Seated, my hands holding a head that threatened to fly off, I heard footsteps approach again. They seemed too slow to be threatening, so I simply sat and took pleasure in the act of breathing. A hand came into my vision, holding a pair of glasses; my glasses. I took them, straightened them on my nose, and squinted up.
Not very far up. The man was short. And Chinese.
“You’re the bookseller.” My head hurt, raised like that, so I allowed it to fall back into my supporting hands.
“I am. Are you all right?”
“I will be. What the hell did you do that for?”
“A man across the street was aiming a pistol at you. I feared that if I merely yelled, you would turn to see and he would hit you.”
I reflected that I was probably the only woman in San Francisco who, if she heard someone yell Get down! might actually obey first and look around to ask questions later—unless, of course, the swift approach of footsteps took precedence. Still, he had no way of knowing that.
“That was a shot I heard?” The impact of shoulder to diaphragm had come simultaneously with the bang, creating a more direct link in my mind than in fact there was. I craned my neck again, trying to see him. He was holding his left shoulder, casually but firmly.
“God, you’re hit,” I exclaimed.
“An insignificant wound, I believe. If you can walk, perhaps we should do so.”
With the impetus of someone else’s blood to drive me, I staggered to my feet, stifling curses as my head swam and pounded.
By this time, three other men had come onto the street from their houses, all of them with the look of soldiers about them—men who would perceive instantly the difference between a motorcar’s back-fire and the sound of a handgun. The nearest came to where the bookseller and I stood, and asked, “Ma’am, is this fellow bothering you?”
“Oh, no, this fellow has just saved my skin, thank you. And at the cost of his own. Mister . . . I’m sorry,” I said to my rescuer, “I don’t know your name.”
He flung at me a series of Oriental syllables that found no foothold in my rattled brain, but I decided that here was not the place for proper introductions. “Yes,” I said vaguely, and looked around me, trying to remember which way my house lay. “Down here, I think. We’ll see if we can find some bandages that the mice haven’t nested in.”
Leaving three men to stare at our retreating backs, Mr Whosit and I made our wavering way up the street and around the corner to the familiar jungle-backed wall. Luckily, Holmes had left the drive gate open; in fact, he was standing in the front door-way, watching us approach.
“A bit of first aid, Holmes,” I greeted him with. “Mr Something here took a bullet for me, and needs patching up. I could use a couple of aspirin for my head-ache. And I seem to have lost another hat.”
“Why does it not surprise me that the sound of a pistol would herald the arrival of my wife,” Holmes drawled, and stood away from the door so we could enter.
Chapter Six
Holmes had better luck with the bookseller’s name, and was soon addressing the small man as Mr Long, which when I heard it caused a somewhat light-headed giggle to try to surface. I suppressed it firmly—he wasn’t that tiny, really, just far from Long—and focussed on the tasks at hand.
We were sitting in the kitchen, bright lights pulsating off the white walls, as Holmes methodically assisted our guest in removing enough of his upper garments to allow treatment. He seemed uncomfortable with my presence, so I closed my eyes against the glare.
“Clever of you to get the power on, Holmes.”
“It was simply a matter of locating the mains,” he said. “The power company had not shut it off, just the caretaker.”
“What about the water and gas?”
“I rang both companies from the watch-dog’s telephone.”
“Was Miss Grimly reassured to find you were a respectable English gentleman?” I asked.
“She telephoned to Mr Norbert’s offices before she would allow me past the threshold; her nephew stood at the ready with a baseball bat.”
“And did she have anything to offer on our intruders?”
A moment of silence served to remind me of our visitor, whose presence I had forgotten. To cover my mistake, I went on. “I took the photograph around Chinatown and must have asked a hundred or more citizens, none of whom recognised the two people. Or said they didn’t. Although I had a very fine if somewhat recherché meal in a tiny cellar café haunted entirely by Orientals, and asked them to ring the hotel if they had any information for me.” My brain, slowly subsiding into its proper setting, finally emitted an original idea, and I opened my eyes to squint at Mr Long. “One of the people whom I questioned was this gentleman, who runs a bookshop that sells, among other things, volumes on the Chinese art of feng shui. I trust I am pronouncing it correctly?” I asked. Mr Long nodded fractionally, then stifled a wince at Holmes’ ministrations; I continued. “However, he has yet to tell me what he is doing rescuing me from assassins on my doorstep.”
The bookseller stirred. “I have to say, Miss Russell, that your display of English—do they call it ‘phlegm’?—is most impressive. I would have thought most young ladies would display more of a reaction to such an attack. Unless you think, sir, that she is suffering from a concussion?”
Holmes snorted. “Her brain wouldn’t dare. No, the only time Russell becomes upset is when those near and dear to her are threatened.”
“Is this—eh!” Long grunted.
“Sorry,” Holmes muttered, and pulled more gently at the shirt.
“Is this common among the English?”
“Russell is not common among anyone. Good, it’s merely winged you in passing—no permanent damage, I shouldn’t think. Do you suppose there are any bandages in the house, Russell?”
“They would be either in the cabinet in my parents’ bath-room, or in the nursery. Do you want me to go?”
