“You make movie pictures.”

“The arts.”

“If you say so.”

“Okay. Okay. I’m running them down in my mind. I watch them. Not directly but slyly out of the corner of my eye. I don’t want them to think I’m trying to make contact, as if I am a desperate man.”

“God forbid,” McNab said, waving the smoke away with his hand. His eyes squinting more at Roscoe, maybe a little less curious now. He checked his timepiece again.

“It’s two minutes past.”

“Past what?”

“Last time you checked,” Roscoe said.

“Christ Almighty.”

“August Fritze.”

“Solid fellow. Brokers cotton.”

“That’s not why I like him,” Roscoe said, pointing his index finger at McNab.

“Do tell.”

“He wears spats. Spats! What kind of man wears spats in San Francisco?”

“A man who likes spats.”

“A man who likes women, drinking, song,” Roscoe said. “Dierks is obvious. How on earth did you get a former liquor salesman on the jury?”

“Because I can outthink and outmaneuver Brady and U’Ren in my sleep.”

“What’s the explosives expert’s name?”

“Crane.”

“I don’t get a read on him. He’s kind of a mystery. Same with that Reef fellow. Both poker-faced bastards.”

“And we all know you like Mrs. O’Dea.”

“She smiled at me.”

“Stop the earth.”

“And who is the big man? The one with the hangdog face?”

“Mr. Torpey.”

“And Kilkenny,” Roscoe said. “Candy manufacturer. I know you found him kinda grim. But he can be won. I can make a case to him.”

“When is that?”

“When I testify.”

“And you’ve decided?”

“Yes.”

McNab stubbed out the cigarette. He stood and slipped into his big black coat and buttoned up the front. He checked the timepiece again before he got the final buttons, and Roscoe knew it was an effort to unnerve him.

It worked.

“Just what did Zukor say to you?”

McNab looked Roscoe in the eye. He bit a cheek and rocked back on his heels, hands in pockets. He kept the same dead-eyed stare and said, “He said you weren’t quick-witted enough to keep up with those jackals.”

“Brady and U’Ren.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Zukor is a fool.”

“I find him quite shrewd.”

“But you know me better.”

“Perhaps,” McNab said. “Good night, Roscoe.”

“That’s it?”

“We’ll speak on this tomorrow. It’s quite late. Thank you for the drink.”

“I’ll see you out.”

Roscoe walked down the long hall of the Palace to the elevator, where McNab pressed the button to ring the boy. He held his fattened leather satchel in his left hand and kept quiet as the elevator groaned into motion, the pulleys taking on the great weight of it all.

“You forgot one,” McNab said, the boy rolling back the cage.

“Who?”

“Mrs. Hubbard.”

Roscoe snapped his fingers.

“The woman in the feathered hat. Old and pinched face. Very sour.”

“She worries me, Roscoe,” McNab said. “Very much.”

“Give me five minutes.”

“U’Ren will ring you dry.”

“You ever performed before silver miners in Arizona while wearing a dress?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Give me a shot.”

“If they make you bleed, it could ruin my career. Make me look foolish.”

“I’ve sat there and listened to lies about me for two weeks,” Roscoe said.

McNab looked at him, up and down, from slippers up to the top of his neatly oiled hair. He slipped into the cage, placing a hat on his head and tipping the brim at Roscoe just before the cage door rolled back and the elevator disappeared below.

THE FOG WAS WET As RAIN.

Sam moved out onto the ferry’s deck to have a smoke, most of the passengers inside, nothing visible beyond the running lights cutting through the night and the thick banks of clouds. Sam lit a cigarette and clung to the railing.

A wide swath of lights shot from the military base on Alcatraz and from the north tip of the city at the Ferry Building, crossing each other every minute or so. From the city, great horns blared across the darkness, helping the seamen find their balance, their place in the black. Sam finished his cigarette. Started a new one.

He would go to the Flood Building and file a report using his Pinkerton number and not his name. You never used your name. The system didn’t work that way.

