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mean; what was going to happen?
    What was going to happen was that Rocco and his wife were going to have to go to the government and look at the face of the body of this unlucky person and explain that it wasn’t Mimmo.
    A cement truck tooted its horn, and the crowd, which now occupied the breadth of the street, contracted toward the sidewalk. Some version of what he was saying to D’Agostino spread among them. The general volume ebbed. He felt, like a swollen sinus, the pressure of their attention on the workings of his private mind.
    D’Agostino said, So he would have to inconvenience himself, that was to say, he would have to keep the bakery closed while he traveled all the way to New Jersey and then back, only because they had failed to keep their records in order?
    “Exactly that,” Rocco said.
    Chiara looked at him, compressing her lips so that the blood left them. “Thou hast borne false witness,” said the resolute expression of her arch, white mouth.
    He mustered all the charity and patience within himself and whispered, “You must understand, my dear. They’re trying to stick their filthy fingers in my mouth and look inside.”
    D’Agostino leaned back on his heels, out of the shadow of the awning, raised his face to the sky, then glanced behind himself, then turned again to Rocco. You would think, he said, that the government could at least read the identification tags that, like everybody knows, you wear in the service at all times, wouldn’t you?
    In a sense, Rocco had to acknowledge, he could understand where the government was coming from, seeing as this boy they’d found was, according to the gentlemen from yesterday, in fact wearing the god tags of a Mimmo LaGrassa, and the serial number matched the one Rocco’d kept in his wallet since Mimmo had enlisted, which he kept the number for just such an occasion—rather dog tags he meant to say—and the height was the same.
    He turned to the girl and said, “Satisfied?”
    “I would very much enjoy an apple fritter,” she entreated.
    He looked at the newspaper. He was full of rage and shame. He was saddened that Chiara should see him this way.
    So the gentlemen from the Marine Corps, D’Agostino pursued, just to make clear, had said to him, “We need you to come identify”—like they were confused and they didn’t know—and here the paper made it out like this information was confirmed?
    Why ask him about the newspaper? He didn’t write it.
    D’Agostino looked up again, and back again, and forward. And how tragic, really, because the gentlemen from the Marine Corps had never used any words like, for example, We are sure or We confirm?
    “Or a marmalade crescent?” said the girl.
    Well, you might say, “I confirm that the moon is made of green cheese,” said Rocco, but if the moon isn’t in fact made of green cheese then you haven’t confirmed anything, because how could you be sure of a statement that was false? And so on and so forth.
    Chiara flitted off on tiptoes, as little girls will do, or else she could not abide his sin.
    Somewhere a bicycle bell was rung.
    Or else it was a desk bell somebody was beating to demand service. A version of what he’d said to D’Agostino, mangled, doubtless, had permeated the host, and they didn’t like it. They maybe disbelieved him.
    D’Agostino excused himself and peeled off in the direction of the bell. Others followed. Soon there was a wholesale dispersal of the verminous crowd. A few wished him courage, told him to keep his eye alive, and disappeared. Probably they were ashamed at having been so mistaken—probably.
    In short order, all of the faces were facing away from him but one. They scattered into the side streets and the places of business along the Eleventh Avenue, but for one old woman who was making her way through the tangle of bodies in his direction. She was in the widow’s uniform—the black shoes, the black dress, the black purse. She came closer.
    She said, “Mr.