here, in The Man’s house?” he said. “You seem right at home.”

“For the last six years, I worked with Martin. One of the ones who worked for him, but one of his favorites. He never left this house. Everything came to him.”

“Why did you marry a Sailor?”

“I want you to be with me,” she said, there in the dark.

“Why did you marry a Sailor?” he said again.

“I want us to be together.”

“Why did you marry a Sailor?”

This time, she let the clock in the other room play a little fill. “I didn’t,” she said. “Hesse is just someone I work with. I’m not married.”

Jimmy’s heart dropped another hundred floors.

“I knew me being married would draw you closer,” she said, “not push you away. Would make you want me more. Especially with the kind of man Hesse is.”

“What about your boy? Where’d you get him?”

“He’s mine. Jamie. He’s mine. He’s mine. I’m his mommy, and that’s where we live, Tiburon.”

She found her softest voice. “Come here,” she said.

He stayed where he was. He felt like the pile of sticks The Man was.

“Come here, Jimmy.”

He crossed to her. There, behind her, was the City, the Bay. A ship was leaving, out under the Gate.

“How did you die?” Jimmy said, that question they alone can ask. And usually never do.

“I took pills.”

“You always hated drugs.”

“I know.”

“Why did you do it? What made you? Why did you want to die?”

She took his hand. “To reach you,” she said.

He pulled away his hand. “A girl died, Mary.”

“I know,” she said. “But that wasn’t because of me.”

“It wasn’t?”

“That was part of someone else’s plan,” she said. “I didn’t order it. I wouldn’t have. I had what I wanted. You were here.”

“She was a human being.”

Mary could have stopped then. But she didn’t stop. “Heartbroken girls die every day,” she said.

The low clouds and high fog had cleared altogether. The City, the world, was all spread out before them, like a board game.

“Look at us,” she said. She meant their refle ction in the window, red by blue. Red. Blue. It was like there were four of them.

He was looking past them, at a judging sky.

“I want us to be together,” she said again. “We’ll do everything together.” A sentence for each of the two Marys.

THIRTY-SIX

The last boat over.

Jimmy liked the idea of that. It matched what he was feeling. He was on one of the piers, leaning against the stub of a piling, smoking the last of the American Spirits. He had left Mary in the house on Russian Hill, blew off all of them up there, and the sense of purpose they rode in on. They didn’t have to show him out. He knew the way. He walked over a block and came down to the waterfront on the cable car, on the Hyde Street line, the last run of the night. The car was almost empty, just Jimmy and a Chinese man who looked a hundred years old. It was after two by the time he made it back down to Fisherman’s Wharf. The Sailors had had it to themselves all night and had trashed it good. The tourists were all still instinctively hanging back, waiting in their hotel rooms until this particular unearthly storm passed. Most of the Sailors had already cleared out, made the crossing to Alcatraz. The ones left milling around, asking questions of each other, of anyone who’d half listen, were the lost ones. The uncertain ones. The undecideds. The ones even more conflicted than Jimmy. Walkers, most of them, with the faintest red or blue auras of all.

He watched the coming and going. Whitehead’s strange black ship made four trips over and back just while Jimmy was standing there, taking aboard anybody who wanted a ride over, north or south, friend or foe, before it was too late. The name was on the stern. White Rose.

He turned and looked at Alcatraz, the turtle shape of it, the sweep of the light. In Time. Wasn’t that the name of the painting in Hesse’s office? The sailboat making it into port just ahead of the black storm, just in time. If Hesse was a doctor.

How could you hope to be with someone if you started with a lie? With a host of lies, interlaced, one feeding off another after a while. As soon as he thought it, he heard Mary’s answer: You started with a lie. You started us with a lie. She was right, he had lied to her from