Locked Rooms Part 7

"Oh yes, I have. And cast out a hundred lines of enquiry, with no result."

"Yet you have never formulated a theory as to their deaths?" Holmes put it more as an accusation than a statement, and eyed him over the top of his gla.s.s.

The bookseller smiled. "I did not say that."

"Aha!"

"Yes. However, until this good lady appeared in my store this afternoon, there seemed little I could do about it."

"Wait, are you saying that I know anything about their deaths?" G.o.d, not another gap in my mind! Or was he saying-no, surely he couldn't think that I, a fifteen-year-old girl, would have come to Chinatown with a gun to do away with the family servants. To say nothing of the fact that in February of 1915, I'd been in England, on the verge of meeting Sherlock Holmes.

"No, of course not. But I have come to wonder if the actions of your parents might not have, unwittingly and posthumously, contributed to the deaths of my own."

Before I could summon speech from my dropped jaw, a rap at the door indicated the arrival of our meal. The distribution of linen and plates suspended conversation for a time, and the momentum of the actions and the odours from beneath the silver lids took us halfway through the meal. But eventually, I laid down my fork and said to the little man opposite me, "I think you need to explain how the Russell family brought killers to your door."

"It is a complex puzzle," he began, "and I do not have all of its parts. But I will fasten together the pieces that I have, and you can tell me what design you see.

"The earthquake was the centre, April the eighteenth, 1906. But the story of our two families had its beginnings a number of years before that. And, I believe, its endings."

Chapter Seven.

The man who would later be known as Micah by a family of mixed American-English, Christian-Jewish heritage was nineteen years old when he sailed from China with a s.h.i.+pload of his countrymen in 1877. Mai Long Kwo was an educated boy with an unfortunate interest in politics and the more unfortunate habit of allowing his hot blood to speak up when he should not. His family sc.r.a.ped together the fare and prayed that, by the time he had earned enough to return, his nature would have cooled and the memories of the authorities would have faded.

Long Kwo, known to his employers as Mike Long, worked as a paid slave for twelve years on the railroad and the docks, sharing rooms with other men in houses that had neither plumbing nor gas lighting. But because he did not gamble or drink, because he worked hard and had learnt to keep his mouth shut, his money belt grew thick, and by 1890 he had migrated to San Francisco and sent home for a wife.

It was a difficult time for a man to send for a wife. Five years after Long had arrived, the American government had established what it called the Exclusion Act, which reduced the numbers of Oriental immigrants effectively to none; after eight years, there was no sign of the Act being loosened. In the 1890s, this meant that the only practical means of bringing in a Chinese woman was on a smuggler's boat.

It took Long a while to find a smuggler who could be trusted with both money and wife, and a while longer for Long's family to locate a bride they could afford for their distant son. What they came up with was Mah Wan, a young woman who looked frankly like a peasant: tall and strong, with unbound feet, a plain face, and a questionable horoscope. However, she was known to be a hard worker, and her father was willing to risk her on the high seas. She sailed for Gold Mountain, as the land was known, in the spring of 1891, arriving on the tail of a storm that left her and the other would-be immigrants more dead than alive. They came ash.o.r.e on a moonlit night in pounding surf, heaved bodily into the small boats and rowed ash.o.r.e.

One of Mah's companions took one look at the dark figures standing on the beach and cried aloud, and would have dissolved into hysterics but for the hard slap one of the sailors delivered. Mah herself, filthy, terrified, and weak from seasickness, nonetheless managed to keep her spine straight and her feet underneath her.

The figures moved forward and began to divide up the immigrants-six women, four men. In seconds, it seemed, they were scattering, and Mah looked at the man who was left.

"Long Kwo?" she said hesitantly.

"Yes," said a voice, "come now, we must get off the beach before we are seen."

Obediently, she followed, stumbling over something on the invisible sand and nearly dropping the precious bundle she had guarded all this way. He stopped, and to her immense surprise took the bundle and seized her hand, guiding her to the road.

A half-hour's walk brought them to a dark house. Long Kwo led her to the back door and knocked quietly. It opened, and a small person let them in. When the door was shut again, the person lit an oil lamp, and Mah saw that it was a woman-a white woman.

This peculiar figure led them to a room, handed Long Kwo the lamp, and walked away.

He put the lamp on the room's shaky wooden table, then turned hesitantly to face his bride.

He saw a thin, pale woman as tall as he was, her hair marked by threads of premature grey, with more intelligence than most men would care for looking out of her dark eyes. She in turn saw a man a little rougher, and older, than she had been told to expect. He was wearing a Western-style suit, but it fit him ill; looking closely, she wondered if he could indeed read and write as she had been informed.

