Locked rooms

North of Market, the Embarcadero is wide, flat, and straight; they saw us coming before we had gone half a mile. Greenfield accelerated and I did the same, and it looked as if we would keep on at this speed until we flew off the first curve into the Bay or crashed into the walls surrounding Fort Mason. Then abruptly he swerved left and shot into the maze around Telegraph Hill.

“Hah!” came a voice from the back; Hammett leant forward over my shoulder and said, “If they don't know the area, we may have them.”

Telegraph Hill loomed ahead of us, too steep for roads on this side, but the motor ahead of us dodged and scurried around its base, avoiding the dead-ends by skill or luck. I kept us on the road and in sight of them, using my horn freely, grateful that this was not an area with heavy traffic. Although we hadn't their engine power, we were better on the corners, and as I grew accustomed to the steering I managed to gain on them a little. We screamed around corners within a hair's-breadth of parked cars and lamp-posts, using the brakes almost not at all; slowly, the maroon motor's number-plate grew ever closer.

I had no idea where I was, and no time to ask. Instead I shouted over my shoulder, “If you have any knowledge of the streets you wish to impart, please feel free.”

Hammett said only, his voice tight, “You're doing fine.”

After several minutes of circling and dodging through the residential streets, suddenly we were back on the Embarcadero, heading south this time, back towards the Ferry Building. Just before he entered the snarl of traffic there, Greenfield flew to the right, taking some paint off a cable-car, dodged north for a couple of streets, then west. He swerved around a horse-drawn wagon, then with a sharp squeal of tyres shot directly across the nose of a taxi and entered a street I knew all too well.

It was afternoon on Grant Avenue: the crowded, bustling, commercial and residential centre of Chinatown.

Chapter Twenty-five

Chinatown was the worst possible place for a motorcar chase—which, I realised dimly, was why Greenfield had chosen it. He knew that I would have to slow for the vendors, children, afternoon shoppers, and infirm who clotted its streets, although he seemed to have no such compunction. He gained fifty feet in the first two streets by the simple technique of laying hard on both horn and accelerator, hesitating for nothing. I, in the mean-time, received the back-draught of his passage—the grandfather who stepped out into the street the better to see the blur that had just sped past him, the laden bicyclist who teetered, nearly fell, and then caught his balance by veering into my path—so that I was forced to slow and dodge.

“Holmes,” I shouted, swerving with one hand and gearing down with the other, “shove your hand on the horn!” But instead, he rose in his seat and shouted for me to stop.

“I can catch them, Holmes—” I protested in grim determination, but his hand came down to slap mine from the steering wheel and he repeated his command.

I jammed my foot off one pedal and onto the other; our stolen motor stood on its nose with a violent protest of rubber, and had Holmes not been tucked tight against the windscreen he would have been launched over the bonnet into a fruit cart. Instead, the instant the motor sat back on its haunches he peeled himself from the glass and leapt out over the door, coming to rest in front of a diminutive white-headed figure. I couldn't see him at first, since Holmes' shoulders hid him from view, but in a split second a small, dignified Oriental gentleman was in mid- air, feet waving, and then standing on the bonnet of the motor, his scholar's hands out to catch his balance. Holmes scrambled up beside him in a flash, and as his right arm came up with his revolver in it, he put his head down and shouted at the snowy white head, “Tell them to stop that motorcar!”

I do not know if any person in the city could have done the thing except Dr Ming. But Dr Ming it was, there at the place and time we needed him, and with neither question nor even protest. Events proceeded as if they had been meticulously choreographed: Holmes' mouth going shut just as the old man was raising his head to shout; the revolver in Holmes' hand going off, pointing at the sky; the crowded street shuddering into attention, every head turned our way. The old man's voice seemed tiny in the wake of the shot, but his words acted like a spark set to a line of gunpowder. His command sputtered through the nearby pedestrians, then caught as each person turned and passed the phrase on, and on it ran up the street, fizzing and furious as it burned through the residents, coming even with the honking maroon bonnet, passing it, converting itself into motion: A heavy-laden greengrocer's cart began moving, slowly at first but inexorably into the path of Greenfield's stolen motor. The horn cut off as the Chrysler squealed one way then overcompensated to the other before smashing into the cart and a parked poultry lorry at the same moment. Cabbages and caged chickens rained down in all directions as the stunned pair tried to keep moving. Greenfield got so far as to raise his pistol, but the crowd had already closed over them, and the gun went off pointing at the upper window of the telephone exchange, causing a number of trunk calls to come to grief as their connexions were yanked free by startled operators.

We remained where we were while the community brought Dr Ming his two prisoners. The old man had settled down onto the emerald bonnet of our own stolen motor, his hands tucked together into invisible sleeves, and was in placid conversation with Holmes; Hammett gazed at the two of them in frank disbelief; I let myself out of the motor slowly, watching the procession come near.

Greenfield struggled against his bonds of grocer's twine, shouting furiously. His sister had her hands tied as well, and I looked at her carefully, wondering if I had seen her on board the Marguerite. She was a tall woman, nearly as tall as I, and although her suspiciously uniform brown hair was slightly mussed by the chase, otherwise she appeared so self-contained, she might have been pausing to answer the queries of a passer-by rather than waiting for the police. Studying her closely, I thought I might have seen her on the ship, perhaps on the night of the fancy-dress ball, but I would not have sworn to it. She came quietly in the hands of her captors, her expression more watchful than daunted; I thought the police needed to be warned that she should be carefully searched.

I wanted to talk to her, wanted in fact to grab her hard and demand what had set her on our heels so resolutely, but then I saw her glance at him, and in that one glance, it all became clear.

Even after all these years, and despite the self-control that was keeping her spine straight and her face untroubled, her weakness was the man beside her. For a brief instant, she looked afraid—not for herself, but for him.

She was not his sister. She might have been his willing slave.

My eyes went to him, as if mere appearance could explain such a lifetime of devotion: Robert Greenfield, my father's comrade-in-youth, who had inspired mistrust in my mother and open animosity in his ex-wife. An ordinary enough figure, other than the scarring on his face, and even that was hardly fearsome.

Standing at the front of the motor, Greenfield's curses only increased in volume, until one of the men nearby drew a length of filthy rag from about his person and held it up enquiringly in front of Dr Ming. Dr Ming deferred to Holmes, who turned to look at me, asking with his eyebrows if I cared to speak with the man before the police arrived.

Greenfield followed the sequence of glances until it ended up with me, at which point his curses strangled in his throat. “Jesus—Charlie?” he choked out, then looked at me more comprehensively. If anything, his face went whiter, and the internal murmur of something, there was something behind the—grew loud and louder in my ears.

“You . . . You must be the daughter. Mary. Christ, that hair, those glasses . . . I thought—” He caught himself up short, and tried hard to summon a crooked grin. “Did anyone ever tell you how much you look like your old man?”

“Before you killed him, you mean?”