In chapter twenty-two, when the detective makes his way to the chanteuse’s apartment at one in the morning, she opens the door dressed in the prefigured gown. With a bow, she offers him a chair and pours him a whiskey. He consumes it at one gulp. Then with grim determination, he lays out the elements of the case against her—the primitive means, the engineered opportunity, the convoluted motive. It’s time to go downtown, Baby, he says at last, and rises to his feet—only to waken eight hours later on the floor of the empty apartment.

Gripping his head, he stumbles down the stairs. In the lobby, he stops to grab the old Chinaman at the desk by his truncated collar, demanding to know where she is.

—She gone, the Chinaman says.

—Gone where?

—Gone back. To Forbidden City . . .

With this news, our hapless shamus reels into the street, headed for the local precinct; or a bar; or maybe a bridge! Eve couldn’t say. Because her thoughts, having already ditched the detective, were on the trail of the chanteuse. Having made the journey across the Pacific on a rusty freighter and disembarked on the rickety docks of Shanghai, Eve followed the glamorous fugitive through a pair of intricately carved gates into a maze of gamboled roofs and red lacquered lattice a thousand years old . . .

The Forbidden City, had thought Eve. Now, that sounds like a place worth going to!

—Excuse me, she said to the kindly looking stranger across the table. Would you happen to have a writing instrument handy?

Armed with the stranger’s pencil, Eve flipped to the blank page that is always hiding at the end of a book like the unprepared kid at the back of the class. Across the top of the page in large capital letters she wrote PLACES TO GO, and then commenced to itemize:

1. The Forbidden City

2. Timbuktu

3.

After Timbuktu she paused. She bit the pencil’s eraser, at a loss for a third locale.

At a loss for a third locale? she chided herself. The world is big. It’s bigger than a bread box!

So, Eve closed her eyes and imagined that she was looking down at the earth from the heavens. She watched as the bright blue marble turned so dependably, bringing each continent successively into view. And there, below the parting clouds, a destination presented itself: Istanbul. And then another. And another. In fact, so quickly the destinations came, the kindly stranger’s pencil could barely keep up.

3. Istanbul

4. Cairo

5. Havana

6. French Polynesia

7. The Taj Mahal!

Lists aren’t so bad, Eve realized. They didn’t have to be a catalogue of matronly constraints. They could just as easily testify to plans and intentions. A celebration of the not yet done. Of what thou shalt.

It really just depended on which side of the pencil you were on.