Locked rooms

Chapter Twenty-three

August 22, 1914

San Francisco, Calif.

To whomever this may concern,

At the end of October, I, Charles David Russell, intend to enter into the employ of the United States Army. However, to do so without having cleared my conscience of the events of April 1906 would make me and the work I intend to do vulnerable to the sorts of pressures often considered blackmail.

I have kept silent for the past eight years. The events involved two other men as well, and the contagion of a felony would have blighted their lives and honors. Since neither man has chosen to come forward under his own initiative, I feel I may not reveal the names here. I shall merely refer to them as Good Friend—GF—and PA—Petit Ami.

GF and I had been friends in our youth, almost as close as the brothers we were sometimes taken for. And although like brothers we went our separate ways under the complications of maturity, I retained an affection for him, and felt that I owed him a considerable debt, for his friendship and his stalwart assistance when I needed both friend and help. I say this to explain the call the man had upon me, although we had not been close in the years since my marriage, or even seen each other for some considerable time.

I need not describe the general happenings of that day in April. My family was shaken from its beds shortly after five o'clock in the morning as the rest of San Francisco was, although—being blessed with a heavily built house with its foundation on rock—we did not suffer as much as those in the lower areas. Nonetheless, the house was a disaster and a highly dangerous place for children, being now carpeted with broken glass and with gaping cracks in the walls and ominous sags in the heavy plaster ceilings over our heads. Along with most of our neighbors, we moved out of doors on that first day, and when the tents began to reach us the following day, Thursday, we moved into Lafayette Park until such a time as our house could be declared either safe or unliveable.

I spent the three days of the fire in the same way that most of the able-bodied men did, namely, providing transport to the wounded while my supply of gasoline lasted, and afterward digging through rubble for survivors and helping the professionals to battle the flames. We rescued those who were trapped, collected the bodies of those who were beyond mortal help, and attempted to make a path down the streets for vehicles and carts to pass, to carry the injured or possessions.

As far as I can determine, the mayor's order to shoot looters on sight was announced within a few hours of the earthquake—an irony, considering how much the man had himself stolen from the city coffers. Official numbers of those looters actually executed were ludicrously low—I myself witnessed three such shootings, none of which were in the least justified. The police and soldiers were as maddened as the rest of us, the difference being that they were armed and had received orders to be free with their bullets.

The first afternoon, Wednesday, having spent the bulk of the day laboring downtown, I drove back as far as Van Ness, left the car there, and walked the rest of the way into Pacific Heights to assure myself that my family was well and to see if I could find something to eat. I found my wife and children in good spirits, and she told me that PA had been by shortly before that, to see if we were well and to reassure us that his own family was uninjured. She had told him where I had gone, and he said he would be back later to talk with me.

I retrieved food and drink from our damaged home and helped my wife build a fire-pit in the front garden out of the overly plentiful fallen bricks from our chimney, then returned to the house for bedding, which we spread among the trees in the garden. The house creaked and groaned as one walked across the floor, and I was not at all certain that it would endure another major shaking.

We ate our meal, settled the children beneath the stars, and then, very late, PA returned. Completely exhausted, he was, badly shaken by an experience he had endured. A soldier, seeing him walk down the middle of the street, had turned his rifle on PA and declared that he must be a looter. When PA protested that he had gone nowhere near any shop, the soldier prodded him with the gun, then put him to work in a gang clearing a fallen hotel. PA was willing to do the work, but he was not a young man, and the labor was harsh.

Eventually, long after dark, the soldier was replaced and PA could slip away. He was becoming extremely concerned about his family, but as the fire was traveling in that direction, he made his way back into Pacific Heights to rest before trying to circle the flames for home. He fully expected to be accosted at any moment by one of the roving bands of soldiers, many of whom, it should be said, were drunk, having themselves looted nearby liquor stores and taverns. But he made it to us, looking half dead with exhaustion.

