Marrity's father stepped forward. "No, Frank!" he shouted. "You'll kill her! Somebody stop him!"
The man who had given Marrity the knife stood up and threw an arm across the old man's chest, and one of the college boys from the farther booth gripped his upper arm.
"It's all he can do," the boy said.
"Hold him," said the man who had provided the knife, and then he pushed his way through the crowd in the doorway.
One of the old women in the north-wall booth shouted something in German, and was shushed by her companions; and peripherally Marrity was aware that his father was struggling very hard with the college boys, who were holding him back; but Marrity's attention was fixed on Daphne.
He pushed her chin up and back, then felt her throat. The larynx muscles were convulsing weakly under his hand, and he felt for the rings of cartilage in her throat.
The younger man from the nearest table had crouched beside him and was holding something in Marrity's field of vision — it was the clear barrel of a Bic pen, with the ink tube pulled out. Marrity nodded, sweat dripping from his face onto Daphne's blouse.
His heart was pounding so hard that he was twitching with it.
Gripping the knife by the blade like a pencil so that only three-quarters of an inch of steel protruded below his thumb, Marrity pushed the point of it into Daphne's throat below the thyroid cartilage, denting the skin and then, as he despairingly pushed harder, puncturing it.
A bloody spray followed the knife blade when he pulled it out, and he snatched the Bic pen barrel from the outstretched hand and pushed it into the makeshift incision.
Air whistled out through the clear plastic tube that now stood up out of Daphne's throat like a dart, and Marrity held the tube in place with his trembling thumb and forefinger.
"Goddammit, stop him!" roared his father.
"Shut up, man," said somebody else. "It's working."
Now air was being sucked into the tube, and a moment later Daphne's legs shifted on the floor and her hands flexed.
The man crouched beside Marrity gave one bark of tense laughter. "You've saved her," he said.
Daphne's eyes fluttered open.
"Don't move, Daph," Marrity said, feeling the smile tugging at his face. "You're fine, just lie still." He sat down more comfortably next to her on the floor.
She managed a slight nod. Her hands floated up toward her throat, but Marrity pushed them back with his free hand. "Don't move, kid, just lie still. Trust me."
She nodded again, and even managed a flickering, uncertain smile, and relaxed. As Marrity watched, the healthy pink color was returning to her face like sunlight filling in shadow.
Marrity glanced at the man beside him; he looked to be in his late twenties, with a dark brush cut, and he needed a shave; he wore a gray linen sport coat with no tie.
"Th-thank you," Marrity said. His hands were trembling and his ears were ringing. He leaned back carefully against a table leg.
"My pleasure," the young man said. "Keep the pen."
Marrity nodded, then tried with one hand to wipe the blade of the knife off on his shirt. The man gently took the knife from Marrity's shaking hands.
"Give that back to your friend," Marrity said.
"Right."
Marrity looked up at his father, who was still gaping down at Daphne in dismay. "She's breathing," Marrity told him. He nodded toward the tube he was still holding in Daphne's throat. "That's a — a tracheotomy."
"I know," the old man said. "I've done one. The results were bad." He blinked a couple of times. "I told you not to have Italian, didn't I?"
"Yes." I think he's more upset by this than Daphne is, Marrity thought. "We should have listened to you."
Three men in white paramedics' uniforms shouldered through the front door and into the dining room now, one of them rolling a folded gurney and the other two carrying aluminum cases and a green oxygen cylinder; they visibly relaxed when they took in the scene, but one of them crouched by Daphne, murmuring reassurances as he shined a penlight into one of her eyes and then the other, while another man was unstringing an IV bag and line from one of the cases. The third man was talking into a radio.
The man who was crouched on the floor gently opened Daphne's mouth and peered down her throat with his light, then shook his head. "They better get it out in ER." He looked over at Marrity. "You okay?"
"Sure," Marrity said. He took a deep breath and let it out. "Tired."
"How long was she unconscious?"
"Not more than a minute," Marrity said.
"How old is she?"
"Twelve."
"Is she on any medications, or allergic to any?"
"No, and no."
"Okay, we'll get an IV going, mainly to get some glucose into her, and we'll run her to St. Bernardine's to get the blockage out and suture her throat. Probably they'll keep her overnight, observation and antibiotics. But this looks good. Who did the tracheotomy?"
"I did," said Marrity.
"You do good work."
"That's what they told me too," muttered Marrity's father.
"I think dinner's off, tomorrow," Marrity told him.
Standing on the shaded sidewalk outside the restaurant, old Derek Marrity watched the paramedics slide the folding stainless-steel gurney with Daphne on it into the back of their white-and-red van, and then Frank Marrity climbed in the back too. A moment later the doors had been slammed shut and the ambulance van had steered out into the sunlight and sped away down Base Line Street to the east, its lights flashing.
The old man was still dizzy, and his ears were still ringing. He had been staring at Frank Marrity's haggard face so intently that now he could still see the afterimage of the straight jaw, the squinting eyes, the compressed mouth.
He looks just like you, Daphne had said.
"What was that you gave him, when he cut her throat?" said an overweight old woman standing behind him; he turned, but saw that she was speaking to the younger man who had been sitting at the table nearest Marrity's booth. He had been with another man, who had disappeared while Daphne was choking.
"A Bic pen," the man said, "with the ink cartridge taken out of it."
"Not very sterile," said Derek Marrity.
"Least of the worries, at that point," the man said shortly. "He's her father?"
"Yes." Yes, Derek Marrity thought, he's her father. I'm a stranger in this picture, soon to disappear. An ineffective, useless stranger, as it turns out.
The young man didn't say anything, just kept looking at Derek Marrity; but Marrity wouldn't fall for that old cop trick of prompting a fuller answer by appearing to expect it. This guy's tipped his hand right here, the old man thought with nervous defiance; he and the guy he was with are from one of the secret outfits, the Mossad, the NSA, whoever, whoever. But what could I tell any of them now? I have no idea at all.
They'll probably follow me. They've probably already bugged the Rambler, with some clunky "state-of-the-art" devices.
His smile was brief and twitchy as he imagined big metal boxes with lights on them, and antennae like sections of polished rebar. Man from U.N.C.L.E stuff.
He found that he was limping rapidly east down the sunny Base Line Street sidewalk, past the grand yellow stucco arch of a car-repair garage and then a couple of faded bungalow-style houses looking shackled behind chain-link fencing and black iron window bars, and he couldn't remember how he had left the young spy and the fat old woman. The Rambler was parked on a side street up ahead; he had stashed a fifth of vodka under the seat, and he would need a bit of its vitamin supplement before he considered what to do now, today having gone so badly wrong. Frank and Daphne must think I'm crazy now, he thought.