The Silver Glove by Suzy McKee Charnas

other hand—if you could have The Olde Salte Seller, why not cutesify the name of a restaurant? I said, “Maybe both words begin with a K ?”
    I heard the computer clicking and the operator said doubtfully, “I do show a restaurant with a name like that, spelled with a K .”
    â€œHa!” I said, hopeful again.
    â€œIt’s not ‘Collie,’ ” said the operator. “I show K - A - L - I , Kali’s Kitchen. Could that be what you’re looking for?”
    It hit me: not “Collie” as in Lassie Come Home , but Kali, the terrible Indian goddess of death and destruction!
    I remembered her from our English class unit on Mythologies of the World last year. Kali is a horrible aspect of a powerful goddess. She has four arms and huge tusks and wears necklaces of snakes, skulls, babies’ heads, and so on, which gives you some idea of her disposition. Her tongue hangs out about a foot and drips blood. I had had a couple of rousing nightmares about her during that study unit.
    â€œAre you there?” I shouted into the phone. “Operator, I don’t want the number, I just need the address!”
    I scribbled the information on a napkin, hung up, and took off for the lower East Side where the streets start to turn seedy.
    And there it was, on a block with a bakery, closed; a liquor store, closed; a tiny little hole-in-the-wall grocery, open and very high-priced; a hat store for men, closed; a magazine store, open, with foreign magazines and several men clustered near the cash register where they kept the girlie magazines; and a tiny French café.
    I walked that block about six times before I got up the nerve to approach the place I was looking for, with its big front window and faded red awning: Kali’s Kitchen , it read, in curly white script.
    I leaned close to read the speckled, sun-dried menu taped inside the window next to two ancient newspaper reviews. The sign on the door said, Open . I peeked in the window, over a table draped in a red cloth with a little vase of drooping flowers on it. Somewhere deep inside in the gloom, somebody moved around.
    Brightner?
    I beat a quick retreat across the street and stood behind a lamppost like a dummy (even I am not that thin).
    A little Indian lady in a pink sari looked out of the restaurant doorway, up and down the street. She had a thick braid of black hair and a flash of gold at her ear. Did she see me?
    She held the door for a couple of patrons and went inside with them, and I started breathing again.
    Now what? If Gran was still around here someplace, spying on Brightner (and she had to be, she was my only hope), she’d be in some kind of disguise. So how was I going to spot her?
    I waited for hours, loafing in the magazine store and hoping every time somebody went in or out of Kali’s Kitchen that it would turn out to be Gran and wouldn’t turn out to be Brightner.
    At dinnertime a steady stream of street people made their way into the alley that ran alongside the restaurant building. They were let in through a side door that was propped ajar. That was how Dirty Rose and Gran must have gone in for their meal last night.
    Gran must still be in there. Maybe she was pretending to be a new waitress, or a kitchen hand. Maybe she was busy going through secret files in some back-room office with a little camera, like a movie spy. Granny Gran and the Restaurant of Doom .
    My job: find her! But how? I came up with the bright idea of making my first effort as a burglar.
    Having no handy disguises with me and not knowing whether Brightner himself was inside, I could hardly march in the front door. I would have to sneak in through the side entrance, sometime before the place was locked up for the night.
    I stayed across the street in the shadow of the magazine-store doorway with my hands in my jacket pockets, hopping from one foot to another to keep warm. My running shoes were not so great for standing around in