“Sibling rivalry in the NYPD? I’m shocked and appalled. Well, bring along the John Doe’s photo. Maybe I know him.”
“Oh, sure. Lydia, you’ve been away so long I’m surprised you still know your way around.”
“For Pete’s sake, it was one month! You sound like my mother.”
“What? I take it back. See you later.”
I did my dishes and got dressed for a day of gumshoeing. As an afterthought, I slipped into my bag the Rosalie Gilder letters I’d printed out last night but hadn’t read. Then I headed out to see if I still knew my way around.
Rushing Chinese people and strolling tourists crowded the hot, bright sidewalks. I worked my way past open storefronts where ice-filled boxes displayed dozens of kinds of fish, past piled vegetable stands and restaurants with chickens glistening in the window. When I hit six lanes of snarled and honking traffic, I’d reached Canal Street.
Canal, running east-west through lower Manhattan, was once Chinatown ’s border, but those days are gone. On the immigrant flood waters of the last two decades, Chinatown has spread north through what was once Little Italy and east through the formerly Jewish tenements of the Lower East Side. It’s lapping at the blocks west, too, merging with Tribeca and SoHo in a jagged scramble of the newly come and the ultra hip.
I surveyed the glittering windows of the jewelry row along Canal. As Alice Fairchild had said, they don’t go in much for antiques here. Chinese people value antiquities, but we generally like to know where things have spent the last, oh, five hundred years. Buying old things from strangers carries a risk: Unless you know what happened to the original owner and you’re sure he or she didn’t mind giving up the piece, you’re in danger of acquiring some bad luck along with it.
Westerners don’t seem to feel that way, and some of the Forty-seventh Street shops carry beautiful antiques. But a Shanghai bureaucrat on the lam might want to steer clear of the yarmulkes and black coats uptown and offer his ill-gotten goods to someone who spoke his language.