There was a round of applause.
“Thank you,” a new voice said.
“Grazie mille,” another new voice said.
“Okay, okay,” Triani said. “Thank you, okay. I think you all know what kind of experience these two men have had, and what kind of people they are. I want you to know...”
“Yeah, they’re fuckin’ hoodlums,” one of the detectives said.
“... first order of...”
“Shhhh.”
“... business will be to find the two bastards who did this murder. I promise you we will not rest till our honor’s been...”
“Bullshit,” one of the detectives said.
“Shhh,” the other one said, and grinned. “Pay a little respect here, huh?”
Mollie could not understand how the man who’d saved her life last December happened to be in that same restaurant where her mother was killed last Wednesday. Six months since they’d seen him, and all at once he pops up in the same restaurant where catastrophe is about to happen. This was some odd coincidence, it seemed to her, something she’d have surely asked her mother about, if only her mother were still alive.
She could not believe all the things the newspapers were saying about Andrew, whose name it now turned out wasn’t really Farrell, but was instead Faviola. How could the person they’d had dinner with shortly after Christmas last year be the leader of a powerful crime family, a person the newspapers were calling the “Boss,” as if he were Bruce Springsteen? The Boss having an early dinner in a little Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, where coincidentally, mind you, her mother and father were also meeting for dinner. Small wonder that all the newspapers were just full of speculation and innuendo as to what the ADA’s beautiful young blond wife was really doing in that place last Wednesday.
What the newspapers did not know was that Sarah Fitch Welles — they kept adding her maiden name, as if she were Hillary Rodham Clinton — had met Andrew Faviola six months earlier. Only Mollie knew this. Well, her father knew it, too, but in a slightly different way; they had told him all about Andrew Farrell, the nice young man who’d saved her life. So what the hell was her mother doing in that restaurant with him last Wednesday?
Well, with him, who says she was actually with him?
Her father insisted he’d been on the way to meet her there, so Mollie had to believe the restaurant employees were mistaken about her mother sitting there with a gangster, holding hands with a gangster, in deep conversation with a...
Was Andrew really a gangster?
That was his picture in all the papers, unmistakably his picture.
The Boss.
Who the DA’s Office was saying had been sitting there alone when her mother accidentally walked past his table into a “deadly fusillade,” as the Daily News called it. But wouldn’t her mother have recognized Andrew on the way to the ladies’ room? Wouldn’t she have yelled “Andrew! How nice to see you again! Do you remember saving Mollie’s life, do you remember saving my darling daughter’s life?” Wouldn’t she have recognized him, for Christ’s sake? I would have recognized him in a minute.
Mom, she thought, Mommy, she thought, what were you doing in that restaurant last Wednesday?
She thought maybe she should ask her father if he really had been on his way to meet her when this thing happened. When her mother got murdered last Wednesday. Instead, she asked him if all the stuff they were saying about this Andrew Faviola person was true.
Her father said, “Yes, Mollie, it’s all true.”
So she didn’t tell him Andrew Faviola was the same Andrew Farrell who’d once saved her life a long time ago, when she was just a kid.
Michael found the pages while he was going through Sarah’s effects. He found them in an envelope in her attaché case, along with several other papers she’d been carrying home from school last Wednesday.
The pages were typewritten, double-spaced on good bond paper.
They had been written by someone named Luretta Barnes, whom Michael recalled Sarah mentioning every now and then, one of her best students, wasn’t she?
Typed onto the first page was the title What I Will Do This Summer.
Sitting on the French lieutenant’s bed in the den where first he’d played the incriminating tapes for Sarah, the grandfather clock ticking noisily down the hall, he thought at first that this was an assignment Sarah had given the kids. But he knew her well enough...
Had thought he’d known her well enough...
Had once, long ago, thought he’d known Sarah better than any woman on earth...
Still...
Knowing her...
... this did seem a somewhat simplistic assignment to have given any of her classes, even the youngest ones. So he had to assume the student, this Luretta Barnes, had come up with the title herself and was using it to put spin on all the “What I Did Last Summer” papers she’d been forced to write ever since kindergarten.
Her intent became immediately apparent the moment Michael began reading:
What I will do this summer...
When school lets out...
What I will do...
I think I’ll watch the dockers and the dealers and the dopers doing their dance of death on this block in hell where I live, and I’ll hope to stay alive.
What I will do this summer...
I think I’ll dodge the bullets of the dealers firing nines from their sleek deadly drive-by machines, and I’ll leap over pools of blood on my way to church each Sunday, where I’ll pray to stay alive.
What I will do this summer...
I think I’ll stare at infants in withdrawal in their cribs and I’ll curse their junkie moms and the pricks who sold them death, but I’ll plan to stay alive.
What I will do this summer...
I’ll keep running from the man who’s trying to rape me where I live in hell and I’ll pray to God every day he dies of an overdose before he succeeds because I don’t know if I have the strength to stay alive even though I plan to.
At least until the fall.
Because in the fall...
In the fall, I’ll move from here to another world where there’s a beautiful woman, I would like to be someday.
In the fall, I’ll go back to her and become alive again.
Until next summer, at least.
What I will do next summer, I think, I’ll start counting the days and weeks and months till autumn.
And... if I can survive hell one more time...
I’ll go back to my school and my teacher.
Michael was suddenly sobbing. Alone on the cast iron bed, he wept uncontrollably, until at last he was able to catch his breath again. Drying his eyes, still clutching the pages in his hand, he went to find his daughter in the empty apartment.
Luretta kept wondering if Mrs. Welles had ever got around to reading those pages she’d given her. She guessed maybe she hadn’t. Probably, planned to read them sooner or later, maybe after she got home from dinner with her husband one night, walked instead into something worse than any drive-by.