who instantly made him think of a girl he’d fallen hard for when he was just a kid, maybe the last real love before he’d become a Sailor. (Maybe they’d slipped him something on the boat.) Right in front of him was a punky-looking girl with silver hair. Eighties Girl. She stuck out her tongue at him. Jimmy almost laughed. He’d accepted the trippiness of the scene, was going with it.

Then he realized the short-haired woman at the other end of the table looked a little like his mother. He didn’t exactly want to dwell on that.

There was an open place at the table. Was it meant for him? There was a glass of wine there. He decided now would be a good time to drink half of it.

It wasn’t all women. Machine Shop was there. Shop had dressed for the occasion, whatever the occasion was, a maroon suit that could have been sewn from the remnants of the velvet hanging on Whitehead’s vessel. Put him in a plush red Al Green suit and the seventies really came out. Shop hadn’t even noticed Jimmy. He was totally into the women around him, full shuck and jive, a bit of the old “And how are you fine ladies this evening?” When his eyes met Jimmy’s, he looked embarrassed, guilty, caught. He was supposed to meet Jimmy at the Wharf.

“Sorry, man,” Shop said.

“Yeah, I was looking for you up there.”

“And now you’re here.”

“How’d you get here?” Jimmy said.

“They brought me in a limousine,” Shop said.

Jimmy guessed that all this was part of Whitehead’s master plan, whatever it was.

Then he saw Mary. Or rather “Mary.”

At the far end of the table. If the lights were up, she probably wouldn’t have looked a thing like Mary. Not the twenty-two-year-old Mary Jimmy had met on Sunset Strip in 1995, not the woman now, out in Tiburon. But the hair was close, the face the same shape. She was wearing a dress that made Jimmy remember the one Lucy had been wearing there at the start. But that was all right, too; all of them were getting tangled up in each other’s stories in his head.

He took his wine over to her. Nobody paid him much mind. He stood over her.

She looked up at him, stopped whatever conversation she was having. This close, she didn’t look like Mary at all.

“Come sit by me,” Jimmy said to her. “There’s a seat down there by me.” He sounded drunker than he was.

“You’re always trying to relocate me,” the Mary almost lookalike said. Or Jimmy thought she did.

TWENTY-FOUR

“I still see them,” Mary said.

She had just said it, blank-faced, sitting there in her white slipcovered armless chair, the light of a cream candle dancing on her face. They were in a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. Le Dome.

Back then it was the kind of place Jimmy wouldn’t have sought out on his own. A little rich, a little too hushed. He’d go if someone else suggested it, but it was too snow-white and round for him.

Mary had picked the place. “I want to talk to you about something,” she had said.

He had assumed it was one of those girl talks about commitment, about “moving to the next level.” In a way it was. But he was way ahead of her, ready to relocate to any level she named. He loved her, simple and sure.

But what she had said in Le Dome was, “I still see them.”

“It’s over,” he said. He knew what she meant.

“I know,” she said. “I know it’s supposed to be over. I know everything you know, everything everybody else knows. They arrested two brothers. Russian brothers. There is all the evidence against them. I don’t care. I still see them.”

“Where?”

Jimmy leaned closer. Everybody knew about Le Dome. The arch of the smooth, plastered ceiling meant the sound bounced around in funny ways. Conversations ended up where they weren’t meant to go. Jimmy had been there one night, late, alone, stood up by someone, and heard more than he wanted to about the problems in the marriage of a fading television star and his young wife all the way across the room. He was worried about who else was hearing Mary. The place was almost full.

“I was on Melrose,” Mary said. “Two of them were following me. In the middle of the afternoon.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I told you when I met you I was crazy,” she said.

“What did they look like?” Jimmy said.

“Just like before,” she said. “Black