anything about my commission in case it got back to the ears of Lee Sing Tai. Noting the ease with which she liked to gossip, I couldn’t be sure that she’d keep to it. There was no sign of Frederick Lee when I came out into Mott Street, but a vendor’s cart was standing at the curb nearby selling vegetables to a line of Chinese men and a couple of half-caste children. Even the vegetables in the basket looked strange—beans as long as my forearm, huge hairy cannonballs (God knows what they were), and tiny little white sprouts. The vendor was a fellow Chinese and was certainly doing a lively trade.

I picked my way past the fresh horse manure and looked for 21 Mott and Miss Clark. I found her in a bare upstairs room, lined with rows of benches, supervising a couple of little half-Chinese girls as they put out hymn books. She was quite the opposite of what I had expected—although no longer young, she was beautiful and elegantly dressed. No wonder she could lure those poor woman-starved Chinese men into services on Sundays. She looked at me with surprise and suspicion until I explained the reason for my visit. Then a smile spread across that lovely face. “So you’re doing the Lord’s work too—trying to save poor girls from a life of degradation. God bless you, my dear.”

I didn’t like to say that my employer wasn’t the Lord but a rich Chinese gentleman. “So you haven’t seen a young woman like this? She didn’t come to you?” I held out the picture.

She shook her head. “And it’s a great pity that she didn’t. I would have given her sanctuary. If she spoke English I might even have managed to find her a position as a servant safely far from the city. I’ve done that for girls before, you know—if they have not descended too far into a life of vice. I have to be careful whom I send to wholesome Christian families. One can’t risk a corrupting influence.”

“So if she didn’t come to you, where do you think she might have gone?” I asked.

“I rather fear the worst, my dear. One has only to walk a few yards from here to the Bowery where every second establishment is a house of ill repute.” She looked up as one of the little half-caste girls called out, “All done, Missie Clark.”

“Nicely done, Elsie. We’ll make a fine Christian of you yet,” Miss Clark said, patting the child on her shining black hair.

She turned back to me. “You see how much we can do if we catch them early enough. Of course these girls do have the benefit of Irish mothers who have been raised as Christians so it is not such an uphill battle to claim them for the Lord and keep them from the sins of the flesh. Sometimes I despair for the full-blooded Chinese, though. It’s a struggle to make them turn from their heathen ways. Even those who profess to be Christians still worship idols in secret. But one does what one can.” She patted the child again. “Run along now and wash your hands and then we’ll work on your letters some more. You too, Alice.”

“Thank you for your time,” I said and went to take my leave.

“If you’ll write down your address for me, Miss Murphy, I will keep my eyes open. I try to rescue girls from degradation whenever I can, so who knows? Maybe I will hear of your girl.”

I considered Miss Clark and her evangelizing as I made my way down the stairs to the street. Having witnessed the sordid establishments on the Bowery, I found it hard to believe that the Chinese were more prone to vice than their Western neighbors. But one of Miss Clark’s sentences stuck in my mind: “If they have not descended too far into a life of vice.” Those words immediately conjured up what I had witnessed on the Bowery—those girls lounging in provocative poses on stoops while nattily dressed men lurked nearby. It was all too possible that if little Bo Kei had not been picked up by the police, she might have been nabbed by a pimp. I saw how easily she could have been incited into one of those brothels—a young girl who knew nothing of the city and of Western ways. “Don’t worry, my dear, we’ll take good care of you and hide you from that Chinese monster.” And then she’d be trapped.

I can tell you I wasn’t anxious to make the rounds of the brothels, asking questions. I was all too likely to wind up kidnapped and trapped inside one myself, if the stories one heard were true. That’s when I remembered that I might have an ally who could help me. My friend Mrs. Goodwin was a police matron who had now been turned into a female detective like myself. Only she was working officially on undercover assignments for the police. So in order to find her or leave a message for her I’d either have to go all the way back to Tompkins Square where she lived, or to police headquarters on Mulberry. Since the latter was also where Daniel worked, I wasn’t in a hurry to do that. So I decided to try all other avenues first, and if I came up with no leads, then I’d visit Mrs. Goodwin’s house on my way home.

I went back to my first plan, which was visiting all the missions around Chinatown. This proved to be fruitless. Some were only open on Sundays. The ones that were open were little more than church halls that ran Sunday worship, nightly language classes, Bible study, and sometimes Saturday socials. No places for a fugitive girl to stay or be hidden. So I now considered the options: if she had been kidnapped by an enemy, as Lee Sing Tai had hinted, then I had no hope of finding her. If he was a big noise, as Mrs. Chiu had described him and Frederick Lee had indicated, then presumably he knew how to send out spies to put pressure on those enemies to get her back. The fact that he hadn’t succeeded already indicated to me that it wasn’t an enemy who had taken her. Unless—a new disturbing thought came to me—unless that enemy had killed her and disposed of the body. But this again was out of my scope.

The other possibilities were that she was being hidden within Chinatown by someone like Mrs. Chiu—someone who took pity on a frightened young girl. But then how would she ever have met a person like Mrs. Chiu if she wasn’t allowed out? How would she have known where to run and which door to knock on? Which left the third possibility: she had left Chinatown.

The next obvious thing to do was to pay a visit to the closest police station—the Sixth Precinct on Elizabeth Street—on the chance that she had been picked up for prostitution and was being held in jail. I was rather leery about going to the police, as my visit could possibly get back to Daniel, who would not be pleased. But I decided that I could take the risk. A constable at the desk there was not likely to recognize me and I could always give a false name if asked. I made my way up Mott to Bayard and then across to Elizabeth. It was remarkable how quickly the flavor of the neighborhood changed. The moment I was out of Mott I was back in a lively Italian scene—noisy streets, children everywhere, laundry hanging from balconies, street vendors calling out wares.

The Sixth Precinct police station was a short way up on the left. I paused outside, staring up at its severe brownstone facade, plucking up the courage to enter. On the way up the street I had worked out a plausible story, but I had to give myself a good talking-to before I went up the five steps to the front door and stepped inside to musty coolness. Police stations, in my experience, all had the same kind of smell—pipe smoke and disinfectant from the holding cells down below and a sort of dustiness as if they were never properly cleaned. A young man was sitting behind a tall oak counter that shut off a large room beyond. He jumped up when he saw me.

“Can I help you, miss?” He looked ridiculously young, with a fresh-scrubbed schoolboy face, and he gave me an eager smile. I wondered how long it would take in this profession before the enthusiasm wore off.

“Yes, you can help me,” I said. “I’ve been sent from one of the missions in Chinatown.” (Well, that wasn’t an outright lie. Miss Clark had wished me luck in finding the girl.) “And I’m looking for a young Chinese woman, newly arrived in this country. Is it possible that such a woman has been brought in here by your officers during the past week?”

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