After several minutes of circling and dodging through the residential streets, suddenly we were back on the Embarcadero, heading south this time, back towards the Ferry Building. Just before he entered the snarl of traffic there, Greenfield flew to the right, taking some paint off a cable-car, dodged north for a couple of streets, then west. He swerved around a horse-drawn wagon, then with a sharp squeal of tyres shot directly across the nose of a taxi and entered a street I knew all too well.

It was afternoon on Grant Avenue: the crowded, bustling, commercial and residential centre of Chinatown.

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-five

Chinatown was the worst possible place for a motorcar chase—which, I realised dimly, was why Greenfield had chosen it. He knew that I would have to slow for the vendors, children, afternoon shoppers, and infirm who clotted its streets, although he seemed to have no such compunction. He gained fifty feet in the first two streets by the simple technique of laying hard on both horn and accelerator, hesitating for nothing. I, in the mean-time, received the back-draught of his passage—the grandfather who stepped out into the street the better to see the blur that had just sped past him, the laden bicyclist who teetered, nearly fell, and then caught his balance by veering into my path—so that I was forced to slow and dodge.

“Holmes,” I shouted, swerving with one hand and gearing down with the other, “shove your hand on the horn!” But instead, he rose in his seat and shouted for me to stop.

“I can catch them, Holmes—” I protested in grim determination, but his hand came down to slap mine from the steering wheel and he repeated his command.

I jammed my foot off one pedal and onto the other; our stolen motor stood on its nose with a violent protest of rubber, and had Holmes not been tucked tight against the windscreen he would have been launched over the bonnet into a fruit cart. Instead, the instant the motor sat back on its haunches he peeled himself from the glass and leapt out over the door, coming to rest in front of a diminutive white-headed figure. I couldn't see him at first, since Holmes' shoulders hid him from view, but in a split second a small, dignified Oriental gentleman was in mid-air, feet waving, and then standing on the bonnet of the motor, his scholar's hands out to catch his balance. Holmes scrambled up beside him in a flash, and as his right arm came up with his revolver in it, he put his head down and shouted at the snowy white head, “Tell them to stop that motorcar!”