Locked Rooms (39 page)

The other thing it had was a band of cloth with a red cross painted on it. Dressed as a rescue worker, GF had gone in and out of houses under the pretense of looking for injured people, when all the while he’d been robbing them blind.

I felt wild when I held that cloth in my hands and realized what it meant. Then later, I got to thinking about the problems I had, and I began to feel even worse. I was stuck with the damned box. If I gave it to the authorities and told them the honest truth, I thought that I’d probably be charged—if not with the actual stealing, then at least with aiding a felon. If I took the box away and threw it off a ferry, I risked getting caught with it red-handed, and wouldn’t that be fun to explain? Plus, if I got rid of it and GF came back to shake more money out of the Russell tree, I couldn’t use it as a threat to get rid of him—surely there’d be his finger-prints or something in that box that would—I started to write “hang him,” which is a little too close to the bone. But I couldn’t leave it where he’d put it—what would stop him from sneaking in one night and digging it up? I could take it down to the Lodge and drown it in the lake, but something about introducing that box into that setting made it feel somehow polluting.

So in the end I talked it over with my friend—I should say, my true friend—PA, and he agreed that it would be best if we just buried it again quietly and said nothing. But not in the same place—we talked about where to do it, and he had a fellow in to do some mumbo-jumbo over it, and we hid it deep, where only he and I know.

A year or so later, the gardener uncovered another box, this one with pictures of chocolates on the front. It had money in it, too, and jewelry. It also had a gun. PA and I buried it in the same place as the first, but without the gun—that I did get rid of.

The whole thing was just a disaster, and it didn’t even end with seeing the back of GF. I told my wife about it a few weeks later, which I probably shouldn’t have done—she always had some odd notions about GF, from the very first time I’d brought her home, she’d never taken to him, never liked having him around. When she heard about what he’d done, and that I’d buried his stash, she became convinced that he would return one night and do something to us, maybe even threaten the children, to get it back. I got quite hot at that, the idea that I’d be friends with such a man—it still seems to me that robbery and panicked manslaughter in the midst of anarchy is a far cry from cold-bloodedly threatening friends, but my wife is as strong-minded a person as I am, and we had words. It took me years before I could talk her into coming home again.

So there’s my story. I haven’t seen GF since, although I think he’s been around, because once in 1910 we found someone had been digging where he’d buried the two boxes. For all I know he’s dead, but I wrote a letter to his half-sister last week, saying that if he was still alive and she was in touch with him, I wanted him to know that around the end of October, the U.S. government would “know the details of an incident that took place in 1906.” The events of those days have been allowed to fade somewhat, but it was murder, after all, and it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out who GF was, if they wanted to come after him. I thought it only fair to warn him that the U. S. of A. might not be a comfortable place for him.

Like I said, he was my friend, once, and frankly I don’t know that we weren’t all pretty insane those days of the fire.

I’ve also told PA all this, and he agrees it’s best. I’ll try to keep him out of it as best I can, and I’ve long since removed all mention of him from my official documents, my will and such, even though he had nothing to do with it until it was all over.

So there it is, my life of crime. I may be over-scrupulous in revealing this, but I would not care to be put into a position involving the security of the nation with this vulnerable point in my past. If it alters the judgment of my superiors as to my fitness for the proposed position, so be it.

Yours sincerely,
Charles David Russell

October 1, 1914
San Francisco

ADDENDUM:

I leave next week for Washington, D.C., and will take the above with me to present to my superiors. I shall bury a copy with the two tin boxes as well, less for insurance than by way of explanation, should someone ever come across the incriminating contents and wonder.

The day after tomorrow, I’m going down to the Lodge, to close it up for some time. Most people here believe the war will be over in a few weeks, but I have been to Germany, I know the strength of her people, and I do not think so. I do not know if I shall ever see my beloved lake again, and I have a sentimental wish to visit it one last time before I go. My wife says she has too many things to do here in San Francisco, but I hope that she will reconsider and that she and the children will join me at the place where we have spent so many blissful days of family unity and pleasure.