"There is hot water and a bath," he told her. "And cold rice and tea, unless you wish American food. I don't recommend it."

"Thank you."

"Tomorrow we will go to San Francisco, and you can have some proper food."

"Hot water is better," she said, and to her surprise, his face lit up.

"I thought you might want it. I remember all too clearly my own trip, and that wasn't with smugglers."

The next day, clean and dressed in the unfamiliar Western clothing he had brought for her, Mah and her bridegroom continued their illicit journey to the city. Before the day was out, Mah had seen his worth and been rea.s.sured. This man she was bound to was unfailingly polite to her. When he spoke to the white man who drove them in the man's own tongue, the driver, like the woman the night before, understood without a problem. And when they climbed out of the closed truck, she was in a place where the people had familiar faces and the air smelt almost normal.

The rooms he took her to were clean, if spa.r.s.ely furnished, and held a surprisingly large number of books in both Chinese and foreign writing. And he might appear rough, but he was in fact so gentle as to be almost shy, and she found herself telling him that she was able to read, a little, forgetting momentarily that her mother and father had been adamant that she was not to let slip the admission until the marriage had been legally formalised.

Both were relieved, and satisfied, and the two strangers set about forming a partners.h.i.+p.

There was much work to be had in San Francisco, if one did not mind sweat and dirt. The city was growing so fast it seemed to be tumbling over itself, and Long Kwo's mastery of the white man's language meant that he was often chosen to supervise the crews of workmen.

Mah was slower to learn English, but learn she did, and work she did. The money was steady. They bought a house, a building with a shop on the ground floor to give an income, and they made themselves a part of the tight community of Chinatown.

The only thing they did not have was a child.

After nine years of marriage, not one of Mah's pregnancies had spent more than three months in her womb. She had been sad and angry at first, and frightened that her husband would put her away. But Long seemed honestly not to mind, and gradually she became resigned to their state.

And then in the closing weeks of the Western year 1899, a woman in their apartment building died, leaving her seven-year-old son an orphan in fact where before he had been one in practice. The woman had no relatives, and her dead husband, too, had been alone in this country, but still, had the boy been a more attractive proposition, he would have been welcomed in any of several homes. However, the child was small and bent, scrawny from neglect, and he looked at a person strangely-in part this was his habit of squinting, but also a sort of aloof manner, as if despite his unprepossessing exterior, he looked upon the adults around him and found them wanting.

But Mah rather liked the child. He was well mannered, other than the look of superiority, and intelligent. Which, she reflected, might account for the look as well.

They talked it over, went before the community a.s.sociation responsible for orphans, and offered the boy a home. Their friends argued with them, saying that there was something very wrong with the child, that the boy must have attracted the evil eye somehow, to be so consistently cursed, and that he would bring his disastrous heritage with him. Mah's soft heart could be understood, but surely Long could see that the best place for the child was a nice anonymous orphanage? His friends' arguments, however, fell on ears that had been deafened by the faint ring of hope in his wife's voice. Long determined to go ahead; his friends and neighbours shook their heads, saying that his weakness for injured creatures would get him into trouble.

With spectacles, the boy's squint went away; with affection and stability, the superior gaze faded. Nothing much could be done about the boy's stature and crooked back, although good food, corrective shoes, and a regimen of traditional exercises helped, but in the end, it did not matter. He was very bright, and with a little luck and a lot of planning, he might not have to depend on manual labour for a living.

School was easy enough, for the teachers in the Chinese school appreciated a student who did his work and more. And with care, the family savings would stretch to teacher-training college, and the boy would teach others, not carry loads like his adoptive father or scrub floors and iron s.h.i.+rts like his mother.

Four years later, the G.o.ds decided to intervene in the family fortunes.

Divine whim being by its nature both capricious and deceptive, the intervention began with catastrophe. One foggy morning in June 1902, when Long was working with a gang of brick-layers on the third story of a new building, the prophecy concerning his disastrous susceptibility to small, weak creatures was fulfilled. For some reason, a mother cat had decided to s.h.i.+ft her litter during the night. And since cats, like ants, have a habit of tracing an impossibly labyrinthine path to their goal, this one had wound her way up some planks, dropped into a half-finished chimney, and come to a rest inside a wall that was due to be bricked in that day. The man with the brick in one hand and a laden trowel in the other had heard the rustle and faint mewing sound, and paused to peer in.

No one particularly wanted to leave the cats inside the wall, but stopping work to dig them out risked getting them all fired. The brick-layer went on with his job, but slowly, sending his hod-carrier to fetch Long who, while not exactly a boss, had a margin more authority than the man with the brick in his hand.

