"I don't know about any pie," said Mrs. Lucchesi loudly, from the plaintiff's table, and Sy Feinberg put a hand on her arm.
"Nothing further," said Sterling Pratt, and sat down, and Mina saw, with the reporter's eye that never quite switched off, that he knew it had not gone the way he wanted.
Then they called her.
She walked up past the rail, through the little swinging gate, past her own table where Bunny sat with her fingers poised on the keys, and climbed the two steps into the witness box, and turned, and sat down, and the room opened in front of her like the Bay at Hyde and Chestnut. Forty faces. Every one of them looking at her. She had sat eleven years in the one chair in this building that nobody looked at, and now she was in the one chair that everybody did, and her heart was going like a stenograph at two hundred and sixty, and her mouth was full of stones.
The clerk swore her. She said, "I do," which had no stones in it.
"Would you state your name for the record, please," said Judge Moy, "and spell your last name."
She opened her mouth. There it was, the P, at the front of her mouth, the old familiar boulder at the mouth of the cave, the one she had walked around for twenty years with a hundred little tricks: Just Mina, the reporter, this is Mina from Fourteen. She could feel the silence starting to stretch. Below her, Bunny waited, fingers on the keys, ready to take down whatever came, even nothing.
She looked down the room. In the second row, where they had let him sit after his testimony, Remy Agostini was not looking at her with pity, or with worry. He was looking at her the way he had looked at her at the top of Nob Hill, with his hands off the lever, coasting, in the place where the car runs on nobody's power at all. Here I am, his face said. I'm not going anywhere you can't follow.
"Mina," she said. "Mina P—" The stone. She let it sit there. She did not walk around it. She leaned on it, the way she had watched him lean on the end of a car on the turntable at Market Street, with her whole weight, until it moved. "Prokop. P-R-O-K-O-P."
Bunny's fingers went down on the keys, and came up, and Mina knew exactly what strokes they had made, and that the record would show no hesitation at all, because Bunny Sauer had been her friend for eleven years, and some things are a matter of interpretation.
Pratt did his best. He asked her about the photographs, and she told him the truth, in order, in complete sentences, and the sentences came. Yes, that was the booth. It had been her booth for four years; she had chosen it because nobody else wanted it. Yes, they had shared it on rainy days, because it was the only seat in the place, and the waitress made them. No, they had never spoken. Not one word. Not one note.