The sounds of the crowd returned, the parade noises, the children’s shouts, and the echoing of many horse hooves on asphalt. Münsterberg felt as he did when he tried to read a book in a dream, a maze of codes and words that made brief sense and came apart when he tried to consider them. He stood up, clutching his reels of film, and followed in his pooka’s path.

Several blocks away, at the corner of Post and Grant, stood Shreve & Co., the finest jewelry store in San Francisco. Founded when armed and unshaven customers still wearing chaps paid for their bawdy sweethearts’ diamond rings with gold nuggets they had mined themselves, Shreve had become, through the gentle softening motion of time, the store where anniversary rings were dutifully purchased for wives. It was a notoriously difficult place to rob; the first looter after the Earthquake had chosen Shreve as his target, and he was consequently the first person shot by army troops, his body left in the street with an exquisitely lettered gold-leaf sign around his neck—“He tried to rob Shreve & Co.”—until the raging city fire consumed him.

Andy Pike, feeling bleary and in need of coffee, stood at Shreve’s counter this very moment, soon to experience a run of very bad luck. Shreve was the only establishment in several blocks that could change a thousand-dollar bill. So Andy had come from Pike’s, the jewelry store at which she worked across the street, to get ten one-hundred-dollar bills for the handsome rabbi now at her own counter.

Pike & Sons had not been blessed, as had Shreve, with sixty years of history and reputation. Still, mistresses needed ornaments, too. Married men rarely went to Pike’s Place, as it was best known, but instead sent a confederate or an attorney or, as Andy surmised had happened today, a rabbi.

The intersection of Post and Grant was so heavy with traffic diverted from Market that it required a policeman’s whistle to sort out the entrances and egresses. Andy stopped on the corner, was waved on with a wink (she had that effect on policemen), and then returned to her store, where her father was continuing negotiations for a pair of pearl earrings and a matching brocade necklace.

Inside, the bell over the door rang when she entered, and the rabbi turned around from the black velvet upon which his future purchases were draped and gave her a nod that was polite. For pretty girls, Mordecai Golod was always polite.

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