But I couldn’t guess which was the important house. Four doors from Jair Quon’s gambling house, Cipriano had said, but I didn’t know where Jair Quon’s was. Waverly Place was a picture of peace and quiet just now. A fat Chinese was stacking crates of green vegetables in front of a grocery. Half a dozen small yellow boys were playing at marbles in the 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.”
“Bunk! You fix your little door and run back and tell Chang Li Ching I want to see him.”
“No can do! No savvy Chang.”
“You tell him I’m here,” I said, turning my back on the door. I sat down on the top step, and added, without looking around, “I’ll wait.”
While I got my cigarettes out there was silence behind me. Then the door closed softly and the scraping and clicking broke out behind it. I smoked a cigarette and another and let time go by, trying to look like I had all the patience there was. I hoped this yellow man wasn’t going to make a chump of me by letting me sit there until I got tired of it.
Chinese passed up and down the alley, scuffling along in American shoes that can never be made to fit them. Some of them looked curiously at me, some gave me no attention at all. An hour went to waste, and a few minutes, and then the familiar scraping and clicking disturbed the door.
The chain rattled as the door swung open. I wouldn’t turn my head.
“Go ’way! No catch ’em Chang!”
I said nothing. If he wasn’t going to let me in he would have let me sit there without further attention.
A pause.
“Whata wan’?”
“I want to see Chang Li Ching,” I said without looking around.
Another pause, ended by the banging of the chain against the doorframe.
“All light.”
I chucked my cigarette into the street, got up and stepped into the house. In the dimness I could make out a few pieces of cheap and battered furniture. I had to wait while the Chinese put four arm-thick bars across the door and padlocked them there. Then he nodded at me and scuffled across the floor, a small, bent man with hairless yellow head and a neck like a piece of rope.
Out of this room, he led me into another, darker still, into a hallway, and down a flight of rickety steps. The odors of musty clothing and damp earth were strong. We walked through the dark across a dirt floor for a while, turned to the left, and cement was under my feet. We turned twice more in the dark, and then climbed a flight of unplaned wooden steps into a hall that was fairly light with the glow from shaded electric lights.
In this hall my guide unlocked a door, and we crossed a room where cones of incense burned, and where, in the light of an oil lamp, little red tables with cups of tea stood in front of wooden panels, marked with Chinese characters in gold paint, which hung on the walls. A door on the opposite side of this room let us into pitch blackness, where I had to hold the tail of my guide’s loose made-to-order blue coat.
So far he hadn’t once looked back at me since our tour began, and neither of us had said anything. This running upstairs and downstairs, turning to the right and turning to the left, seemed harmless enough. If he got any fun out of confusing me, he was welcome. I was confused enough now, so far as the directions were concerned. I hadn’t the least idea where I might be. But that didn’t disturb me so much. If I was going to be cut down, a knowledge of my geographical position wouldn’t make it any more pleasant. If I was going to come out all right, one place was still as good as another.
We did a lot more of the winding around, we did some stair-climbing and some stair-descending, and the rest of the foolishness. I figured I’d been indoors nearly half an hour by now, and I had seen nobody but my guide.
Then I saw something else.
We were going down a long, narrow hall that had brown-painted doors close together on either side. All these doors were closed—secretive-looking in the dim light. Abreast of one of them, a glint of dull metal caught my eye—a dark ring in the
