The Barker Street Regulars

apologized and went on to make amends. She claimed to have forgotten my last name. It seemed to me that she’d never heard it. When I supplied my full name, Holly Winter, Althea, Robert, and Hugh exchanged little smirks, and Althea offered what was to me the bewildering assurance that there was nothing vitriolic about me. Kitty Winter, I later found out, was a nasty character, a vitriol-thrower who appeared in “The Illustrious Client.” By the time I happened on Kitty, I was taking the Holmes stories personally and was far from pleased to find a violent Miss Winter with what had by then proved to be a weirdly prophetic first name. But I have leaped ahead. At the time, I was mystified. Robert MacPherson and Hugh Searles, Althea went on to say, were two of her oldest and dearest friends. Neither man, I thought, was as old as Althea. Both were certainly more than seventy, probably more than eighty, but I couldn’t guess their ages more precisely than that. Like active people I knew in dogs, Hugh and Robert looked vigorous and shared a liveliness that made age irrelevant. Robert, a thin, craggy, white-haired man at least as tall as Althea, looked so much like pictures I’d seen of Highland Scots that I wondered whether I hadn’t, in fact, seen him wearing a kilt and playing the bagpipes at one of those Celtic music concerts that are popular in Cambridge. It was even possible that I’d noticed him ambling through Harvard Square in traditional Scottish garb. Not that a six-foot, knobby-kneed man in a skirt really stands out in the Square, which always reminds me of an eccentric dog show with heavy competition for Weirdest of Breed: kids with topknots like the crests of exotic birds, blond-haired women in saris who’ve managed to pierce their noses, but haven’t mastered the Indian technique of applying makeup and consequently look as if they have oozing wounds on their foreheads. I later learned that I was right about Robert MacPherson, except that he didn’t parade around the Square in his kilt, but reserved it for the Robert Burns Festival, and didn’t play the bagpipes, but carried the haggis, which, I should mention, is not a musical instrument, but a sheep’s stomach stuffed with oatmeal and offal. It’s eaten only in Scotland, where people apparently like it, and in certain rarefied circles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where everyone hates the taste of the stuff but eats up the image.
    As Robert was taking Althea to task for calling herself old and for referring to Hugh and to him as old friends, Hugh was staring at Rowdy, who had rolled onto his back on the linoleum and was waving his immense paws in the air. I translated: “He’s hoping someone will scratch his chest. There’s no obligation.” Hugh was a good six inches shorter than Althea or Robert, and attractively burly in the manner of people who look as if they’re savoring the pleasure of the previous meal while happily pondering the delights of the next. He had yellowish hair, bright blue eyes, and a dapper mustache, which I suspected he’d grown forty years earlier in an effort to add maturity to his round baby face. In contrast to Robert, who wore a dark three-piece suit, Hugh was dressed in khakis, a plaid flannel shirt, and a tan cardigan sweater. He struck me as a man who probably liked to tinker with mechanical objects. What accounted for his staring was, I suspected, curiosity about what made Rowdy work. When I later learned that Robert had gone to Harvard and Hugh to M.I.T., I was not surprised.
    “Now,” said Hugh, tentatively fingering the white hair on Rowdy’s tummy, “would this be an Alaskan malamute?”
    “He would be,” I said. “In fact, he is.”
    Robert lightly cleared his throat. Rising, he reached over the Sherlock Holmes figurines and removed one of the volumes that rested on the windowsill beside Althea. In making my way through the Gateway, I had noticed that almost no one was ever reading and that books were almost completely absent from windowsills, shelves, and other places where people displayed their belongings. Here in Cambridge! Book City, U.S.A.! Althea, in contrast, kept a miniature library that included several editions of the Sacred Writings. Her most prized possessions, which she stored in her nightstand, were what looked to me like nothing to brag about, just a pair of undersize paperbacks, although I’ll concede that the little books were bound in leather and bore Althea’s name stamped in