Locked rooms

glass-shops, and went to Norbert's office. Before we got started on the day's mountain of paperwork, I asked him about the Chinese couple employed on the property. He knew nothing about them, but said he would look into it. Then I asked how many sets of house keys he had.

“Just the one I gave you,” he answered. “I do have another complete set, but it's down the Peninsula with my other papers. Do you wish me to have it sent up for you?”

“No, I just wondered. It appeared as if we'd had a visitor in the house recently.”

At that, the lawyer's somewhat distracted air vanished and he sat upright, frowning. “A visitor? Oh, that is not good. The will clearly stipulates—”

“Yes, I remember. Tell me, you mentioned something about your elderly relative spotting someone about the place fairly recently. Would you perhaps recall when it was?”

“It must have been, oh, five or six weeks ago. Certainly well before the end of March—we send Miss Grimly a cheque the first of each month, and I do remember that April's included a bonus. But she did see them, and called the police immediately, although they didn't find anyone there. Most worrying. Is anything missing, or damaged?”

“No, nothing of the sort. They merely looked around, tracked some soil on the floor, may have burnt something in the fireplace—I take it the fireplaces were cleaned back in 1914?”

“Oh, certainly they would have been. We shall have to do something about the locks, I'm afraid—it just wouldn't do to have some vagrant moving in and lighting fires. And perhaps the old lady is getting beyond the responsibility. But nothing was missing, you're sure?”

“Not that I could see.”

And he nodded and stretched out his arm for the first of many files.

When I left, three and a half hours later, my mind was so taken up with balance sheets and legal language that I was at the street before I remembered, and turned back to the office. Norbert's secretary looked up at my entrance.

“Sorry,” I told her, “I forgot to ask, has a letter come for me?”

“Nothing today, Miss Russell.”

I reminded myself that the United States postal system was not the English one, and that a letter posted one afternoon might not generate an overnight response, even within the city limits.

Perhaps Dr Ginzberg was too busy to speak with an old patient? No, that I could not imagine. She might be out of town.

If I hadn't heard from her by tomorrow, I decided, I would travel across town to her house and see if she was there. I wanted badly to see her, to let her know that I had done well, that I was well.

And perhaps to ask her how it was that a person could forget half her life.

At something of an impasse, I watched a trolley rattle past, considering my options. I could go to the house and join Holmes in his examination of the fireplace's burnt papers. Or I could interview the old woman and her halfwit nephew across the street, to pin down the date of the March intruders. Or I could see what I could discover about Mah and Micah on my own, without waiting for Norbert.

I retraced my steps to the hotel for the photograph and for directions, then followed the route I had wandered in a daze three days before. Soon I was standing at the gates of Chinatown.

Chapter Five

San Francisco's Chinatown had burnt to the ground in 1906; the blaze had scoured the infamous district of its noxious cellars and by-ways—a part of my sense of dissonance two days before had been merely the change in stage sets, that the neighbourhood which had always borne a trace of lingering wickedness and the sensation of things scuttling out of sight was now a place of gaudy chop-suey restaurants and tourist gee- gaws. Why, the streets smelt more of spices and incense than they did of rotting fruit.

Not that the place looked artificial: The hotchpotch of buildings was so hung about with extraneous pavement stalls and the grime of use that a person had to look closely to note the uniformity of building materials and the relative lack of wear, to see that they were none of them old enough to have seen the century's turn.

But the changes had not erased the essential nature of Chinatown. This was a place apart, a small, intricately crafted miniature city with rules and mores all its own. The air here was not the same as that outside of its borders; the people moved differently. The Chinatown of my childhood survived in glimpses—the joyous exoticism of curlicued buildings; the unlikely fragrances, sweet and sharp; the dancing script on buildings and signs; an old woman in silks mincing along on bound feet; a man wearing a pole across his shoulders to carry his baskets of fruit—but even the girls in dresses that matched my own and the men in lounge suits and felt hats walked and spoke as if they knew their place in this delicate, perfect machine that was Chinatown.

Now that I stood on the busy pavement, caught between a lantern store whose rafters were solid with its wares and a noisy poultry shop stacked high with cages of ducks, geese, and roosters, my idea simply to ask among the residents began to seem simplistic. The bustle and press of people, the sheer number of shops and buildings whose signs bore only Chinese characters, made it clear that, Western dress and English-speaking schools notwithstanding, this dozen or so blocks formed a city unto itself—small, yes, but it was easily conceivable that not everyone here knew everyone else.

I did not even know their names, since “Micah” was a highly unlikely appellation for a Chinese man and Mah could have been short for anything. All I had was a photograph, at least fifteen years old, and the likelihood that they were interested in the art, or science, or perhaps even religion, of balancing the energies of the earth's dragons by the use of small bowls of water, mirrors, and plants.

It took conversations with three impatient shopkeepers to give me a name for this Oriental discipline: fungshwei, the fish-seller called it, shaking an octopus in my face, but no no, he didn't know no-one, go down to bookstore, please go now he busy. So I left him to his eels and squiggly things and went past the barber shop and around the pavement-seller of small decorated cakes, stepping into the street to avoid hitting my head on a platoon of flattened ducks, in the direction that he had indicated, only what appeared to be a bookstore turned out to be some kind of apothecary, odorous and shadowy with an entire wall of drawers marked only by characters. Further down the street, a building with curlicued roofs that I took to be a temple was revealed as a telephone exchange, so I turned back, narrowly avoiding collision with a heavily laden silver tray of fragrant covered bowls, and made a more methodical search. The bookstore, which I had passed twice, was tucked behind a pavement greengrocer's; I found it only by spotting a man coming out with a fresh newspaper in his hand.

I pushed between the crates of strange knobbly dark objects on the one side and baskets of strange smooth light objects on the other, to enter a world that was comforting in its familiarity. Books of all sizes, colours, shapes, and languages stretched from floor to ceiling, riding in neat piles on central tables, filling the hands of the half dozen patrons, all of whom glanced up as I entered and watched me unabashedly for a while before their books pulled them back in. The front of the shop displayed newspapers, mostly Chinese although I saw two San Francisco English-language dailies as well as a week-old New York Times. Nothing from England, though.

“May I help you?” asked a voice in lightly accented English, with no trace of the pidgin dialect. I hadn't noticed him before, as he had been standing behind a high desk, but now he rose up and seated himself on a stool. A Chinese man of about thirty, wearing a brown suit, flecked red tie, and wire-rimmed glasses much like those on my own nose.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. With the recent experience of harried and impatient shopkeepers in mind, I thought I had better pin the man down in a commercial transaction before asking questions about Chinese cooks and