middle of the street. On the other side, a blond young man in tweeds was climbing the six steps from a cellar to the street, a painted Chinese woman’s face showing for an instant before she closed the door behind him. Up the street a truck was unloading rolls of paper in front of one of the Chinese newspaper plants. A shabby guide was bringing four sightseers out of the Temple of the Queen of Heaven—a joss house over the Sue Hing headquarters.
I went on up to Spofford Alley and found my house with no difficulty at all. It was a shabby building with steps and door the color of dried blood, its windows solidly shuttered with thick, tight-nailed planking. What made it stand out from its neighbors was that its ground floor wasn’t a shop or place of business. Purely residential buildings are rare in Chinatown: almost always the street floor is given to business, with the living quarters in cellar or upper stories.
I went up the three steps and tapped the red door with my knuckles.
Nothing happened.
I hit it again, harder. Still nothing. I tried it again, and this time was rewarded by the sounds of scraping and clicking inside.
At least two minutes of this scraping and clicking, and the door swung open—a bare four inches.
One slanting eye and a slice of wrinkled brown face looked out of the crack at me, above the heavy chain that held the door.
“Whata wan’?”
“I want to see Chang Li Ching.”
“No savvy. Maybe closs stleet.”