Part 15 (1/2)

”Quite. Yes, that should be fine.” And if this relatively sensible child and her strong young escort with the bright blue motor weren't enough to keep Russell from harm, little would be. ”And if I might ask one more favour: I believe Rus-Mary would be happiest if she did not know I'd been here. Collusion between husband and friend might prove . . . alienating.”

”Right-o,” she said cheerfully.

He stood up, taking her hand again, holding it for a moment so that he was bent over her almost like a courtier. Then he left, and Flo watched him go; he was, she thought, really pretty swell.

That, thought Holmes, took care of Sunday and Monday at the very least. Which left only the afternoon and evening to get through.

Walking towards the lawyer's office, Holmes noticed a news-agent's with a small sign in the window advising OUT-OF-DATE JOURNALS LOCATED OUT-OF-DATE JOURNALS LOCATED. He wrote down Hammett's name, told the proprietor that he'd take anything the man could locate by the fellow, and was strolling up the street (for the seventh time) as Russell came out of Norbert's office, pulling on her gloves with little jerks of irritation.

”Holmes,” she said in surprise when she spotted him. ”What are you doing here?”

”I was finished with my business, and thought I might accompany you on this fine afternoon.”

She looked at him sideways. ”Holmes, I hope you don't mind, but I'd rather like to spend some time in the house on my own.”

”But of course, that was merely the direction in which I was headed. You remember the Italian cafe we ate at the other day? The owner happened to mention that his great-grandfather was a childhood friend of Paganini and had a sheaf of the composer's early attempts at music. I thought I might add a section on my monograph concerning childhood patterns of behaviour that extend into maturity.”

”Yes? I didn't know you had such a monograph in process; it sounds interesting.”

So they walked the mile in amicable discussion of the nonexistent monograph, and after Holmes had seen her safely into the house (using the excuse of seeing if the 'phone and electrical companies had done their duties) he went off, whistling a brisk tune the Italian had composed for violin.

At the end of the block, he paused to look back at the house that was holding his wife, in both senses of the word. The place reminded him of one of those primitive societies so beloved of archaeologists, where a people had stood up from their breakfast and walked into nothingness. The kitchen cupboard still held the packet of coffee used the morning the Russells had climbed into their new Maxwell motorcar and driven away, now so stale that, when he had tried it the other morning, it had given him little more than a brown colour and a sour taste in the cup. The half-packed trunks in all rooms but Russell's bore mute evidence of a future that would not exist for three people. He wondered if Russell had found her mother's night-gown inside the laundry hamper.

He shook his head and turned his back on the house of the dead.

Holmes had no intention of visiting the Italian's cafe (although its owner did in fact own two or three sheets of music in what he swore was Paganini's hand). Instead, he set about a systematic interview of those inhabitants of Pacific Heights he hadn't yet spoken with.

Eighteen years in London is nothing-there, even eighty years after an event one might expect to find a high number of houses inhabited by the families' descendants. In San Francisco, however, particularly given the circ.u.mstances of the past two decades, this was not the case. He had already discovered this when he had questioned the immediate neighbours on Friday and discovered that only two of the eleven houses contained the same residents as they had in 1906. Those two had, admittedly, proved useful, one of them describing how the Russells had been among the first to move back into their damaged house, the other providing the name of the postman who had worked the streets for many years. It had been the postman-or mailman-who had come up with the piquant information concerning the Russell argument, a detail of which Holmes had been very dubious and which had necessitated an interminable round of enticing similar feats of recall, until he finally was forced to admit that the postal gentleman had a perfectly extraordinary memory, prodigious in its powers of retention when it came to t.i.t-bits of gossip.

He'd left profoundly grateful that the man had not delivered to Baker Street, and that he seemed to have not a sinew of the blackmailer's impulse in his makeup.

Still, the interviews with the neighbours had taken most of Friday morning, and hunting down the mailman the bulk of the afternoon. He could only hope that today's research proved more brisk.

It did not. Worse, the day's ratio of 1906 residents to newcomers was even lower than Friday's. Of the first ten dwellings to receive his enquiries, four had no idea who had lived in their house in the year of the fire; three knew the names but not their current location (”somewhere down the Peninsula” seemed a hugely popular dwelling-place for those who had fled the city); two were new householders in new houses, having bought cracked and leaning wrecks and built anew; and one alone had lived in that house at the time of the earthquake, and even recalled a period spent under canvas in the nearby park; unfortunately, that person had been twelve years old at the time, had been visiting from his home in that mythic land ”down the Peninsula,” and had been ushered back to that safe haven within days, as soon as motorcars could traverse the littered streets. The man remembered no-one named Russell.

The pattern held with a depressing reliability. At the end of four hours, Holmes had drunk enough tea to bring him to sympathy with the Boston rebels, found the coffee no better, taken to refusing the offers of a ”quick one” through concern for his liver, and come up with a mere handful of residents who had been present at the time of the quake. Five of them had remained in the city during the weeks that followed; three of those had fled the approaching flames as far as Golden Gate Park; the other two had lodged with friends in relatively undamaged houses in other parts of the city. The maids who opened the doors to him suggested that a visit in the morning might be more productive, and he reluctantly agreed, although Sunday was often a difficult time to interview persons of this cla.s.s, for reasons different from those on a week-day.

