disappeared into a drug store on Broadway.
‘What do we do now?’ Sister Kassia asked.
‘Wait for her to come out.’
A few minutes later, she did exactly that, only to enter Zabar’s, an upscale market every bit as pricey as the Fairway Market to the south, and a lot more famous. If you’re fond of Namibian goat cheese at twenty bucks a pound, it’s the only place to shop.
‘This waiting business,’ Sister Kassia noted as we stood outside, ‘it wears thin pretty fast.’
‘Policing is a game of starts and stops. You’re always waiting for something, an autopsy, a ballistics report, a witness to surface. There’s no end to it.’
This time the wait was only a quarter of an hour; still too long, it seemed, for the little maid. She double- timed along 80th Street as if she’d just snatched a hundred-dollar bottle of grape-seed oil and Zabar’s security guards were on her tail. By the time I caught up and took her arm, she was halfway to West End Avenue.
‘Police,’ I said, displaying my badge, ‘I need to talk to you.’ She stared at my shield for a moment, through dark blue eyes, while the implications of my sudden appearance made themselves felt. Then her legs buckled as she dropped her parcels and I had to tighten my grip to keep her from falling. A second later, Sister Kassia chugged up, breathing hard. She said something to the girl in Polish and the girl managed to get her legs under her. Nevertheless, she was shivering with fear, her eyes as wild as those of a deer in a forest fire. Her chest had locked up as well, as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether to inhale or exhale. When she finally spoke, she spat her words out in short, choppy phrases.
The woman spoke directly to Sister Kassia, gripping the nun’s arm. I understood not a word of their conversation, but I didn’t interrupt. I knew about fear, of course, having seen it first hand, in the terrified eyes of battered women and battered children, in the eyes of rape victims in hospital examining rooms, in the eyes of the elderly after even a minor assault. Like grief, fear is an emotion cops try to avoid, but this woman was gripped by a terror so powerful that when Sister Kassia finally turned to me, I found it mirrored in her eyes.
‘I’ll make it simple, detective,’ the nun told me. ‘Her name is Tynia Cernek. She has a ten-month-old son and she’s worried about what Aslan might do to the child if she speaks to the police. She also claims that her chores are timed by her employer. If she’s late getting back to the house, she’ll be physically punished.’
Again, I wondered if Aslan included an abuse premium in the fee he charged for the maid’s services. You want to beat her? Fine. You want to stick her in a refrigerator? Great. In fact, you can even kill one from time to time, as long as you’re willing to pay the price. Dominick Capra had told me a story about a servant regularly beaten by her Saudi employers. I remembered it, then, but my attitude didn’t change. I was the bad cop here.
‘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.
