He nodded again.
Steve?
He looked into her eyes.
Are you ever going to get over this, or what?
'Get over what?' he asked mischievously, signing the words at the same time, grinning. Then he took her in his arms, still grinning, and kissed her, and held her close, and she remembered a beginning, long long ago, when a detective named Steve Carella stood hatless and gloveless in the falling snow and offered a girl named Theodora Franklin a single red rose on St. Valentine's Day — and filled her life with roses forever.
She turned off the bedside lamp, and snuggled close to him again.
AT 3:00 P.M. the next day, a young blond woman checked in at Spindledrift International Airport for Air France's 5:10 p.m. fight to Paris. Passport Control had been alerted to stop and detain a woman named Melissa Summers. The name in the blonde's passport was Carmela Sammarone. The inspector merely glanced at her photo, stamped the passport, and said, 'Have a nice flight, Miss Sammarone.'
Melissa smiled demurely, and walked towards the security gate, where she placed the violin case she was carrying on the scanning machine.
Yesterday, a Homeland Security officer had listened to Meyer on the telephone, had written down the pertinent information about some valuable violin, asked if this constituted a bomb threat, and when told that it did not, shrugged and thanked Meyer for the 'heads-up,' were the exact words he'd used.
The airport security people who opened and examined Carmela Sammarone's violin case were similarly looking for bombs or guns or knives or tweezers, and in any event would not have known a Stradivarius from a Budweiser.
All they did was pat down the case and shake the violin to see if anything suspicious rattled around inside there.
One of the guards remarked, 'My uncle used to play the fiddle.'
'That's nice,' Melissa said, and watched while they closed the lid on the case, and snapped the clips shut.
'Have a nice flight,' the other guard said.
Waiting for takeoff in the first-class section of the plane, Melissa sipped at a glass of ouzo and leafed through the June issue of Vogue.
'First time to Paris?' the flight attendant asked.
'Yes,' Melissa said, smiling.
It was a beginning.
THE END