Long came, and saw that, short of tearing down the previous day's work, the only way to reach the litter was from the scaffolding on the outside of the building. And being the tallest man on the crew, his long arms were the clear candidates for the rescue operation.

Mother and two kits were soon in a burlap sack. He was stretching for the third, fingers out and brus.h.i.+ng the tantalising softness that was hissing furiously from a niche just beyond his reach, when the board of the precarious scaffolding jerked, trembled for a moment, then slid with a sickening airiness into s.p.a.ce. Arms flung out to catch at the framework of lashed-together boards scrabbled briefly at the fog-slick surfaces, then gave way, clawing a path through the intervening structure until Long finally smashed down on a surface that did not give. He lay on his back, staring up at the faraway faces of his horrified coworkers, at the slowing sway of the traitorous scaffolding, at the grey of the sky above, wondering if this was what the transition into death was like.

He waited for the shock of injury to drift away into the afterlife, but it did not. And then he heard the yowl of the mother cat, fighting her terrified way out of the bag, and somehow the noise told him that no, he was not yet dead.

The fall hadn't killed him, miraculously enough, or even crippled him. It hadn't snapped his spine or crushed his skull or ruptured some vital inner organ. It had dislocated three fingers and broken six bones-both those of his left forearm, one in his right ankle, two ribs, and his left collarbone-but the healer who pressed the expensive herbs on Mah a.s.sured them that he would heal.

And he did, slowly, although it was a month before he could hook a pair of crutches under his arms and hobble from one side of the apartment to the other. And two months before his leg enabled him to negotiate the stairs and stand on the street again.

Mah worked all the hours she could, and twelve-year-old Tom, strong despite his stature and the twist in his spine, was hired by the downstairs grocer to make deliveries all that summer. Still they went into debt to the money-lender. When the school year started up again, Tom demanded to keep working for the greengrocer, but Long was even more adamant that the boy needed to be in school, and his edict carried. Tom did work after school and on the weekends, but only on condition that his homework got done as well.

In October, Long began to look for employment, but building crews wanted the able-bodied and offices the formally educated. He picked up a few hours a week keeping the grocer's accounts, and tutored some men in English, but it was not enough. The money-lenders bit deep, and deeper.

The rains came, and if California in November was not as cold as China had been, nonetheless the air in an underheated apartment chilled the bones, especially bones that had been broken eighteen weeks before. On the days he did not have work, Long often walked, with an idea that he was building his strength. He also kept his eye out for potential jobs, along the docks or in the industrial edges of the town, although he was wary about the shopping centre, and avoided the residential areas a.s.siduously: A forty-four-year-old man with a gimpy leg would be easy prey for a gang of toughs.

One Sat.u.r.day in late November, Tom came upstairs from the greengrocer's and told his father that he had been asked to deliver a crate of exotic vegetables clear the other end of the city, all the way out at the western sh.o.r.e. The boy was both excited and apprehensive about the lengthy expedition, and Long offered to accompany him. In fact, he even convinced the grocer to throw in a second cross-town street-car fare, to ensure that the produce would arrive without mishap. The month before, another, older delivery boy had been set upon by a gang of white boys, leaving the fruit he had been carrying crushed and worthless. Even limping, Long's presence might serve to deter the vandals.

The trip went smoothly, other than a few disapproving glances. And the restaurant at the end of the world was so pleased at the freshness of the crate's contents that the cook gave Tom a dime tip and two thick sandwiches. Father and son took the food down to the beach at the foot of the cliffs, settling in against the sea wall for shelter.

It was a cold afternoon, the wind fitful from the previous day's storm, the waves erratic against the cliff. Although the Playland carnival rides were going full-strength, there were few other beachgoers that day to object to a Chinese boy. Tom happily stuffed the remnants of his sandwich into his mouth and ran off to see what the waves had thrown up. He stopped regularly to swipe his gla.s.ses clean on his s.h.i.+rt-tail, and squatted occasionally to examine some treasure or other.

Another family was making its slow way up the beach in their direction. They were white people: a tall man with that yellow hair some of them possessed and, behind a pair of gold spectacles, the peculiar blue eyes that often went with the hair; a woman with dark eyes and tendrils of normal-coloured hair blowing out from under her warm hat; between them, half hidden between the woman's dark red skirt and the father's tall legs, toddled a young child. The father had taken off his hat and tucked it under his arm against the wind. The man and the woman, both of them warmly bundled, were talking and watching the ground. The woman, too, bent from time to time, holding up whatever small thing she had found to show to the man or the child.

