Thinking about Anna Savard, by comparison, didn’t make him sad. He certainly spent too much time thinking about her. An educated woman of strong opinions, self-sufficient. The nursemaids—pretty, educated to the point that they could read and write, keep track of household accounts, do needlework and mending, with families and reputations good enough to gain employment looking after the children of the wealthiest families—they were more likely to marry than Anna or Sophie Savard. Or than his own sisters.
With that thought he caught sight of Anna headed his way. She had turned into the park from Fifth Avenue, walking quickly so that her skirts swirled around the toes of her boots and the edge of her cape—a deep evergreen color—kicked up with every step. Jack wondered if she was wearing split skirts today, as she had the first time he saw her in that church basement, locking horns with Sister Ignatia. He wondered if the hair she had coiled at the back of her head would curl once released from its pins.
She didn’t see him sitting there and would have passed without taking any note.
“Pardon me, Dr. Savard.”
She turned on point, alert, her frown shifting to surprise. “Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte. What are you doing here?”
He gestured to the bench. “Sitting. In the sunshine.”
She looked up at the clock in the university tower. Her walk had put high color into her cheeks and at the very tip of her nose.
Jack said, “It’s about half past two. You aren’t late.” And at her puzzled expression. “We have an appointment at three; did you forget?”
He waited until she took a seat on the very edge of the bench and folded her hands in her lap. She wore gloves embroidered with ivy.
“Is that your work?” He gestured to her gloves.
She frowned, not understanding him.
“The embroidery.”
“No. You’re interested in embroidery?”
“Only because I see so much of it. Both my sisters embroider, for various churches and for some well-to-do ladies who have less time or inclination.”
She lifted a shoulder, almost apologetically. “The only kind of sewing I do is very different. You have two sisters?”
“And five brothers. And you?”
“I had an older brother, but he died when I was young. Now I have Sophie. And Cap.”
She looked away into the depths of the park. Her eyes were the color of tarnished copper, tawny browns shot through with green.
“I’m sorry about your friend Mr. Verhoeven,” Jack said.
There was a small silence. “Thank you,” she said finally. And: “You have news about the Russo boys?”
“No,” Jack said. “But there is someone to interview who might be of help. If you care to join me.”
Her eyebrows lifted ever so slightly. “Today? Now?”
“Unless you have other appointments.”
She seemed to bristle a little, as though she disliked the idea of being waited for. “Close enough to walk?”
“A half hour, at a reasonable pace.”
She got up, and so did he.
“I’ll take your bag,” he said, but she swung it away from him.
“Peremptory of you, wouldn’t you say?”
She was in a prickly mood. He looked forward to this walk.
• • •
THEY MADE THEIR way along the park to Greenwich Lane and then north, through neighborhoods of small houses and tenements. On this warm spring afternoon people had come out to sit in the sun on their stoops, grandmothers and children just walking, invalids and cripples, war veterans too numerous to count. A toddler lurched up and down the sidewalk with an older sister close behind.
A group of young girls were playing skully, stopping just long enough for Jack and Anna to pass by. As they approached a vacant lot, a whole pack of young boys came racing onto the sidewalk. In the middle of the group a grinning boy held a bloody pocketknife up, waving it like a trophy. He was limping, but his expression was pure victory.
Anna took in the details automatically: he was filthy from playing in the dirt, but he looked well nourished, and more important, he looked like a boy with no worries beyond the next challenge to his status as victor. No doubt he didn’t even feel the wound on his foot.
“Oh dear,” Anna said. “Mumblety-peg.”
Jack laughed. “You don’t approve.”
“Do you know of any woman who does? There’s something wrong with a game that you can win by pinning your foot to the ground with a dirty pocketknife.”
“That’s not the only way to win.”
She looked at him sharply. “Did you play mumblety-peg with your brothers?”
“We still do, now and then.”
She stopped, her mouth falling open.
“Boys bloody themselves,” he said. “One way or the other.”
“Yes,” Anna said grumpily. “And they lose toes on occasion, too. I’ve sewn up more than a few lacerated feet over the last few years.”
They walked in silence for a long minute. Jack had decided that discretion was the better part of valor and was declining to argue the merits of this particular game.
“The world is a dangerous place for children,” she said finally. “As we both know too well. Those boys were just Tonino Russo’s age.”
Jack said, “Let’s hope Tonino has nothing more dangerous than a game of mumblety-peg to deal with.”
Another longer silence, in which they both remembered that they might never know what became of Tonino or his brother.
“You know,” Anna said, “Rosa cries herself to sleep, but she’s very careful to present a calm face to the world. She doesn’t even ask about the letters Sophie and I have written, or the list of places we’re putting together to visit. The only thing that’s keeping her from breaking down is Lia. For Lia she puts on a brave show.”
“And you?”
