telling, and now our guest sat forward with his drink clasped in his hands.
“That much I know, for a certainty. And it was necessary to tell you in detail so that you might understand the links between our families. It began with the rescue of a woman, but it was not simply a matter of rewarding a service.”
“I do see that,” I told him.
“And as you were young when you knew my parents, I did not think that you would have understood the ways in which they were something other than mere servants. I think your mother would not have spent hours discussing Chinese philosophy with her gardener, were she not aware that he was more than a man who could make plants grow. And your father would not have felt so free to lend him books, and later talk about them, were the things between them not more solid than a job and a payment.”
“I am grateful to you. I . . . I don't remember a lot about my parents.”
“That would be true of any child who is not given the opportunity to know his or her parents as an adult.” The way he said this reminded me that he, too, had lost his mother and father—twice over, in fact.
“As I said,” he continued, “it is necessary to perceive the strength of the links between them in order to make sense of what happened in 1906. Although that, I fear, is precisely where my tale falls into thin ground.
“You may have been too young to remember, but the catastrophe of those first days after the earthquake was unimaginable. Block after block of buildings collapsed, often on top of those trying to rescue their belongings. Men and women wandered the streets, driven mad by shock or simply with no place to go, no possessions to guard. People would be trapped under rubble, and the fire would reach them before the rescuers could—more than one was shot, through mercy, to save them from burning alive. The police feared riot and disorder so much, it was ordered that any person caught looting would be shot on sight—with no suggestion as to how the soldier or policeman might tell if the person in his sights was a looter or a rightful home-owner. It was an absolute hell of irrational behaviour against a back-drop of flames and shattered brickwork.
“In that macabre and unearthly setting, something happened that involved your father and mine. And there my story falters, for I do not know its details, I could merely see the shape of the thing in the aftermath. I was fourteen at the time, no longer a child, not yet seen as a man. I was left with my mother as the fire grew near, to pack our goods and prepare to abandon the house. My father needed to go and see to the Russells, to make certain they—you—were alive and uninjured. A portion of the fire lay between us, so he did not know how long it would take him to work his way around it, but my mother urged him to go, insisted that we would be fine. He left at four o'clock on the Wednesday afternoon, and we did not see him until eight o'clock on Friday morning. In the forty hours he was gone, the fire reached and consumed Chinatown, driving us all to the edge of the sea. When he could finally return, he found all of Chinatown pressed between the docks and a wall of fire, the air thick with explosions and panic, everyone half suffocated from the smoke. I tell you these details to illustrate the urgency of the demands, to have kept him away from his responsibilities to us.
“He was near despair when he could not find us among the crowd, but a neighbour saw him and told him that we had already made our way to the Presidio, where the Army had permitted us an area to shelter, and provided food. He finally caught up with us there, and wept when he found us safe, saying over and over that he should never have left. He told us that your house was damaged but standing, that you were all living under canvas in a nearby park, that he had helped your father move some valuables. And that was essentially all he told us, that day or ever.
“But whatever it was he had done with, or for, your father, made him uneasy. One might almost say it haunted him.”
“What do you mean? Was he frightened?”
“Frightened,” Long repeated, considering the word. “It is difficult to imagine one's father frightened. No, I don't believe so. It was, rather, as if he had done something without considering the results, and reflection made him wonder if he had made the right choice. Or as if he had begun to suspect that what he had been asked to do actually concealed another purpose.”
“As if he no longer trusted my father?”
“Not your father, but as if some underlying question threatened to betray them both.” He shrugged, wincing at the motion. “It is difficult to put into words, a vague impression such as that.”
“But you can't think what it was based upon? Was it something that happened to him, or that he saw, that he did?”
“Any of them. None.” His spectacles caught the light as he shook his head. “He would never talk about it.”
It was by now late, and I could see little sense in playing Twenty Questions with a man who could describe the object only by its outline. Holmes clearly felt the same, for he reached out to knock his pipe decisively into an ash-tray.
“Mr Long—” he began to say.
“There is one other thing,” Long interrupted, and Holmes obediently settled back. “Again I do not know what it means, but your father came to see mine in the middle of September 1914. Two weeks before he died. They talked for a long time, and when he left, my father was quiet, but somehow as if a burden had been lifted from him. And when they shook hands, they seemed friends again, as they had not for some time.”
“But you don't know what they talked about.”
“They walked across to the park and sat on a bench, going silent whenever another person came near.”
“Well, thank you, Mr Long,” I said, wishing I did not feel so dissatisfied.
“If we think of any questions, Mr Long,” Holmes said, “may we call on you in your shop?”
“Either I will be there, or my assistant will know where I have gone.”
“Let me go downstairs with you and arrange a motor to take you back. It is late, and your arm clearly troubles you.”
Long protested that it was but a short walk, but Holmes would not be swayed. He retrieved our guest's hat, standing at the ready should the man have any difficulty rising from his chair. He did not, although as Holmes had said, the wounded arm gave all indications of paining him. By way of support, Long gingerly worked his hand into the pocket of his jacket, but when he had done so, he paused, and drew the hand laboriously out again. In his fingers was a paper-wrapped object the shape of a very short cigar, secured in neatly tied twine, which he held out to me.
“In the turmoil of the past few hours, I forgot to give this to you. My father said that it was an object precious to your mother, and removed it for safe-keeping, lest vandals take it.”
I turned the object over in my hands and saw, in a precise, spidery hand:
Inside the paper lay the front door's mezuzah.
Whatever Long saw in my face caused him to take a half-step forward as if to grasp my arm, but he wavered, and instead merely asked, “I hope my father's actions did not create problems for you. He seemed to think it was a kind of household god, perhaps not literally but—”
“No,” I said, my hand closing tightly around the cool metal. “It's fine. I'm very glad to find it safe. Thank you.”
I felt Holmes' sharp gaze on me, but I did not look at him. He caught up his own hat and stick to accompany our guest out, so I was not surprised when he did not return for the better part of an hour, approximately the time it would take to make a slow and thoughtful foot trip back from Chinatown.
When he came in, he found me where he had left me, curled on the sofa with the mezuzah in my hand. When he had shed his outer garments at the door, he came and sat down beside me, taking my hand—not, as I thought at first, in a gesture of affection, but in order to prise my fingers away from the object. The palm of my hand was dented red with the shape of it, my fingers stiff. He examined it curiously before laying it on the low table before the sofa, then reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief.
I blew my nose noisily and drew an uneven breath. “I never had a chance to say good-bye to them. Not before they died, not even at their funerals, since they had to be buried before I got out of hospital. Dr Ginzberg took me to their grave site, but I was so full of drugs at the time, it made no impression on me.
“It's the . . . unfinished quality of their deaths that is hard to set aside.”
“Yes.” There was an odd intonation to the monosyllable, almost as if he had asked a question: Yes, and . . . ?