We fed PA and urged him to stay with us that night, for the soldiers and self-appointed vigilantes among the population would surely be even more aggressive under cover of darkness than they had been in daylight. I pointed out that although it looked as though the fire was nearing his part of town, in the darkness and without identifiable landmarks, it could easily have been a mile to one side. I assured him that surely the flames would be extinguished during the night, and that his wife and son, intelligent and capable individuals, would without a doubt be safe until the morning—safer than he would be were he to set off then and there. He did not wish to remain, but as I was making my argument, we heard a volley of shots from down the hill, and he had to concede my point. We gave him blankets and went to sleep ourselves, certain that in the morning a degree of normality would have been restored.

Instead, of course, matters deteriorated. The fire spread, the air was rent by the sound of explosions as building after building in its path was brought down, gunshots were heard throughout the day. My own family was safe, being in an area far from the fire and with sufficient numbers there to drive off intruders (official or otherwise). I talked it over with my wife, and we decided it best that I accompany PA across town, thinking that two responsible individuals might stand forth against the mob. We set off, intending to reassure ourselves as to the state of PA's family (whom he had not seen since the previous afternoon). The view from the Heights was other-worldly: to the east, the fires of Sheol, to the north, all appeared completely normal. We made our way north along Franklin, so as to put off as long as possible the hell that waited for us on the other side of Van Ness. Eventually, however, we had to turn east, but we only made it as far as Larkin before we were shanghaied again and put to work on a rescue attempt.

It was a toppled apartment building, and we could hear the weak cries of women and children from its depths, trapped there for more than twenty-four hours. I regret to say that, although we succeeded in rescuing several from their living tombs, some of the wretches were still trapped inside when the flames came.

We were forced to retreat from the intense heat, and I for one was grateful that the roar and crack of the burning building obscured the feeble cries of its victims. Still, it is that moment of failure that lives with me, in memories of that terrible time. That, and one or two others, which I will come to soon.

PA and I collapsed for a time and poured water down our parched throats, turning our backs on the fire as if we could deny its existence. Only then did we notice the angle of the sun through the smoky pall, and found to our astonishment that we had been fighting that doomed apartment building for going on six hours. It was nearly two o'clock—I had to put my pocket-watch to my ear to be certain it was going—and we had not come anywhere near PA's home. Again we set off to the north, giving wide berth to the hotly burning mansions on Nob Hill, but climbing to the top of Russian Hill in order to determine where the flames were, that we might avoid them—neither of us wished to be pressed yet again into fire-fighting duties.

The vision of the city stretched before us was like something from Dante, an ocean of ruin set with broken towers that clawed their way upwards like skeletons attempting to rise from their graves. Great pillars of smoke gathered over several places, the highest with hot red fires at their base, others low and wide above smouldering wreckage.

I commented to my friend that the pillars of smoke must be visible for a hundred miles, but when he did not answer, I saw that he had attention only for his home.

It was no longer there. From our feet to the sea, only Telegraph Hill remained, and it appeared embattled. PA would have run straight down to the smoking ruin that was his home had I not brought him down in a flying tackle, and shook him hard, repeating over and over again that he should think: His family would not have been taken unawares by the flames. They would have moved before it, as tens of thousands of others were doing. We needed only find whether they had gone north, or east.

Flames were working their way towards the north. The only thing to do was to go that way as well, as far as we could, and hope we met neither flames nor press-gangs. We nearly ran down the side of the hill, until I seized PA's arm and pointed out to him that two men walking might appear less criminous than two men sprinting away from the wealthy neighborhood.

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.

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.

The other thing it had was a band of cloth with a red cross painted on it. Dressed as a rescue worker, GF had gone in and out of houses under the pretense of looking for injured people, when all the while he'd been robbing them blind.

