Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before slipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade

paid his fare and left the taxicab. San Francisco’s night-fog, thin, clammy, and

penetrant, blurred the street. A few yards from where Spade had dismissed the

taxicab a small group of men stood looking up an alley. Two women stood with a

man on the other side of Bush Street, looking at the alley. There were faces at

windows.

 

Spade crossed the sidewalk between iron-railed hatchways that opened above bare

ugly stairs, went to the parapet, and, resting his hands on the damp coping,

looked down into Stockton Street.

 

An automobile popped out of the tunnel beneath him with a roaring swish, as if

it had been blown out, and ran away. Not far from the tunnel’s mouth a man was

hunkered on his heels before a billboard that held advertisements of a moving

picture and a gasoline across the front of a gap between two store-buildings.

The hunkered man’s head was bent almost to the sidewalk so he could look under

the billboard. A hand flat on the paving, a hand clenched on the billboard’s

green frame, held him in this grotesque position. Two other men stood awkwardly

together at one end of the billboard, peeping through the few inches of space

between it and the building at that end. The building at the other end had a

blank grey sidewall that looked down on the lot behind the billboard. Lights

flickered on the sidewall, and the shadows of men moving among lights.

 

Spade turned from the parapet and walked up Bush Street to the alley where men

were grouped. A uniformed policeman chewing gum under an enameled sign that said