“To apologize. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“No. Goodbye, Mr. Farrell.”
“Andrew,” he said.
“Yes, Andrew, goodbye,” she said, and started down the steps into the subway. He fell behind her for just an instant and then immediately caught up, falling in beside her again as she dug into her handbag for a token. She was out of tokens. She was starting for the change booth when he stepped into her path again.
“Please stop doing that!” she said.
“A cup of coffee. So I can explain.”
“No.”
“Please.”
There was on his face the same plaintive look that had been on Mollie’s the night they’d bought the Christmas tree. She was already shaking her head, no, no, no, but the look on his face was so forlorn, so very...
“Listen,” she said, “I really...”
“Please,” he said again. “I’m sorry for what I did that morning. I want to explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain. I accept your apology. It was nice seeing you again.”
“You don’t really mean that,” he said.
“I really don’t,” she said, and stepped around him and up to the booth. The black woman behind the glass looked at her.
“Ten tokens, please,” Sarah said, and took out her wallet and was reaching inside it when he said, “I’ve got it.”
“What?” she said.
He slid a twenty under the glass panel.
“I’m paying for it, miss,” she said at once, and slid a five and a ten under the panel.
“Take it from the twenty,” he told the attendant.
“Who is paying here?” the woman said calmly.
“I am,” they said simultaneously.
“You can’t both be paying,” she said, “and I’m busy here.”
“She never lets me pay for anything,” Andrew said, and grinned and retrieved the twenty.
Sarah picked up her change and the packet of tokens.
“Now I owe you a cup of coffee,” he said.
“How do you figure that?” she asked.
She already knew she would allow him to buy her a cup of coffee.
“Well, you paid for the tokens, didn’t you?” he said.
“The logic escapes me,” she said.
“Is there a place nearby?” he asked.
There was a cluster of restaurants, coffee shops, and delis along Lexington Avenue near the subway station, but she did not want to take him to anyplace frequented by students from the school. She would wonder about that later. Wonder why she had chosen even then not to be seen in his company by any of her students. She walked him down to Second Avenue instead, where she told him she knew a little French place that served terrific croissants and wonderful coffee.
There was a sense of wintry coziness inside the shop, overcoats huddled on wall pegs just inside the enclosed entry, patrons in turtlenecks and tweeds, the aroma of strong coffee and good things baking, the paneled and bellied front window framing pedestrians hurrying past with their heads ducked against the ferocious, wind.
They found a table near a giant copper espresso machine, and they both ordered cafe filtre and chocolate-filled croissants. He was wearing a blue flannel shirt, a gray tweed sports jacket, darker gray slacks. Sarah was wearing what she called her “schoolmarm threads”: a moss-green sweater, a dark brown wool skirt, opaque green panty hose. Normally, she wore French-heeled shoes to work. Today, because of the rotten weather, she was wearing knee-high brown leather boots. She had taken off the red hat and stuffed it into the pocket of her coat. The red muffler was still draped around her neck. He’d been hatless to begin with. They sat on either side of a small scarred wooden table, blue-eyed and blue-eyed, blond hair and brown hair.
Later, she would tell him they made a good-looking couple.
And would wonder if she’d actually thought it on that first day together in New York.
“So let me explain,” he said, and waited for her nod, and then said, “To begin with, I don’t usually go around kissing married women.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I mean it. I’m usually very... careful that way.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That morning... I don’t know... I just... I couldn’t take my eyes off you the night before, and when...”
“Andrew,” she said, and hesitated, and then said, “I don’t want this, really. I’m not looking for it, I don’t want it, I don’t need it...”
“You want to be alone, I know.”
“I’m not alone. I have a husband.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Oh, Jesus!” she said, and quickly glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone was sitting close enough to hear all this. “Andrew,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, “I don’t think you understand what I’m telling you. I’m not being coy, I’m not in any way trying to encourage...”
“I know.”
“So cut it out, okay? Just stop it!”
There was a long silence.
Awkwardly, they sat across from each other.
The coffee and croissants arrived.
She sipped at the coffee. Cut into the croissant with a fork. The chocolate was rich and dark and delicious.
“Do you like teaching?” he asked.
“I love it.”
“How’d it go today?”
“Fine.”
“Good, I’m glad.”
“How’d your day go?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“I never did learn what you do.”
“I’m a gangster,” he said, and grinned.
“Sure,” she said.
“Actually, I’m what you’d call an opportunity investor,” he said, the grin giving way to the earnest look of someone very young trying to appear very serious and very grown-up. “I look for businesses that need an investment of time and money, and I nurture them along till they bring me a good return.”
“What sort of businesses?”
“Import-export, shipping, real estate, construction, and so on. I’m into a lot of things.”
“Sounds exciting.”
“You’re exciting,” he said.
“Okay, I think it’s time I went home,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because you still don’t under—”
“I’d love to kiss you,” he said.
“Let’s get a check,” she said.
“Do we fight over this one, too?”
“No, you asked me.”
“That’s true. May I kiss you?”
“No.”
“In that case,” he said, and leaned across the table and kissed her full on the mouth.
She would later tell him that she became immediately wet the moment his lips touched hers again.
Now she stood abruptly.
“Goodbye, Andrew,” she said, and left him sitting at the table while she went to the row of pegs and yanked her coat off the wall, and ran outside into the cold without putting it on and without looking back at him.
The two detectives initially assigned by Michael to the surveillance of Andrew Faviola met with him in his office on Tuesday morning, the twelfth of January. They’d been working the case for a week now, ever since Michael got back from the Caribbean, but there wasn’t much to report.
Johnny Regan, the older of the two detectives, and the more experienced, sat in a chair alongside his young partner, Alex Lowndes. The men felt comfortable in this office, they’d been here many times before. Besides, the office encouraged casualness. When Michael was a teenager, his mother had engaged in a constant battle with him to keep his room from resembling a garbage dump. His office wasn’t quite the mess his room had been; he was, after all, a grown man now. But an office told a great deal about the person who lived in it sometimes twelve out of every twenty-four hours, and Michael’s bordered on the edge of neglect. This was not to say that it was either sloppy or untidy. Instead, there was a sense of... well... somewhat orderly clutter.