Murder in Black Letter
Copyright© 2025 by Poul Anderson
Chapter 4
Not until evening was Kintyre free to cross the bridge into San Francisco. He had spent hours on Bruce’s uncorrected papers, and talked with Yamamura, who said he would sniff around, and he had called Margery on the phone to see if she was all right.
“Come over and take potluck, Bob,” she said. He sensed loneliness. But—hell’s boiling pots, she made him feel cluttered!
“I’m afraid I can’t,” he evaded. “Commitments. But take it easy, huh? Go visit someone, go have a cup of espresso, don’t sit home and nest on your troubles. I’ll see you soon.”
He poured himself a small drink after hanging up and tossed it off. Then he changed into his darkest suit and got the car rolling. Personally, he would not have placarded a loss on his clothes, but Bruce’s parents were from the Old World.
As he hummed along the freeway and over the great double span of the bridge (Bruce must have been carried dead in the opposite direction, wedged in a corner so the tollgate guard would think him merely asleep; doubtless the police were checking the memories of all night shift men) Kintyre rehearsed the career of the Lombardis. Bruce was the only one he had really known, though he had been over there for dinner a few times. The parents had been very respectful, innocently happy that their son should be friends with a Doctor of Philosophy. His mother made good pasta...
There wasn’t much to remember. Angelo Lombardi was a Genoese sailor. Chronic hard times were not improved when his son Guido came along. Nor did he see much of his young wife. (Did Maria’s years of being mostly alone in a dingy tenement, with nobody to love but one little boy, account for what Guido had become?) In 1930 the family arrived as immigrants at San Francisco. Here Angelo worked in the commercial fishing fleet; here Bruce and the daughter were born; here he saved enough money to buy his own boat; here he lost it again in a collision—by God, yes, it had been a collision with Peter Michaelis’ single craft. Feeling the years upon him, Angelo used the insurance money to start a restaurant. It had neither failed nor greatly prospered: it gave him a living and little more.
Yet Angelo Lombardi had remained a man with hope.
Kintyre turned off at the first ramp, twisted through the downtown area, and got onto Columbus Avenue and so to North Beach. Hm, let’s see—a minor street near the Chinatown fringe—uh-huh.
The sky was just turning purple when he stopped in front of the place: Genoa Café set in a two-story frame building perpetrated, with bays and turrets, right after the 1906 fire. It was flanked by a Chinese grocery store, full of leathery fragrances, and a Portuguese Baptist mission. A sign on the door said closed. Well, the old people would be in no mood for discussing the various types of pizza tonight.
Yellow light spilled from the upper windows. Kintyre found the door to the upstairs apartment and rang the bell.
A street lamp blinked to life, a car went by, a grimy urchin watched him impassively from a doorway across the road. He felt much alone.
He heard feet coming down the stairs, a woman’s light quick tread. Expecting Maria Lombardi, he took off his hat and bowed in Continental style when the door opened. He stopped halfway through the gesture and remained staring.
Morna, he thought, and he stood on the schooner’s deck as it heeled to the wind, and she was grasping the mainmast shrouds with one hand, crouched on the rail and shading her eyes across an ocean that glittered. Her yellow hair blew back into his face, it smelled of summer.
“Yes?”
Kintyre shook himself, like a dog come out of a deep hurried river. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I’m sorry. You startled me, looked like someone I used to—” He pulled the chilly twilight air into his lungs, until he could almost feel them stretch. One by one, his muscles relaxed.
“Miss Lombardi, isn’t it?” he tried again. “I haven’t seen you for a couple of years, and you wore your hair differently then. I’m Robert Kintyre.”
“Oh, yes. I remember you well,” she said. Her mouth turned a little upward, its tautness gentling. “Bruce’s professor. He spoke of you so often. It’s very kind of you to come.”
She stood aside to let him precede her. His hand brushed hers accidentally in the narrow entrance. Halfway up the stairs, he realized he was holding the fist clenched.
What is this farce? he asked himself angrily. Nothing more than straight blonde hair, worn in bangs across the forehead and falling to the shoulders. Now in the full electric light he could see that it wasn’t even the same hue, a good deal darker than Morna’s weather-bleached mane. And Corinna Lombardi was a mature woman—young, he recalled Bruce’s going over to the City last month for her twenty-second birthday party—but grown. Morna would always be thirteen.
Corinna had been nineteen when he saw her last, still living here and working in the café. That was at a little farewell dinner the Lombardis had given him, before he departed for his latest year in Italy. They had wanted him to look up Angelo’s brother Luigi, the one who had made a success in the old country as a secret service man. Kintyre had visited Luigi a few times, finding him a pleasant sort with scholarly inclinations, most interested in his brilliant nephew Bruce, with whom he corresponded.
At any rate, Kintyre had had too much else to think about to pay much attention to a quiet girl. By the time he returned, as Bruce told him, she had left home after a spectacular quarrel with her parents. That was soon repaired—it had only been a declaration of independence—but she had kept her own job and her own apartment since then.
The rambling of his mind soothed him. At the time he did not realize that, down underneath, his mind was telling itself about Corinna Lombardi. It decided that she had few elements of conventional prettiness. She was tall, and her figure was good except that the shoulders were too wide and the bust too small for this decade’s canons. Her face was broad, with high cheek-bones and square jaw and straight strong nose; it had seen a good deal of sun. Her eyes were greenish-gray under heavy dark brows, her mouth was wide and full, her voice was low. She wore a black dress, as expected, and a defiant bronze pin in the shape of a weasel.
Then Kintyre had emerged on the landing, and Angelo Lombardi—thickset, heavy-faced, balding—engulfed his hand in an enormous sailor’s paw. “Come in, sir, please to come in and have a small glass with us.”
Maria Lombardi rose for the Doctor of Philosophy. Her light-brown hair and clear profile told whence her children had their looks; he suspected that much of the brains had come from her too. “How do you do, Professor Keen-teer. We thank you for coming.”
He sat down, awkwardly. Overstuffed and ghastly, the living room belonged to a million immigrants of the last generation, who had built from empty pockets up to the middle class. But families like this would eat beans oftener than necessary for twenty years, so they could save enough to put one child through college. Bruce had been the one.
“I just came to express my sympathy,” said Kintyre. He felt himself under the cool green appraisal of Corinna’s eyes, but could not think of words less banal. “Can I do anything to help? Anything at all?”
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