Sunday school

Sunday school is a local gang’s ironic name for a profitable scheme of targeting elderly women. Mentioned in the course of Richard Noonan’s investigation, it gives an ordinary, reassuring phrase a predatory meaning: the group’s members describe their visits as a kind of school, while their victims are old women from whom they can make money. Noonan repeats the name, hears in it a clue, and changes the direction of his inquiry.

Name and Practice

The group’s label is presented as its own casual expression: its members call their activity Sunday school and invite one another to go there. The phrasing makes the operation sound like a familiar collective outing, but the account strips away that veneer. Their targets are elderly women, and the young men make fairly good money from them. The contrast between the harmless name and the exploitative practice is the defining fact about Sunday school in the novel.

The available account identifies no formal structure, rules, or larger purpose for the group. It describes a small circle of young locals who share customers and profit from them. In that sense, Sunday school appears less like an established institution than an informal criminal practice, named and normalized among its participants.

The Group and Its Customers

The young men associated with Sunday school include Halevy, Rajba, Chicken Tsapfa, and a man known as Zmyg. The speaker also says that the Maltese often goes there, connecting the practice to a broader local underworld rather than to an isolated pair of offenders. These names emerge in conversation about which local people are steady customers, and the list gives Noonan specific figures to associate with the operation.

The victims are described collectively as old women, including one woman from Europe. The account supplies no further details about her identity or the circumstances of any individual visit, so the group’s method remains sketchy. What is clear is the imbalance built into the business: a group of young men repeatedly targets elderly customers and earns money from them.

Noonan’s Investigation

Sunday school enters the story during Noonan’s questioning about local criminal activity. He is trying to understand the network surrounding the Zone’s leaked materials and their circulation among irresponsible people and organizations. The conversation about steady customers turns from a list of names to the group’s routine, and the phrase Sunday school becomes the point at which his attention shifts.

Noonan repeats the name, pauses over its implication, and rises with a new thought. He then rejects the talk of picnics as irrelevant to what he and his interlocutor are pursuing. The scene does not establish that Sunday school itself handles Zone contraband; rather, the term gives Noonan a lead within the local social world he is investigating. Its importance lies in how a piece of street vocabulary redirects his attention from general talk toward a particular pattern and its participants.

Significance

Sunday school’s name depends on a sharp mismatch between surface and conduct. It sounds communal and innocuous, but denotes a scheme built on exploiting elderly women. That mismatch reflects the way criminal activity can be disguised by routine language: the participants’ joking label makes predation sound like an ordinary outing, even as the stated target and profit expose what is happening.

The episode also shows how Noonan works from fragments rather than complete knowledge. A list of local names, a description of their customers, and a repeated phrase are not a full account of the group’s organization. Yet the phrase is enough to make him stop and reconsider the conversation. Sunday school is therefore both a small criminal practice and a clue: its significance in the narrative comes from the point where an evasive-sounding bit of local talk becomes legible as evidence.