‘When we were coming into the station. I saw some maps on that bookstall.’ He frowned. ‘I regret not being able to leave any money for it, but under the circumstances . . .’
‘We were in a hurry,’ Irene agreed, taking the map eagerly. She upturned a couple of buckets to make a makeshift table. ‘Very good job, Kai. Seeing as we’re in New York, have a cookie.’
‘I’d settle for cocktails and a dance,’ Kai said hopefully.
‘They’d probably recognize me as “Jeanette Smith” the minute I walked into a nightclub by now.’ Irene unclasped the locket with Evariste’s name in it and dangled it over the map. ‘You, too. As an imported English mobster, that is. You were standing right behind me when the reporters were taking photographs.’
‘I managed to hide my face more than you did. Which is probably a good thing.’ Kai frowned. ‘If Qing Song is here, and if he or Hu recognizes me . . .’
‘That would be inconvenient,’ Irene agreed. She focused her thoughts and held the pendant over the map, as she’d done before. ‘Locket, indicate the place where the Librarian whose name you contain is to be found . . .’
A couple of hours later, Kai was assisting Irene off a streetcar in the middle of Brooklyn. Brownstone buildings three or four storeys high walled the streets and turned them into canyons, rising high enough to block off most of the sunlight. The entrance doorways were higher than street level, and little flights of steps ran down from each one to the sidewalk. Ranks of windows looked down at the people hurrying below, blank eyes in shadowed faces watching the crowds of New Yorkers going about their business.
Nobody had spotted them yet – or at least nobody had pointed at them and yelled, ‘Hey, aren’t you Jeanette Smith, the famous English mobster?’ – and Irene was tentatively starting to relax.
The brownstone on the street corner they’d located on the map looked like any of the other brownstones in the area. It had been a single building once, before being converted into apartments: Irene could just make out the row of doorbells inside the porch. There was a convenient corner shop opposite, giving Irene and Kai an excuse to look in the window while they pondered their next move.
‘The front door would be too obvious,’ Kai said quietly. ‘If anyone’s watching it, they couldn’t miss us.’
Irene nodded. ‘But the back’s suspicious to any watchers.’ Their route had taken them all round the block while they scouted the place. There was a fire escape visible up the back of the building, but that approach had its own risks. ‘Better to walk up to the front door, as if we’re regular inhabitants.’
‘As long as you let me do the talking,’ Kai said. ‘Your American accent is . . .’ He looked for a tactful way of phrasing it. ‘Unconvincing.’
Irene glared at him in the shop window, and adjusted a wrinkle in her stocking rather than look at him directly. ‘Oh, very well,’ she agreed.
Kai tilted his fedora, inspected his reflection, re-tilted it, then led the way to the brownstone. He mimed fumbling in his pocket and finding a key, then unlocking the door. Irene stood behind him and, just loudly enough to be audible, said, ‘Door lock, open.’
The door swung open and Kai held it for Irene, before closing it behind them. The hallway inside was sparsely furnished, with only a numbered set of letter boxes to break the entrance corridor’s monotony. It was floored in battered linoleum, and the old wood that panelled the walls was scarred and dented by years of casual punishment. There were two doors on the left-hand wall, and a flight of stairs at the end of the corridor. Irene glanced at the letter boxes, but none of them had names next to them, just apartment numbers. A pity: it would have made things easier.
The second door on the left swung open and a woman poked her head out. She was in her mid-fifties, her hair a brassy orange and her shawl-collared dress a battered purple. ‘Have you got the— Oh, sorry.’ She looked over Kai and Irene. ‘I figured it was someone else.’
‘Sorry,’ Kai said, managing a rather convincing New York accent. ‘Hope we didn’t bother you.’
‘Nah, not a bit. I was waiting for my Tom to get back from the store. You new here?’ Her eyes were bright with curiosity.
‘Just here to see an acquaintance,’ Kai said. ‘I think he’s on one of the upper floors. He gave me his key, but not his apartment number.’
‘What’s his name?’ the woman asked.
‘Evariste,’ Kai said. They couldn’t be sure he’d be using his real name, but one had to say something. ‘He won’t have been here long; a month at most.’
‘Oh, him.’ The woman pursed her lips in disapproval. ‘I don’t know his name, but there’s this new fellow who’s been here only a couple of weeks. And everyone else has been living here for years. He’s on the third floor, left-hand side. I have got to say, while I’m not prejudiced, a boy like him would have done better taking rooms in Harlem. I mean, it’s only natural, isn’t it?’
Irene was sharply reminded of the prejudices of 1920s America. But if they wanted information, unfortunately they’d have to play along. ‘That’s what we told him, wasn’t it?’ she said to Kai, struggling to match his accent. ‘We said he should have taken rooms there.’
Kai nodded soberly. A glint in his eye showed that he’d caught Irene’s direction. ‘I hope he hasn’t done anything to disturb you while he’s been here,’ he said to the woman.
‘Well, no, not so much,’ she admitted, in a tone of voice suggesting that she wished she had something to complain about. ‘It’s not as if he even leaves his apartment that much. Just sits there all day and does I don’t know what, and only goes out to get some food and a glass of something from round the corner. What does he do for work? It looks real shifty – know what I mean? I’ve heard about that sort of thing on the radio.’
This was interesting. It sounded more like hiding than active cooperation with a dragon partner. Irene filed it away thoughtfully and nodded. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you,’ she said to the woman.
‘Not a problem,’ she said reluctantly. Clearly she’d been hoping for a longer gossip about their new tenant. ‘Have a nice day.’
As the door shut behind her, Irene and Kai trotted up the stairs.
They paused on the second floor. Irene unclasped the pendant from her neck and looped it round her left wrist. ‘Point to the Librarian whose name you share,’ she instructed it softly.
The pendant jerked and pulled at her wrist like an impatient puppy, pointing upwards and to the left. She and Kai quietly began ascending the stairs.
On the third floor the pendant’s pull became horizontal, tugging towards the left-hand apartment. Just as the woman had said. There was no obvious sign of anything out of the ordinary. No swarms of flies, no smell of corpses, no suspicious noises . . . Irene forcibly jerked her mind away from trashy detective-novel tropes, and glanced at Kai to see if he had any thoughts.