“Do we really know much of anything about the backgrounds of any of these children?” Gregor asked. “This is the part of all this I don’t understand. They come up here, ‘unaccompanied minors,’ they call them. Who knows where they’re from or what they’ve been through?”
Ed George shrugged. “Gregor, most of these kids, they may be unaccompanied, but you can talk to them. They’ll tell you where they’re from. They’ll talk about their lives at home.”
“You can’t verify any of it,” Gregor pointed out.
“No, you can’t,” Ed said. “But you can punt. You at least have something to say. Angela Gonzalez from Honduras. Jose Gomez from El Salvador. It gives you something to write down and it makes everybody feel better. Unless you’ve had better luck than the rest of us, we don’t even have a last name for this one.”
“I wonder if we just couldn’t make up a last name for him,” Bennis said. “We could call him Santamaria, because he’s always sitting in the Mary chapel in church.”
“He’s going to have to have a last name for school,” Ed said. “What are you using there?”
“Demarkian,” Gregor said. “It seemed like the most sensible thing to use.”
Ed shook his head. “You might as well use that on this stuff. I’ve been fudging it for weeks now. They haven’t been happy with me. That’s why you have all this, now. I’ve been putting off doing it until we could decide what to do about a surname. And it’s not safe to let it go too long.”
“We really have to worry about that,” Gregor said, feeling completely disoriented. “Do you realize how many people this neighborhood has brought over from Armenia just since I came back to live here? Never mind before that. I can remember all kinds of snags and problems and I don’t know what else. Armenia was under Soviet control for a lot of the time. But I don’t remember anybody ever worrying about raids from immigration.”
“It’s a new world,” Ed said.
“Is it just because he’s, you know, Spanish?” Bennis asked.
Ed shook his head. “It’s everybody, everywhere. Except Canadians. Nobody seems to care about the Canadians. But we’ve got a guy in the office doing immigration from the UK, and they’re threatening one of his guys with deportation over a DUI from 1982. Granted it was a pretty spectacular DUI and the guy spent a month in jail, but we’d never have had that kind of problem even five years ago.”
“Sister Margaret Mary said they keep watch for ICE vans over at the school,” Bennis said. “They’ve never had ICE there, but some of the other schools in the city have. It seems insane to me.”
Ed George got another sheaf of papers out of his attaché case. It was smaller, but also more official looking in some way. Gregor picked it up and looked at it.
“Department of State?”
Ed took the sheaf of papers back. “We’re going to try something. If it doesn’t work, it can’t hurt us. If it does work, we’re going to be able to protect Javier here, at least in part. We’re going to make his visit official.”
“Whatever Javier’s story,” Gregor said, “I don’t think he was the Honduran minister of agriculture.”
“And we don’t know who his parents were, so we can’t say his father was the Honduran minister of agriculture, either,” Ed said. “We’re also stuck with not knowing his country of origin. But maybe that’s a good thing. We’re going to guess that he’s Mexican.”
Gregor nodded. “That’s the most logical thing, if you think about it. I’ve been thinking that he can’t have come far. He wasn’t hurt or abused. That’s almost never the case with kids who take the long trek up here from Central America. They get preyed on.”
“My interest is that the Jesuits have an educational exchange program going on with Mexico,” Ed George said. “Javier is actually a little too young to qualify, but it’s like everything else in his case. We don’t know his age, so we can fudge it a little. I’ve talked to the Maryknoll nuns down at the border and the sisters here and the head of the program in Philadelphia and we worked something out. You can use Demarkian as his last name. That’s all right. That won’t matter. But from now on we have to be consistent. This at least has to look good.”
“So the State Department will think Javier is here on an educational exchange program?” Bennis said. “And that will protect him from ICE?”
“Sort of,” Ed said. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about the raids. If ICE decides it wants to swoop in somewhere and check everybody’s documentation, there’s nothing we can do about it. And they sometimes pick up people who are here perfectly legally but can’t prove it. After all, can either of you prove you’re in the United States legally? I couldn’t. I don’t carry my birth certificate around and I keep my passport in my safe-deposit box. And if ICE does stage a raid and scoop him up with a bunch of other people, he won’t necessarily be given a chance to phone you. Assuming he knows how to phone you.”
“We’re getting him a cell,” Bennis said.
“In that case, if he suddenly goes missing, you’re going to have to go looking for him. If I were you, I’d make sure somebody walks him to and from school every day. And the office is all set up to go looking for him if he gets snatched. But what this will do”—Ed pointed at the State Department paperwork—“is make him not exactly undocumented. He’ll have paperwork he can carry and you’ll have paperwork you can keep, saying he’s part of this program. But it would be a really good idea if you could hurry.”
“Why?” Gregor asked.
“Because,” Ed said, “we probably can’t get this backdated. He’s supposed to have done all this before he ever crossed the border. And we’re not going to send him back down there to cross the border again, so we’re going to have do a few dipsy doodles so it isn’t clear that he came in illegally first. You fill those out today, if you can. When I come back to get them, I’ll bring a notary from the office. And I’ll come back at six.”
“I’ll do them,” Bennis said quickly.
Out in the hallway, the doorbell sounded, playing the first few notes of “Für Elise.”
“I’ll get it,” Gregor said.
TWO
1
Meera Agerwal got to the office late, still sick, and still in a very bad mood. The sick was even worse than it had been the night before. She had taken ibuprofen before she left home, and also had a cup made from one of her mother’s special tea packets that was supposed to cure everything because it was Indian. She had no idea what was in the damn thing, and she didn’t care. Her head was pounding. Every muscle in her body ached. She seemed to have both fever and chills at once. Then, to tear it all, she was finding it nearly impossible to balance on her high heels. There were two things that were better in India than in the United States: you didn’t wear high heels with a sari, and it didn’t get this kind of cold.