I felt wild when I held that cloth in my hands and realized what it meant. Then later, I got to thinking about the problems I had, and I began to feel even worse. I was stuck with the damned box. If I gave it to the authorities and told them the honest truth, I thought that I'd probably be charged—if not with the actual stealing, then at least with aiding a felon. If I took the box away and threw it off a ferry, I risked getting caught with it red-handed, and wouldn't that be fun to explain? Plus, if I got rid of it and GF came back to shake more money out of the Russell tree, I couldn't use it as a threat to get rid of him—surely there'd be his finger-prints or something in that box that would—I started to write “hang him,” which is a little too close to the bone. But I couldn't leave it where he'd put it—what would stop him from sneaking in one night and digging it up? I could take it down to the Lodge and drown it in the lake, but something about introducing that box into that setting made it feel somehow polluting.

So in the end I talked it over with my friend—I should say, my true friend—PA, and he agreed that it would be best if we just buried it again quietly and said nothing. But not in the same place—we talked about where to do it, and he had a fellow in to do some mumbo-jumbo over it, and we hid it deep, where only he and I know.

A year or so later, the gardener uncovered another box, this one with pictures of chocolates on the front. It had money in it, too, and jewelry. It also had a gun. PA and I buried it in the same place as the first, but without the gun—that I did get rid of.

The whole thing was just a disaster, and it didn't even end with seeing the back of GF. I told my wife about it a few weeks later, which I probably shouldn't have done—she always had some odd notions about GF, from the very first time I'd brought her home, she'd never taken to him, never liked having him around. When she heard about what he'd done, and that I'd buried his stash, she became convinced that he would return one night and do something to us, maybe even threaten the children, to get it back. I got quite hot at that, the idea that I'd be friends with such a man—it still seems to me that robbery and panicked manslaughter in the midst of anarchy is a far cry from cold-bloodedly threatening friends, but my wife is as strong-minded a person as I am, and we had words. It took me years before I could talk her into coming home again.

So there's my story. I haven't seen GF since, although I think he's been around, because once in 1910 we found someone had been digging where he'd buried the two boxes. For all I know he's dead, but I wrote a letter to his half-sister last week, saying that if he was still alive and she was in touch with him, I wanted him to know that around the end of October, the U.S. government would “know the details of an incident that took place in 1906.” The events of those days have been allowed to fade somewhat, but it was murder, after all, and it wouldn't be too hard to figure out who GF was, if they wanted to come after him. I thought it only fair to warn him that the U. S. of A. might not be a comfortable place for him.

Like I said, he was my friend, once, and frankly I don't know that we weren't all pretty insane those days of the fire.

I've also told PA all this, and he agrees it's best. I'll try to keep him out of it as best I can, and I've long since removed all mention of him from my official documents, my will and such, even though he had nothing to do with it until it was all over.

So there it is, my life of crime. I may be over-scrupulous in revealing this, but I would not care to be put into a position involving the security of the nation with this vulnerable point in my past. If it alters the judgment of my superiors as to my fitness for the proposed position, so be it.

Yours sincerely,

Charles David Russell

October 1, 1914

San Francisco

ADDENDUM:

I leave next week for Washington, D.C., and will take the above with me to present to my superiors. I shall bury a copy with the two tin boxes as well, less for insurance than by way of explanation, should someone ever come across the incriminating contents and wonder.

The day after tomorrow, I'm going down to the Lodge, to close it up for some time. Most people here believe the war will be over in a few weeks, but I have been to Germany, I know the strength of her people, and I do not think so. I do not know if I shall ever see my beloved lake again, and I have a sentimental wish to visit it one last time before I go. My wife says she has too many things to do here in San Francisco, but I hope that she will reconsider and that she and the children will join me at the place where we have spent so many blissful days of family unity and pleasure.

I have had no word from the man I called GF, nor from his half-sister, although considering the disruption France is currently undergoing, I do not suppose that is surprising. Well, I have done my best by him, and can only hope that his life since we last met has been lived in a manner to recompense his sins.

As for my own, we shall soon see.

Signed,

Charles Russell