When the group left, the doorway was narrow, and Mina was standing beside it, and for one second he was as close to her as he had ever been. She could smell the smoke on his jacket and the soap underneath it. The sleeve of his coat touched the sleeve of hers. He stopped. He did not say anything. He did not look at her. He stepped back, half a pace, and inclined his head toward the open door, a small, grave, old-fashioned gesture, like a man in a black-and-white movie letting a lady go through first, and waited for her to go out ahead of him.
She did not move. She was the reporter; she could not leave before the jury. They stood there in the doorway of the burned bakery for perhaps three seconds, both of them looking at the sidewalk, each waiting for the other, like two people at a four-way stop, until Thurston said from the street, in his carrying whisper, "Mr. Agostini, bus is this way," and Remy went.
She put her hand on the doorframe after he had gone, and her fingers came away black.
On the third Saturday of the trial, her mother came down from Sacramento on the Greyhound to go shopping at Macy's, which she did twice a year whether she needed anything or not, and insisted, over lunch at the Woolworth's counter on Market Street, on riding a cable car.
"Ma. You've lived two hours away for fifty-eight years. You've ridden the cable car forty times."
"And I'll ride it forty-one. It's nice. You get air." Her mother had a Macy's bag on each knee, a cloud of frosted hair, and the cheerful, steamrolling sociability of a woman who had worked the switchboard at the State Capitol for twenty-six years and had never once been at a loss for something to say. "Besides. You look pale. You look like a person who sits in a room all day typing what other people say."
"I am a person who sits in a room all day typing what other people say."
"So get some air."
The line for the Powell and Hyde car at the Market Street turntable was forty minutes long, and full of people from Ohio in sweatshirts that said ALCATRAZ PSYCHO WARD. Mina stood in it with her mother and the Macy's bags and watched the gripman and conductor of the car ahead push their car around on the big wooden turntable by hand, leaning their shoulders into the end of it until it swung slowly through its half circle like a ballerina in a music box. A man with a saxophone was playing "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" for tips, and doing it beautifully, and getting none. She did not think about it. She did not think about it at all, until the next car rolled down onto the turntable and the gripman stepped off it, pulling off a pair of leather gloves, and it was him.
Of course it was him. It was the Powell and Hyde line. She had known it was the Powell and Hyde line since the first Monday in September. She had simply, she realized, failed to make a calculation that a ten-year-old could have made, possibly because some part of her had been careful not to.
He saw her across the turntable. She watched him see her. It went through him like a current, from the top of his head to the boots, and then he turned his back with great deliberation and put his shoulder against the end of the car and pushed.