I have had no word from the man I called GF, nor from his half-sister, although considering the disruption France is currently undergoing, I do not suppose that is surprising. Well, I have done my best by him, and can only hope that his life since we last met has been lived in a manner to recompense his sins.

As for my own, we shall soon see.

Signed,
Charles Russell

BOOK FIVE

Russell

Chapter Twenty-four

T
he letter was written and sent to France the third week of August,
just after the war began,” Holmes remarked. “And the accident that killed your family occurred the third of October. Even in the first month of war, mail was getting through, particularly to Paris. ‘Good Friend’ would have got the letter within a week. He could have made it back here from Paris with time to spare.”

“His friend,” I said bitterly. “A man he helped out of a tough place, a man with whom he shared a wild . . .” My voice shifted tone as my mind tore itself from the immediacy of my father’s presence and began to process the information it had been given, now and in recent days. I finished “. . . wild youth.”

“Petit Ami, or ‘PA,’ could only be Micah Long,” Holmes observed, too taken up with his own thoughts to notice my distraction, “considering the references to hiding things in the garden and the fellow’s protective ‘mumbo jumbo’ of feng shui. And as Charles Russell himself says, it shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a name for the other. Particularly after one has had a close look at the household records, in which is noted a cheque for seven thousand five hundred dollars, written just days after the earthquake. Your father seems to have held the charmingly innocent notion that changing the amount of the cheque in the letter would mislead anyone investigating the evidence of the accounts book.”

I stood up abruptly. “I have to go. I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”

I was out of there before he could stop me, striding down the streets with neither hat nor coat. I pulled the ornate bell, then banged on the door when it did not open instantly. When Jeeves appeared in the opening I pushed my way inside.

“Where’s Flo?” I demanded. “Miss Greenfield? Is she still in bed?”

The abruptness of my entrance and the lack of delicacy in my question reduced him to jerky little protests, which I overrode ruthlessly. “I need to talk to Flo this instant. Where is her room? Oh, never mind, I’ll find it myself.”

The house-maid he summoned sprinted up to me after the sixth door I had opened, and said breathlessly, “This way, miss, er, ma’am.”

I’d have found the room eventually, but I did not bother to thank the little maid, just marched past her towards the formless shape on the bed. “I’ll bring coffee!” the poor girl squeaked, and slammed the door.

“Flo!” I said loudly, shaking where I thought her shoulder would be. “Flo, wake up, right now. I don’t have time for your morning dithers. Flo!”

My shout brought her bolt upright, staring around in a panic. She dashed her hands across her eyes as if doubting their evidence. “Mary? What on earth—”

“Flo, do you know a man with a scarred face?”

“What?” It came out more like, Wha? With an effort, I resisted the impulse to slap her awake.

“A man with scars on his face, burn scars.”

“What of it?”

“God damn it, Flo, who is he?”

“My father,” she said, her pretty face screwing up in confusion. “What about him? Mary, what a state you’re in! You look like you’ve been rolling in the garden!”

I sat down abruptly on the bed, ignoring her fastidious protestations. “Your father had a scarred face?”

“Yes, it was sort of puckered, like. He got burned rescuing people in the great fire. Mary, what are you doing here? What time is it? Oh, golly,” she said, squinting at the clock on her table, “it’s not even noon. Do you know what time I hit the hay?”

“Flo, I really don’t care if you haven’t slept in a week. What did your father look like?”

“He used to be handsome once,” she replied, and settled her back against the head-board in resignation, although I watched her closely to make sure she didn’t fade into sleep again. “At least, that’s what Mummy says, and the picture she has of him is kind of dreamy, in an old-fashioned kind of a way.”

“How tall was he?”

“Oh, yes, his height. Poor Daddy, he was so sensitive about it. Used to wear shoes to make him taller. Oh, thank God!” she exclaimed as the house-maid backed in with a tray of coffee. “This feels like one of those horrible dreams you keep trying to wake up from and it drags you back.”

