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stress syndrome. I'm not saying without reason,
sweetheart. I mean, I know you're Superwoman, but even a Woman of
Steel can develop metal fatigue."
    "I've just been tired. I've been working too hard."
    "Bullshit," Lee said politely. "You've spent
months doing nothing but type reports and worry about me. You've
been through hell, Kate. First the man Lewis and then, when you got
your feet under you again, the Morningstar case steamrolled over
you."
    "So what do you want me to say?" Kate demanded.
"That I'm not quitting? Okay, I'm not quitting. We
can't afford it, for one thing. We'd starve if I went
private." Which, she realized belatedly, revealed that
she'd at least considered it, a point that Lee did not miss.
    "You know full well that with your reputation in the city, if
you went into private investigations, within a year you'd be
making twice what you do now."
    "Not twice," Kate protested feebly.
    "Damn near. So don't use salary as an excuse."
    Anger did not sit well on a face so carved by pain's lines as
Lee's face was, and the sight made Kate rise up in wretchedness
and despair.
    "You want me to quit? I'll quit. I've told you
that before, but you have to say it. All right, I thought if I hated
the job enough, I'd want to resign on my own, and that would make
you happy. But I didn't. All I hated was being away from my job.
I will quit if you ask me, Lee, but if you don't, all I can say
is, I'm a cop. I am a cop."
    Lee's features slowly relaxed and the lines lessened, until she was smiling at Kate.
    "Your resignation would not make me happy, sweetheart.
I've never much liked your job, and now it just plain frightens
me, but I don't want you to quit. You are a cop, Kate, and I love
you.

    FIVE

    Le Jongleur de Dieu
    The sun came out while Kate was driving across the Bay Bridge the
next morning, and the hills behind Berkeley and Oakland were green with
the winter rains. The departmental unmarked car had something funny
about its front end, so rather than wrestle it through the side
streets, Kate stayed on the crowded freeway, got off at University
Avenue, and drove straight up toward the University of
California's oldest campus, squatting on the hill at the head of
the broad, straight avenue like an ill-tempered concrete toad. At the
last possible instant, Kate avoided being swallowed by her alma mater
and veered left, then right on the road that followed the north
perimeter. Between university buildings on the right and converted
Victorians and apartments on the left, she drove until she came to a
cluster of shops on a side street and one of the main pedestrian
entrances to the campus, a continuation of Telegraph Avenue on the
opposite side. She turned up this street away from the University of
California, moving cautiously among the crowds of casually earnest
students and suicidal bicyclists, and in two hundred yards found
herself in a different world. As she had remembered, the university
crowds seemed miraculously to vanish, leaving only the serious-minded
graduate schools of divinity and theology and eternal truths.
    There were also more parking spaces. She fought the car into one,
fed the meter, and then walked back down the hill to indulge in a few
minutes of nostalgia. The Chinese restaurant was still there, and the
pizza-and-beer joint in whose courtyard, in another lifetime, Lee the
graduate student had oh so casually brushed against the arm of Kate the
junior-year student, Kate the unhappy, Kate the unquestioningly hetero,
leaving a tantalizing and only half-conscious question that would crop
up at inconvenient moments until it was finally resolved almost two
years later: Yes, Lee had meant it.
    The espresso bars and the doughnut shop, the scruffy bookstore and
the art-film theater, shops selling clothes and pens and backpacks, all
crowded into one short block. Browsing the windows in bittersweet
pleasure, Kate's attention was caught by a display of unusual
jewelry made of some small scraps of odd iridescent