The Cold Room (26 page)

‘That’s not good enough,’ I told the nun. ‘That doesn’t get us anywhere. We can’t just let her go.’

When the maid’s eyes widened, I knew that she understood English well enough to grasp my intentions. The look in her eyes grew imploring and for a moment I thought she was going to drop to her knees.

‘Tell her,’ I instructed Sister Kassia, ‘that if she cooperates, the police will protect her, her child, and all the other workers. But she has to make a decision right now. She has to convince me that she won’t run back to Aslan. Otherwise, I’m going to take her to the Ninety-Second precinct in Brooklyn where I can question her at my leisure.’

Sister Kassia gave me a searching look, but I ignored it. There was no going back.

‘What exactly will it take, detective,’ she demanded, ‘to let her go? Please, be precise.’

‘I’m the only chance she has for a normal life, Sister. Me, and me alone. I’m her only hope.’

‘That doesn’t answer the question.’

By then, I was certain Tynia was following the conversation. ‘First, she has to swear that she won’t contact Aslan or anyone else. Then she has to name a time and place where we can talk to her without being disturbed.’

Tynia began to speak before Sister Kassia broke eye contact with me. ‘Tomorrow in early afternoon,’ she said, groping for the words, ‘family goes to lunch for museum benefits. I will be in this house alone.’

‘Does that about cover it?’ Sister Kassia asked.

‘Almost.’ This time I spoke directly to Tynia. ‘I want to know where you stay on Saturday and Sunday when you aren’t working.’

Tynia’s eyes first grew mistrustful, then resigned. She went into her purse to withdraw a little notebook. The address she rattled off, on 38th Street in Queens, included an apartment number. Though I wasn’t familiar enough with the borough to pin the location exactly, I thought it was somewhere in Astoria, near Steinway Street.

‘Now, tell me Mynka’s last name.’

The fear returned then, followed by an onrushing of tears. ‘Mynka, she is dead? Aslan has told us she is running away.’

‘Yeah, she’s dead. I want to know her last name and how to contact her relatives.’

‘Mynka Chechowski. This is her name. Together we are growing up in Poland, in Grodkow. We come here for better life.’

Did the irony escape Tynia Cernek? I was only certain that when I handed her my notebook and she wrote down a phone number, her hands were still shaking. ‘Mother’s name is Katerina. Of her daughter she is greatly fearing.’

I nodded, then let go of her arm. I was pleased, of course, to finally know Plain Jane’s full name. She would have her funeral, in her own country, surrounded by her family. I’d wanted this for her from the very beginning. But there was still that phone call to make, to Katerina who was ‘greatly fearing’ exactly what I was going to confirm.

‘One more question, Tynia. When you were still on Eagle Street, did Aslan live with you?’

‘No, there is not room for man.’

‘Do you know where he stayed?’

‘I am sorry. Aslan, he only speaks to make threatening. If from customer is complaint, he is very angry.’

I nodded to myself as an idea blossomed, then drove home my final point. ‘Listen, now, Tynia, to what I’m going to tell you. You must keep this meeting to yourself. Your child’s safety depends on it. Speak to nobody, not to your closest friend or your closest relative. Tomorrow, we’ll create a plan that accounts for everybody. By the end of the week, this nightmare will be over. I promise you.’

Tynia said nothing for a moment and I turned impatiently to Sister Kassia. ‘Please, Sister, repeat what I just said in Polish.’

When Sister Kassia finished, I stepped away. Tynia didn’t hesitate. She snatched up her parcels and sprinted toward Riverside Drive.

‘You could rescue those children right now,’ Sister Kassia said once Tynia disappeared around the corner. ‘You don’t have to wait.’

‘And what would I do next? Hand them over to the social workers? Deliver them into the foster care system?’ I turned to face the nun. ‘Given the illegal status of their mothers, their missing fathers, and the fact that their mothers knew they were in danger and failed to protect them, the odds are those children would remain wards of the state for the next ten years.’

An hour later, after a quick tour of Astoria, I put Sister Kassia in a gypsy cab, then returned to the Nissan, parked a hundred yards from the address supplied by Tynia Cernek. Nondescript, the building was six stories high, spanned several lots and contained somewhere between forty and fifty apartments. As I’d suspected, it was a block from Steinway Street, the neighborhood’s main commercial drag.