“Just a little more and I’ll let you go back to sleep,” I said ruthlessly. “What about a ring?”

“A ring?” she said uncertainly, her cup paused in front of her mouth.

“A pinkie ring with a stone.”

She took a gulp, gasped a little with the heat of it, then wheezed out, “How did you know that? He never used to, but when I saw him later, he had it. I always figured it meant he’d made it big after the divorce. Although it was a little flashy.”

“You mean, he didn’t wear the ring when you were small and they were still married, but he did later on? When did you see him, later?”

Her face took on a look of childish shiftiness and she glanced at the door, where the maid had just gone out. “I didn’t.”

“Flo, I know you saw him. When was it?”

“Mummy didn’t like it.”

“I won’t tell her. When?”

She let out a gusty breath. “Just every so often. After the fire, I didn’t see him for a long time, and when he came back he sort of scared me, his face I mean. But then I could see that it was him, and he told me that he’d gotten it rescuing people, so it was all right, sort of. Sad, I mean, and not nice to look at, but he was so brave and that mattered. But not to Mummy.”

“Your mother wouldn’t let you see him?”

“She didn’t like it. They had a bad divorce, you know, and later on he kept asking her for money. But I didn’t see why that should mean I couldn’t see him. He was fun, you know?”

“Do you remember what years you saw him?”

“No.”

“Flo, please. Try.”

She screwed up her face again, thinking hard. “He was here for a couple of my birthdays—that’s in September,” she added, “the twenty-fifth. He was here for my tenth, and I think my twelfth—yes, it was pretty much every other year.”

She was the same age as I, born in 1900. “And your fourteenth?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, he brought me a very pretty pearl necklace from Paris that year,” she said happily. “I told Mummy they were good fakes that a friend had gotten tired of and gave me, but they’re real, and they were from him.”

I rubbed my face, suddenly tired. Flo’s father, who had been my own father’s close friend in his youth, whose crimes during the fire had driven the final wedge between them, had been here immediately before the accident.

“Tell me,” I said, “do you know a woman, she might have been an acquaintance of your father’s, who is taller than he is by several inches, and younger, with brown hair she wears up on her head?”

As descriptions went, it did not go very far, Flo’s quizzical expression seemed to say. I began to tell her it was all right, but she surprised me.

“Not a friend, but his sister used to have long brown hair she wore up.”

“Sister? The one who owns a night-club in Paris?”

“I don’t know about that, but last I heard, she lived in Paris. She was actually his half-sister, that’s what he told me, a lot younger than him. Didn’t look a bit like him, and Daddy kind of flirted with her, which was a bit strange. Still, she was nice enough to me, sent me pretty things to wear. When Mummy didn’t catch them and take them from me,” she said, and yawned. She added, “Although she must be some kind of old maid, to be so devoted to her half-brother. Hung on his every word.”

The “sister” sounded less and less like a blood relation, but I suppose it hardly mattered. “Do you have a photograph of either of them?”

“Sure, why? Mary, what is going on?”

I thought that I preferred her stupefied by sleep.

“I think your father may have been involved in something criminal.”

“Oh, bunk! Have you been talking with Mummy? She’s got crime on the brain when it comes to Daddy.”

“No, I haven’t spoken to your mother. May I see the pictures?”

I thought that the only hope was if I did not pause for explanations, but simply overwhelmed her with peremptory demands. It worked, in that it got her out of bed to pad in her pyjamas over to her childhood book-shelves and draw out a picture album.

She’d hidden the photos of her father behind harmless snapshots of friends and holiday scenery. One of him, young and handsome, with hair as light as my father’s (blond hair on a guest-room pillow, the machinery in the back of my mind noted: blond enough that his face would not show much of a stubble some days after it had been burnt) holding a black-haired baby girl in his arms: Flo had her mother’s hair. The second photograph showed Robert Greenfield some years later, turning his scarred face slightly away from the camera as he lay on a deck-chair with some stretch of the Mediterranean behind him; a third showed him later yet, his body beginning to thicken and his hairline receding, standing beside a handsome, somewhat taller woman dressed in pre-war fashion—but when I took my eyes from their figures to study the background, my knees gave way and I had to fumble for a chair.

