"Will it always be crowded?"
"No. They'll clear out in an hour or so."
"Then let's have dinner first. I want to show off. I know how to use chop-sticks."
Lennox looked at her. "Taught to you by an eclectic Chinaman?"
"No, by a Hawaiian. He was very nice, but terribly hasty."
"Gabrielle, I swear you're a great woman. We'll have to wait for a table. Let's go to the bar."
The Yellow Sea had expanded twice in its rise to prosperity. In the forties it had added a tourist-type dining room to the original teakwood and silk-screen restaurant which now catered exclusively to the Chinese locals. In the fifties it added a chrome and neon bar. Lennox and Gabby went up a flight of stairs, down another, and entered the bar where they were unexpectedly greeted by a stranger.
"Ah!" he cried. He spoke with the explosive Chinatown diction. "Missa Hu-li Lennox. Dissa g'eat pleasuh an' honauh." He came forward, shook Jake's hand, and said: "Lon' time no see. Yes? Ha-ha."
He was short, very stout, and either an old young man or a young old man, as is so often the confusing appearance of the Chinese. His round, boyish face was perpetually wreathed in a sunny smile to which a wall-eye lent a distracting quality. You never could be sure whether he was beaming at you or at some faraway recollection.
"You 'membuh me, Missa Lennox? Stanley Fu, the Sh'off?"