Chapter 21: The Hallway

We drove down on the Monday, in the marshal's gray sedan.

Sandro sat in the back with me.

He'd shaved his beard down short for court, and the stitches over his eyebrow had come out, leaving a thin pink line.

He'd put on a suit the old man lent him. It was twenty years out of date and an inch short in the arms.

"You look like a man going to his own wake," I said.

"I've been to my own wake," he said. "The food was terrible."

The marshal laughed in the front seat, which she almost never did.

We came into Providence after dark.

She didn't take the highway exit for the hotel.

She took the one for Federal Hill.

"Ten minutes," she said, without turning around. "We don't stop. We don't get out. Nobody waves."

She drove slowly up Atwells Avenue, under the arch with the pine cone.

Past the bakery. Past the restaurant that had been mine, in my books, for nine years.

Then she slowed even more.

On the second floor of a narrow brick house, there was a window with plastic geraniums in a box and a Saint Anthony statue on the sill.

The light behind it was on.

Sandro put his hand flat on the glass of the car window.

He didn't say anything.

A shape moved behind the curtain, a small old woman, carrying a plate to a table.

Then we were past.

He kept his hand on the glass until the corner.

I took his other hand in my lap and held it in both of mine all the way to the hotel.

The federal courthouse was on Kennedy Plaza, gray stone with tall windows.

We went in through a side door at eight in the morning.

The grand jury met on the third floor.

The hallway outside it had a long wooden bench, a water fountain, and a window looking at the bus station.

Renato was standing at the window.

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