With the door securely locked in my face, there was little to do but follow him down the drive (he, too, peered sharply all around before he stepped out of the gates) in search of his fragrant Italian bistro. My lunch consisted of a glass of wine (which the waiter solemnly called “grape juice”) and a crisp bread-stick; Holmes, on the other hand, did the menu justice.

When he had mopped up the last of his tomato sauce and drained the inky coffee from his cup, we returned to the house, and spent the afternoon trying, with small success, to rescue any portion at all of the blackened papers in the fireplace. Holmes had taken a closer look at them the previous morning and, after having the first flake dissolve into dust, decided that four hands were better than two for the job. But even with both of us, Holmes to raise each remnant a fraction and me to slide the glass beneath it, they were still heart-breakingly fragile. No matter how gently we worked and despite all the art in Holmes' hands, time after time they crumbled into flakes and dust.

At the end of it, we were left with sore knees, black hands, and seven fragments large enough to preserve words.

Five of them, rather to my surprise, were type-written, as far as we could tell on the Underwood in my father's library, which had a marginally skewed lower-case “a” from when a curious child—me—had tried to commit surgery on it. Holmes judged it the letter's original, rather than a copy, which is why it was so disappointingly preserved: Carbon would have survived the fire better than the ink had.

From the top sheet, three fragments survived:

tates Army.

y conscience of the

has chosen to
may not reveal
Good friend—GF —

felt that I owed
and his stalwart

From later pages, the two fragments we deciphered were:

shoot looters
the earthquake—
had himself stolen
those looters actu-
myself witnessed three
the least justified

ured it wouldn't be healthy
full of money.

The newspaper cuttings appeared to be from the period immediately following the quake, for one had the bold headline “URNS!!” which was more likely, considering the size of the font, to be an article concerning the destruction of the city than the archaeological discovery of some Greek jars.

The other appeared to be about a man and his new wife who had lost each other for days after the Fire, then discovered that they were half a mile apart in Golden Gate Park. With either of the newspaper bits, however, it could have been the opposite side that was of importance, and in both cases that obverse was illegible.

We left the plates arranged on my mother's writing desk and went through the kitchen to sit on the stoop, where Holmes lit a pipe and I worked to find a comfortable niche for my kinked spine.