It was Cary Alder himself who had told her, when he’d first hired her, that it was always best to deal with illegals when you could. Illegals have no options. They can’t go to the authorities, for fear of being spotted and arrested and deported. They have to do what you tell them to. They have to work cheap. They have to keep their mouths shut.
Marta Warkowski couldn’t keep her mouth shut if she sealed it with superglue.
5
Bennis Hannaford Demarkian had never really thought about having children. Unlike many of the girls she’d gone to school and college with, dreams of a family had never been front and center in her plans. She hadn’t spent the early part of her career obsessively reading articles about her biological clock. Even so, she’d always really liked children. She’d always been happy to babysit for Donna Moradanyan. She’d always been happy to coo over Lida’s photographs of her grandchildren. In a way, children had been to her like the setting of a science fiction novel—a vast and alien landscape, both endlessly fascinating and endlessly foreign.
Now that there was to be a child in her life, however, she was beginning to wonder if she had fallen down on the job over the last few years. Gregor had been married and widowed before they met. No children had resulted from that, and Bennis had, without realizing it, just assumed that that was because Gregor had not been interested. She thought she probably should not have taken that for granted. They should have sat down and had a talk. They should have gone about it all deliberately. Instead, they were standing on the doorstep of St. Catherine’s School in the cold and dark, coming to pick up a seven-year-old they’d never met and whose language they couldn’t even begin to speak. The language was going to be a problem. Technically, Father Tibor Kasparian spoke Spanish—but apparently, it was the wrong kind of Spanish.
St. Catherine’s School was unlocked during the daytime, but locked tight once it got dark. The church next door felt an obligation to keep its doors open. Father Alvarez felt strongly that a church should always be open for people to pray, and to be a refuge on the worst of nights for those who had nowhere else to go. The school had no such obligation. After a half dozen incidents of theft and vandalism—computers ripped out of their terminals and hauled away; expletives written on the walls of the first floor in feces; the Sodality Chapel torn apart and all the paintings of the Virgin slashed to ribbons—Sister Superior had put her foot down. The doors were locked after dark.
Bennis and Gregor had to ring the bell and wait. Bennis looked at the side of Gregor’s face.
“Here we go,” she said. “Are you sure you’re all right with this?”
“I’m very all right with it. I was all right with it when Tibor first asked us.”
The door in front of them pulled back and there was Sister Superior herself, Sister Margaret Mary, in her “modified” habit that left her neck and the sides of her face clear but sported a long black veil that fell down her back to her waist. Sister shot them both a vague smile. Then she stepped out onto the little stoop and looked up and down the street.
“Is everything all right?” Bennis asked.
Sister Margaret Mary stepped back inside and opened the door wide. “Come on in,” she said. “I’m sorry. We’ve been having a kind of weird evening.”
“You’ve been having trouble?” Gregor asked.
“No, no. It’s been nothing, really. I was out earlier, watching for the Girl Scouts. It’s the neighborhood. I wish we had enough people to see them here and see them home on the nights when there are meetings. It’s the neighborhood, if you see what I mean. Anyway, I was out there watching them come in, and there was this van. This big, black, shiny, new, expensive-looking van. It came through four times in less than fifteen minutes. Let’s just say it wasn’t the usual kind of thing.”
“Maybe it was something official,” Gregor said. “A police vehicle. Something unmarked.”
“I’ll admit, I worry a lot more about sex trafficking,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “A van that size. With things the way they are these days, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It could be some perfectly innocent person who got lost. If you call the police, if you take the license number and turn it in—well.”
“Did you get the license number?” Gregor asked.
“No,” Sister Margaret Mary admitted. “It didn’t occur to me until it was all over. Never mind. It really was most likely nothing. And Javier is in the auditorium waiting for you. We’ve got four new foster families picking up tonight. Javier’s already getting acquainted with the dog.”
“Father Tibor’s dog?” Bennis was confused. “I thought Tibor wasn’t going to be able to make it in until seven thirty.”
“The dog came with the boy,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “He said he was with all of you, so we let him in and he’s been talking to Javier ever since. And they’ve been talking to each other, too, although I’m not sure how. The boy speaks English. Javier speaks Spanish. They seem to be making it work.”
As they were talking, Sister Margaret Mary had been walking them down the main first floor hall to the back of the building. The hall ended in a set of double fire doors. She pushed these open. The room in the back was a large square space meant to serve as an auditorium on some occasions and a gym at others. The space was full of people. There were nuns. There were children. In one case there was a couple, sitting on folding chairs and talking to a very little girl with ribbons on the ends of her braids.
“Over there,” Sister Margaret Mary said, pointing all the way across the room.
Bennis looked across. There was Tommy Moradanyan, sitting on the bottom bench of the foldaway bleachers. Next to him was a very small boy dressed in jeans and a white shirt and a cotton crewneck sweater. Bennis recognized the clothes, because she’d sent them. She thought the boy looked scared to death.
“I keep telling myself that of course he’s scared to death,” she said. “I’m scared to death.”
“He may be a little more scared than most of them,” Sister Margaret Mary said. “It’s a difficult situation. I did try to tell you—”
“No, no. That’s all right,” Bennis said. “We understand all that. To tell you the truth, I’m a little flattered that you think we can help. I wouldn’t have said I was the most obvious person to take care of a traumatized child. I supposed they’re all traumatized.”
“Of course they are,” Gregor said. “What else would they be?”
They all watched. On the other side of the room, Tommy leaned down to pick up Pickles, who was out of her raincoat and booties and was wearing only her turtleneck sweater. Javier put out his hands. Tommy put the dog into them. Pickles settled into Javier’s chest as if she’d been born there.
Javier’s face lit up.
“Well,” Gregor said. “That worked.”
Sister Margaret Mary started moving again, but Bennis put out a hand to hold her back.
“Just one more thing,” Bennis said. “Did you have a chance to check on any of the things I asked you about? I know it may not be possible, but any information we could have would help. At least it would be a start.”