A-Splendid-Ruin(92)

“No,” I insisted. “Not yet.”

His jaw tightened. “All right. As you like.”

I tried to make him understand. “If they find me this time, I’ll disappear.”

“You won’t disappear. I won’t let you. I’ll look for you. I’ll have the whole city looking for you.”

How intent he looked, how devoted. I should not feel so warmed by his concern. “At least someone would be out there searching this time. I could bear it better, knowing someone was trying to find me.”

For a moment, he was quiet. Then, hoarsely, he said, “I’m sorry, May. I’m so very sorry. For all of it.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I’m sorry anyway. I wish I’d been able to stop it. I would have done anything if I’d realized.”

The words raised in me a longing I didn’t expect, again that need to be close to him, to touch him. No one had truly cared about me since my mother had died, and in that moment the loneliness I’d borne since her death, the loneliness I’d told myself Goldie and my uncle had assuaged, swept through me so strongly that I rose and stepped away. I could not be still. I could not look at him; I was afraid I would cry if I did.





A week later, when I next met Shin, she rolled up her sleeve to show me the bruises on her wrist, but her voice was triumphant. “No opium since the earthquake, and she has bad nightmares. Now, she is worse than ever.”

I was horrified. “She hurt you?”

“She suffers. She does not know her own strength.” Shin rebuttoned the cuff and gave me a small and wicked smile. “It is all right, Miss May. It is worth it to see her this way. Mr. Sullivan does not care about his daughter’s problems these days. The Chinese are unhappy. They have asked for a meeting with the governor and he has granted it because of the stories in the newspaper. Mr. Ruef is worried about the meeting because he has no power with the governor, and he is not listening to Mr. Sullivan, and so Mr. Sullivan is not listening to his daughter’s complaints.”

Dante’s articles were working. I imagined my uncle watching his grand plans for Chinatown slipping away. It was satisfying, but it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. “What about Mr. Farge?”

“He is . . . sad. Upset. Nothing pleases him. They fight all the time.”

“Good,” I said.

“Miss May, there is something else,” Shin said urgently. “Mr. Sullivan had a visitor last night. Mr. Oelrichs.”

“Mr.—Stephen Oelrichs? You mean Goldie’s ex-fiancé? Why would he come to see Uncle Jonny? He didn’t see Goldie?”

Shin looked grim. “He saw your uncle. They spoke quietly, then they fought. They were both very angry.”

That was puzzling, and troubling too. I had thought Stephen Oelrichs wanted nothing to do with the Sullivans, so why would he come to Nob Hill to argue with my uncle?

Of course, I’d been gone a long time. Perhaps things had changed. Perhaps Oelrichs and my uncle had business together.

“Did you hear anything they said?”

“No. But Mr. Sullivan was not himself the rest of the day.”

“I see. Well.” I took a deep breath. “I’ll see if Dante knows anything about it. Be careful, Shin. Please. And . . . don’t let Goldie touch you. She hasn’t the right.”

“It is almost over. I am doing my part, Miss May. I trust you to do yours.”

Again, my responsibility and obligation pressed. Things were going according to plan, and I should be content, but the scene Shin had described between my uncle and Stephen Oelrichs disturbed me. I didn’t understand it, and it seemed important, something I should know. I rolled my uncle’s vest button between my fingers as I walked back to Dante’s house.

I’d only gone a few blocks when a bright blue canary flew past my shoulder, so close I could have touched it. A sign, if I chose to see it that way, because I started from my thoughts and turned to see the man behind me. There were men everywhere, of course, but this one stepped casually—too casually—aside to study a half-standing brick wall. There were a hundred half-standing brick walls just like it, and the way this man studied it was strangely intense. I could not see his face; his hat shadowed it.

No one could possibly recognize me. It was just a man with a predilection for brick walls. But my gooseflesh told me otherwise, and I knew now to pay attention to my instincts, no matter how silly they seemed.

I turned back again, pretending not to see him, but now I was aware of him. I tried to give him no hint that I knew I was being followed, but at the next corner I turned abruptly, and then at the next. My excursions throughout the city in those days after the fire had given me a rat’s sense of safety. The moment I found a fallen chimney, I crawled into it and waited.

The man had been following me. I wasn’t wrong about that. He turned the corner onto the street where I was, hesitated, searched, and then turned away again. I did not move. I curled in that cramped and uncomfortable position for the rest of the day. When twilight came, I crept from the chimney and made a circuitous way back to Dante’s house. It took more than an hour, and I came to the back door, where I waited another fifteen minutes to make certain I had not been followed before I went inside.

The door opened into Dante’s bedroom—the bed neatly made, clothes hanging on hooks in the walls, boots encrusted with mud and ash, a tilting dresser cracked up the side, scattered with an overfull ashtray and hairbrushes and shaving things, and throughout the scent of cigarette smoke and Dante’s soap, which I would have recognized anywhere.