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    Aida rented a room in a five-story building in Chinatown over Golden Lotus Dim Sum, at the northern end of tourist-laden Grant Avenue. All the residents were single working women like her. Cable cars clanged down the street during the day, and local streetcars ran until midnight, so she usually didn’t have to pay for a taxi after work or worry about straining her calf muscles hiking up and down the hilly streets alone, which made the six-block walk from Gris-Gris seem twice as long. Weekly room and board included free dim sum—as the proprietors owned both the apartments and the restaurant—and her room contained a Murphy bed that folded up into a closet, an armchair, a desk, a telephone, and a private bath.
    But the best part was the black iron fire escape that stretched outside her window. It doubled as a meager balcony, upon which she sometimes sat at night to stare out over pagoda roofs lined with swaying paper lanterns and the gold dragons entwined around Chinatown’s lampposts.
    Four days after the incident with Winter Magnusson, when Aida rose at her usual late-morning hour, she rubbed goose bumps on her arms and pulled back curtains from her window to peek outside past the fire escape. Nothing but gray skies and drizzle. Mark Twain supposedly once joked that a summer in San Francisco was the coldest winter he’d ever spent, and from what Aida had experienced since she’d arrived, this wasn’t an exaggeration, especially at night when the fog rolled in.
    â€œBetter than the blistering heat out East,” she said to the small oval photo inside her gold locket. “And cold weather just means more customers stopping by the club tonight to warm up with a drink. See, Sam? I’m still thinking positive.” She snapped the locket closed and headed to her humble bathroom.
    As she bathed, her mind wandered to Winter Magnusson. She’d dreamed about him twice—unsurprising, considering what she’d seen that night. But in her latest dream, instead of him being naked, it had been
her
, and he’d taken on the persona of some tabloid gangster, fighting rival bootleggers with machine guns and sawed-off shotguns.
    She wondered if he’d ever been involved in anything like that in real life. Perhaps it was better if she never found out. He was likely wishing he never saw a ghost again. Maybe he’d already forgotten her. She certainly wished she’d forgotten the melodic rumble of his voice, the two dimples in the small of his back, and other notable parts of him . . .
    Shaking that thought away, she dressed in bright clothing to fortify her mood: a lapis blue dress with long, sheer sleeves and knife pleats that fell just below her knees, and a pair of matching Bakelite drop earrings. After donning her gray coat and cloche, she grabbed her handbag and headed out the door. Four flights of stairs later, she stepped through a side door into the ground-level restaurant.
    Golden Lotus was in the middle of a brisk lunchtime rush, and its ostentatious red and gold decor greeted her as she wound her way past dark wood tables and velvet-cushioned chairs, inhaling the enticing aromas of ginger and garlic. Customers who dined here were a mix of locals, tourists, businessmen entertaining out-of-town clients, and young working girls—typists and switchboard operators. Servers in smart red
tangzhuang
jackets with mandarin collars wheeled wooden pushcarts brimming with tiny plates of pungent bites: slender spring rolls, buns filled with Cantonese-style pork, and bamboo trays of steamed shrimp dumplings.
    She headed to the restaurant’s main entrance. Near the door, a counter held a rosewood Buddha statue on one side, and on the other, display boxes filled with Wrigley’s gum and cigarettes sat next to a cash register. Day or night, one of the owners stood behind the counter—usually this was Mrs. Lin, as it was