The northern and eastern reaches of Astoria have long been the center of New York’s Greek population. So much so that natives automatically link Astoria to the many Greek restaurants and groceries along Ditmars Boulevard. But there’s another Astoria to the south, near the Grand Central Parkway. This Astoria is a United Nations of ethnicities in which no group predominates. On this particular stretch of Steinway Street, for instance, a block from where I sat, the signs on the storefront businesses were all in Arabic.

Like the warehouse on Eagle Street, the building on 38th Street was an excellent place to hide. For most of the week, apartment 5E would be occupied by Zashka and the children. The workers would arrive on Saturday night. On Monday morning, back they’d go again. This arrangement would not appear terribly unusual to the mostly poor locals, many of whom were illegal themselves.

I sipped at a container of coffee, then got on my cell phone and called Drew Millard. I wanted to locate a detective named Ralph Scott, the arresting officer on Margaret’s second bust, the felony assault.

Millard didn’t seem all that happy to hear from me. Most likely, he wanted to tell me that I could take my connections and shove them. Instead, he went to his computer and ran the name. Detective Ralph Scott, he told me, now a lieutenant, commanded the squad room at Manhattan North. He was on duty.

I dropped the phone to my lap as the door to the apartment building opened and Zashka Ochirov emerged. She was a hundred yards away, at the opposite end of the block, but I slid down in the seat and stayed there until she disappeared around the corner. Then I called Manhattan North and asked for Lieutenant Scott. He answered his phone on the second ring.

‘Lieutenant Scott.’

‘Detective Harry Corbin here. I’m calling about a case you handled in 1995.’

‘Really? 1995? I can barely remember what I did last week. What’s it about?’

‘A felony assault. The suspect’s name was Margaret Portola.’

‘Holy shit. That bitch. I shoulda fuckin’ killed her when I had the chance.’

‘That bad?’

‘You wouldn’t fuckin’ believe it. When she finds out I’m gonna arrest her, she attacks me. Kickin’, punchin’, scratchin’ at my eyes. The bitch went all out.’ He paused, then said, ‘What’d ya say your name was?’

‘Harry Corbin.’

‘Alright, Harry, lemme just say this. I knew I was in the home of the rich, if not the famous. So I didn’t go nuts when she came at me, not even when she spit in my face. All I did was bring her to the ground and put on the cuffs. Meantime, she sues me for police brutality two months later. I still haven’t heard the end of it.’

I gave it a few beats, then changed the flow of the conversation. ‘This happened inside her house?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What brought her to your attention in the first place?’

‘She kicked the crap out of a window washer named Pedro Guiterrez for leaving the windows streaked. Clocked him from behind, then beat him until her older son pulled her off. A neighbor heard the guy screaming and called nine-one-one.’

‘How bad was he hurt?’

‘Busted arm, busted ribs, cracked skull. He was lucky she didn’t kill him.’

‘So, how come the charge was dismissed?’

‘C’mon, Harry, I’m sure you figured it out by now. The Portola family and Pedro Guiterrez reached a settlement on the lawsuit he filed against her, whereupon Pedro went back to Ecuador.’

Under ideal conditions, I would have maintained the surveillance throughout the night, just in case Tynia called Aslan Khalid and he tried to remove the children. But under ideal conditions, I’d have a team behind me and the use of a van designed for surveillance. As it was, I had other work to do and I broke the stake-out a few hours later, at nine o’clock.

I drove directly from Astoria to a section of Williamsburg called the Northside (where I’d almost witnessed the dance of the Giglio). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, while other white folk, including thousands from surrounding blocks, were retreating to the suburbs, the Northside had maintained its ethnic identity, in this case Italian. The residents’ vigilance was the stuff of legend, yet somehow they’d failed to protect their flanks and now were rapidly losing ground to a mixed band of artists, bohemians and yuppies. The end result was much in evidence at 121 North Third Street, a two-story brick building that had once been an automobile repair shop. I only knew about the shop because its name, Elio’s Body Repair, was etched into a concrete ledge that separated the upper and lower floors. Otherwise, Dark Passions, the high-end lingerie shop now operating on the first floor, might have been plucked out of SoHo. But I wasn’t interested in the lower floor, which was dark in any event. The upper floor, separated from its neighbor by a narrow alley, was obviously residential. This was the address listed on Zashka Ochirov’s driver’s license and registration.

