And without a word, against a lifetime’s warnings, the girl, Toni Parker, climbed in. Why did she do it? She would ask herself this, off and on, for the rest of her life. A chorus of horns broke out and spread down the line of cars behind him. He was holding up the traffic, it was rush hour, he was shockingly inconsiderate. Sometimes Toni wondered if she made this split-second, life-changing decision because she’d been brought up to think of others. Because she was a nice middle-class girl who was embarrassed. He was so calm, so matter-of-fact, that she bent down to look at him, thinking he must know her, perhaps he worked with her father. In the dim cab light she saw a youngish man, no more than thirty, with a large pale deadpan face and black eyes looking up at her, his thick eyebrows raised in query. She saw – did she? – what could she see in those few moments? – that he was wearing black with a strip of white at the neck, like a priest.
