"What?"
"Joshua fit the battle of Jericho. Book of Joshua, chapter six. The Israelites walk around the city walls seven days with the priests blowing trumpets, and on the seventh day they all shout and the walls come tumbling down. Sister Margaret Ann, fourth grade, St. Benedict's. She used to make us march around the classroom seven times and then we got to yell, and Paulie Russo yelled so loud the first time he wet himself and they never let us do it again."
"So the blanket is a wall."
"I guess."
"And at the end there's a trumpet." She opened her eyes. "So at the end the wall comes down."
"Maybe. I don't know. I've never seen it either, remember." He looked out the window at the rain. "Carmela knows. She won't tell me. She wants me to find out. She said the ending of this movie is the best ending of any movie ever made and if she tells me I'll ruin it by acting like I know."
"Haven't you read the script? Her script?"
"Sure. In Carmela's version it ends with the stage going dark and a trumpet sound. Father Albanese plays the trumpet. He used to play in the CYO band. That's the only reason she's threatening me with him, she's got no one else to blow the trumpet." He shook his head. "But I don't know what it means. I can say the words. I don't know what they mean. That's what she keeps telling me. You're saying the words, Nicky, but you don't know what they mean."
The bus hit a pothole the size of a bathtub and they both bounced, and Nicky's hand flew up to protect the tape, and his elbow knocked against Theda's arm and stayed there a second, warm through the wet sleeve, before he took it away.
"Sorry," he said.
"It's fine."
The Elmwood Avenue garage was a vast, low brick building with a sawtooth roof, sitting behind a chain-link fence in a lake of puddled asphalt under sodium lights that turned the rain the color of weak tea. Barney let them off at the gate. "Have fun at the movies," he called after them as the door folded shut, in a tone that was going to be repeated, Theda suspected, in the drivers' room for the rest of the year.
Inside, the garage was enormous and echoing and smelled of diesel and rubber and wet concrete. Two dozen buses sat in long dark rows with their destination signs blank, enormous and patient, like elephants asleep standing up. Nicky led her down a long walkway painted with yellow safety stripes, past a wall of time clocks and a bulletin board covered in notices about overtime and a bowling league and a lost set of dentures (REWARD — NO QUESTIONS ASKED), to a glassed-in office where a small bald man with a large nose sat at a desk in front of a bank of radios, eating a meatball grinder off a sheet of wax paper.
"Cosmo," said Nicky.
Cosmo Zito looked up. He looked at Nicky. He looked at Theda. He looked, as everyone did, at her foot. He put down the grinder.