And because she could not ask him anything, she watched.
She was good at watching. It was half of her job; a reporter who could not see who was talking could not get the record right. She watched him as she watched witnesses, without appearing to, and she learned him the way she learned a new attorney's speech patterns, the habits and the tics and the stray verbal flourishes, until she could have picked him out of a crowd by his silhouette alone. He ordered the meatloaf on Mondays and Wednesdays and the minestrone on Tuesdays and Thursdays and a hot turkey sandwich on Fridays, with extra gravy, which he ate with a fork and knife like a civilized man. He tipped thirty percent, which was showing off. He did the Jumble in ink in under three minutes. He hummed when the jukebox played anything by Tracy Chapman, a low tuneless rumble under his breath that she was fairly sure he did not know he was doing. He had a small white scar on the back of his left hand, shaped like a comma. He read very slowly and with great seriousness, his lips occasionally moving on a word he liked, and every day, at the end of lunch, he turned one page. Never more. Never fewer. One page a day, like a man taking his medicine, or keeping a vow.
By the second week he had reached the chapter on ambergris. By the third he was out of the whale's head and onto its tail.
In Department Fourteen, she watched him too. She could not help it; he was seventh in a row of twelve, directly across from her, in the line of sight between her lamp and the witness box, and the job required her eyes to pass over him a hundred times a day. In the courtroom he was a different person, stiller, more contained, a man in a jacket and tie that she suspected had been bought for this trial and would be worn again only at funerals. He took notes in a small spiral pad with a Muni pencil. He listened with his whole face. When the fire captain testified about the burn patterns on the bakery floor, he leaned forward. When the insurance company's arson investigator, a precise little man named Thorvaldsen, described a "pour pattern" and an "accelerant trail" and held up an enlarged photograph of a charred floorboard as though it were a holy relic, Remy frowned at the photograph for a long time with his pencil against his lips. When Mrs. Lucchesi herself took the stand on the ninth day of trial and explained in her low, accented, careful English that the oven had come from her husband's uncle's bakery in Lucca in 1931, in pieces, in the hold of a ship, and had been reassembled brick by numbered brick on Grant Avenue, and had been lit every morning at three-thirty for fifty-seven years, and that she would sooner have set fire to her own hair, Remy put his pencil down and did not pick it up again until she was finished.
Mina took down every word. She did not look at Mrs. Lucchesi, and she did not look at Juror Number Seven. She looked at the paper tape folding itself into the tray. Fifty-seven years, it said, in her shorthand. Every morning. My own hair.
On the fourteenth day of trial, Judge Moy took the jury to see the bakery.
It was called a jury view, and it happened perhaps once a year in Department Fourteen. The jurors rode a chartered bus with Thurston up front like a large, solemn tour guide, and the judge and the lawyers and the clerk followed in county cars, and so did the court reporter, because a jury view was a proceeding and everything said at one had to be taken down. Mina rode in the back seat of the second car with her machine in her lap and her tripod across her knees. They went up Van Ness and over the hill on Broadway, through the tunnel, and down into North Beach, where the air smelled of espresso and garlic and, on one particular block of Grant Avenue, very faintly, seven months later, of smoke.
The Lucchesi Bakery was boarded up with plywood that someone had painted, all over, with loaves of bread. A neighbor, Thurston explained to the jury, in a whisper that carried the length of the block. Every loaf the bakery used to make. Pane Toscano. Focaccia. Biscotti di Prato. Panettone, at Christmas only.
They went inside in groups of four, because the space was small and the floor was not safe at the back. Mina went in with the first group, setting up the tripod just inside the door, under a ceiling that was black and blistered and hung with stalactites of melted fixture. Judge Moy stood at the center of the room in a tan raincoat and said, for the record, that the jury was now present at the premises at Grant Avenue, and that they were permitted to look but not to touch, and not to discuss what they saw with anyone, including one another, until deliberations. Then she stepped back, and the jurors looked.
There was not much to see, and there was everything. The long counter, scorched to charcoal. A cash register melted into a strange soft shape like a Dali clock. Glass on the floor. A calendar on the wall from the Bank of America, for February 1988, which had somehow survived, its edges brown and curled, with a photograph of Yosemite Falls and the numbers of the days crossed off in red pencil up to the eleventh. And at the back, past a yellow rope Thurston had strung between two chairs, the oven, intact. The great brick dome of it, eight feet across, soot-black, still standing among the ruins of everything that had been built around it, like the last tooth in an old mouth. It had been built to hold fire. Fire had come for everything else and had not been able to do anything to it at all.
Remy was in the third group. Mina was still at her tripod by the door; she had to be, for the duration. She watched him come in behind Mrs. Louie, the retired schoolteacher in the cardigan, who was Juror Number Three and had appointed herself the jury's den mother and appeared to have read every Agatha Christie in the San Francisco Public Library. Mrs. Louie went straight to the calendar and peered at it with her nose two inches from Yosemite Falls. Remy went to the rope and stood there looking at the oven for a long time, with his hands in the pockets of his funeral jacket, and his face doing something complicated that she could not read, and did not try to.