Raisins and Almonds

Raisins and Almonds

Phryne Fisher #9

Kerry Greenwood

DEDICATED TO JEAN GREENWOOD

incomparable

with thanks to Dennis, Mark and Benjamin Pryor, Arnold Zable, Ashley Halpern, Lily Grossman aleha ha-shalom, David Greagg, Jenny Pausacker, Richard Revill, J. Cosmo Newberry III, Lee Kennedy and Susan Tonkin.

Beneath my little one's cradle

Stands a clear white goat

The goat set off to trade

In almonds and raisins.

There will come a time, my child

When you will journey far and wide

Remember this song I sing today

As you travel on your way.

Raisins and Almonds are laden with spice

You will trade in merchandise.

This is what my child will do.

Sleep, my child, lue-lue-lue.

from Rozhenkes mit Mandlen

(Raisins and Almonds),

Yiddish lullaby,

translated by Arnold Zable.

The ranked books exhaled leather and dust, a comforting scent. The noise of the Eastern Market, the roar of traffic and voices and feet was almost inaudible inside Lee's Books New and Secondhand prop. Miss Sylvia Lee, a haven of peace and scholarship at the top of the city. Miss Lee's shop was always ordered, always quiet, and always scented with the gum leaves she bought from Miss Ireland on the upper floor: an arrangement of gum leaves and poppies was her favourite decoration, and when there were no poppies she made do with gum leaves alone. She specialized in abstruse works in Latin and Greek, though her concession to popular taste was the brightest point in the shop: a table of yellow-jacketed novels for railway reading. The space was small and closely packed with volumes in leather bindings. The shelves extended to the ceiling, which was white. The room was lit by a large electric light in the middle, and a working lamp over Miss Lee's desk. Miss Lee herself wore sub fusc garments, a skirt of a dark colour and a beige or white blouse and a cardigan under her neat working smock. Her mouse-brown hair was cropped short. She lived across Exhibition Street in an apartment, a perfectly self-contained young woman who required no masculine attentions, merely wishing to get on with her own neat life in peace.

Miss Lee was adding up a column of figures. Her pencil moved smoothly up the pence, then the shillings, and she was about to write down the total when it happened, and she was never afterwards able to forget the sum of eleven pounds, twelve shillings and eight-pence halfpenny.

The tall man in the long black coat, who had been examining Volume 9 of Hansard for 1911, for which Miss Lee had long abandoned hope that someone would acquire for their library, exclaimed in a foreign tongue and dropped the book.

She dashed from behind her counter quickly enough to support him as he sank to the floor. He held out one hand, palm upwards, as though inviting her to notice its emptiness, or was it the small wound on the forefinger?

His eyes opened wide for a moment, and he spoke again. Then he convulsed, limbs flung out like a starfish, so abrupt and horribly strong that Miss Lee was forced to release him. His head hit the floor and she heard his teeth gnash, a dreadful grating noise echoed by a rattling in his throat. As she grabbed her ruler to lay between his teeth, he convulsed again and lay still.

She stood with the ruler in her hand, gripped so tightly that the edge cut into her flesh. The young man was dead, that was plain. What to do next?

She walked steadily to the door of her bookshop in the Eastern Market and said to her neighbour the teashop lady, 'Mrs Johnson, can you call a doctor? One of my customers ...'

She was proud of herself. Not a quaver in the voice. And as Mrs Johnson's scatty assistant was chivvied out of the shop to call for Dr Stein, who had consulting rooms in the next building, she walked back into her shop and sat down rather abruptly behind the counter to wait for some help. She clasped her hands together on her shabby calf-bound ledger, to stop them from shaking.

For there was nothing she could do for her customer now, and one must not give way.

Phryne Fisher was dancing the foxtrot with a sleek and beautiful young man. She was happy She was agreeably conscious that she was gorgeous, from the turn of her brocaded shoe with the Louis heel, through the smoky-grey stockings of the sheerest silk to the Poitou gown, tunic and skirt of heavy, draped, amethyst brocade threaded with a paisley pattern in silver. A silver fillet crowned her black hair, cut in a cap like a Dutch doll's. She had a huge amethyst in silver on her right hand, a wide band of engraved silver around one upper arm, and the same stones in her ears. She smelt bewitchingly of Floris honeysuckle and knew, without doubt, that her partner appreciated her. He would not, otherwise, have spent a small fortune on the purple orchid which decorated her shoulder. Another young man might have spent the money, but only a devoted and intelligent young man would have ascertained the colour of the dress on which it was to be worn.