“I was yelling for help, but the rain was starting; no one was on the street. Any passing drivers were keeping strictly to themselves. The men were pounding on me and telling me to learn the hard way to mind my own business when a police car came by. As soon as they saw the police the men ran down the street. One of the policemen got out and tried chasing them, but of course they had a head start. They just abandoned their car right there. But as we were driving home I thought, they must have been confusing me with you. Because I was driving your car.”

She was right. I knew she was as soon as she told me the men leaped out of their car to attack her. How many men, and what did they look like, I wanted to ask, but she wasn’t in the mood for interrogation. And it explained why she’d been in such a peculiar state: not from shock, but anger with me for putting her at risk.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

She kept her eyes shut, but her mouth twisted in the parody of a smile. “I am too. More than you, no doubt.”

“Is that why you came to the restaurant? To twist a knife into my side?”

She opened her eyes at that and looked at me from under the ice pack. “No, Victoria. I came to you because I’ve never been so scared in my life, at least not since coming to America. And it seemed like your business. Something you might perhaps fix, make right for me, so I’m not frightened every time I step outside my house into my car.”

I got down on my knees and put my arms around her. “I’ll do my best, chief.”

She shut her eyes again and lay there, breathing lightly, holding my hand, while we waited for Max and Art. I shivered to myself, picturing her under the assault, wishing I could remake the last few days and have it turn out that I’d kept the Trans Am, that I was the one they stopped. How far would they have gone if the police hadn’t shown up? Left her with some broken bones? Maybe lying unconscious in the street, brain-damaged, or dead?

I couldn’t keep my mind from its feverish circling. It was a relief when Max rang the bell, even though it was the prelude to a tough encounter with him. He hadn’t found Art Gioia, but he’d brought Audrey Jameson. She was one of Beth Israel’s more promising young house physicians; I knew her because she spent fifteen hours a week helping Lotty at the clinic.