certified hazardous materials team.”
“You’re about to find out,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Whenever friends of mine from out of town come to visit, they always want me to take them to Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown.
Fisherman’s Wharf has lost all of its authentic charm and become a low-end shopping center with a Fisherman’s Wharf theme. But I take my friends there anyway and reward myself for my sacrifice with a loaf of fresh, hot sourdough bread at Boudin, which is no longer the simple bakery that it once was, either. Taking its cue from the rest of the neighborhood, Boudin has become a massive attraction, complete with tour, two restaurants, and a gift shop.
It’s depressing.
But Chinatown is still pretty much the real thing, a distinct city within a city. I don’t wait until out-of-town friends show up to go there. It’s one of my favorite places.
There are lots of ways into Chinatown, but tourists always want to go through the pagoda-style, three-arched gate on Grant Avenue and Bush Street that’s adorned with ornamental dragons, carps, and lions. It’s a manufactured photo op built in 1970 and draws a clear line between the Union Square shopping district and the main street of Chinatown.
I avoid the gate for exactly that reason and I usually wander in from the opposite end of Grant Street.
Visually, Chinatown is nothing like China. It’s an American backdrop dressed up with Chinese stuff, sort of the urban equivalent of decorating a Ramada Inn banquet room with surfboards, piles of sand, suntan lotion, and seashells for a party with a beach theme. Red lanterns are strewn across streets with names like Stockton and Sacramento. Pagoda cornices, green tiles, and colorful Chinese signage are affixed to the kind of standard Edwardian stone and concrete buildings found on any Main Street in America.
But even so, it’s the real deal. There are twenty thousand Chinese people living in the neighborhood, so you’ll find some uniquely Chinese touches that will transport you, if not to China, at least to somewhere away from the familiar.
There are pagoda-styled streetlights supported by twin golden dragons whose tails twine around the poles. You won’t find that in your housing tract. In the windows of meat markets and grocery stories, you’ll see turtles, ducks, squid, pigs, and eels ready for the dinner table. You won’t find that at your neighborhood Safeway.
When you walk the streets you’ll hear a cacophony of Chinese, from people talking and yelling, movie clips playing loudly in DVD shops, and music blaring from the stores, apartments, and car radios.
And you’ll smell incense mingling with the luscious aroma of Chinese food being fried, grilled, boiled, and steamed in the countless bakeries, restaurants, and tearooms.
Chinatown is a complete sensory experience.
I like letting myself be pushed by the flow of tourists down Grant Street because it takes me past the scores of gift shops that are spilling out onto the sidewalks with things like silk ties, back scratchers, prayer wheels, Buddha statues, chop-sticks, porcelain figurines, teapots, T-shirts, pottery, sandals, wind chimes, pot holders, mah-jongg sets, bells, Hello Kitty pillows and bootleg Versace bags.
Monk hates Chinatown, of course, for all the reasons I love it. He becomes overwhelmed by the disorganization, the disarray, and the lack of symmetry. For him, it’s anarchy.
So rather than inflict Grant Street on him, I parked on the western periphery of Chinatown and we walked down one of the less busy and ornamented streets to JoAnne’s, an unassuming storefront tucked between a dim sum restaurant and a laundry.
The simple sign on the salon read, JOANNE’S, beneath what I assumed was the same thing written in much larger Chinese script. Elaborate drapes, decorated with pagodas, wa terfalls, dragons, and carp, were closed over the windows, so it wasn’t possible to peek inside. But from the outside, the salon didn’t look to me like the epicenter of chic for skin and nail treatments.
I opened the door and we stepped inside.
Based on the facade, inside I expected to see a drab neighborhood nail salon full of wizened old Chinese women sitting in torn vinyl chairs.
I was half-right.
The old Chinese women were there, but so were women of all ages, sizes, races, and ethnicities. They all wore white terry-cloth robes and sat in retro-futuristic chairs made of black leather and chrome. Their faces were being slathered with white cream and their fingernails were being buffed like sports cars by beautiful, slender young Chinese stylists with incredibly smooth skin, identical short haircuts, and one-piece white uniforms that resembled a lab coat on top and a miniskirt on the bottom.
The stylists looked so much alike that they might have been androids manufactured from a single mold.
The place resembled a nightclub more than a salon. The floors were black marble, the walls were gleaming white, and the curved-edge counters were stainless steel and it was all bathed in an otherworldly blue glow from ambient LED lighting.
“I like it here,” Monk said.
I wasn’t surprised. The stylists all looked alike and the customers, with the white face cream and matching robes, did, too. The interior was shiny and clean and the ambient light was the same blue as toilet bowl cleaner.
I spotted Linda Wurzel in the back of the salon. She didn’t have cream on her face or I might not have recognized her from a distance. She was wearing a robe and sitting in a chair in front of an ankle-high aquarium on the floor. It wasn’t until we got closer that I realized that her feet were actually
Dozens of tiny brown fish swarmed around her feet as if they were devouring them.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Wurzel?”
She looked up at me with those unnaturally alert eyes. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry to disturb you. I’m Natalie Teeger and this is Adrian Monk.”
She glanced at Monk, whose gaze was fixed on her feet.
“The famous detective? The one who solved the murder of those two judges?”
“That’s him,” I said.
“You work with Nick Slade,” she said.
“You know him?”
“I’ve bumped into him at the InTouchSpace Invitational Golf Tournament,” she said. “He was one of our many early investors. What can I do for you?”
“You could take your feet out of that aquarium,” Monk said.
“It’s not an aquarium,” she said. “I’m getting a pedicure. The fish are eating the dead skin on my feet.”
“Piranha!” Monk yelled.
He grabbed her legs under the knees and yanked her feet out of the water.
Her chair tipped over backwards but I caught it before she fell.
Linda Wurzel yelped in surprise and slapped his hands, drawing stares from everyone in the room.
“Let go of me,” she said.
Monk did. “Are you insane? You’re lucky you still have feet.”
“I appreciate your concern for me, Mr. Monk, but they aren’t piranha; they are garra rufa, which means ‘doctor fish,’” she said. “They’re harmless carp.”
“They aren’t harmless if they are gnawing on your flesh,” Monk said. I have to admit I was with Monk on this one.
“They’re only eating the dead skin,” she said, and dipped her feet back in, causing Monk to gasp. I wasn’t too comfortable with it, either. “It’s a painless and totally natural pedicure that has been around for centuries.”
