There were people gathered outside the church when I walked down the block. As they were universally Caucasian, I gussed they were arriving for the Polish mass, as I assumed there’d already been masses conducted in Spanish and English. The Roman Catholic Church in New York is committed to satisfying the demands of believers from nations as diverse as Rumania and Botswana. In the vernacular.
I scanned the crowd as I passed the face of the church, looking for a group of young women escorted by a single man, but found only the expected gathering of families. I was headed for a narrow wood-frame addition jutting from the church’s northern face. Blessed Virgin Outreach was run from this building and that’s where I was to meet Sister Kassia.
The large room I finally entered was given over to a motley collection of couches and upholstered chairs. Hand-me-downs, without doubt, their wildly mismatched fabrics, colors and patterns might have filled a manufacturer’s sample book. The effect was homey, nevertheless, with the chairs and couches arranged in small groupings that afforded a bit of privacy. Sister Kassia was sitting on one of the couches, speaking to a woman who sat next to her. In her late twenties, the woman’s face was swollen and discolored, with one eye closed altogether.
When I shut the door, the nun turned to look at me for the first time, and I knew, instantly, that I’d been right about her take-no-prisoners attitude. Her nose was pointed, her mouth pinched and turned down at both ends, her chin sharp enough to punch holes in sheet metal. Two deep grooves rolled up and out from the bridge of her nose to echo the sharp hook of her pale eyebrows. Beneath those brows, her hazel eyes were as round as an owl’s. They appraised me without apology.
Finally, the nun turned to half whisper a few words to the woman on the other side of the couch before crossing the room. Late in middle age and a good thirty pounds above her best weight, she nevertheless moved with grace, coming at me with her shoulders squared, offering her hand for a firm shake.
‘Mr Corbin?’ she said.
I nodded my head. If she didn’t want it known that I was a cop, that was okay by me. ‘Why don’t you just call me Harry,’ I suggested.
‘Fine. Now I’m going to need a few minutes here. I have to get Flora settled.’
‘Actually, I was hoping to speak to Father Manicki before the mass got started.’
That brought her up short and she paused to reassess the big cop who towered above her. I met her gaze without flinching, the message I wanted to send quite simple. When Sister Kassia picked up the phone to call me, the entrance to the maze had closed behind her. There was no going back.
‘Father Stan’s in the sacristy, putting on his vestments.’ She pointed at a door to my right that fed into the church. ‘He won’t be happy to see you just now.’
‘Father Stan’s not gonna be happy to see me any time,’ I said. ‘Most likely, he was against your calling me at all.’
She smiled then, a thin and grudging smile to be sure, but a smile nonetheless. ‘You’re very astute, Harry, but don’t judge Father Stan too harshly. Our position here is very delicate. It seems the archdiocese approves of Blessed Virgin’s outreach to the undocumented, as long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.’ I couldn’t help but think of the bosses in the Puzzle Palace. They didn’t care if you ignored a suspect’s civil liberties, as long as you didn’t get caught.
‘Tell me, Sister, does the parish offer this Polish-language mass on a weekly basis?’
‘Every Sunday.’
‘And Father Stan, does he usually conduct the mass?’
‘Almost always.’
‘These women you spoke of, can I assume they show up?’
‘Most of the time, they do.’
‘I see. Now, I’m not a Catholic, so I don’t know the customs all that well. But does the priest who performs the mass go outside to greet his parishioners as they leave the church?’
‘He does.’
‘Thank you, Sister.’
I discovered Father Manicki in a small room at the end of a narrow hallway. He was standing before a closet that held a variety of robes and brightly colored vestments. There were two children in the room with him. I would have made them for altar boys in an earlier era, but these two were of mixed gender, the girl a foot taller than her companion.
Father Manicki turned to me when I knocked on the open door. He raised a hand to slow me down, then instructed the children to wait outside. When they were safely gone, he closed the door behind them.
‘What do you mean, barging in here?’ he demanded. ‘I’m preparing to celebrate a mass.’
But I wasn’t about to be bluffed, not this time, not by the hawk’s nose, the square jaw, or the firm set of his mouth. At first glance, Father Stan might have passed for a bare-knuckle prize fighter, but there was something else in his blue eyes, a sense of regret that I knew I could exploit should the need arise.
‘I didn’t come here to accuse you,’ I said. ‘But I want you to tell me, right now, whether you recognized the girl in that photo. I want a confirmation or a denial.’
His jaw tightened momentarily — perhaps he wasn’t used to being challenged — but then he suddenly deflated, his gaze dropping to the carpet. ‘Try to understand,’ he said. ‘Those young women are virtual prisoners.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because I’ve looked into the eyes of the men who escort them.’
When I didn’t argue the point, he continued. ‘And like all prisoners, if they attempt to run away.?.?. well, you know what happened to the girl you want to identify.’
‘No, I don’t, Father. I don’t know what happened to her. If I did, I wouldn’t be here asking for your help.’
‘But don’t you understand? Everything I learned about her life came to me through the confessional, so it’s just as I said when you first approached me. I can’t help you.’ He held up Plain Jane Doe’s photo. ‘In the Catholic Church, the seal of the confessional is absolute. I’m helpless here.’
The room was very spare, a plain chest of drawers, several ladder-back wooden chairs, a small table. Except for a large crucifix above the door, the walls were undecorated. Father Manicki turned his eyes to the crucifix at that moment, to a stylized Christ whose arms and legs were too long for his emaciated torso, who wore, in lieu of a crown of thorns, an actual crown, as if already risen. ‘This girl,’ he continued without turning around, ‘she’s beyond help. But the other girls are still at risk. You may think that you can ride to the rescue, perhaps arrest the men who watch over them. But even if you’re successful, it won’t help.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because in this country, when it comes to undocumented workers, the policy is don’t ask, don’t tell.’
‘You mean they’re okay as long as the INS doesn’t find out about them?’
‘Exactly. But if they should come to the attention of the INS, say as a consequence of your investigation, they’ll be deported.’ He hesitated for a moment before delivering the punch line. ‘Right into the hands of the gangsters who sent them here in the first place.’
It was Sister Kassia who filled in the blanks, her story essentially the same as that of INS Agent Capra. Most likely, the young women in question had contracted a debt which they were now obliged to work off. Most likely, they’d originally been promised wages high enough to settle the debt in a year or two, along with decent housing and an unfettered lifestyle. Most likely, their dreams had been of opulent boutiques and trendy nightclubs that didn’t open until one o’clock in the morning, of celebrities, of opportunities.
Bait and switch, a marketing strategy as old as marketing itself. Sister Kassia told me the girls might be working for any employer willing to hire illegals. They might be waiting on tables in Manhattan, or sewing garments in Elmhurst, or dusting furniture in Bayside.