‘On whose phone?’
‘The Portolas’. But she made the calls when the family was out of the house.’
‘And how do we know somebody wasn’t eavesdropping on the other end? You understand, if Aslan gets wind of our plans, not only will the women and the kids vanish, the Portolas will be notified, at which point they’ll lawyer up and my case against Mynka’s killer will also vanish. Even if I eventually prove that she was murdered in this very room, I’ll never be able to prove who did it. My entire strategy is based on catching the family unaware.’
Sister Kassia’s eyes dropped to her hands. I can’t be sure, but I suspect that she’d finally grasped the magnitude of the risk I was taking. In any event, it was Tynia who broke the silence. ‘Mynka, this is where she was dying?’
‘Yes, Tynia, your friend died in this very room. Does that frighten you? Do you want to leave right now? Because if you do, I can arrange to have you taken directly to a detention center.’
Tynia took Sister Kassia’s arm and began to speak in Polish. She spoke very quickly, but her tone was even. I settled back in my chair and waited until she paused.
‘Tynia says that last weekend she and the other girls were taken to a place they’d never been. Aslan wasn’t there, nor was a man named Konstantine. But there were other men there. They offered the girls new jobs at a motel in Los Angeles.’
‘They say to us it will be better,’ Tynia interrupted. ‘Time off every day to be with children. These men, they have nothing in their eyes. They are looking at you like you are dead.’ Suddenly, she reached over the table to take my hand. ‘We are ready, all of us. For a long time we have been ready. We cannot live more like this, every second afraid. Help us.’
The refrigerator’s motor kicked on at that moment and I listened to what might have passed for a death rattle before it finally settled into a low-pitched hum.
‘Listen, Harry,’ the nun said. ‘The women Tynia contacted are old friends of hers. They knew each other in Poland and came over together. They’re eager to cooperate.’
‘Fine, now tell me the rest of it. What, exactly, have these ladies cooked up?’
‘On their day off, when they’re in Astoria, they’re watched by a woman named.?.?.’
‘Zashka Ochirov.’
Tynia jerked back in surprise, but Sister Kassia merely smiled. ‘Tell me about Zashka,’ I continued. ‘Is she armed? Will she fight?’
‘Zashka takes care of the children when the women are at work. According to Tynia, she treats the children kindly and they respond to her without fear. The only threat she’s ever made against the women is to call one of her bosses.’
I nodded. ‘Did you make arrangements for a signal?’ This was another topic I’d asked her to explore.
‘There’s a window in Tynia’s bedroom that faces the street. If Ochirov is alone when you arrive at ten o’clock, the window will be raised. If there’s someone else in the apartment, but Tynia will be able to let you in, the window will be closed. If she can’t let you in, the window will be halfway down.’
‘Good. Did you tell her that you won’t be there when I come through the door?’
‘I told her that I’d be waiting downstairs, ready to take her and the others away. She was suspicious at first, but she finally accepted it.’
I turned back to Tynia then. My sense was that I’d done about as well as I could have, given the constraints, and it was fast closing in on the time for Sister Kassia and me to leave. I just had a few more questions.
‘Tell me how old Mynka was?’
Tynia’s expression clouded for a moment when I said Mynka’s name, but then she grew sober and her eyes lit up. I liked what I saw in her eyes. When the time came, she would not back down.
‘Are you knowing Mynka is pregnant?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Then this is two peoples who are dying. Two lives are being killed.’
I nodded agreement, then repeated my question. ‘How old was Mynka?’
‘She was eighteen years, still a girl only.’ Tynia rattled off several sentences in Polish, which Sister Kassia promptly translated.
‘She says that Mynka loved romance novels, that she dreamed of true love. Mynka thought that love would save her.’
Yeah, right.
‘One last item, Tynia, and we’ll be gone. David Portola. Tell me what he’s like?’
As she considered her reply, Tynia put the last of the spoons into a mahogany chest and closed the top. Then she rose to put the chest away.
‘David is father of Mynka’s child.’
‘I already know that. I want to know what he’s like, as a person.’
Tynia thought it over for a moment. ‘This boy is with anger every minute. Sometimes, I think he is ready to blow up, like bomb. But on nights when I am coming past his room, I can hear him inside and he is weeping. It is for Mynka that he weeps.’
TWENTY-NINE
I went for a swim that night, hoping to work off some energy. No suck luck. I fell asleep late and woke up early, feeling like a prizefighter on the day before a big match. All those weeks of training, of devising strategies to negate my opponent’s skills, to maximize my own. Would there be a payoff? Or would I end up on the canvas, eyes glazed, tasting my own blood? There was no way to know. After breakfast, I took a small toolbox from a closet shelf, fiddled through the screwdrivers and pliers, and finally withdrew two items: an L-shaped bar about the thickness of a toothpick, and a specialized tool the size and shape of a glue gun. The bar was called a tension bar, the tool a snap gun. They were designed for folks, like myself, who sometimes need to get past a locked door but never mastered the art of picking locks.
I went to the door of my apartment, to a multi-pin, deadbolt lock similar to the one on Aslan’s door. I inserted the tension bar first, rotating the lock slightly, then the blade of the snap gun. When I pressed the gun’s trigger it lived up to it’s name, making a distinct snap, like the snap of a finger, as the blade flew up. The point here was to kick the upper pins into the cylinder. If they became trapped above the shear line, the lock would open. If they didn’t, you could always try again.
The nicest thing about a snap gun is that you can’t screw it up. The lock opens or it doesn’t. In this case, I got lucky on the third try.
I kept at it for two hours, moving from the upper to the lower locks on the door. The point was not just to open the lock. Eventually, I’d be doing this in public. I needed to be quick and casual. Over time, I improved on both counts, but there was no way to get past a snap gun’s ultimate flaw. The process was entirely random. On one pass, it took me twelve attempts before the lock opened.
When my fingers began to cramp, I finally brought the gun to my office and left it on the desk. It was now eleven o’clock. For the first time in weeks, there was nothing I absolutely had to do. Over coffee, I checked the movie listings, considered driving up to Yankee Stadium for an afternoon game, checked the hours of the Metropolitan Museum, considered a long walk in Central Park or a trip to Jones Beach on Long Island. The last was especially attractive. It had been a long time since I’d taken a swim in heavy surf.
But I didn’t drive to Jones Beach, or choose any of the alternatives in Column A. Instead, I took the subway to Riverside Park and once again settled down across the street from the Portola townhouse.
Ronald and Margaret Portola made an appearance at noon, cabbing off to place or places unknown, while David emerged at three o’clock, his skateboard tucked beneath his arm. As before, he headed north. I watched him until he disappeared behind a hill, then sat back.
Tynia’s story had confirmed Father Manicki’s. David had loved Mynka. He loved her still. Men have a powerful need to protect the women they love. The urge is visceral, an impulse as physical as hunger or thirst. David, of course, had failed to protect his beloved. Most likely, he was currently protecting her killer. It had to hurt.