Then, when the afternoon sun was going soft with the incoming fog, he met Miss Adderley.

Chapter Thirteen.

Miss Hermione Adderley was ninety if she was a day, and might have admitted to ten years more if he'd been her doctor, or priest. She was well guarded by a butler who looked nearly as old, and a house-maid in her late forties who bore a striking resemblance to the butler. All three had spines as straight and unbending as one of the gleaming bra.s.s pokers arrayed beside the ten-foot-wide marble fireplace, and Holmes would never have got inside had he been mere trade. But the old lady, whose shoes had the unbent look of those whose owner spent most of her waking hours in one chair or another, was fiercely curious about the world outside her window, and before the fragile old man at the door could turn the visitor away, the maid was behind him, whispering in his ear.

Disapproval and suspicion stiffened every thread of the butler's spotless black suit, but its wearer stood back, bowed Holmes in, and accepted hat, walking-stick, and overcoat, handing them over to the maid. He then picked up the gleaming silver tray from the polished teak table, held it out for Holmes' card, and showed the visitor into the room to the left of the door-way. His gait as he went to take his mistress the card told Holmes that the man was a martyr to rheumatism, but he crossed the freshly waxed marble floor without event and was back in moments, murmuring that Holmes should come with him.

The old lady in the brocade chair was so tiny her head did not clear the chair's oval back, and her creaseless shoes rested on a needlepoint ha.s.sock. Her hand in his felt like a bird's foot, so delicate he was afraid to close his fingers lest he leave bruises. But her cornflower blue eyes were undimmed by age, her pure white hair soft but full, and the myriad wrinkles that made up her face seemed to quiver with interest.

”Mr Holmes,” she said in a high, thin voice, ”from London. Pray have a seat so I don't get a neck-cramp looking up at you. How do you find London these days?”

He settled onto a chair across the bay window from her, trying to arrange his knees so his legs didn't rise up around his ears. ”I left London in January, when a person would find it cold and dreary. I imagine that in April it is most pleasant.”

”And are the fogs as bad as ever they were?”

”So long as the town continues to heat its homes, there will be yellow fogs.”

”I have very fond memories of your 'pea-soupers,'” the old woman confided. ”We spent some months there when I was a young sprig of a thing, and I escaped the eyes of my governess under the blessing of just such a fog. I had a beau,” she explained, one eyelid lowering in a manner that would have been coquettish had it not also been self-mocking.

Holmes laughed aloud, and the old blue eyes danced. Tea was brought then, and as the maid poured and offered the sugar, she surrept.i.tiously watched the visitor. Whatever she saw in him a.s.suaged her suspicion; her spine relaxed and with it her tongue, so that before she left them, she raised an admonitory finger and said to Holmes, ”Now you watch that she doesn't get over-tired. And if she tells you she wants you to take her out dancing, she's not allowed out on a Sat.u.r.day night.”

”I hear, and obey,” Holmes said with a small bow of his head. When the door had closed again, Miss Adderley picked up her child-sized eggsh.e.l.l cup.

”Mimi has lived in this house her whole life. I think she forgets that I'm not actually her grandmother. Her mother worked in the kitchen, and Hymes-the butler-is the child's grandfather. So, Mr Holmes, what brings you to San Francisco and to my door?”

Holmes a.s.sembled his words with care, aware that too long a story would tire his hostess cruelly, and too little would not satisfy her.

”I am acting on behalf of a woman whose family was here at the time of the earthquake and fire.”

”This would have been 1906?”

”Yes.”

”I ask because the city shakes and burns with regularity. I remember the 1865 quake vividly.”

”No, this was the recent one. Her parents have since died, but she wishes to know more details about the weeks following the fire. They had a house here in Pacific Heights, and I believe lived in a tent for some time.”

”As did a number of us, in Lafayette Park.”

”Ah. You were here, then?”

”I was. And Hymes, and Mimi, and the rest. We had a staff of, let me see, seven at the time. It was normally nine, but the footman and an upstairs maid had just eloped.”

”Did you by any chance spend some time in the park yourself?”

”Certainly. Best time of my life, those three weeks, an absolute lark. Other than the bathing facilities, but then, an old lady doesn't need to be too fussy about her toilette. No, Hymes found a tent somewhere, the Army I think, and Mimi and three of the others moved in with me. Hymes stayed in the house, at first to fight any fire that might blow in, and later to discourage any looters. I told him not to be silly, that it didn't do any of us any good if he saved the house only to have it fall down on his head, but he wouldn't listen, nor would the other men. They buried the silver, in case of robbers-silly boys, they lost one of the spoons for the longest time, unearthing an entire flower bed before they came across it in the branches of a rose-bush-and took turns watching over the house and over me at the park. They enjoyed the adventure, too-we even had concerts while we were there, around a grand piano one of the families had pushed through the streets from the other side of Van Ness. Yes, everyone was quite restless for a while after we moved back inside.”

”So, you lived in the park for about three weeks?”

”Twenty-three days, I believe it was.”

”The people I'm interested in were named Russell. Charles was an American, would have been in his early thirties, tall, blond hair. His wife-”

”His wife's name was Judith. English girl, Jewish I think. And weren't there children?”

”Two.”

”A little girl, and a baby. Can't remember if the baby was a boy or a girl.”