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sadness.
    Mavranos’s grin was flinty. “Just what you were about to say yourself, ma’am, I know,” he growled. “Oh well—now that the boy’s got the strength in his limbs back, maybe he could help me and this other gentleman with the carrying.” He picked up his beer can and drained it, then tossed it onto the grass. Perhaps to himself, he said, softly, “But why couldn’t the boy have asked me whose truck it was ?”
    Again Angelica opened her mouth to say something, but Mavranos waved her to silence. “Moot point and rhetorical question,” he said. “It always happens this way, I guess.”
    “At least give me forty-nine cents!” Angelica said. If these people pay me and thus become clients of mine, she thought, if I’m following my ita in my dealings with them, we can be protected by the orishas; if there are any orishas left out there, if my ita still counts for anything, after whatever it is that has happened today.
    Mavranos grinned sleepily and dug a handful of change out of his jeans pocket. “Look at that,” he said. “Exact.” He dropped the quarter and two dimes and four pennies into her shaky, outstretched palm. He looked past her at Kootie and Pete, and called, “You fellas want to give me a hand? Let me get the back of the truck open.”
    He plodded back toward the truck, his hand rattling keys in the pocket of his old denim jacket, and Kootie and Pete exchanged a nervous glance and then stepped forward to follow him.

BOOK ONE
 TO THE BOATS
The likeness passed away, say, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender …
    —Charles Dickens,
    A Tale of Two Cities
    TROILUS: Fear me not, my lord;
    I will not be myself, nor have cognition
    Of what I feel.
    —William Shakespeare,
    Troilus and Cressida

CHAPTER 3
“In short,” said Sydney, “this is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one …”
    —Charles Dickens,
    A Tale of Two Cities
    W HERE JANIS CORDELIA PLUMTREE finally wound up was in a chair in the TV lounge.
    She had visited people in hospitals where the lines on the linoleum floors led you somewhere—“Follow the yellow line to OB” or something—but the black lines in the gray floors of Rosecrans Medical Center just led around in a big dented loop, with frustrating gaps where hallways crossed. Maybe the point was that you were free to pick your own destination … the TV lounge, or the meds station, or your “room” with two unmade beds in it and no bath or shower and a door that couldn’t lock.
    There were wire-reinforced windows in the halls and the lounge, but the views were only of fenced-in courtyards, shadowy in the late-afternoon sunlight and empty except for picnic tables and dome-topped swing-door trash cans; and you generally couldn’t get out there anyway.
    The pictures on the walls—vapid reproductions of watercolor flowers—had rectangles of Plexiglas over them in the frames, rather than real breakable glass. She couldn’t remember how she knew this, she didn’t recall having touched one in the … nine days she’d been living here.
    “I think he’s like you,” Dr. Armentrout went on. The rotund white-haired psychiatrist had dragged up a chair next to the one she’d collapsed into after finally stepping off the floor-line circuit and wobbling into the TV lounge. He had been talking to her for a minute or two now, but she was looking past him.
    On the TV, hung behind a clear Plexiglas shield up above head-height on the wall beyond Armentrout, Humphrey Bogart was showing his teeth, talking mean and ruthless as he told the fat man, “We’ve got to have a fall guy.” There were no colors—all the figures, the Fat Man and Bogart and Joel Cairo and