I started to worry about Sergei. It was an odd little interlude. Grandfather was using one of several names he was entitled to use (that’s the British upper classes for you), so even as “Mr. Pryce” he shouldn’t have been on anyone’s radar this far from home. Also, I happened to know the area codes for Houston because Nat was from there. His grandparents telephoned sometimes, and he would mouth “713” at me and roll his eyes, because they were apparently living sometime in the 1990s and their calls usually included urgent pleas for him to move away from San Francisco because they were convinced he would catch AIDS here by breathing the air. Sergei Viktor Wolf had given me a different area code. He was lying. Or, I told myself, he lived there but still had his old cell phone number. That happened, right?
“He said his name was Sergei Viktor Wolf. From Houston,” I added conscientiously when I telephoned my grandfather. There was a long silence. “Grandfather?”
“Hang up the phone, Judy,” he said crisply, and the call dropped. I stared at it in my hand, a little surprised. Grandfather is as sharp as someone half his age, which is about seventy, and my name isn’t Judy.
Before I had time to call him back, the shop’s landline began to ring. I’d been told to keep it in case the cell towers were knocked down in an earthquake, but I hadn’t used it since we opened. It was a wall phone with a curly wire on the handset, and shelves had been built around it some time after brick-sized, navy blue phones had their heyday in the 1980s. It had one of those harsh bells that kept ringing and ringing while I moved things around, eventually unearthing it behind a box of body lotion samples.
“Um, hello?” I was pretty sure it was Grandfather again, but it felt odd to be uncertain. It was like being in one of those black-and-white movies where no one knew who was calling until they picked up the phone.
“Theophania, did you use your cell phone while Sergei was with you?”
“Only to put his number into my phone.”
Another silence followed. I could almost hear him thinking.
“Don’t use your cell phone for the time being for any conversation you don’t want overheard—”
“Overheard by wh—?”
“Why don’t we meet for lunch, my dear? The Garden Court at two o’clock?” He hung up again without waiting for my reply, which was worrying. Grandfather didn’t do spontaneous, and he’d been abrupt to the point of rudeness. Grandfather was often abrupt, but he was never rude.
All the same, an invitation from him carried pretty much the same compulsion as a parliamentary writ, so I called Haruto, who lived above the shop in the apartment below mine, and who obligingly came downstairs to keep Aromas open, carrying his Siamese cat, Gar Wood, and telling me about surfing that morning at Ocean Beach. Gar Wood stalked around for a minute or two in the arrogant way of Siamese cats, and then settled into a sunny spot in the window and started to wash one of her back legs. She and my dog, Lucy, had reached a cranky detente. By and large they ignored each other when Lucy deigned to join me in the shop; she usually preferred to stay upstairs, solely, I was convinced, so I’d have to trudge up two flights of stairs at lunchtime to take her down for a break in the gardens.
Haruto looked like a cross between the Mikado and a flower child, with his raven black hair pulled back and wrapped into a knot with raffia. He only needed to sleep for three hours a night, so he was always looking for things to fill in the extra hours. He kept busy designing Japanese gardens and was a sort of freelance security consultant, which meant he spent the early morning hours hacking into his clients’ computer systems to test their fire walls. He worked for me a couple of half days a week, mostly for the entertainment value, I think, or when I needed some extra help, and he’d expressed some interest in buying the shop. Some days I was just about prepared to give him the place, but until it was out of debt, it didn’t seem like a very generous gesture.
He waggled a hand at me as I passed the front window on my way toward California Street. I got nods and smiles from my Polk Street neighbors, who had been accepting, welcoming even, when I’d opened Aromas. I’d bought the three-story building after it had been vacant for years, which meant I had refurbished the neighborhood blight and they’d seemed oddly grateful. One of them told me the building had reached the stage where they were worried about homeless squatters breaking in and setting up camp. Now, if I did say so myself, newly painted, with its climbing rose under control, and Aromas busy and attractive, it was one of the neighborhood jewels. With its new plumbing and wiring it had two full-floor flats. I lived in the top and Haruto was currently my tenant in the middle one. For a short while, Ben had lived in the ground floor studio, but nowadays, when he was in town, he stayed upstairs with me.
