only for architecture, but for investments, farming, planning battles, and a thousand other activities. Here, let me show you.” He patted through his pockets until he found a mechanical pencil and a scrap of paper, smoothing it out on the table-cloth and sketching an octagon. He then connected each angle with the centre, and ascribed to each of the eight resulting triangles an area of influence: family, wealth, knowledge, and so on, with the all-important health at the confluence. After a few minutes, the minutiae of detail became more than even a sober Russell might have asked for, and she interrupted his explanation of the
“chien”
side of the octagon.