An alley gapped ahead; on TV, fleeing criminals always ran down alleys; he was well down this one before it occurred to him that they were probably pretty familiar already with the alleys they chose to run down.
This one became narrower and stranger with each stride he took, turning and turning again, as though it would never reach another street.
The clatter of hooves behind him sounded like a cavalry charge in a movie. He heard their rhythm break as the horse jumped the same overturned garbage can he himself had leaped only a moment before, then the animal’s awful scream, and a sickening thud as its steel shoes slipped on the icy bricks.
He ran on, the map flapping in one hand, the doll thumping his heaving chest with each gasp for breath. A witch’s black cat hissed him from the summit of a ramshackle board fence, and a Chinese lounging upon an old divan and smoking what appeared to be an opium pipe smiled benignly.
He turned a corner and confronted a dead end.
“You want leave?” the Chinese asked.
He looked over his shoulder. “Yes. I—got—get—out—ahere.”
The Chinese rose, smoothing a drooping mustache. “Okay! You come.”
A slanting door opened into a cellar. When the Chinese had shut it behind them, it was pitch dark save for the tiny crimson glow from the bowl of the pipe.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Now noplace,” the Chinese told him. “In dark, who say?”
The sweet smoke of the pipe battled the mildewed air. He could imagine it curling around him like a white snake, a pale Chinese dragon. He tried to refold the map, conscious that he was doing it wrong; after a moment he shoved the clumsy packet into a side pocket.
“Paradise maybe. Hell maybe. Who say?”
He said, “I could, if I had a match.”
The Chinese chuckled like the rattling of nine ivory balls in the mouths of nine ivory lions, and he felt a hard square box pushed into his hand. “There match. Strike. You say.”
He had shaken his head before he realized the Chinese could not see him. “I might start a fire.”
“Then Hell. Strike match.”
“No,” he said.
“I strike,” the Chinese told him. There was a dry rasp and a flare of light. They were standing near a pile of mattresses. Barrels, bins, bags, boxes, and tall stacks of books crammed the cellar. There were floor joists an inch or less above his head. “Paradise? Hell?” the Chinese asked. “Now you say.”
“Paradise.”
“Ah! You wise! Come upstair, drink tea. Police man look outside, no find.”
He followed the Chinese up a flight of steep steps, through a hatch in the floor above, and into a cluttered shop. Scarlet paper lanterns daubed with black Chinese characters dangled from the ceiling, and long scrolls hung on nails in the walls showed tigers as sinuous as serpents.
“You want sell? Sheng buy. You want buy, Sheng sell,” the Chinese told him. “Not tea. Tea for nothing, make friend.”
Again a match flared, and gas blossomed violet above an iron ring in a tiny room behind a bead curtain.
“You’ve made a friend already,” he said.
“What you want, come Sheng. Good! You want, Sheng got. No got, Sheng get. Sit down?”
He sat in a flimsy bamboo chair that appeared to have been intended for a child. Though it had been cold outside, he found that he was perspiring.
“Tea, grocery, firework, medicine. Many, many things, very cheap.”
He nodded, wondering how old the Chinese was. He had never met a Chinese before who had not spoken idiomatic American. If anyone had asked (though no one ever had) he would have answered readily that there were hundreds of millions who did not, who in fact knew no language but their own; now he learned that knowing and understanding are vastly different things.
The Chinese knocked out his pipe, refilled it, and lit it again on the violet gas tongues. After a token puff or two, he set a dented copper teakettle on the gas ring. “Sheng say Paradise, Hell? You say Paradise. Why you—what wrong?”
The doll had moved.
The Parade
Gingerly, he took the doll from his pocket. Its legs, he felt certain, had been straight before. Now one was slightly bent at the knee. Its face had been calm and serious—perhaps he would have said blank if he had not loved that face so much. Now the lips were slightly curved.
“Ah, you admirer of goddess!”
Half unconsciously, he nodded.
“That good! I see?”