“You sit.”
So I sat, as his stride went up the stairs, and a few minutes later came down again. His search was successful, even to the presence of a bottle of Merthiolate. He sniffed it, then painted away at the bookseller’s seeping upper arm, wrapping a length of gauze around the whole and tying it off in a neat bow. He handed Mr Long back his shirt, but carried the coat over to the sink, turning on the taps with an air of experiment. Nothing.
“I can’t even offer to salvage your coat from the bloodstains,” he apologised.
“That is of no importance,” the bookseller said, gingerly inserting his arm into the ruined sleeve. Holmes moved to assist him, and between the two of them they got the man clothed without too much discomfort. The small man moved his shoulder experimentally, testing the limits of comfort, then turned to me.
“I am pleased that I could, as you say, rescue you from your assassins, but I cannot claim I came here with any such intention. No, I came to speak with you about your photograph, and as I paced the sidewalks in indecision, you came around the corner and the man with the gun showed himself. Pure felicitous accident. May I ask, are assassins a commonplace in your life?”
I might have returned his earlier question aimed at me, for his own demonstration of phlegmatic behaviour made me wonder if it was his own nature, Orientals in general, or a result of living in San Francisco, which after all was not so very far removed from its Wild West roots. But it was difficult to know how to answer his question, so I decided to consider it rhetorical rather than requiring an answer. Instead, I asked, “Why were you coming to speak with me?”
“The photograph you showed me. It is of my parents.”
“Ah,” Holmes said, and reached for his pipe.
“Mah and Micah were your mother and father?” I asked, with a dubious glance at the length of the man’s legs.
“‘Mah and Micah,’” Mr Long repeated with a faraway look on his face. “I had forgotten that. They adopted me when I was seven years old, and my mother died. As it happened, I was their only child. Their actual names w
ere Mai Long Kwo and Mah Long Wan. They worked for your parents as gardener and cook, beginning in 1902. I did not know your mother had a photograph of them on her bureau. I suppose I should not have been surprised, for this was one of the few things my mother saved from the Fire, and it resided near the place she had her house gods.” He drew from his inner coat pocket a portrait in a simple black wooden mounting, handing it to me. Smaller and set in a different frame, it was otherwise the same family portrait that lay buried in a drawer in Sussex: tall, blond American father, a secret smile under his trim moustaches; smaller, darker English mother, her eyes dancing as if she was about to burst into laughter; lanky blonde twelve-year-old with smudged spectacles, every inch of her shouting her impatience with the entire exercise; intense, dark-haired boy of perhaps seven, looking at the camera as if he intended to pull it apart to see how it worked.
I handed it back to him. “Where are your parents now?”
“They are dead.” He put the photograph into his pocket, seeming to spend considerable attention getting it settled, then raised his face to mine. “Murdered.”
A tingle of shock ran down my legs, and I was aware of Holmes coming to point, the pipe frozen in his hand.
“Tell us,” I said.
“It was during the New Year celebrations of 1915—our New Year, not that of the West, which is some weeks earlier. I was not here. I was at medical school in Chicago, and Western universities do not recognise the celebrations of other calendars. They were both in the store—but I should explain first.
“The previous spring, your parents had made them a loan of money to start a business. My father had begun to find the physical demands of gardening increasingly difficult, and when he admitted as much to your mother, instead of merely dismissing him as most people in her situation would have done, she asked him what he intended to do. He trusted her enough to tell her his dream of running a bookstore, although their savings would mean they would begin with little more than a cart on the street. Medical school is expensive. But your mother would not hear of it, and insisted that they find a space large enough for a proper store, and that they could repay her over time.”
He smiled in reminiscence. “Your mother was a most strong-willed woman. She would, as the saying goes, not take no for an answer, and even refused to sign formal loan papers, saying that if she were to drop dead suddenly, my father should consider it her thanks for the years of pleasure she had received from his work in the garden. And as it happened, my parents had recently seen a sign go up for a new shop-space, and eyed it wistfully.
“In the end, they accepted your mother’s offer, and put up the money for the space that week. My father retired his aching knees from your garden to his shop, and began to order books and build shelves. He worked slowly, because he wanted the place to be perfectly balanced in itself. He wanted it beautiful.
“And then in early October came your family’s tragic accident.” He did not say he was sorry, did not mouth any platitudes, he merely made the statement. I thought, however, that he was in fact sorry, that he grieved for my parents alongside his own. I found myself liking him for his reticence.
“There was, as you may imagine, considerable discussion between my parents as to the status of the money. Your mother had been definite, but neither of my parents felt comfortable with the situation. And you, the sole survivor and heir, were not only a child but in the hospital as well, and clearly in no condition to make any decisions. In the end, my father went to the old lawyer who was handling your parents’ affairs, and explained as best he could. The lawyer seemed more confused than anything else. There are men who require pieces of paper to give their world order, and cannot deal with the lack. In fairness, I believe the man had spent so much of the previous eight years wrestling with the lack of documentation in legal affairs following the Fire, that he simply could not face one more such problem, particularly when it involved such a—to him—paltry sum. In the end, he actually shouted at my father, saying that if Mrs Russell wanted to throw her money away on a pair of . . . Chinese people and not even make mention of the fact in the will, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. And he invited my father to leave, rather rudely.”