I drove around the corner, parked, then sat for a few minutes with my hands resting on the steering wheel. As far as I could tell, Zashka lived full-time with the women and their children, first in Greenpoint, now in Astoria. So what need did she have for a second apartment that rented for at least $1500 a month? Was she independently wealthy? I didn’t think so. Was she subletting? That was entirely possible. As it was entirely possible that her tenant was Aslan Khalid. After all, he had to live somewhere.

If Aslan was living in that apartment, I needed to know it. One obvious strategy was to establish surveillance, but that was impossible. Not only was Aslan as wary as a three-legged fox, the Portolas’ townhouse had a prior claim on my time.

As I weighed my options, I got out of the Nissan and took a walk around the block. It was past ten on a Wednesday night, but the trendy restaurants and bars were still open and there were people on the street. All were young, the oldest appearing no more than thirty, and a number were pierced and tattooed. Their very presence was an affront to the Northside’s century-long commitment to hard work and discipline. It was as if the damned hippies had won after all.

My intention was to walk past Dark Passions and the four-story tenement to the east without slowing down, but I hesitated for a few seconds at the mouth of an alley separating the two. In other parts of town, alleys are impromptu garbage dumps peopled by rats and feral cats, by junkies and crack-heads, by whores servicing tricks, by homeless men and women in search of a secluded patch of concrete on which to lay their heads. But that wasn’t the case in gentrified Williamsburg. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t enough trash in the alley to support an anorexic cockroach.

I continued on to Bedford Avenue, strolling north toward the subway station where I found an open cafe with outdoor seating. The cafe’s tables were the size of trivets, the chairs rickety and the staff none too friendly when I ordered a double espresso and a slice of banana cake from the cafe’s all-organic menu. The place was deserted, inside and out, and the workers were cleaning up. But I held my ground for an hour, until Bedford Avenue finally grew quiet at eleven thirty.

When I came back to North Third Street, I again took careful note of the human activity on either side of the road, including the upper windows of several apartment buildings. I didn’t see anyone in the windows, or in the parked cars, and the only people outside at that moment were a trio of men smoking in front of a bar at the corner. As far as I could tell, they didn’t so much as glance in my direction when I ducked into the alley.

I made my way to the end of the alley and turned the corner before squatting down. Across a gap of about fifty feet, the rear walls of the buildings facing North Fourth Street all had multiple windows looking out in my general direction. Two of the buildings were commercial and their windows were dark, but the rest were residential and I knew I couldn’t stay where I was for long, much less climb the drainpipe to my left, without risking discovery. I had a strong interest in that drainpipe because it ran past a lighted window on Dark Passions’ second floor. There was even a toehold on the lip of the concrete ledge separating the two floors, and handholds on the steel bars protecting the window from invaders. I gave the pipe a little tug. Secured to the side of the building by clamps screwed into the brick, it moved just far enough for me to get my fingers behind it.

In a combat situation, any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision. Climb or retreat. Risk discovery or leave without knowing who resided in the apartment. I think I might have chosen the latter course, if only I could have imagined another way to accomplish my primary goal. I had to know who was living in that apartment and I’d never have a better chance to find out.

After another quick check of the windows across the way, I stood and reached above my head to get both hands around the pipe. Then I began to walk up the side of the wall, digging my toes into the recessed grouting between the rows of bricks, pushing off on my legs, raising my arms, one at a time, to pull myself up. I was enough of a narcissist to be flattered by the ease of my progress; all those hours in the pool were paying off. But the fact that I was able to climb quietly – and that the pipe readily supported my weight – was far more important. Within a few minutes, my head was alongside the closed window.

I shifted my head and shoulders to the right and brought one eye to a corner of the window. When I was certain there was no one in my field of vision, I leaned further in and took a closer look at the small bedroom in front of me. Two things struck me. The place was an absolute mess, with clothing scattered over the floor, and all the clothing belonged to a man.