“I’m not much of an actress, but then I don’t spend very much time with them. Margaret and Mrs. Lee and Aunt Quinlan deal with the day by day, and all of them have vast experience with orphaned children. Sophie and I are prime examples.”
He was studying the sidewalk, it seemed to Anna. Trying to find something to say. She hoped he would realize that she would not want or need sympathy.
“Rosa said something to you about your brother, back in Hoboken. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.”
Anna kept her silence, and he took this as permission to go on. “She said that your brother failed you, and you agreed.”
“Did I,” Anna said. Her voice caught a little, but he seemed determined to go on.
“What I was wondering was, has anyone else ever said as much to you? That your brother failed you?”
“No,” Anna said. “Of course not. My brother was a West Point graduate. He was an army officer, and he did his duty. He was proud to do his duty. For that he deserves respect.”
After a moment she glanced at Jack and saw an expression she didn’t really understand. Not pity, she was fairly certain. Uncertainty, reservation, confusion. She was struck quite suddenly with an almost overwhelming fear: he would ask questions now, questions she didn’t want to think about, much less answer.
An ambulance came rattling past them, pulling up to the portico at St. Vincent’s, just ahead. Anna picked up her pace a little.
Just that simply the conversation slipped away.
• • •
JACK SAID, “DOES it make you curious, the ambulance?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “You mean professional curiosity, I suppose. Is that how you feel when you see an arrest being made?” And without waiting for his answer she went on.
“I wouldn’t call it curiosity, but a kind of awareness, a tensing. After a while you can gauge the situation by the way the ambulance drivers move and by their voices. My guess is
that this isn’t a very serious case, so no. I’m not interested enough to interfere.”
She had been easy with him, until they started talking about the Russo boys and then, by extension, her brother. He wished now that he had waited for another time to ask questions. She intrigued him, she surprised him. She went on surprising him while very little seemed to surprise her. But she was not without scars, ones she had no intention of showing or even, he realized now, acknowledging, even to herself.
She said, “Do you think that a woman wouldn’t be able to cope with the realities of the work you do?”
This tone he understood; she was irritated and willing to let him know that.
“Your sensibilities don’t strike me as fragile,” he said. “So let me tell you about yesterday morning. A cobbler with a business on Taylor Street killed his wife. He is more than seventy, she was less than thirty.”
She seemed to be interested. “Jealousy?”
“Italians make an art of it. So we got the call and went out, but the cobbler disappeared before we got there. We spent most of the day looking for him and were about to give up—it was just getting dark—when he walked past me. This was in the Italian colony in Brooklyn. It’s not hard to disappear for a few days at a time over there.”
Anna said, “You recognized the cobbler?”
“I had a description—short, bald, a gray mustache—”
“That must describe hundreds of men. You’re smiling. Is there a joke here somewhere?”
Jack rubbed the corner of his mouth with a knuckle. “Not a joke, but maybe a bit of a secret weapon. I’ll tell you how I caught him: I asked him a question.”
She made a gesture with her hand, impatient for him to go on.
“I was standing on the corner when he walked past me. He fit the description so I said, ‘Hey, Giacalone!’ and he stopped and turned. Then I said, ‘So why did you kill your wife?’ He told me, and I arrested him. End of story.”
She had stopped and was looking at him the same way he might look at a pickpocket with a dodgy alibi. “Why would he do that? Just because you used his name?”
“Don’t you turn when somebody calls your name?”
“Yes, probably. But I wouldn’t confess to a crime on that basis. There must be something more to it.”
She liked puzzles, clearly, and would ask questions until she got to the bottom of things.
“Yes, there was more to it. I said it in his language.”
“You spoke Italian.”
“Sicilian.”
“They don’t speak Italian in Sicily?”
“The Italians in Sicily do. The Sicilians do not. I can see you don’t believe me, but it’s true.”
“Say it for me. First in Italian and then Sicilian.”
“A command performance,” Jack said, giving her an exaggerated bow from the shoulders. “‘Perchè hai ammazzato la tua donna?’ would be a colloquial, friendly Italian. ‘Picchì a ttò mugghieri l’ammazzasti?’ is Sicilian. Or one kind of Sicilian.”
They walked on, and he could almost hear her thinking, looking for flaws in his story.
“There is more than one Sicilian language?”
“Dozens of dialects of Sicilian. Hundreds of dialects of Italian.”
“How is it you speak Sicilian?”
“I don’t, really. I just have a collection of sentences at the ready.”
Her mouth contorted as if she were repressing a smile. “Do tell.”
“‘Why did you kill your wife—or friend, or neighbor?’ ‘What did you do with the money you took?’—that kind of thing.”
“Are Sicilians responsible for most of the crime?”
“Oh, no,” Jack said. “Which is why I know how to say those crucial sentences in more than one kind of Italian.”
She was quiet for a full minute. “Detective Sergeant Mezzanotte,” she said a little huffily, “I think you’re pulling my leg.”
