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As Henry left the room, Marist stopped him, said that he had some good news for a change. That he, Marist, had been promoted. He was moving to Henry’s department. Starting that Monday, he said, he would be taking Arthur Weir’s place.

8
    San Francisco, Spring 1956
    Henry thought that he had entered the wrong apartment. He stood in the living room, disoriented, almost dizzy. Heavy burgundy drapes covered the windows. A chenille sofa and chair sat where the secretaries’ furniture had been. Paintings hung on the walls, nude women reclining and bathing, white and Negro, Oriental couples in various sexual positions and combinations, all lit with small electric pin lights clipped to the wood of the overly ornate frames. The walls were still wet with paint, a dark, nearly blood red. Drop cloths covered the floor, color-stippled along the edges.
    In the bedroom, the twin beds had been replaced by a large four-poster covered in a gold spread, with an assortment of fringed velveteen pillows. The utilitarian dresser under the mirror had been replaced with something massive and baroque.
    “Don’t worry, I didn’t screw up any of your stuff.” Dorn stood in the doorway, dressed in spattered painter’s overalls, holding a paint roller in one hand and a martini glass in the other. “You should give me a key, it’ll make it easier to get in.”
    “Who else was here?”
    “You don’t think I’m capable of doing this? I have an eye for this stuff.”
    “Who else was here?”
    “I already told you, Hank. Nobody.”
    Henry walked back through the living room, crossed the vestibule, and unlocked the south door.
    Dorn followed at a distance. “You don’t trust me?”
    “I don’t know you.”
    Henry went through the office. All seemed to be in order. The recorder, the shutter controls for the cameras. He unlocked the top drawer of his desk. The ledger was still in its place.
    “Nothing else changes,” Henry said. “Nothing else comes into the apartments without my approval.”
    Dorn raised an eyebrow, nodded.
    Henry said, “Understood?”
    “Aye-aye, Captain.”
    Henry backed out of the south apartment, locked the door, brushed past Dorn on his way to the stairs.
    “Don’t start worrying already.” Dorn sipped his drink, called down over the railing. “We haven’t done anything yet.”

9
    On her way home, Hannah tried to remember the same walk in Arlington, the long stands of birch and ash trees, the familiar houses, the neighbors’ cars in welcoming colors, but all she could see was the new town, its paint-peeling weathered ugliness, and then back over her shoulder the imagined crash and glow, the city in flames across the bay.
    They’d shown a civil defense film at school, footage of atomic bomb tests cut together with a projected aftermath, images from the San Francisco earthquake standing in for the next great destruction. Hollow shells of buildings, piles of brick and glass, smoke rising to the sky. A narrator warned of the dangers in the city after the bomb: radiation in the air, in the water; desperate criminal activity; still-falling masonry.
    She couldn’t get the movie out of her head. She could picture her father at work in the city, the building in which he sat crumbling from under him, his desk and chair tipping, other desks tipping, men in suits grabbing for their hats as they fell. She reached the house, their new house, tried to imagine it as the house in Arlington, but the light from the explosions across the bay flickered in the windows.
    She didn’t want to talk to her mother. Her mother wouldn’t understand. Her mother would say what she always said, that it wasn’t worth thinking about the bad things. As if that made them go away. She wouldn’t let Hannah walk to school alone again after a scene like this,coming home in tears. Hannah would be forced back into the ridiculous parade of those first weeks here, she and her mother and Thomas ambling down the hill.
    She would wait for her