His smile was a wintry thing now. “You may not be aware that even today my people, when they venture outside Chinatown, risk being set upon and beaten by drunks and young men. They throw rocks at us as if we were stray dogs. Ten years ago it was far worse. I suppose my father was fortunate not to be dragged away by the police as a common thief.
“In any case, during my visit home over the Christmas holidays we debated the problem, and in the end, decided to let the situation stand. My parents would continue with their plans for the bookstore, with my mother working there now as well. They thought that opening immediately after New Year’s, which came in the middle of February, would prove auspicious. During the celebrations, they worked late at night to finish the preparations, shelve the books, arrange the furniture.
“No one heard the gun-shots. If they did, no doubt they would have taken them for fire-crackers. Only the following afternoon did it occur to the grocer next door that the bookshop was strangely quiet. He went to see, found the door unlocked, and discovered my parents in the back, dead.
“When the news reached me in Chicago, I left my studies and came home. And I have been here ever since.”
“And the police?” Holmes asked.
The dark, folded eyes behind the lenses regarded him with gentle pity. “The murder of two elderly Chinese servants, in Chinatown? The incident made less of an impression than the police chief’s missing budgerigar.”
Holmes nodded, then asked, “After you took over the bookshop, were there any threats or . . . attempts against you?”
“None. Whatever my parents were killed for, it was not the store itself.”
“Had they any valuables?”
“My father, unlike many men his age, was progressive when it came to money. He put his into a nearby bank that was beginning to take Chinese customers—the Bank of Italy, it was called. My father was very impressed with the actions of its owner, Mr Giannini, who went through the fires of hell, very nearly literally, in preserving the savings of his depositors during the days after the earthquake. So no, there was no store of gold under the mattress, no rare painting or Ming vase a collector would desire. No book worth more than a few dollars. And his bill-fold was in his pocket, untouched.”
I spoke up hesitantly. “What about the Tongs? I’ve heard they are ruthless against those who stand against them.”
“That is true, unfortunately, but unless it was a thing that came up in the few short weeks after I returned to Chicago, no point of conflict had been raised. My father paid what could be called his ‘association fees.’ And when I opened the doors of the bookshop, I was never approached for more than I owed.”
“So the murder was because of something they were, or had, or knew,” Holmes mused. “But you never caught a trace of what that might have been?”
“The life of the city closed over them as if they had never been,” the bookseller told us.
After a minute, Holmes rose and stepped out of the back door to slap his pipe out on the stones. He came back inside, locking the door as he spoke over his shoulder.
“Russell here has very clearly indulged in a pleasantly exotic meal, but I for one have not taken sustenance since a cup of tepid American tea provided by our watch-dogs some hours ago, and a supply of soap and water would not go amiss. Mr Long, would you care to join us in dinner and further conversation?”
“At your hotel?” the bookseller asked, sounding dubious.
“Certainly, unless you have to be back to your shop.”
“My assistant will have closed up, but I don’t know that I . . .” His voice drifted off.
“We can find you another coat,” Holmes said.
“Holmes, I don’t think that’s the problem,” I said. “The St Francis may have certain . . . exclusionary policies.” br />
“Ah. Well, if they do, we’ll take him to our rooms and have our supper brought up. Come, we can do nothing more here at the moment.”
Three sets of eyes and ears scanned the streets for gun-wielding lurkers, but we walked two streets down and caught a cab on Van Ness without mishap. At the hotel, we avoided the question of the dining room’s policies by simply whisking our guest past the desk and onto the lift; the operator did glance sideways at Mr Long, but his interest seemed to be more upon the small man’s bloody sleeve than on the shade of his skin.
“Russell, would you like to order up a dinner while I remove a quantity of grime from my finger-nails? I won’t be a moment,” Holmes said, and stepped into the suite’s bath-room. I consulted with Mr Long and then picked up the telephone and placed an order. When Holmes emerged, scrubbed and damp, he made for the collection of bottles which, in a shallow bow to the Volstead Act, the hotel had placed behind the doors of a side-board.
“What flavour of analgesic may I offer you, Mr Long? Despite the strictures of your Eighteenth Amendment, we appear to have brandy, gin, whiskey, the inimitable American bourbon—”
“The brandy would be fine,” our guest said, settling back a fraction into his chair. He took a healthy swallow, then took off his spectacles and cleaned them with a pristine white handkerchief. When they were back on his face, he seemed to relax, as if the cleaning exercise had clarified a decision as well.
“I hope you understand,” he said to me, “why I hesitated to respond to your questions this afternoon in the shop.”
“You wanted to think about it first.”
“Indeed. And also to see you, as it were, in situ rather than in my place of business. However, when I saw a man with a gun aimed at you, it decided me that you were on the side of the angels. May I ask, though: When I ran at you—for which I apologise; I hope it is understood that I did not intend to injure you?”
“You need not apologise for saving my life, Mr Long.”