"I do," Tony said, and Georgie wanted to kill him Ask him if he knew my grandmother." Tony's grandmother was from Siciliy, where you did not exactly speak Dante's Italian. The dialect now used was the one he'd heard at Filomena's while she was cooking her abominable fish. First asked Lorenzo his name.
"Mi chiamo Lorenzo Schiavinato," Lorenzo said.
"His name's Lorenzo," Tony translated. "I could make out the last name."
Small wonder, Georgie thought.
"Ask him if he knew my grandmother."
"Where are you from?" Tony asked.
"Milano," Lorenzo said.
Where they spoke Florentine Italian, and where Sicilian dialect was scarcely understood. Lorenzo in fact, squinting his very blue eyes in an effort to understand Tony's Italian, which itself was bastardization of the dialect his sainted grandmother had spoken.
It occurred to Georgie that the so-called conversation between them was taking place in a market reputedly run by the mob, whose Italian limited to a few basic words like "Boffon gool," itself was a bastardization of the time-honored "Va in culo," better left uninterpreted in the presence of a fine lady like Priscilla Stetson.
Who now said, rather impatiently this time, ask him if he knew my goddamn grandmother."
In Sicilian Italian, Tony asked if Lorenzo had known Priscilla's grandmother.
In Florentine Italian, Lorenzo asked who perchance her grandmother might have been.
"Svetlana Dyalovich," Tony said.
And Lorenzo began running.
From where the detectives were coming down the center aisle of the indoor market, checking out the men selling fish from stalls and barrels and bins and ice chests on either side of them, they saw a tall blond man running toward them, chased by Svetlana's grand daughter and the two goons who'd braced them at the club on Saturday night.
If the tall runner was, in fact, Lorenzo Schiavinato, then he was the one who'd bought the gun that killed Priscilla's grandmother. Despite what was known in the trade as "background" the number of innocent bystanders at any given scene the fact that Lorenzo had purchased the murder weapon was justification within the guidelines for Carella and Hawes to draw their own guns. Besides, the man was running. In this city, unless you were running to catch a bus, the very act was suspicious.
The guns came out.
"Stop!" Hawes shouted. "Police!"
"Police!" Carella shouted. "Stop!"
Lorenzo wasn't stopping.
A hundred and eighty pounds of muscle and bone plowed right through them, knocking Hawes off his feet, tossing Carella back onto a stall of very nice iced salmon, and causing a mustached man in a brown derby to throw his hands over his head in fright. Both detectives recovered at once, Carella first, Hawes an instant later.
"Stop!" they shouted simultaneously.
Hawes was in a crouch, pistol levered, holding gun steady in both hands.
Carella was standing beside him, gun extended both hands, ready to fire.
"Stop!" he shouted. Lorenzo kept running.
Hawes fired first. Carella fired an instant later Carella missed. Hawes did, too. He fired again. This time, his shot took Lorenzo in the left leg, sending him tumbling. Everywhere around them, the back was screaming. The mustached man in the derby was running in the opposite direction, from the shooting, waving his hands hysterically in the air. He tripped over Georgie, who had thrown himself flat on the floor the moment he'd heard shots, the way his uncle Dominick had taught him to do. Lorenzo trying to crawl away, dragging his wounded leg behind him. Hawes kicked him and then stepped on his back, holding him down while Carella cuffed him.
"Ask him if he knew my grandmother," Priscilla said. "Few things we'd like to ask you, too," Carella said. Everyone was breathing very hard.
Fat Ollie Weeks was asking the computer for tri-state area high school, prep school, parochial: school, Christian academy or so-called alternative school whose name began with the letter P. There were fifteen such private schools in the metropolitan area alone.
Thirty-eight in the entire state.
Of the public schools, there were a hundred and forty-six, thirty of them beginning with the word "Port." Port This, Port That, more damn coastal towns than Ollie knew existed.
In the two neighboring states combined, there were thirty-nine private schools and a hundred and ninety eight public schools that began with the letter P. All of the public schools in this city were designated with the letters P.S. before the name, and so the computer belched out what looked to Ollie like more high schools than he could possibly cover in ten years of investigation. He limited the search to proper names alone and came up with sixty-three schools that had the letter P in their names.
