‘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.