While all this was going on with his wife Lydia, Wes had been consumed with something else altogether removed from his domestic life… the trial of his best friend Mark Dooher, who had been charged with murdering his wife. Wes was Dooher's attorney, and it had been the trial of his life.

He leaned back on the couch. Why the hell wasn't sleep coming? He didn't want to think about this now. Not ever, in fact. Maybe he would go and pour in a shot or two of vodka, take the edge off.

But he didn't move.

The truth was, after everything had shaken down, Wes was left with the bereft conviction that he had lived his life and it just hadn't panned out all that well. The child-rearing years were behind him, and he felt he hadn't been much of a dad, hadn't spent enough time on the personal stuff, and now the kids were gone and he didn't know them and they didn't care to know him and he didn't blame them.

And the law – the god he had worshipped and served for all of his adult life – the law had proved to be a sham.

When Lyd had said she wanted to leave him, what had shocked him the most was that after twenty-seven years he had felt only a mild regret that he'd spent so much time in the charade if the only place it had taken them was to here.

But it was the nature of his best friend Mark Dooher's betrayal that had shaken his faith to its foundations. And he had gradually come to realize that he had just stopped caring. The natural skepticism that he had cultivated as a protective device for working with venal and dishonest clients had turned to a profound cynicism about humanity in general.

It was why he had started to drink and why he kept at it so religiously. To keep himself numb. To keep things on the surface. You move fast enough on thin ice and it won't crack. But he also felt himself slipping further and further out, away from everyone else, away from any sense that anything had meaning.

It was why he'd taken and kept and continued to care for Bart. It was also why he was suddenly so ambivalent about what might well be a stark reality – Kevin Shea could be counting on his legal help.

Potentially, another line to the raft. But also another opportunity to hope, and he was not inclined to listen to its knock, especially where the law was involved. The law – the once sacred beautiful law…

No. He couldn't let himself be drawn back to it. He wasn't going to try to help Kevin Shea or anybody else. Maybe he'd refer him – that was as far as he'd go. He wasn't going to open himself up to getting betrayed again. If that happened, he held no illusions – it would destroy his soul, if he had one, and then there would be nothing at all left to save.

He stood up. A little vodka – tasteless, odorless, colorless – would hit the spot after all, thank you. Hold the Clamato.

A telephone seemed to be ringing somewhere. Underwater. Which proved it was a dream. He didn't have to acknowledge it, do anything. Just roll over and it would stop.

He knew he couldn't have been asleep more than an hour, and for a change of pace he'd made it into his actual bed, under the comforter, before he'd crashed. Pulled down the blinds. It was dark as night in his bedroom, warm and secure. He wasn't moving and that was that. He needed at least six more hours before he could face the day.

He turned over, pulling the comforter over his head. Two more rings. Three. Then silence again.

See? A dream.

At seven-forty in the morning the mayor of San Francisco, Conrad Aiken, stood looking out over yet another tent city, this one in the Civic Center Park, directly below where he stood partially hidden behind the flags of the United States and of California on the ceremonial balcony area over the magnificently carved double-doorways of City Hall.

As had been the case for the past day and a half, he was having trouble assimilating the information before him. Here he was, the executive in charge of the billion-dollar-plus budget of one of the world's most well-loved and beautiful cities, the destination of thousands of tourists every year, one of the convention capitals of the country, a mecca for gourmets, a center of liberalism and the arts, with the sixth greatest opera house in the world, a haven for the have-nots, homeless and homosexuals of the rest of the country, and he felt as though it had all fallen to pieces around him in a matter of hours.

Through the thin morning fog smoke from cooking fires was rising in wisps over the tents. In his mind's eye it recalled the image he had seen in photographs since his childhood – San Francisco struggling to rise from the ashes of the Great Quake of 1906, until today the city's darkest hour. Before, the image had always struck him as hopeful – the citizens pulling together to rebuild their lives and homes – but today, looking down over the tents, hearing the thrum of boom boxes, the sporadic voices raised in frustration or anger, the reality was anything but hopeful.

Aiken was meeting with the eleven members of the Board of Supervisors in fifteen minutes and he had no idea what he was going to tell them. Worse, in spite of his best efforts with selected staffers whom he had cultivated as moles, he had no real sense of what they might recommend to him. Experience told him that whatever they came up with was unlikely to be productive, although it would vastly increase his workload, undermine his authority and dilute whatever substantive efforts that might be called for and even already in the works.

He'd put the Board off all day yesterday, hoping the situation would somehow blow over quickly, but with the assassination the previous night of the city's district attorney, Chris Locke, which had sparked a new wave of nocturnal riots, there was no longer any pretending that this was going to go away.

Donald, Aiken's administrative assistant – a tall, well-groomed single man of thirty-five – appeared at his elbow. They both stood unmoving for a full minute. 'If you'd like an opinion…' Donald ventured.

Aiken, still lost in his thoughts, nodded. Donald was an asset – ears always to the ground, open lines of communication with everyone at City Hall and blessed with a keen sense of politics, positioning, strategy. 'I'll take anything you can give me.'

Donald was holding a folder that Aiken hadn't noticed. Now he opened it and handed the poster of Kevin Shea to his boss. Aiken had seen it a hundred times. He was sick to death of it, but he'd listen to Donald. He looked over and up at him, thinking not for the first time that Donald would be the perfect assistant if he weren't so damn tall.

'Okay? What about it?'

'I spent all day yesterday walking these hallowed halls, and my sense is that if you don't immediately take charge of the meeting this morning with the simplest possible message you are going to have an unqualified political disaster.'

Aiken had come to this same conclusion on his own. The members of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco were elected in city-wide, non-district elections. No one person represented any geographical area – a Nob Hill or a Hunters Point or Castro Street. In effect each member of the Board represented – embodied – an agenda. Aiken's experience was that this tended to make consensus very difficult on many issues.

Further exacerbating the problem with the Supes – as they were called when not referred to as the Stupes – was their salary structure. The San Francisco charter provided that each supervisor made twenty-four thousand dollars per year. (Which meant that their own clerks and secretaries made twice what they did.) In other words, anyone who needed to work to make a living could not be a supervisor.

So many individuals – including Conrad Aiken – had come to hold the view that the members of the Board were for the most part abysmally ignorant of the rudiments of the workplace. This failing was often combined with a disdain for compromise, an almost sublime disregard for reality, at least as Aiken knew it.