I had no good reason to make the stop. I just felt that I needed some time before I went home. But time to do exactly what? To think? To examine my conscience? To prepare myself for atonement?
But I wasn’t ready to go there, apparently, because my attention quickly settled on a pair of photo-hard images. Konstantine Barsakov first, carefully posed before the Chechen flag. Then Aslan with his back to me, singing at the top of his lungs to that same flag.
I kept these images in front of me as I considered my next move, eventually focusing on the worst-case scenario: Aslan decides to round up the women and carry them off, possibly to another country. How fast could he do it? The women were all at work, five women living in the homes of five employers, each employer wealthy enough to afford a live-in servant. Would these employers simply release their maids if Aslan knocked on their door? More to the point, would Aslan risk it? Or would he wait until Saturday and pick up the unsuspecting girls at the usual time?
Aslan had taken his files and computers, along with some of the furniture and clothing, from the warehouse on Eagle Street. According to Sister Kassia, debts like the ones that bound the women to Aslan are commonly bought and sold. Well, that’s exactly what I’d do, if I were Aslan. I’d sell them, preferably to an entrepreneur doing business in some far off place. Like, maybe, Cambodia.
I looked out through the windshield at a gray curtain fragmented by lines of water streaming down the windshield. The rain was picking up, the patter on the Crown Vic’s roof more or less continuous. I flicked on the wipers and the headlights, then put the Crown Vic into reverse before making a broken u-turn. This close to the river, my headlights barely penetrated a fog that hung in folds above the deserted streets. I didn’t pass a single vehicle on Kent Avenue.
But there was traffic up on the bridge, bakery and newspaper delivery vans and yellow cabs just beginning their twelve-hour shifts. I trailed behind, in the right lane, ignoring the astonishingly bright lights of an eighteen-wheeler that didn’t slow down until it came to within a yard of my rear bumper. I ignored the blast of its air horn, too, and the driver’s upraised finger as he fell back.
‘Thick skin,’ I remembered an old partner telling me. ‘That’s how you do it. That’s how you get through the day. Nothing in, nothing out. Keep it from the wife, keep it from the kids.’
SEVENTEEN
I got out of bed at ten o’clock, after five hours’ sleep, and set a pot of coffee to brewing. Then I quickly showered and shaved. Though I couldn’t be sure that Aslan was contemplating a move — or that he wasn’t already in the wind — the need for haste was obvious enough.
At ten thirty, I dialed the number of INS Agent Dominick Capra. He picked up on the third ring.
‘Dominick, it’s Harry Corbin. You remember, we had lunch at Pete’s Tavern.’
‘Hey, Harry,’ Capra said, ‘how’s it goin’?’
‘Can’t whine. How about yourself? You put away any foreign gangsters this week?’
‘We don’t put ’em away, Harry. We just send them back where they came from. So, what’s up?’
‘Chechens, Dominick. Chechens are up. Or one particular Chechen, named Aslan Khalid, who used to have a Russian business partner named Konstantine Barsakov.’
‘Used to?’
‘Barsakov’s dead, but that’s not what I’m calling about. I always thought that Chechens and Russians hated each other.’
Capra took a minute to consider the statement. I could almost hear the little wheels turning.
‘First thing,’ he finally said, his good-old-boy tone conspicuously absent, ‘Khalid is not a Chechen family name. Chechen family names sound like Russian names. Second thing, there’s no Chechen immigration quota. Chechnya is a province of Russia. If your man’s here legally, he came in under the Russian quota. Third, Chechnya has been penetrated by jihadists from everywhere in the Middle East, so the only way a Chechen could enter the United States under the Russian quota is if the Russian government intervened to get his application approved.’
‘I saw Khalid’s green card, Dominick. It seemed legit to me.’
‘What was his country of origin?’
‘Russia.’
‘Well?’
I gave it a couple of seconds, than got to the point. ‘Aslan’s vanished and I need to find him,’ I said. ‘I was hoping you’d run his name through your database. If he’s here legally, he has to have a sponsor. I’d like to know that sponsor’s name.’
This time Capra took so long to respond that I thought we were disconnected.
‘Dominick?’
‘Yeah, I’m here.’
‘Well?’
‘Harry, listen close to what I’m sayin’. I feel the dead hand of higher-ups in this business. You’ve grabbed a buzzsaw, but gettin’ cut is not on my list of priorities. Not only will I not do this little favor for you, I don’t want you to call me again. Comprende?’
Chastened, I refilled my coffee mug before making a series of phone calls, to the Department of Finance, The Motor Vehicle Bureau, and the Department of Consumer Affairs. My hope was to connect Aslan to Domestic Solutions, but the calls were unproductive. Finance told me that Domestic Solutions was not incorporated and had never paid taxes of any kind. Motor Vehicles told me that the Econoline’s registration had been signed by Konstantine Barsakov. Consumer Affairs told me that Domestic Solution was unlicensed.
I’m not terribly superstitious, but I’d had enough of the telephone by then. I walked to the living-room window and stood for a moment, looking out on a playground overrun with screaming children. For the past week, the playground had been deserted because of the heat, so whatever the kids had been doing, they’d been doing it indoors. Now all that pent-up energy was pouring out.
The children were in constant motion, running from one apparatus to another, barely pausing to interact.
A few minutes later, I fired up the computer in my office and went back to work. Aslan Khalid had issued a personal challenge to me when he posed Barsakov in front of the Chechen flag. This was a display of ego I could certainly use against him. As for the challenge itself, the case became personal for me when I rolled Jane Doe over and saw what was done to her. I didn’t need additional motivation.
I jumped from my server to Google, typed in Chechnya, got 892,000 hits. For the next hour, I bounced from website to website, covering no more than twenty. At one, I discovered a version of Aslan’s flag. At another, a history of rebellion that stretched back to 1785 when a Russian army swept south to engulf Chechnya, at the time a virtually autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. In 1944, a fed up Josef Stalin deported the entire population to the gulags in Kazakhstan. In 1959, a conciliatory Nikita Khrushchev allowed their return. The struggle for independence continued throughout. Not even the 1994 assault on the capitol of Grozny, an attack which left the city looking much like Berlin at the end of World War Two, was sufficient to stop it.
It was all very noble and I found myself in sympathy with the Chechen people. Still, the past ten years had seen a pair of troubling developments. After the rebels were driven out of the capitol and into the hills, Chechnya had been penetrated by Arab jihadists offering money, arms, and a concept of struggle that led to the mass slaughter of Russian school children. At the same time, in the absence of any rule of law, a criminal class had emerged. According to an article in Le Monde, Chechnya had become a trans-shipment point for everything from Afghani morphine headed for Europe to stolen BMWs headed for Thailand. Kidnappings for ransom were an everyday occurrence, even now that the Russians had consolidated what passed for a victory by installing a sadistic butcher named Ramzan Khadyrov as president.