The photograph had been taken at the Lodge.

“Who’s she?” I asked Flo, although I thought I knew already.

Flo squinted at the photo. “That’s Aunt Rosa. Daddy’s half-sister. She came to California a couple of times. Look at that hat—this must’ve been taken before the earthquake.”

“When was her other visit?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I was maybe eight or nine. Yes, that was when Daddy went away.”

(“Looked familiar,” Mr Gordimer had told me—he had in fact seen her before, nearly twenty years earlier.)

Flo pressed other snapshots into my hands and I was dimly aware of glancing at them, but when I looked up again she had gone back to her coffee and was sitting cross-legged on the bed, brushing her hair vigorously.

“I’m going to borrow this one, Flo,” I said.

“Ninety-three, ninety-four,” she chanted.

I put the others on top of the album that lay on the shelf and walked towards the door. Her hair-brush clattered to the floor as she jumped off the bed and came after me.

“No, you can’t borrow anything if you don’t tell me why you want it. Here, give it back.”

She made to grab it from me, but I held it out of her reach, looked straight into her eyes, and said, “Don’t.”

She took a sharp step back, her eyes going wide and hurt at the force of my tone. “I’ll return it,” I said, and walked out.

I heard her call my name as I went down the stairs, but I did not stop. Jeeves managed to get the door open before I could touch the handle, and I trotted down the steps, not in the least surprised to find Holmes seated on the wall beside the entrance gate, a slim book in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

He watched me come down the drive, and when I handed him the photograph, all he said was, “Her father?”

“And a woman, who may or may not be the half-sister he claims. She runs a cabaret in Paris; he’s lived there since around 1908.”

“Very good,” he said. “Now we have a chance to lay hands on them.”

“If we’re going to talk to the police, I think I ought to bathe first. I don’t look like the most reputable individual.”

“Let us go by the house on the way to the hotel and see if Long and Hammett are still there.”

We set off walking, but on reaching the next street a taxi went past, slow and vacant. Holmes put up his hand and we climbed in, and he had the driver go past the house to fetch the other two men. Hammett came out with a bundle in his arms, wrapped in a torn piece of dust-cloth. When he settled in, he said, “I didn’t know that you’d want to leave this in the house. If you don’t want to trust the hotel safe, I can recommend a nice discreet bank for you.”

On the way, Holmes asked the driver to stop at a photographic shop around the corner from the St Francis.

“You don’t think we should give the photograph to the police?” I asked him.

“I’d prefer to have a copy of our own first.”

“Or perhaps a number of copies,” I said.

“Quite.”

The driver paused at the edge of traffic for Holmes to run inside; he was back in moments. Once at the St Francis, as I turned on the taps in the bath-tub and went in and out of the rooms with my clean clothing, I listened to the three men discussing the case over the lunch that had been sent up. I shut off the taps and lowered myself into the hot water, lying on my back and allowing my head to submerge until only my face stood above the surface.

Alone at last with nothing but my breathing, I pulled out of my mind the small treasure Holmes and Hammett had given me the night before, and looked at it.

The brake rod had been cut.

Fourteen-year-old Mary Russell had not sent the motor off the cliff. Mary Russell’s argument with her brother had absolutely nothing to do with it. The brake rod had been sawed nearly through and when my father had pressed his foot against the pedal to slow the car at the top of the hill, the rod had snapped and the motorcar had swerved to the right, directly at the abyss.

My only sin was being a survivor.

And survival, I thought, might be something I could live with.

After a while I raised my head above the water, and as I scrubbed the grime off my ankles and hands, I listened to the conversation in the next room, following the points of the discussion as they came up, one at a time.