Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  We walked, quickly, working our way towards our destination. My friend knew all the paths and short-cuts here, as it was a route he traversed daily, and he led me surely through delivery alleys and the foot-paths that cut through hillside gardens. Twice we heard shouts behind us, but with a twist and a turn we would be out of sight again.

  We came to an area of pleasant homes between the Italian district and the docks, homes in the process of being emptied by their owners under the watchful eyes of a pair of soldiers. We nodded to them, keeping our hands in our pockets and walking straight down the center of the street to show our innocence, and although we ran the gauntlet without coming to harm, the two soldiers adjusted their long rifles over their shoulders and sauntered after us. We turned a corner and had just stepped into a rubble-strewn alley when there was a rapid and surreptitious movement ahead.

  We both stopped dead, caught between some unknown threat and the two soldiers at our backs. PA was turning to ask my opinion when I heard my name being called from ahead.

  It is at this point that my “Good Friend” enters the story. I had not seen him in two or three years, was not even certain that he was still living in the city, but we were brought face-to-face here in this deserted alley. He walked up to me and offered his hand.

  I took it, said his name, and asked him if he lived here now, but something about the way he answered, or rather took care to avoid answering, led me to interrupt his glib reply with the warning that soldiers were probably on their way to ascertain that we were up to no harm.

  Immediately, he grabbed my arm and pushed me down the alley towards where he had come, doing the same with PA, hurrying us ahead of him. His urgency coupled with the awareness of the rifles at our backs proved contagious, and PA and I stumbled over the bricks and tiles until he jumped ahead of us and slipped into an invisible hole between a wall and a shed that had been thrown against it. It was pitch black inside, and GF hissed at us to be silent.

  In a minute or so, we heard voices outside, and the two soldiers came down until they were standing just at the entrance to our lair. In the end, they decided that there was nothing here worth stealing anyway, and went back the way they had come.

  GF collapsed into nerve-taut giggles, only pulling himself out of the state when I told him that we would be on our way.

  “But you mustn’t,” he told me. “I need your help.”

  “With what?”

  “Hiding some stuff.”

  I somehow knew in an instant what his attitude of mischief meant. Although we had not been close for years, I knew him of old, known him as a brother when we were both careless youths. In that setting, and being fully aware of what was going on in the city, it took no great leap of imagination to see that the “stuff” was not something rightfully his, that in the confusion and turmoil he had helped himself to the contents of some abandoned shop or jewelery box, and stashed them here. That my old friend was a common thief and a looter.

  I pulled myself away and led PA away without saying another word to GF. PA and I did not speak about what we had seen, merely went on through the disorder until we came near to his home.

  His neighborhood was aflame. We stood staring, as if we had never seen such a thing before, and gaped at the firemen struggling to coax a trickle out of the hoses. Then PA saw a friend of his, and pounced on him, demanding where the residents had gone.

  “To the docks,” the man replied, and we set off again, circling around until we found the refugees of my friend’s neighborhood, thousands of them milling about with their meager possessions.

  PA turned to me and told me that he could find them from here, that I had to leave and see to my own family. I refused to go until we had some news of his wife and son, but it was not until nightfall that we found a man who had seen them settled into a tent in the nearby Army base. This time PA was adamant: He would not have me accompany him, but told me that he would find them, and send word to me that they were well. He turned his back and walked off, and reluctantly I went my own way.

  His family, I will add here, was unharmed, and although his house burned to the ground, his wife and son had managed to rescue the things they valued most, and guarded them throughout the flight and to their new canvas abode.

  I reached home very late that night, to find my family missing. But a neighbor, taking his turn walking guard up and down the sidewalks, directed me to the park, where the Army had provided tents. My family was happy to see me, and I slept that night under canvas for the first time in many years, too tired for the nightmares to reach me.

  I didn’t tell my wife about seeing GF, not then anyway. She was friends with GF’s wife, primarily because we had children the same age, but GF himself was a sore point with her, and I didn’t want to go into it then and there. In truth, I did not think there was anything to go into.

  Friday I spent with the rescue crews, although by the end of the day, the tacit agreement was that we would retrieve whatever bodies we might without risking our own life and limb. The fires would take care of the others.

  We fought hard, and all that day and into the night the explosions continued in the determination to create a fire-break the flames could not breach. Van Ness was most peculiar—a flat and smoking wasteland on one side while appearing grotesquely near normal on the other. We staggered off to our rough beds that night knowing we had done all we could.

  And won. Saturday morning the news came that no new fires had broken out, in spite of instances of the clumsy use of black powder that set off the very fires it had been meant to prevent. We held our breath lest the wind come up and fan the embers, but it did not. By Saturday afternoon we began to think that the worst was over. Now it was a matter of reconciling ourselves to the Aegean stables—we who in three short days had already come to loathe the feel of a shovel.

  We would be a long, long time bent over picking up bricks.

  Abruptly I realized that I was no longer a boy of twenty, able to spend all day in physical labor—my back ached, my hands were ripped raw, I had cuts and burns at a dozen places on my arms and legs, and I couldn’t breathe without coughing up black. I took to my bed, cuddling my two small children to me with the pleasure of life itself, while my wife read to us from some nonsense child’s book.

