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strong.
    When I looked at myself in the long mirror, to be sure I'd done
up all my buttons properly, there was a film of tears in my eyes. I
swiped at them once with the back of my hand, pressed my lips
together firmly, and stood tall with shoulders square. That would
do, but my disguise was not yet complete. It lacked the hat, which
I was loath to put on because I hate hats.
    To tell the truth I was none too fond, either, of the long gray
coat that covered me from neck to toe. It was absolutely plain yet
tolerably well cut, buttoned all down the front with cheap but
matching mother-of-pearl buttons. A more boring garment can
scarcely be imagined, but that was the point: to render me
unremarkable. Michael said it was quite a chore to render me
unremarkable, due to my height-five feet eight inches, which is
tall for a woman-and a number of other factors he declined to
mention. Nor did I insist upon enlightenment, being somewhat wary
of what he might say.
    It was the loathsome hat that made my disguise most effective.
In a style that had been popular a couple of decades earlier, this
hat came down low in the back to cover my hair, almost like a
bonnet; it had a little peaked brim, trimmed in ruching, from which
hung a half veil. That is to say, the veil covered half my face:
forehead, eyes, nose. Altogether this did not leave much of me to
be recognized.
    A few moments later I tapped on the door of Michael's little
private room downstairs and said in a slightly raised voice, "I'm
off. Wish should be back here shortly but in the meantime-"
    The door opened so abruptly it startled me, and Michael was
standing there with a gleam in his eyes, finishing the sentence: "I
know, I'll answer the telephone and listen for the door. You look
so demure in that outfit, Fremont; it makes me want to ravish
you."
    I took a couple of steps backward. "Don't you dare! I haven't
time to do up all these buttons again."
    "A kiss then," said Michael, aiming his lips toward the one
section of my anatomy that remained uncovered. And a fine kiss it
was, too.
    With a deep, abiding surge of affection I touched his cheek,
replied, "I will," to his counsel that I be careful, and sailed out
of the house.
    When Michael proposed, several months ago, that he and I start
up a business of private investigation, I had felt in one way
excited by the prospect, and in another resigned to it-the latter
due to something very bad, indeed irrevocable, that had happened to
me the previous year. I didn't like to think of it, and never spoke
of it, not even to Michael; yet this bad thing had changed me. Even
more than the Great Earthquake did-and that event had changed all
of us who went through it.
    I parked the Maxwell a few blocks from my destination and walked
the rest of the way, into a part of the City called North Beach. As
I walked, I thought of the days when I'd first come to San
Francisco, with nothing but a typewriter and a lot of hope. The
memory seemed to shine with a kind of innocence, now gone
forever.
    If Father ever finds out what I did last year, it
will kill him.
    A shudder passed through me, but I raised my chin higher
and quickened my steps, and the moment of unpleasantness was soon
behind me. I walked briskly until Columbus Avenue came in sight,
then I slowed to a sedate pace, relaxed my shoulders into a kind of
Victorian slope, and directed my gaze downward. Or so it should
appear. In reality, though the angle of my head suggested demurely
downcast eyes, I was making the fullest use of my peripheral
vision-albeit through a haze of gray veil.
    The J&K Agency had been hired to identify a petty thief
whose crime sounded negligible until one realized that when small
items are stolen day after day, month after month, the cost does
mount. The police, when told of missing cabbages and spools of
thread and suchlike, had not been particularly zealous in their
attention to the problem. So the victims, Mr. and Mrs. Garofalo,
had asked us to find out who was