Goodman picked up a piece of chalk.
"I'd like to start with the various types of hostage-takers we can expect to encounter," he said.
His eyes met Eileen's.
"Inspector Brady has already mentioned ..."
Or was she mistaken?
"... terrorists, the political zealots who are the most commonly known of all takers," Goodman said, and chalked the word onto the board:
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"But there are two other types of takers we'll . . . let's get used to that shorthand, shall we?" he said, and chalked another word onto the board:
"The takers we'll most frequently encounter ..."
No, she wasn't mistaken.
". . . can be separated into three categories. First, as we've seen, we have the terrorist. Next, we have the criminal caught in the ..."
He rode in the limo with the three women dressed in black. Sat between his mother and his wife, his sister on the jump seat in front of them, everyone silent as the big car nosed its way through the Thursday morning heat and humidity, moving slowly in convoy toward the cemetery where Aunt Katie was buried. His father was in the hearse ahead. He had talked to his father on the telephone only last week. It occurred to him that he would never talk to his father again.
Teddy took his hand.
He nodded.
Beside him, his mother was weeping into a small handkerchief edged with lace. His sister, Angela, stared woodenly through the window, gazing blankly at the sunlit landscape moving past outside the car.
It was too hot to be wearing black.
They stood in the hot sun while the priest said the words of farewell to a man who had taught Carella the precepts of truth and honor he had followed all his life. The coffin was shiny and black, it reflected the sun, threw back the sun in dazzling bursts of light.
It was over too soon.
They were lowering the coffin into the ground. He almost reached out to touch it. And then his father was gone. Gone
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from sight. Into the ground. And they moved away from the grave. His arm around his mother. A widow now. Louisa Carella. A widow. Behind them, the gravediggers were already shoveling earth onto the coffin. He could hear the earth thudding onto the hot, shiny metal. He hoped his mother would not hear the earth hitting the coffin, covering his father.
He left his mother for a moment, and walked up the grassy knoll to where the priest was standing with Angela and Teddy. Angela was telling the priest how beautiful the eulogy had been. Teddy was watching her lips, reading them, eyes intent. They stood side by side in black in the sun, both of them dark-haired and dark-eyed - he wondered suddenly if that was why he'd chosen Teddy Franklin as his wife all those years ago.
Angela was in her early thirties now, enormously pregnant and imminently parturient with her second child. She still wore her brown hair long, cascading straight down on either side of eyes surprisingly Oriental in a high-cheekboned face. The face was a refinement of Carella's, pretty with an exotic tint that spoke of Arabian visits to the island of Sicily in the far-distant past.
Teddy was a far more beautiful woman, taller than her sister-in-law, her midnight-black hair worn in a wedge, intelligence flashing in her dark eyes as she turned now to study the priest's mouth, translating the articulation of his lips into words that filled the silence of her world: Teddy Carella was deaf; nor had she ever spoken a word in her life.
Carella joined them, thanked the priest for a lovely service, although secretly - and he would never tell this to a soul, not even Teddy - he'd felt that the priest's words could have applied to anyone, and not to the unique and wonderful man who'd been Antonio Giovanni Carella, so-named by an immigrant grandfather who'd never once realized that such names would never be in fashion in the good old US of A. Nevertheless, Carella invited the priest to join the family at the house, where there'd be something to eat and drink -
"Well, thank you, no, Mr Carella," the priest said, "I must get back to the church, thank you anyway. And, once again,
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be cheered by the knowledge that your father is now at peace in God's hands," he said, which caused Carella to wonder whether the priest had even the faintest inkling of how much at peace his father had been while he was still alive. To make his point clear, the priest took Carella's hand between both his own and pressed it, from God's hands to Father Gianelli's hands, so to speak, in direct lineage. Carella remained unimpressed.
Teddy had noticed that her mother-in-law was now standing alone some ten yards or so down the knoll. She touched Carella on the arm, signed to him that she was going to join his mother, and left him there with the priest still sandwiching Carella's hand between his own, Angela looking on helplessly. Standing in black, her hands resting on her big belly, her back hurting like hell, she knew damn well that the priest's eulogy had been boilerplate. Fill in the blanks and the dead man could have been anyone. Except that it had been her father.
"I must be on my way," the priest said, sounding like a vicar in an English novel. He made the sign of the cross on the air, blessing God only knew whom or what, picked up his black skirts, and went off toward where his sexton was standing beside the parish car.
"He didn't know Papa at all," Angela said.
Carella nodded.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yes, fine " she said.
The sexton*gunned the priest's car into life. Down the knoll, Teddy^as gently hugging Carella's mother, who was still crying into her handkerchief. The car moved off. On the lawn below, the two figures in black were etched in silhouette against the brilliant sky. On the knoll above, Carella stood with his sister.
"I loved him a lot," she said.
"Yes." ¦?-
He felt inadequate.
"We'd better get to the house," she said. "There'll be people."
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"Have you heard from Tommy?" he asked.
"No," she said, and turned suddenly away.
He realized all at once that she was crying. Mistaking her tears as grief for his father, he started to say, "Honey, please, he wouldn't have wanted ..." and then saw that she was shaking her head, telling him wordlessly that he did not understand the tears, did not know why she was crying, stood there in black in pregnancy in utter misery, shaking her head helplessly in the unrelenting sunlight.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Nothing."
"You told me you thought he was still in California ..."
Shaking her head.
"You said he was trying to get back in time for the funeral ..."
Still shaking her head, tears streaming down her face.
"Angela, what is it?"
"Nothing."
"Is Tommy in California?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know? He's your husband, where is he?"
"Steve, please ... I don't know."
"Angela ..."
"He's gone."
"Gone? Gone where?" #
"Gone. He left me, Steve. He walked out." %*
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying my husband walked out on me."
"No."
"For Christ's sake, do you think I'm making this upV she said fiercely, and burst into fresh tears.
He took her in his arms. He held her close, his pregnant sister in black, who too many years ago had been afraid to come out of her bedroom to join her future husband at the altar. She'd been wearing white that day, and he'd told her
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