  The children fell asleep, and I was not far from it when my wife, seeing my eyes beginning to close, told me that she was going to our house before the sun set to retrieve some waterproof garments, as the sky looked threatening. I could not of course allow her to go alone, so I forced my blistered feet back into their boots while my wife asked the neighboring tent to keep an eye on the children should they wake.

  We walked hand in hand through the cool evening. The wind had shifted, coming in from the sea to drive the worst of the smoke in the direction of Oakland; indeed, I thought, rain appeared possible.

  We found our waterproof coats, and I went upstairs and brought some toys and books for our daughter to keep her from fretting if the rain should last. Between one thing and another, it was nearly an hour before we left the house with our armloads of provisions. We took a detour to the edge of the high ground, to look at the darkness falling across the city, and found the familiar view profoundly eerie—few lamps, no street-lights, just the outline of the Fairmont Hotel on the opposite rise, and below us a great stinking expanse of blackness, the fires out at last. We must have stood there looking at the foreign landscape for twenty minutes, and when we got back to the tent, we found the entire area in a state of writhing turmoil.

  In our absence, someone had come looking for me, and frightened my daughter. Her screams had awakened all the infants in the vicinity, and they had raised their voices in chorus, along with half the women, all the men, and most of the dogs. We soon got her soothed and I went to ask if anyone knew who the intruder had been, but he hadn’t left his name, merely said (or rather, shouted, over Mary’s roar, which had been of fear but had quickly turned to one of indignation) that he would come back later.
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  The most glaring characteristic of the man, all agreed, was that his face had been burnt, and that his thick ointment and bandages rendered his face invisible.

  A burned face could have been any of the men I labored with over the past few days, so I thought nothing of it. He did not come back that night, or the following morning, and it was not until noon on Sunday that I found who it was.

  During the night, the rain had come down hard, Nature’s cruel joke on our heartbreaking efforts against the fire. Had it begun earlier, the city might have been saved, but it came on Sunday, to turn the ruins into a sodden black slop-pit. Even our tidy green park was a sea of mud, and we needed shovels to direct the runnels and creeks out from under our feet.

  As I walked through Sunday’s drizzle down the drive beside the house, intending to fetch tools from the gardener’s shed, I heard something move inside the house.

  It could have been the foundations settling, or a precariously balanced whatnot taking its final plunge, but it was a sound, and I stopped to listen for more. Nothing came, but I walked around the back just to check that the door was locked, and found it was not.

  I hesitated, since I knew there was a gun inside and that if an intruder had found it, I would be in trouble. But then I turned the handle and took a step inside, and shouted for them to come out.

  I wasn’t expecting an answer, and certainly not the one I got. Which was a voice calling from upstairs, “Charlie? Is that you?”

  It was my Good Friend. I asked him what he was doing there and how the hell he got in, the oath startled out of me by his unexpected presence in my home, and he reminded me that I’d given him a key long ago, and that he’d never taken it off his ring. I’d forgotten that he had a key, but indeed, before I married I’d given him and two or three other of my friends keys to the door, in case I was away when they needed a place to sleep. That had been years ago, but they were the same locks, and clearly the key still worked.

  As we called to each other, he had been coming down the stairs. When we met in the gloom of the hall-way, a great deal became clear: His face was shiny with smears of white ointment, his eyebrows and lashes had been burned away, and he had a bandage around his head.

  “Hey, you’re the one who scared my little girl!” I accused him, and he immediately began to apologize for it, saying he’d never thought about how his appearance would strike a child, certainly never thought the kid would be alone in the tent, and he’d left as soon as he saw there were people that she knew who could look after her, so as not to frighten her any more. So he’d come here, and found the place empty, but he’d desperately needed a place to sleep so he’d let himself in and dragged the guest bed over to a spot where the plaster had already fallen down.

  He ended by saying he hoped I didn’t mind, and that he’d been careful not to light a fire anywhere.

  “I guess not,” I told him, and asked what he’d done to his face. He touched it gingerly and said he’d done it on Friday night when the fire he was working on hit a stash of kerosene and blew up in his face. “Knocked me top over teakettle,” he said with a laugh. “I woke up in the hospital tent twenty-four hours later, and since I could walk and remember my name and that Teddy Roosevelt was President, they kicked me out, since they had a dozen others who needed the bed worse than me. My boarding-house is gone, so I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Of course not,” I told him.

  “There’s one other thing,” he said, and the way he said it made my sympathy for his plight fade.

  You see, when we were young, we’d gotten into a number of scrapes. Just through high spirits, but it would begin with a dare and a look, and even beneath the white grease and the bandages he wore, the look he gave me now was the same he’d give me when he had something really outrageous in mind. And I remembered the “stuff” he’d needed help with, and I immediately stepped away from him.

  “GF,” I said, “I have a family. I can’t do that kind of thing anymore. You’re on your own.”