My immediate neighbors were Bonbons Chocolat, where I spent too much time and money, and Peter Williams Jewelry. The block also had Donna Marie’s Best Buds, selling bouquets from tin containers on the sidewalk; Mr. Lee’s no-name grocery on the corner; a hardware store; two antiques shops; a couple of clothing shops; an expensive hat shop, whose clientele was largely African-American women; and Hang Chuw’s, which made the best dim sum and garlic noodles in the city. One of the smaller stores at the end of the block did one-hour photo printing and sold cameras. I didn’t know anyone who had their photos printed, but the store stayed in business somehow, and I’d bought my camera from them. There was also our local, Coconut Harry’s; a pizza and falafel place, and a small but pricey Michelin four-star restaurant, which drew people from other parts of the city. And of course now there was The Coffee, which filled our need for coffee, pastries, and sandwiches.
It was a neighborhood where people lived, worked, and shopped, on the nicer end of Polk Street, away from the rent boys and SRO hotels farther south. It meant I could do pretty much all of my errands close to home, and I didn’t often have a reason to leave. The truth was, I felt more exposed, less able to protect myself, in areas of the city where strangers might recognize me. I preferred to stay where people knew me—or at least thought they did.
Most of the rough sleepers—what Nat told me are called hoboes here—who normally hung around downtown had been chased into the outer neighborhoods by one of the city’s periodic “Clean Up Market Street” campaigns. In addition to Matthew, who had apparently lived on Polk Street on and off for the past year, the neighborhood now had a couple of mostly pleasant, weathered men using the street as their combination dining room, bedroom, and bathroom. Like Matthew they seemed harmless, although they were considerably more mentally together. St. Christopher’s, the Catholic church on the next block, had a small overnight shelter in the basement where some of them stayed.
I caught the California Street cable car, hopped off at Montgomery, and walked the few blocks to the Palace Hotel on Market Street. In an effort to thin out what had become a sludge-slow tangle of traffic along Market, it was closed to private cars, allowing buses and bicycles and delivery vehicles to make their own accommodations with local pedestrians. I often wondered why the city streets were so much more crowded with people in those old movies, with packs of them waiting to cross the road at every intersection. More people live here now, so where are they all? In their cars, perhaps. But not on Market Street.
The sidewalks on Market were wide and gracious, left over from the time when the street was the city’s main thoroughfare and the main business district as well. I knew from my movie watching that, years ago, theaters and restaurants used to line both sides of the street, but they’d been mostly replaced by discount electronics stores and fast-food places, which gave it a down-market feel. All of which meant that the uber-posh Palace, one of the city’s grandest hotels, was set like a gem in a tarnished pinchbeck setting. As I reached the marble steps, a couple of ragged men with a well-fed dog on a piece of bright yellow rope were shuffling away from the entrance under the watchful eye of a doorman. For some reason, he was wearing a bowler hat, but otherwise he looked ready to bench-press a bus.
When Grandfather arrived at 1:57, I was loitering near the display cases of historical memorabilia, and I saw him before he noticed me. He attracted interested glances as he strode across the lobby—and not just from women. His hair was silver, but he was soldier-straight, with the kind of angular good looks that aged well. The Batgirl stuff disguises some of the resemblance, but Grandfather and I both have our family’s standard-issue, china blue eyes. He was wearing what I always thought of as his casual uniform: gray trousers with a knife-edge crease and an elderly but immaculate navy blue cashmere jacket. He was also wearing an Eton Ramblers tie. He had his Aquascutum raincoat over his arm as usual, but the tie gave me pause—Grandfather wasn’t an Old Etonian, he went to Harrow, as did Lord Byron and Benedict Cumberbatch, although not at the same time. Men of his class and generation wore their ties like labels, to help them recognize fellow members of regiments, schools, universities, and clubs. The Eton tie was as out of place on him as a scribbled mustache on a portrait of the Queen.
He placed a hand lightly at my elbow, and we were seated at one of the Garden Court’s best tables—Grandfather had that effect on maître d’s—before we had time to exchange more than our usual, slightly formal greetings.
Even though the enormous Garden Court was arranged cleverly with see-through screens and potted palm trees to provide the illusion of privacy, it was actually possible to take in the entire room at a glance, which I noticed Grandfather doing as we sat down. Then came the discussion of dishes and ingredients with the waiter, the ordering of a Manhattan for him and their signature flowery iced tea for me, and the obligatory appreciation of what was arguably the most beautiful public room in the city.
I finally interrupted him as he seemed about to launch into details about the glass ceiling dome. “Grandfather, for heaven’s sake. What’s all this about?”