He would skip coffee and some hash and go straight home. Jose would be waiting up, rocking the baby and looking down on Eddy Street, ready for him before he put the key in the door. She’d have something warm for him already, the Murphy bed laid out with clean linens, bleached white and fresh smelling.

Jose.

His face heated with shame.

Shoes clacked on the wooden deck through the fog.

Tacoma seemed years ago. She was the prettiest nurse by far, with those soft blue eyes and a hell of a body. She’d laugh at his jokes and let him follow her through her rounds at the sanitarium, helping her wheel out terminal patients onto that giant front porch on sunny days. And while the old soldiers would stare at the yellow-gray horizon with gaping mouths, they’d trade stories about Montana or about her time in London during the war. She convinced him he wasn’t terminal, that he’d be fixed up before he knew it, and it’d taken him a full two weeks before she met him in town for a plate of spaghetti and to catch a moving picture. They saw Pollyanna with Mary Pickford, and for weeks after that that had been his nickname for Jose every time she’d talk to him about his cure, sitting outside in that same spot watching those openmouthed, shell-shocked bedraggled men staring at the skyline. Pollyanna.

She had a warmth about her, a heat. And the films grew into the rental of a little downtown flat where the passing streetcars would clang past and rumble the building, he and Jose not seeming to notice, the little metal bed they shared rocking so hard it would skip across the beaten-wood floor, traveling from wall to wall, the pair joined at the hip.

Sam flicked the cigarette into the lapping waves.

The beams crossed over each other, one from the shore, one from the island, nearly connecting but passing, and it was night and blackness again. The horns sounded. Sam lifted the collar on his suit and tucked his hands into his jacket, moving toward the front of the ferry, whistling.

A solid fist knocked him square in the gut, dropping him to the deck, him crawling.

A big black shoe came for his face and split his lip.

Another hard kick in the gut. Sam rolled to his back, trying to find just a pocket of air for his squeezed lungs. He stared up at the man and saw the face, the dark man smiling down at him and offering a hand. Sam found an inch of breath and crawled backward, trying his feet but only getting his knees, wiping his lip, a boxer just trying to make it to round’s end.

The man kept his hands in a large black overcoat. A wide-brimmed black hat sat on his gray head. He just kept smiling at Sam, quickly glancing around him through the thick blankets of fog misting their faces. He kicked at Sam hard once more, and Sam landed with a giant thwack on the deck, his mouth reaching for air, nothing coming into him, and he blacked out for a moment but never lost sight, trying just to right himself, the beams crossing overhead, cutting across the man’s dark skin and misshapen ear. He toed at Sam as if he were a dead fish found on the shore.

Sam tried to breathe. The bovine horns called through the fog, dueling from the islands and shore. Sam’s vision scattered, rolling to his hands, the deck a patchwork of wooden planks, blindly searching, cold and wet. More horns. They were close to the Ferry Building now. Four more kicks.

No questions.

The Dark Man reached for Sam, finding the back of his suit and belt and hoisting him to his feet and pushing him to the railing, forcing him to look at the churning water, light cutting across and through the fog and darkness, and whispering something in his ear about the way of the world, repeating “the way of the world” at least twice, but Sam not getting much, his mind turned back to ’17 and the wooden sidewalks of Anaconda, the cold sprays of fog and bay tasting like copper smelting in his bloodied mouth, moving into the heart of the little mining town, the beaten floor-boards in a rooming house and Frank Little’s empty bed. As his feet were hoisted from the creaking deck, Sam’s body halved across the ferry’s railing and he grabbed and reached for something to hold, finding only slick metal, the man pushing with all his weight, pushing Sam farther off the ferry and into the blackness and fog. Sam saw Little twirl from the trestle, that first light cutting across the barren, raped hills and over the sack that covered the labor leader’s head, and he let go, the horns sounding loud and close, reaching into his tweed jacket and leaning back with a little heft to his legs and aiming his boots for the deck, collapsing in a crushed heap.