Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [87]
“I was going to warm it up in here, but then it occurred to me that I ought to have the chimneys looked to first. I wouldn't want to smoke up the place.”
“Or burn it down.”
She looked ill at the thought, although Holmes was beginning to wonder if it wouldn't be for the best: The polished chairs and laid fire, the child's gift of flowers, suggested that she was becoming more interested in re-creating her past than she was in recalling it. He held the door for her until, reluctantly, she pulled herself away from her father's laden desk and joined him in the hall-way. He helped her into her coat, handed her the hat and gloves from the stand, and waited while she locked the door behind them.
“You want to go to your Italian friend again, Holmes?”
“No, I've spent rather enough time there. I suggest we investigate the culinary exotica of Chinatown.”
Wordlessly, she turned towards Grant Avenue. They walked the evening pavements, out of the heights and across the busy thoroughfare of Van Ness, climbing again and then dropping down into the bright lights and lurid colours of the Chinese district, where the gathering mist pulled like gauze across the street-lamps and coloured lanterns.
All the way, she said not a word and kept her hands in the pockets of her coat, making no effort to take his arm. This in itself did not concern Holmes, but that she also kept her eyes on the pavement did. She appeared oblivious to threat, as if the shooting seventy-two hours earlier had happened to another woman in another place. With another person, he might have thought that she was leaving the necessities of defence to him, but she was not that person.
He felt like seizing her by the shoulders and shaking her.
Or like giving her a hard shock in a less physical manner. But he could not decide if the shock he had in mind would clarify matters for her, or only make them worse. As with any blow, once delivered it could not be retracted; and so he kept his silence, although his eyes never ceased from probing the dim, fog-soft streets around them.
Halfway down the bright cacophony of Grant Avenue, Holmes touched her elbow. “Mr Long appears both fully recovered and at his till,” he noted. “Shall we invite him to join us?”
They were, indeed, before the greengrocer's stand, with the door to Long's bookstore open to reveal the owner making change for a customer, moving his arm with no apparent distress. Without waiting for her approval, Holmes stepped around the displays of bok choy and flat Oriental peas to stick his head inside of the door. The conversation went on for two or three minutes, and then he emerged, touching her elbow again with one hand and indicating the street with the other.
“He'll join us in half an hour, we can have a drink while we wait.”
He led her down the street to a building whose entrance was encrusted with carved dragons highlighted in gilt. Just inside the door was a tiny old woman all in black holding a clutch of large red leather menus to her breast, braced foursquare as if to guard the virtue of a granddaughter. Holmes delivered the message that they were friends of Mr Tom Long, who would be joining them in half an hour. The glittering black eyes scowled up at them, and then she turned and stumped away into what proved to be a large, warm, comfortable-looking restaurant peopled entirely by Chinese. She seated them at a table that was not visible from the front windows yet in close proximity to both front and kitchen doors, dropped two of the menus on the table, and hurried back to her post. Holmes held Russell's chair, then took the one beside her. She opened the menu, glanced at its pages, and closed it again. It was in Chinese.
“Are you up to a cocktail,” he asked solicitously, “or would you