“Test me, then, if you don’t believe me.”
“All right. Florence.” She said it as if she knew for a fact that the men of Florence would never kill their wives.
He smiled openly at that. “‘O perché tu ha’ammazzaho la tu’ moglie?’”
She pressed her lips together while she thought. “Of course I have no way of knowing if that’s right. You could be making it up out of whole cloth.”
He laughed, and very deftly took her hand and hooked it through his crooked arm.
“Your claim,” she began after a long pause, “is that this man was so taken by surprise to find a countryman that he let his guard down.”
“Something like that.”
“I find it hard to imagine.”
“If you found yourself on the other side of the world in a country where you were disliked and distrusted on sight and you didn’t speak the language—”
“I would learn the language.”
He glanced at her. “You would learn the language. But you would miss your own language, your people. In a crowd you hear nothing but this other language that has been so much work for you, it gives you a headache sometimes trying to follow. The people you talk to make fun of your accent, the way you turn sentences around. They insult you to your face. Then all of a sudden you hear somebody speaking your language. The language of your town and family, the language you heard around the dinner table as a little girl, or playing with other little girls like yourself. It’s like being handed a wonderful present with no warning. Suddenly you’re not alone in the world.”
She was listening closely, her head canted. “When you put it like that, yes. I can see it. To put it bluntly, you took advantage of his loneliness.”
“He killed his wife,” Jack said. “His feelings are not my concern.”
“So you only pursue Italian-speaking criminals.” Her tone was vaguely disbelieving and he wondered what she had up her sleeve.
“I never said that. I arrest all kinds of people, young and old, rich and poor. This week I arrested a banker, an associate of the Astors whose family has been here for two hundred years. For embezzlement, a rich man’s crime.”
“But your secret weapon works only with Italians.”
“Dr. Savard, do you begrudge me my professional tools?”
“No,” she said, and bit her lip. “Maybe a little. I am glad that the rest of the world is safe from your tricks.”
He lifted a brow, and saw her expression shift.
“Now you are boasting. How many languages do you speak?”
“I don’t know,” Jack lied, just to see her expression. “I’ve never counted.”
• • •
WHAT HAD BEEN a neighborhood of factory workers and store clerks and wagon drivers gave way suddenly, and they found themselves surrounded by the tenements that housed the workers from the turpentine distilleries and the Manhattan Gas Works. Even on a Sunday the air was heavy with the smell of coal oil, of pine sap and resin, all together a soup that made Anna think of young men with drawn faces and lungs the color of ash.
She heard herself say, “I did some of my training at St. Vincent’s. I’ve made calls in this neighborhood.”
“I wasn’t aware that surgeons make house calls.”
“I was a physician first,” she said. “My education was quite broad and thorough.” She took firmer hold of his arm and yanked, stepping sideways to draw him away from the corner where an old man was coughing so hard that a mist of droplets shimmered in the air.
“Contagion,” she said, a little embarrassed now at her temerity.
She wondered if he would take offense or find her way of expressing herself distasteful. The kind of thinking she thought she had conquered, finally, but here it was again. She reminded herself that people who shied away from her because she had a brain and a profession weren’t worth her time. A friend was someone you didn’t
have to make excuses to. Someone who took you as you were. And another realization: she liked the man, and wanted him. As a friend.
She found it almost impossible to raise her head and look at him; she needed another minute to remind herself that he would have expectations that she would not be able to, would not want to, meet. But he made her laugh, and try as she might, Anna couldn’t think of another person outside her family and Cap who could make her really laugh.
They passed Twentieth Street and the neighborhood changed again. There were trees here, small parks, and children shrieking as they played. Brownstone respectability, and then the open campus of the Theological Seminary, as staid and somber as the inside of a church.
Jack stopped in front of a small property just across from the seminary. He pulled a rope and the sound of the bell echoed from deep in the house.
After a full minute he said, “This is a home for elderly nuns. They are not quick.”
“Nuns?”
“It’s called St. Jerome’s, a residence for retired religious.”
Before she could ask him what help such people might be in helping them find two little boys, the heavy wooden door swung open. The nun wore rough homespun robes far too big for a tiny frame, cinched together by a rope at her waist. Beneath her wimple her eyes were a vivid, watery blue.
As she closed the door behind them Jack said, “Sister—”
She turned her back and left them there without bothering to hear or answer his question. Anna thought she must be deaf, but then a quavering voice rose over the departing shoulder.
“He’s waiting for you.”
“Where?”
That made her stop and turn to display a frown that consumed her lower face. “Where else? The kitchen.”
8
THE MAN JACK was looking for sat at a long table reading a newspaper while he ate from a dish of olives and pickles and slices of raw onion. He held the paper so close to his eyes that when he looked up at them, the first thing Anna noticed was the newsprint on the end of a long, straight nose over an honest smile made up of teeth the color of old ivory.