A kidnapper tells a parent, Don’t call the police or your child will die. Do the parents think the kidnapper will be good to his word? Of course not. Do the parents call the police? Usually not. The police don’t have their kid. The kidnapper does.

The night promised to be cool, so I went to the closet for my raincoat. I had no choice but to show up.

I took a cab into downtown Oakland, where Broadway meanders into Chinatown. From there, I visited a pawnshop, a men’s haberdashery, and a laundry, hoping that these three stops might save my life.

Then I hailed another cab and had it take me to the marina on Treasure Island’s Port of the Trade Winds. At a little bar on the marina, I watched two immense flying boats, the Yankee Clipper and the China Clipper, bob about in the choppy water like toys in a child’s bath while I nursed a beer for an hour.

Nine P.M. I wandered into the fair via Portway Passage, the corridor between the two air hangars. I knew this would almost certainly be the last time I’d see Atlantis before it was torn down. I took the Pacific Promenade past the lagoon, giving a hasty glance to the Japanese castle, now lit by hundreds of lanterns, and turned quickly away from it.

The passing crowd was thinning rapidly. The last remnants of the honest-colored sunset relinquished the job of illuminating the buildings to the island’s blue and pink floodlights. I felt like a spirit in an opulent cemetery fighting off an eternal sleep. I wanted away from this polished city, one that seemed to know it had only a few weeks left to live. If there ever actually was an Atlantis, this was how it must have felt a month before its submersion.

I walked quickly to the Gayway. I didn’t offer Pacifica more than a passing glance. The Street of the Barkers gave me new life. The crowd was dwindling here, too, but as long as there was a sucker with a few dollars in his pocket, no self-respecting pitchman would ever cease his spiel.

I suppose no one ever simply finds themselves anywhere, not by chance, but I found myself outside Sally Rand’s. I turned to a pretty ticket vendor in her kiosk. “I’d like to see Nancy Carmack if she’s here.”

“She’s out on a dinner date,” the woman said.

“I had something I wanted to leave for her.”

“You can leave it here for her, honey, if you want. I don’t know if she’s coming back tonight.”

I told the woman I’d return in a minute, walked past the tropical drink stand and into a recess that someone was calling a souvenir shop, and purchased a small box of Treasure Island stationery.