She hesitated. “Only indirectly.”
“Now you’ll have to satisfy my curiosity.”
She looked him directly in the eye. “Not every whim has to be satisfied, Detective Sergeant. I can tell you this much. Sophie and I refer to the matter more generally as the Corset War.”
He laughed, he couldn’t help himself. “That’s enough information, you’re right. Let me ask you something else then,” he said. “Do you think you could call me by my first name?”
“You want me to call you Giancarlo?”
“I like Jack better. You object?”
She tilted her head a little, considering. “It might be seen as inappropriate, if we were to use first names.”
“According to—”
She gestured at the city around them. “Everyone. We are two professional people working together to solve a problem, a certain degree of formality is called for.”
“I call Oscar by his first name.”
“Really? I have heard you call him Oscar, but more often you seem to call him Maroney. And he calls you Mezzanotte for the most part, as I recall. I could call you Mezzanotte, I suppose, and you could call me by my last name. It’s how we were addressed in medical school until we earned our degrees.”
“That would be a step in the right direction. In the spirit of cooperation. And friendship.”
The word seemed to give her pause. “I don’t have many friends outside the women I went to medical school with and other doctors,” she said. “I scare people off, I think.”
She had said more than she meant to; he saw that in the way she averted her gaze.
“Then,” he said, “it’s high time you widened your circle of friends.”
? ? ?
THE POLICE DEPARTMENT ferry was small and used primarily, as far as Anna could guess, for transporting convicted criminals from the Tombs to the city penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island. Jack’s prisoner was a middle-aged man wearing a good suit; he might have been a shopkeeper or a schoolteacher. He sat inside the locked cabin, his head thrown back against the wall and snoring so loudly that the glass rattled in the windowpane.
Jack went to talk to the pilot as they moved into the middle of the East River, crowded with anything and everything that could float. Another hour until the end of the workday, but it would be light for a good while yet.
She liked being on the water, the chilly air against her heated skin. Anna watched the city and the traffic, as busy now as it had been at nine in the morning. As they got closer to the island the different buildings began to distinguish themselves, all of them facing Manhattan like a pack of squat, humorless bulldogs. As a student Anna had been assigned here twice, for short periods. It was one of the few places so desperate for doctors willing to donate their time that they allowed women medical students to attend. It had been a useful experience, but she could not recall one positive memory of the place.
Today, she reminded herself, she wasn’t here to treat anyone, but to interview a man who might be Carmine Russo. She was glad to have Jack Mezzanotte with her, not just because he spoke Italian, but because without him she would have no idea where to start beyond the very obvious and blunt question Why did you abandon your children?
Anna wondered if this sentence was on Mezzanotte’s list of things he needed to be able to say in multiple languages. In her experience police detectives did not bother with abandoned children, but Jack Mezzanotte seemed to be the exception.
He came back to stand beside her at the rail, his eyes scanning from the workhouses to the hospitals and on to the penitentiary and back again. Anna was very aware of his size, the width of his shoulders, the way he held himself. He was far bigger than other Italians she knew, and why, she asked herself, was she comparing him to anyone at all?
And that was a truly inane question. Not an hour ago he had leaned toward her and declared his interest; he had opened a door, and she stood on the threshold, considering.
? ? ?
A MATRON MET them in the waiting room of the men’s workhouse, a bony, unusually tall woman wearing a starched white apron and an old-fashioned white dimity cap over thinning gray hair. She listened to Jack’s request with eyes averted, then led them through corridors toward the back of the building.