Watchers across the way perked up a second later, as if he’d gotten the silent signal, too. Suddenly they were all on their feet, Jeremy’s crew, looking around in every direction. Like hunting dogs.

And then they were gone, all of them.

A second or two later, the background noise changed. A movie sound engineer could explain it, would know all the layers, would know what had built the previous sound, the ambient resonance of the water, the waves against the pilings of the docks, seabirds on top of that, the traffic near and far, and all the ways the crowds were noising, and would know what had changed.

It wasn’t a silence exactly. It was nothing, turned up loud.

Jimmy looked over to the right. Whatever had happened, it was to the east, the Embarcadero.

He found it.

He walked into the back of the crowd. Here was another kind of audience. Jeremy and his men were already there, had already pushed through to the front.

It was a streetcar, stopped dead in its tracks.

It was a body, cleaved into halves.

It was a transit driver standing there with that nothing-I-could-do look.

And that smell in the air, spilled gore.

Jeremy dispatched his men. To Look. It was like the other night, the men circulating through the bands of spectators, staring individuals in the eyes. Looking.

Jimmy moved closer. He couldn’t see if it was a man or a woman, old or young.

Of course he thought, Lucy. When he’d seen her, with Sadie and Pam, they were heading this way. If they were headed anywhere. They were just strolling. Pam had a drink with a straw, something bright red in clear plastic. Sadie had her arm in Lucy’s.

It was a man. Two halves of a man.

Jimmy stepped closer.

The eyes were still open. The upper half was on its side. The lower was on its back. (Had this human being already lost the right to personal pronouns?)

The impact had torn open his pants. He had an erection. Jimmy had heard of it, a final jolt of nerve voltage through the cord, a last rude impulse. A last joke.

“Don’t you have a tarp or something?” Jimmy said to the driver.

The driver shook his head. “You don’t touch ’em. You just wait.”

Then Jimmy saw Lucy in the crowd, across, on the far side of the halved man. She had seen it, and seeing it had changed her face.

But she was moving away, or being moved away, Sadie with her arm around her, Polythene Pam coming along behind them, finishing her drink, cute as a bug.

He went after them, pushed people out of the way to get to them, but they were too far ahead of him.

EIGHT

He heard the newspaper land on the carpet in the hallway, against the door.

Some call it morning.

He was in the club chair with the drapes open. There was a little blue on the right side of the sky, but it was still dark. He had a glass of vodka in his hand, the glass from the bathroom, but he wasn’t drunk. It hadn’t done anything for him. He never read the paper anymore. The news always seemed to be something he’d already gotten some other way. But he got up anyway and went to the door.

It was fat. A fat paper. He let the door close against his back standing there and then held the lever and let it close quietly, with just a click. No use waking anybody.

He went back to sit in the chair by the window. He put the paper on the ledge. He’d gone to get it not for the news but in the hope it could renew the sense that the world was still out there, remind him that maybe the world wasn’t as small and as empty as it felt right now to him. The cold air from the AC ruffled the edges, made it flutter.

He turned the paper over to the front page.

It was below the fold, but there it was:STREETCAR SUICIDE

With a picture. The body covered.

Things tend to be a little dead at a newspaper on a Saturday night. They’d given the assignment to a reporter, probably somebody young, maybe even an intern, and let him or her do a feature treatment rather than just the hard news. So the first graf wasn’t the five W’s, but more along the lines of . . .

The weekend revelers and visiting conventioneers in their matching T-shirts who congregated at the edge of the Bay on a Chamber of Commerce brochure-perfect Saturday night