  “It’s nothing at all,” he told me. “Hey, my face really hurts. You got anything to drink in this mess?”

  That was the moment I should have ended it. I should have told him no and showed him the door, taking his key as he left. I should have, but I did not. He was burned and I’d seen far too much in the last few days to put my old friend out on the street. Before I knew it we were sitting in the library with a candle and a bottle of good whiskey, talking about old times.

  It turned out his “stuff” was a tin cookie box that he’d tripped across right in the middle of Geary Street the first morning. Because it was heavy enough to trip him, he’d taken a closer look and found it packed to the gills with cash—bills, coins, even gold. No names on it, no identifying marks, no body lying nearby. “So I kept it.”

  “It’s not yours,” I told him in disgust. “You’ll have to put up a notice and ask somebody to identify it. If they tell you what kind of money was in it and how much, it’ll be theirs.”

  “Well, there’s a little problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I kind of added to it. It’d be hard to know what was there originally and what went in as time went along.”

  “Jesus wept!” I shouted at him. “You’re a damn thief.”

  “I guess,” he said, “but I’ve got to tell you, it all came from people who won’t miss a hundred dollars here or there. All of it. And I can’t give it back, there’s money there from maybe ten places.”

  I dropped my head in my hands, feeling sick.

  “Charlie, I really need a new start.” He was pleading. “You know about my wife and that mess, and I can’t get any money, and without money you can’t make money. You’ve got to help me.”

  “You disgust me,” I told him.

  “I know.”

  “Where is the box now?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. It’s buried in your garden.”

  I nearly hit him, bandages and all. If I’d had the gun, I’d have shot him dead, I was so angry. He saw it, and put up his hands as if to say “Whoa.”

  “Now look, Charlie, I couldn’t very well just leave it sitting on your kitchen table while I went up to sleep, could I? I just buried it under a bush to keep it safe for a while.”

  “You buried your looted cash in my garden.” I couldn’t believe I’d once been close to this idiot.

  “Just until I can get it and go. I’m off to France. My half-sister lives there now, she said I could go stay with her and help manage the business—she’s got a nice little bar and cabaret in Paris. Anyway, I was thinking about it even before all this happened. This town has been a curse for me, Charlie, you know that.”

  I did know that, as it happened. He’d had a lot of bad breaks, and only some of them he’d brought on himself. His final blow had been when his wife had divorced him, then six months later inherited a packet.

  I stared into my glass for a while, and then I asked him, “How much do you suppose is in your box?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe about three thousand.”

  I thought he was absolutely sure, but I didn’t call him on it. I was tired, and I was tired of him, but on the other hand I felt so incredibly lucky, having seen all those poor souls dead, mangled, and homeless while my family had come through unscathed, that I could not bring myself to judge him. “If I give you a check for five thousand dollars, will you go to France and leave me alone?”

  “Charlie, I can’t ask you to—”

  But of course he allowed himself to be talked into it. I’d find a way to return the money to its owners somehow, or donate it to the orphans, but buying GF out seemed somehow appropriate, as if it placated the Fates that had passed me over. I hunted down my checkbook, wrote him his check, and told him I didn’t want to see him again, ever. And to leave his key with me. He took the thing out of his pocket with a hurt expression and put it on the table, then grabbed my hand and made me shake his, told me he’d buried it under that statue with the book,
and ran away like I’d given him a set of wings.

  It was madness, I know, to do that, but he’d been like a brother once, and in the last few days we’d all walked through hell.

  It was only later that I heard the whole story—or rather, heard some, read about parts of it in the papers, and guessed the rest, but by then he was gone and I was stuck.

  It seems that on the Friday night after the quake, a cop had seen him going into a house whose residents had been ordered out just ahead of the fire. There were actually two cops together, but they split up when they heard the distinctive crash of a breaking window on the next street. One went to investigate that, the other followed GF, and when the cop came through the back door after him, GF panicked and bashed him with the fireplace poker. It killed the man, or anyway GF assumed it did, but instead of just running away, he thought he’d conceal the evidence by burning the house. What was one more burning building when the whole city was up in flames?

  But being GF, a couple of problems came up. The first was that the bottle of gasoline GF found in the pantry and poured around the floor didn’t just burn when he set a match to it, it went up like high explosive, shooting GF out of the house and scorching off all his hair. The other problem was, the fire shifted and didn’t eat up that street, so after the fire died down, there was one house burned among a bunch still standing. And in that house was a dead cop with a broken skull and a fireplace poker lying next to him.

  GF had buttoned the box of money inside his shirt to leave his hands free when the gas went off in his face, and when he picked himself off the ground and found he could walk, he did so. Eventually he more or less passed out, and was taken to a hospital tent, but as soon as he came to on Saturday he figured it wouldn’t be healthy to be a scorched man with a box full of money.

  So he came to me.

  And I bought his way to freedom, leaving me with a tin box so badly dented that I understood why the hospital workers hadn’t looked inside—when I dug it up, I had to use a hammer and screwdriver to get it open. It had money in it, but only about $1700, and some of that had what looked to me like blood on it. Talk about your blood money.