herd animals on a Land Rover safari. The men opened a path. They seemed to be a polite lot, for beasts. Almost intentional. It was after two in the morning. Another hour or two, they’d have the world to themselves.

“Did you try to find out?” Angel pressed when Jimmy didn’t say anything.

“No.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

Jimmy felt like he was in the dean of boys’ office. Or a cop station.

Then he remembered. “Down here,” he said. “The night of one of the suicides. A guy stepped in front of a streetcar.”

“Did you ever talk to her, face-to-face?”

“No.”

“Machine Shop said he talked to her, had a cup with her one night.”

“I was across the street,” Jimmy said defensively.

“He said she was a real talker,” Angel said. “Baring her soul.” He was quiet for a minute. “She was never that way with me, just said something when it needed to be said, not even then most of the time. She was real sweet.”

What do you want me to say? Jimmy was thinking.

The Sailors were packed in tight around the car now. And not so fast to move out of the way. Angel saw where they were. Pier 35, where Lucy had died.

“I don’t need to see it,” Angel said.

“Shop called, thought he saw Les Paul down here. With the woman in the white dress.”

“She was with Lucy, the last time you saw her?”

“Yeah. And another woman. Short black hair.”

Les Paul. Sexy Sadie. Polythene Pam. The Leonidas girls. Truth was, Jimmy was looking for everybody.

Anybody except Mary.

Turn the page, you got another day. Whether you wanted one or not. Duncan Groner had had his own way of bringing Jimmy back to the case, of pressing his fingers down on the fiery Braille again, of dragging him back across the bridge from Marin to San Francisco.

“Page A-6,” Groner had said, a wake-up call at the hotel, though Jimmy had never turned toward the bed that night. “The Chronicle, All the News That’s Fit for Fools.”

It was a full page of faces. The dead. The suicides.

“Some friends of yours . . .” Groner said.

Jimmy opened the newspaper standing in the doorway to the suite, and there they were, all the suicides, in clean rows with their names underneath, way too much like a high school yearbook. He’d expected something else, the latest edition of the present maybe, not the past.

What he’d expected was something about Mary. Or her husband.

The accompanying copy was bylined. Duncan Groner apparently had become the go-to guy for self-murder. There wasn’t much “story” to the layout, one long graf in which the reporter laid out the terms: San Francisco proper usually had eight to ten suicide deaths a month. (The Golden Gate had its own segregated stats, two a month since the plain-clothes patrollers had been instated, “blending in” with the despairing.) Since the first of September, all told there’d been forty-eight suicides, successful suicides was the term, bringing to mind dozens more with half-slashed wrists, with only a half bottle of pills to be suctioned out in the ER, jumpers off one-story roofs, shooters firing starter’s pistols at their temples. Groner ended the lead-in with a few sentences of behind-the-scenes stuff, the disclosure that the editors “vociferously debated” the “dangers” of “publicizing” the suicides (of telling the truth, in other words), for fear that the “suggestible” in San Francisco might think the unthinkable, and act on it, join the club. Even if the initiation ceremony was a tad severe.

Faces. Hairstyles, forced smiles. The retoucher’s craft. Lives smoothed out, flattened onto cheap pulp paper, tamed in black and white, gussied up. There was the old lady, the ninety-year-old chorus girl. The young man with AIDS. The German tourist. All the pictures shaved off years, decades in some cases. Now the AIDS man from the hospice was outdoors, resurrected into a brighter yesterday, coastal cliffs behind him, his perfect thick hair wild in the wind up off the water, a white smile on his face that made you wish you could see the cutoff person at his shoulder, the man, Jimmy guessed, who’d gone through the drawer of pictures to pick this one. There were the Greek twins. There they all were.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Angel said.

“New,” Jimmy said. It was a vulgar term.

Some of the Sailors, the more dramatic ones, used the word aboard when they were talking about new Sailors: a new Sailor was “aboard.” New meant “new meat.”

“You don’t think Lucy’s down here, do