"It's not a typewriter."
"It's not."
"I'm going to figure it out."
"You won't have time. You're only here today."
"Right," he said. "Right. That's true." He tapped the book against his palm. "Well. It was nice not bothering you, Just Mina."
"Likewise."
He went out the front door into the glare, and the little bell over it jangled, and through the window she watched him walk not up Larkin toward the cable car lines, as she had expected, but south, toward the Civic Center, toward the great gray dome of City Hall rising over the plane trees like a wedding cake left out in the rain. She watched him until a bus came between them. Then she looked down and saw that he had left something on the seat where he had been sitting: a slip of folded card stock, pale blue, that must have fallen out of the paperback when he picked it up.
She knew what it was before she unfolded it. She had seen thousands of them. SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO, it said across the top, in the stern typeface of the government. SUMMONS FOR JURY SERVICE. And under that, typed in the boxes, his name, AGOSTINI, REMY J., and his juror number, and the date, which was today, and the place, which was Room 400, City Hall, and the time to report back after the lunch recess, which was one-thirty.
"Oh, no," Mina said aloud.
Hettie, passing with a coffeepot, paused. "Something wrong with the melt, honey?"
"No," said Mina. "No. The melt is fine." She folded the blue card back up along its creases, very precisely, and looked at it for a moment in her palm. Then she looked at the clock over the pie case, which said one twenty-seven, and was wrong, and was not wrong enough.
Department Fourteen was on the fourth floor of City Hall, at the end of a marble corridor so long and so quiet that footsteps in it sounded like someone being followed. The courtroom itself had been built in 1915, when San Francisco was still proving to the world that it had not burned down for good, and it had the high coffered ceiling and the walnut paneling and the tall arched windows of a city that wanted you to feel it meant business. Judge Moy kept a small electric fan on the bench, aimed at herself.