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maximum five years for the second-degree crime.
    Sokolin had come off pretty well. He was a war veteran, and this was a first offense. It was, nonetheless, first-degree assault and the judge could not let him off with a fine and a fatherly pat on the head. He was found guilty and sentenced to two years in Castleview Prison upstate. He’d been an ideal prisoner. He’d applied for a parole after serving a year of his term, and the parole had been granted as soon as a firm job offer was presented to the board. He had been released from Castleview two months ago— on April 3.
    Meyer Meyer pulled the phone to him and dialed Carella’s home number. Carella answered the phone on the third ring.
    “I’ve got that stuff you wanted on Sokolin,” Meyer said. “Did that patrolman show up for the note yet?”
    “About a half-hour ago,” Carella said.
    “Well, he’s not back here yet. You’re leaving about noon, huh?”
    “About one o’clock, actually.”
    “Where can I reach you if the lab comes up with something?”
    “The wedding’s at three at the Church of the Sacred Heart at the intersection of Gage and Ash in Riverhead. The reception starts at five at my mother’s house. It’s gonna be an outdoor thing.”
    “What’s the address there?”
    “831 Charles Avenue.”
    “Okay. You want this stuff on Sokolin?”
    “Give it to me.”
    Meyer gave it to him.
    When he’d finished talking, Carella said, “So he’s on parole now, huh? Went back to California with a firm job offer.”
    “No, Steve. I didn’t say that.”
    “Then where is he?”
    “Right here. The job offer came from this city.”

By one-thirty that bright Sunday afternoon, Antonio Carella was ready to shoot his wife, strangle his son, disown his daughter, and call off the whole damn wedding.
    To begin with, Tony was paying for the wedding. This was the first time—and the last time, thank God—a daughter of his was getting married. When Steve married Teddy, it was her parents who had paid for the festivities. Not so this time. This time, Tony was shelling out, and he was discovering that the wedding would cost, at a conservative estimate, just about half what he earned in an entire year at his bakery.
    The biggest of the thieves, and he had half a mind to ask Steve to arrest the crooks, were the men who called themselves Weddings-Fetes, Incorporated. They had arrived at the Charles Avenue address at 9:00 A.M. that morning (after Tony had stayed up all night in the bakery getting his Sunday morning breads baked) and proceeded to turn the Carella backyardinto a shambles. The Carella house in Riverhead was a small one, but the land on which it rested was possibly the largest plot on the street, stretching back from the house in a long rectangle that almost reached the next block. Tony was very proud of his land. His back yard boasted a grape arbor that rivaled any to be found in his home town of Marsala. He had planted fig trees, too, nourished them with loving care, pruned them in the summer, wrapped them with protective tarpaulin in the winter. And now these crooks, these brigandi, were trampling over his lawn with their tables and their ridiculous flags and flower canopies and…
    “Louisa!” he had screamed to his wife. “Why inna hell we can’t hire a hall? Why inna hell we have to have a outdoor wedding! A hall was good enough for me, an’ good enough for you, an’ good enough for my son, but Angela has to have a outdoor wedding! So those crooks can tear up my lawn an’ ruin my grapes an’ my figs! Pazzo! E proprio pazzo!”
    “Shut up,” Louisa Carella said kindly. “You’ll wake up the whole house.”
    “The whole house is wake up already!” Tony said. “Besides, there’s nobody in the whole house but me, you, an’ Angela, an’ she’s getting married today an’ she’s not sleeping, anyway!”
    “The caterers will hear you,” Louisa said.
    “For what I’m paying them, they’re entitled to hear,” Tony replied, and