They did not see Tom; Tom did not see them; the two paths were set to coincide. And although Long did not worry that this man would perform any act of actual violence against the boy, he did not want his son's day ruined by a white man's crus.h.i.+ng remark. So he got to his feet, as if his limping gait might actually interrupt the meeting.

To his relief, however, the progress of the trio was broken when the child's small foot caught on a length of kelp and she was sent sprawling face-first into the sand. Both parents lifted her, brushed her off, comforted her. The father held her to his chest and seemed to be engaging her in conversation, which made Long warm to him: White men so seldom talked with their children. And then the father turned away from the sea, carrying the child to the shelter of the sea wall. Long could not hear her, but he could tell when she laughed, and he was smiling himself when the father sat down with his great arms wrapped around her slim, well-padded body.

The woman, meanwhile, had been distracted by the approach of Tom. Long's face twisted in concern and he strode as quickly as he could out onto the damp sand, but half a dozen steps and he slowed again. The woman said something to Tom, but whatever her greeting, it had been friendly, and Tom answered her by holding out something in his hand. She leant over to examine it, and the two discussed it for a while. She must have asked where he had come upon the object, because Long saw his son's arm go out to point up the beach towards the rocks. The woman straightened to look, and then she nodded at the boy. They both continued in their original directions, Tom down the beach, the white woman in the direction of the cliffs; in a minute she was pa.s.sing between Long and the water, greeting him with a polite nod before her eyes returned to the rocks.

It happened so fast that, if Long had paused even an instant to consider his actions, he would have been too late. The long-skirted figure strolled around the spit of boulders, comfortably above (or so she thought) the waves that broke and sank into the sand eight or ten feet away from her boots. But on this sea, the waves were unpredictable, and turning one's back on the water invited that seventh wave, or seventieth-the big one. The woman had bent to study something in the lee of the boulder or she might have noticed the uncharacteristic retreat of the waters, sucked back to feed a growing swell like the lungs of a man preparing to shout. The husband saw the danger-Long heard the man behind him, his call faint and s.n.a.t.c.hed away by the wind. But the woman remained oblivious, the wave built and swelled, and Long stumbled into a run, ignoring the pain in his leg.

"Miss!" he screamed. "Miss, come away, oh-"

But the great wave was already surging on, its summoned waters rising, cresting to hurl itself at the sh.o.r.e. Its ridge began to show white, the cap dwarfing the woman even as she stood upright, stared in alarm at Long with his lurching run and flailing arms, then whirled to see what threat lay behind her. The monster wave leapt at her like a falling wall, like the slabs of pavement at the base of the scaffolding. It pounced and scooped her up and hurled her over the small spit like a twig-a booted foot and a swirl of red skirt above the white foam the only signs of her as she skidded over the rocks and onto the sand, then turned, tumbling and gaining speed as the weight of the water sucked her down to the bowl of the ocean.

Long saw only a flash of red in the turmoil of foam and launched himself at it. The fingers of his right hand met only liquid grit and the bite of rock; his left felt the tease of wet fabric darting rapidly past them and he grabbed hard.

Even with two of them struggling, even with four legs and two sets of arms digging into the sand and clawing at the rocks, the ocean nearly had them. Long's heels dug in first, came to rest with a jolt against a half-buried outcrop of rock, and the sudden jar of the woman's weight shot a bolt of hot pain up his arm. The half-healed collarbone snapped; he cried out, but he did not let go, his fingers clenched into the wet fabric as he prayed that the seams did not give way, that his muscles not fail, that his bones . . . And then the predatory water turned its back on its prey, retreating into the sand; out of its foam appeared a tangle of red skirts and undergarments, a moving tangle as the woman choked and pushed herself upright against the immense weight of her sodden clothing. Long staggered upright, curled his right arm around her waist, and hauled her up into the air and away from the greedy fingers of the waves.

They collapsed onto sand that was damp but not wet, the woman retching and crying, blood and hair casting red-and-black fingers across her face as she fought to free her arms from the ripped and constricting garments. Only when he saw that she was safe did Long sink to his knees, gagging up quant.i.ties of sea water.

The husband was there then, the little girl in his arms screaming with alarm at their startling flight across the sand and the state of her mother and this strange man, both of whom were bleeding and making frightening noises. After a minute, Tom arrived, stark-faced, bending over his father, dabbing at Long's b.l.o.o.d.y hand with his schoolboy handkerchief.

