Read Online Sherlock Holmes by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online Page A

– in between
tracking down the movements of a number of Mr. Connington’s
relations – had been drinking coffee, smoking, and reading
newspapers. Of course he had already heard the story which was
related to me.
    Julian Li was a young illusionist of Chinese
extraction, though both his parents had been born in California to
immigrants from the great Gold Rush of 1849. He was well-known in
the vaudeville circuits of the Western states and promised to
become one of the finest practitioners of his trade in the country.
The finale of his act involved what our table-mates referred to as
a “Magic box gag,” meaning that a member of the audience was placed
in a cabinet on one part of the stage, and “miraculously”
transported to a corresponding box on the other side of the stage –
both boxes being ostensibly suspended in mid-air. On the previous
evening, the sixth of June, at the Californian Theater in San
Francisco, the subject of this illusion had been a six-year-old
girl from the near-by community of Sausolito, Emily Redwalls. She
had entered the “magic cabinet” at one side of the stage, but after
the obligatory flash of light and puff of smoke, when the second
cabinet was opened, the child was nowhere to be seen.
    Antonio Rosales, the stagehand who had helped
Li, swore that he had placed the child in the second cabinet (which
was a great deal closer to the backdrop than the illusory lighting
had led the audience to believe). The child’s parents were
distraught, and rumor had flashed through the white community that
Li had kidnapped the little girl for unspeakable purposes: “Though
surely if one were to descend to the unspeakable,” commented Holmes
drily, “even the most sinister criminal would hardly care to do so
in front of four hundred people.”
    “Three hundred and eighty-seven,” corrected
Mrs. Carey, who had a very good sense of any performance’s daily
“gate.”
    “Oz said this afternoon he’d go across and
see what could be done about posting bail,” said Mrs. Pellingham, a
diminuitive actress who specialized in ingenue roles despite the
possession of daughters almost old enough to take on such roles
themselves. “We all chipped in for bail, of course, but I told him
he’s wasting his time. A Chinese, that’s kidnapped a little white
girl? He’ll be lucky if the police don’t kill him themselves. Oz
allowed I had the right of it,” she added sadly, “but he said, he
couldn’t not go.”
    Holmes glanced across at me, and within
minutes, he and I were in a cab, hastening to catch the last ferry
of the evening. The dense fog that characterizes the city was
rising from the bay by the time we arrived at the Geary Street
Station, and found, to our alarm, a considerable crowd of
rough-clothed workingmen, as Enzo Moretti had predicted, gathered
on the station-house steps, in furious altercation with the station
chief and O.Z. Diggs himself. Since a number of these men were
armed – some with the tools of various trades such as hammers and
crowbars, but several, in proper American fashion, with pistols and
rifles – I was just as happy to see they were already beginning to
disperse as Holmes and I approached: I heard one of the men on the
steps snarl, “He’s a goddam Chinaman , for Chrissakes! How do
I know why he’d do it?”
    And another added as he passed me, “They
don’t think like we do,” and tapped the side of his head.
“Inscrutable. It’s like they ain’t even human—”
    “And what do you call human?” I began
angrily, but Holmes took me by the elbow and propelled me up the
steps.
    “Fifty years ago I heard the police in New
York say that about the Irish,” sighed Diggs, and the station-chief
– just closing the door behind us as we entered the gaslight of the
watchroom – bridled.
    “That ain’t the same thing,” he objected.
“You have only to look at him—”
    “Do I, sir?” retorted the little wizard. “In
my carpet-bag I have two bottles and a jar