9:30
Angela walked beside Nick through the lighted streets , enchanted with the flowerlike lanterns that bloomed in front of balconied restaurants or places of entertainment , and with the crowding figures that shuffled silently by in felt-soled slippers or high rocker shoes . Tiny , elaborate women , young and old , slim youths with greeny-yellow faces like full summer moons , little old men with hands hidden in flowing sleeves , and dull eyes staring straight ahead , were to her ghosts of the Far East , or creatures of a fantastic dream from which she would soon awake . When they had `` done '' the principal thoroughfares and Angela had bought ivory boxes , jade bracelets , and a silver bell collar for Timmy the cat , Nick said that the time had come to join their guide . He had engaged a man supposed to know Chinatown inside and out , and the rendezvous was at 9:30 in Portsmouth Square , the `` lungs of Chinatown '' -- close to the memorial statue of Robert Louis Stevenson . It was quiet there , and pleasant in the starlight , faintly gilded by the street lamps . The young moon of the sixth month , which had sunk with the sun when Angela was in Monterey , had not yet dropped beyond distant house roofs . Its pearly profile looked down , surrounded by a clear-cut ring , like the face of a pale saint seen through the rose-window of a cathedral .