Slowly, the woman's vomiting pa.s.sed, to be replaced by deep shudders of cold and shock. The husband, satisfied at last that her bleeding was superficial and her skull and bones unbroken, dashed tears of relief from his eyes and lowered the child down to her mother's lap, where the two clung to each other. He glanced over his shoulder to measure the distance to the road, then looked at his wife's rescuer; taking in Long's pinched expression and the care with which his right hand was cradling the other elbow, the pale eyes s.h.i.+fted from relief back into alarm.

"You're hurt."

English was an effort, but Long managed to retrieve the words. "Old injury, sir. It will heal."

"You must see a doctor. Do you live around here?"

Tom answered. "We live in Chinatown."

"Then you'll have to come with us in the car." Long tried to protest, but the man was already speaking to the child, his voice measured and rea.s.suring. "Mary, my brave girl, I need you to help me. Your mama's all wet and cold and she needs me to carry her to the car. This nice man here hurt himself helping Mama; can you take care of him and his boy? Do you think you can bring them to the car for me?"

The child's pale eyes considered the situation, and then she clambered out of her mother's sodden embrace and extended her hand to Tom. The man swung his wife up easily, waited until Tom had got his father upright, and led the way across the sand.

It was Tom's first ride in a motorcar, and he was torn between the softness of the upholstery and the hisses his father let out, like a prodded kettle, every time the car b.u.mped and swayed. At the end of the ride, the white man pulled into the drive of a house so grand Tom wondered if he was the mayor. He turned off the motor and trotted around to lift his protesting wife out of her seat and carry her to the door, which opened an instant before they reached it. They vanished inside; a stern-looking white woman peered out of the doorway, and appeared to be coming out until a command from within made her hesitate. She said something, at which a voice so sharp it could be heard from the car made her turn and retreat inside, leaving Tom, his father, and the little girl seated in the car.

Child and boy looked at each other in the silence, self-contained blue eyes meeting apprehensive black ones.

"What's your name?" she asked. Behind the piping lisp of youth, her voice sounded like her mother's, some kind of accent, Tom thought.

"My name is Tom."

"Mine's Mary. Is your papa okay?"

"He hurt his shoulder in a fall a while ago. I think he's hurt it again helping your mother."

The pale gaze travelled from the cradled arm to the Chinese face. "I'm sorry," she said.

Long had to smile at her seriousness-he did not know young children well, Tom having come to him half-grown, and the size of Western infants always confused him, but despite her fluent speech he didn't think this one could be older than three. "It will be fine, missy," he rea.s.sured her.

"Does it hurt?"

"A little, yes."

"My papa will make it better for you," she said, without a doubt in the world. "Would you like to come in?"

"I think your father will have someone take us home," Long said. He couldn't afford any more doctors, and in any case there was little to do but strap the shoulder and keep it still. He just wished the man would hurry; the sun had gone and his clothes were soaked. He stifled a s.h.i.+ver, then grunted at the effects the motion had on his grating bones; the child saw, and frowned.

"Are you cold?" she asked, and without waiting for an answer, stood and pulled herself over the front seat, balancing over the seat with her feet dangling free while she stretched down, then slid back clutching the corner of the plaid travelling-rug the man had wrapped around his wife. Ignoring Long's protests, she arranged it over him, tucking the thick, soft wool around his knees in a child's imitation of adult nurturing. "There," she said, admiring her handiwork, and then looked up at an approaching figure.

It was the stern woman from before, come to s.n.a.t.c.h her employer's child from the wicked Orientals. She yanked the car door open and, without sparing the Longs a glance, pointed one finger at the ground by her feet.

"Come out here." Her command brooked no argument, but to Tom's astonishment, the infant's chin came up and her eyes narrowed.

"Papa said to take care of them."

The woman's eyes flashed and she reached over Long's knees for the child. "Your father didn't intend for you to sit in a dark motor with a pair of heathen-"

"Miss MacPherson!" The male voice from behind her gave the woman pause; with a glance at the wide-eyed faces of Tom and his father, she stood back from the car door.

"The child-" was as far as she got.

"We'll be fine, Miss MacPherson. Perhaps you could go and heat some water for the doctor, and see if Philips needs any more warm bricks for my wife's feet. Thank you."

The woman hesitated on the brink of insubordination, then thought the better of it and stalked away. The blond man laid one arm across the roof of the car and leant inside, his unruly hair falling forward onto his high brow.

"Sorry about her," he said. "She becomes a bit mother-hennish. Let's get you in and comfortable. The doctor will be here in a minute."

Long tried to protest, but the man already had his hands on Long's legs to swing them to the ground. He seemed to sense which motions would be difficult for a man with a bad shoulder, and his supporting hand was there to help. In moments, the man was propping his damp, sand-clotted Chinese guest on an immense leather sofa before a fire and giving succinct orders to the servants who appeared.