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"You do not wish to do this, " he said.
I did want to do it, I could almost taste the glory of revenge. And then
suddenly I did not. The murderous impulse left me, the hand fell away, and as
if by a stage cue, the police arrived, bluff and uncomprehending and requiring
a great deal of attention, from all of us, for a very long time.
Epilogue
Late, late that night Holmes and I crept back to our rooms at the St Francis.
We had persuaded Officialdom to let Long go home, and even Hammett, but at the
cost of remaining and explaining, again and again, what it all meant: why Rosa
Greenfield's finger-prints had been found on the toilet-pull of my house; why
a bullet from Greenfield's gun would match one to be found in a fence in
Pacific Heights; why Greenfield's finger-prints were going to be found on
coins in the tin boxes in our hotel's safe.
Had it not been for Holmes' name, the bewildered police would have thrown us
all out and let us sort it out on the street.
But in the end, Robert and Rosa Greenfield were charged, and we were free to
go.
As we walked towards the lift, shortly before midnight, the night man came out
from behind his desk and gave Holmes a packet. His hand reached out
automatically for it, and as we rode the lift upwards, my eyes idled across
the address on the label as if its letters contained some arcane message. It
was, I realised only when we were in the room and he ripped open the paper,
the urgent reproductions of Flo's photograph that he had left to be
copied only that morning yet many, many hours before.
I went through the motions of hanging up my coat and divesting myself of shoes
and the like, then plodded into the bath-room to wash my face.
When I came out, Holmes was sitting with a photograph in his hand not that of
the Greenfields; he held it out in my direction.
"What is that?" I asked wearily.
"Another photograph I left the other day for copying. I'd all but forgotten
it. "
I sat down to save myself from falling and took the picture from his hand.
A tent city. A woman, a blonde child with a book, a man trudging up the hill,
looking as exhausted as I felt.
My family.
I took off my glasses to study my father's face. Too tired for the nightmares
to reach me, he had written in the document; I wondered if all his dreams had
been of the fire.
"Do I look like him?" I asked.
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"You do somewhat, without a hat and your hair as it is. To a guilty mind, the
resemblance would be startling. "
I picked up a copy of the other picture as well, showing the Greenfields at
the Lodge, unscarred and not yet embarked on murder. They were standing by the
lake, looking over the shoulder of the photographer at the log house that the
young and carefree Greenfield had helped his friend Charles build.
"The sun was red, " I murmured.
"Sorry?"
"During the fire. Everything was a peculiar colour from the smoke and ashes,
and it was terrifying, with the sun a red glow in the sky and the earth
shaking and the sound of explosions. But my father came back then and he
explained it to me, told me that the booms were just the firemen removing
houses so there wouldn't be anything for the fire to burn and it would go out.
I understood what he was saying, and when he told me it would be all right, I
believed him. "
"Your parents were good people, " he said. And then he added the most perfect
thing anyone has ever said to me. "They would be proud of you. "
Not that I believed him, of course. Instead I gave voice to the remnants of my
guilt. "If I'd told my mother about seeing Greenfield that day, if I'd said
something, I might have saved them. "
"I think not. Greenfield was already set on his course. Had you told your
mother that you had seen him,
it might have caused an argument between your parents, and at most a
resolution to confront Greenfield when they returned to the city, but it would
not have interrupted the family's progress to the lake. Only Greenfield
himself could have done that. "
And I could picture it, clearly: Mother's indignation that Father was meeting
the man; a family's final minutes tainted by recrimination and regret; the
motorcar setting off down the road...
"You would not have changed a thing, " Holmes said firmly. This time, I
believed him.
I changed out of my day-clothes and settled into a soft bed that seemed to
tremble and sway with my tiredness, but my eyes would not close. I looked at
the mezuzah, lying still on the bed-stand, and found myself saying, "Holmes,
would you mind awfully if we didn't leave right away? I'd like to see my
family's graves, and explore the area a little. "
"No, I do not mind spending more days here. We've been in California for a
week and a half, and I don't believe I've set eyes on a redwood tree. "
"And it would also allow you to finish your Paganini research. "
"My ah, yes, my Paganini research. "
"There is no research project, is there, Holmes?"
"Not as such, no, " he admitted. The bed's sway was magnified briefly as he
settled in beside me. I turned to him, closing my eyes with the pleasure of
simple human touch.
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"Don't let me forget, " he said. "I must be downstairs at nine o'clock for
breakfast with Mr Garcia and the Irregulars. "
"I'm sure that if you haven't appeared, we shall wake to find them staring
down at us. " He laughed, and stretched to shut off the light. As darkness
took over, I had a final thought. "Holmes, what was Dr Ming saying to you?"
"While he was sitting on the motorcar bonnet, do you mean? I apologised for
manhandling him so unceremoniously, and said something to the effect of what
good fortune it had been to happen across the one person in Chinatown who
could summon a crowd's instantaneous response. He replied that the lines of
good fortune and the lines of feng shui are often mistaken for each other. "
My sleepy brain chewed on that for a bit. "So, what, he was saying that his
presence there was predetermined?"
"His words were 'Those who perceive the dragon's path may alter it. ' "
I wavered: If the old doctor's presence was deliberate, that would suggest
that the Fates or the old gentleman himself had not only seen the need for his
presence at that precise time and place, but had also envisioned our ability
to make use of it.
In the end, I shook the troubling conundrum out of my head and settled into
the comfort of the pillow.
As I slid towards sleep, I felt, or dreamt, the lightest of touches on my
hair, followed by the words, "Ah, Russell, what is to become of me? I find
I've even grown attached to this infernal hair-cut. "
I felt my lips curl slightly. "That is really most unfortunate, Holmes. I had
just decided to allow it to grow back. "
And at last I slept, dreamlessly.
Afterword
Thanks are due, as always, to the wise and capable people of the McHenry
Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, without whom this book
would be a smaller and less lively thing.
Thanks are also due to Dick Griffiths, Jon Hart, and Fred Zimmerman of the
Blackhawk Museum in Danville, California. If you want to see Donny's blue
Rolls-Royce, that's where it lives.
To Abby Bridge, researcher extraordinaire, and the collections of the
California Historical Society, the San Francisco Public Library, and the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]