“Thank you, I will. Could I-may I also have her address in Zurich? In case I miss her?”

“Of course you may.” She all but audibly beamed at my self-correction. “I’ll get it for you.” I heard the phone clunk down, and before long she was back. She read off an address and phone number in Zurich, both the same as on Alice’s card.

“Thank you. And I have just one more question.”

“Ask as many as you like. This has been so interesting. You know, when we came back, what with the horrible news from the concentration camps in Europe, and the prisoner of war camps in the Philippines and so on, no one wanted to listen to us talk about our war. Most people didn’t even know where Shanghai was. My parents never spoke about the camp, either. I suppose they didn’t want to bring up bad memories. And our family had other things to adjust to, after all. Alice and I had never been to America. We saw snow! And we were both sick when we got here. Then we got well and we started going to school and that was that. So I haven’t talked about it very much at all. So many memories! Even if most of them are muddled.” She stopped, coughed, then said, “Yes, I’m sorry, dear. You had another question?”

The needle on my guilt-o-meter had flown into the red zone, but I asked my question anyway. “After people died, what became of the things they’d brought with them? Mrs. Ulrich, for example. What would have happened to her suitcases?”

“Her suitcases?” A pause. “This won’t sound very nice, I’m afraid. I don’t remember about Mrs. Ulrich’s things specifically. But when people passed on, their things were… divided up. None of us had enough, you see. Clothes, or shoes, blankets, toiletries, medicines. Hairbrushes or sewing kits. Even the suitcases themselves-people made furniture from them, and cribs for the babies. So that would have been what happened. When poor Mrs. Ulrich took ill she died very quickly, a matter of days, I think. My mother was probably in charge of deciding what to do with her things, and they were put to good use, I’ve no doubt about that.”

I thanked her, promising to call again if my research needed anything else, and hung up. It crossed my mind she might call Alice and gush about the nice young graduate student from New York who was so interested in Shanghai. Well, it couldn’t be helped. What possible rationale could I give for asking her to keep mum?

I poured a cup of tea and thought about Mrs. Ulrich’s things being put to good use. It was likely they had been, but unlikely that, if she’d had the Shanghai Moon, anyone had knowingly ended up with it and kept it secret all these years. Why would they? But unknowingly? Could someone have it now-sewn into Mrs. Ulrich’s sewing kit, concealed in one of her many suitcases the way Rosalie and Paul had hidden Elke’s jewelry? Could it be languishing in some airless attic, tossed onto a moldy pile of World War II keepsakes? That was possible, and if so it was as good as gone forever. But that left Bill’s question unanswered: If Frau Ulrich had had the Shanghai Moon, or even knew where to find it, why hadn’t she used it to buy her way out of the camp?

So probably she hadn’t had it and couldn’t have laid her hands on it. But it was clearly way beyond coincidence that Alice had been locked in the same camp, in the same room, with the Ulrichs. Especially since that fact, like so many other things-say, the existence of the Shanghai Moon itself-was one Alice had failed to mention. But if something from those days gave her a clue to where the Shanghai Moon was now, why had it taken this long, and the discovery of Rosalie’s other jewelry, to get her moving on it? And if, as Wong Pan claimed, it had been in a secret compartment with the other jewelry all along, and he had it now, what was I supposed to make of Alice’s relationship with the Ulrichs? Or of Zhang Li’s contention, echoed by his brother C. D. Zhang, that it was stolen in a robbery in 1949?

I called Bill.

“Who’re you?” he drawled.

“I’m sorry.”

“And I’m pissed off. Pleased to meet you.”

“Are you really?”

“Pleased to meet you? I already know you. So I wasn’t surprised that you called and woke me to tell me you’d call me back. So no, I’m not really pissed off.”

That being the case, I told him about my morning.

“Whoa. You’ve been busy. Maybe there’s something to this early morning thing after all.”

“You think?”

“No. But this business about Alice Fairchild and the Ulrichs-God, I wish I knew what it means.”

“So do I. The other thing I wish I knew is what the White Eagles are going to be up to this afternoon.”

“You think this is it? The big score?”

“Don’t you? Mary said we have to stay away. But-”

“No buts. If the NYPD is all over it, we’re not. For one thing, it may have nothing to do with us, with this case. And come on, Mary will tell you all about it.”

“If she ever starts speaking to me again.”

“Doesn’t she owe you one, for calling me in the first place?”

“She doesn’t see it like that. Bill?”

“Uh-huh?” I could hear the snap of a match as he lit a cigarette.

“Do you think my mother could have done that on purpose? Called Armpit’s mother to see if she could find out anything to help me?”

Silence while he drew in that first nicotine hit. “I’d say yes.”

“But this is my mother!”

“Did she have any other reason to speak to Armpit’s mother?”

“Not that I know of. But…” I couldn’t think of anything more to explain my inability to believe this than “This is my mother.”

Bill and I made plans to meet; then I spent a useless half hour on the phone and online while Bill showered and pulled himself together. I called Mr. Chen, so Irene Ng could tell me he wasn’t in, and Mr. Zhang, so Fay could tell me he was out. I called Alice, so her voice mail could tell me she wasn’t available. I Googled the Ulrichs, the Fairchilds, and Chapei Camp in all the combinations I could think of, so the Web could tell me the Shanghai Moon wasn’t anywhere. I stared at my cell phone, trying to hypnotize it into ringing the Wonder Woman song so Mary could tell me anything at all. It just sat there.

I did my dishes, swept up, and straightened this and that. When the phone finally played something, it was the Bonanza theme. I grabbed it up. “Took you long enough!”

“Why, something happening?”

“No, and I’m sick of it!”

“A little antsy?” Bill asked sympathetically.

“So antsy I can’t stand it. Come on, I’ll buy you coffee. Meet me at Tai-Pan.”

“Uh-oh. Do I detect disobedience of a direct NYPD order?”

“No way! Do you see me anywhere near the White Eagles? And why can’t I buy my partner breakfast at my favorite bakery?”

“Since when is Tai-Pan your favorite bakery?”

I didn’t bother to answer, because he knew: since we found out how handy it was to Mr. Chen’s shop. I also didn’t comment on how he didn’t comment on my slip of the tongue that brought out “partner.”

My congee being a fairly recent event, I contented myself with tea and a red bean bun at Tai-Pan. I put this measly array on an unnecessary plastic tray and added napkins and knives and forks, the better to colonize space at the counter. Bill showed up soon after and ordered a large coffee and an ugly cream-filled pastry, something Chinese people wouldn’t have dreamed of eating until the Hong Kong British introduced what passed for food back home. When Bill took out his wallet, though, the stone-faced woman at the register waved him off with a nod to me.

“I told you I was buying.” I slid the placeholder tray off his part of the counter.

“You’re a class act. How’d she know it was me?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He turned and looked at tables crowded with Chinese grandmas chattering in Chinese, Chinese waiters on their way to work in Chinese restaurants, Chinese mothers with Chinese babies. The only lo faan besides Bill were a tourist couple trying in whispers to guess the ingredients in the pastries.