Robert Tanenbaum: Falsely Accused

“But she’ll hate me if I tell.”

“Yes, she might. In which case you have to decide whether you want Isabella safe and hating you, or loving you and hurt or dead.”

Marlene’s heart broke as she watched her daughter’s eyes fill with tears, but she held her tongue and resisted the urge to sweep the child into her arms and roll back the implacable years. Suddenly, Lucy sniffed loudly and turned away and ran clattering out of the kitchen. She was back in a moment holding out at full arm’s length a piece of folded notebook paper. Marlene took it and spread it out.

Around the outside of the page was a garland of lush flowers, heavily outlined, executed in colored pencil. Birds in yellow and green, beautifully rendered in the same bold style, were set among the blossoms. In the center was written, in a smooth, antique, schoolroom hand: Lucy, Yo Te Amo, Su Amiga, Isabella Conception Chajul y Machado.

Marlene swallowed a lump and said, “Good call, Luce. Now, do you happen to know her mommy’s first name?”

“Corazon,” said the child, and then collapsed, wailing, in her mother’s arms.

“That sounds like a Maya name, that Chajul,” said Ariadne Stupenagel over the phone. “You say they’re Guatemalans?”

“We think so,” said Marlene. She had called Stupenagel for help with finding out where a Church-connected underground would stash a kid from Guatemala. Stupenagel was one of two people she could think of to call, and the other one, Mattie Duran, was unlikely to have any Church contacts.

“Where from in Guatemala?”

“We don’t know that either. Lucy was babbling something about San Francisco, but apparently there are dozens of-”

“Could it have been San Francisco Nenton ?” Stupenagel asked carefully.

“Possibly. Why?”

“ Jesus !” A shriek.

Marlene had to take the phone from her ear. “What?”

“Marlene, in November of the year before last, a special unit of the Guatemalan Army, trained by the U.S. government, entered the village of San Francisco Nenton and massacred the entire population, 434 men, women, and children. Or so we thought. God, I’ve got the trembles, Champ! If this fucking kid is an eyewitness to the Nenton massacre … my God, the junta would go crazy if they knew she was wandering around in the States. And you say she’s got a brother to confirm it? Christ, Marlene, you got to find her. And let me have first crack at her, of course.”

“Of course,” lied Marlene. “But look, what about my original question?”

“Oh, who they’d shunt her to for cover? God, I couldn’t begin to figure …”

“What about those nuns you mentioned that time-the Sisters of Perpetual Dysentery? Are they in the States?”

“Damn! You’re right, I must be getting senile. I’ve been so focused on this cab driver thing. They’re the Sisters of Perpetual Help.”

“I never heard of them,” said Marlene.

“No, they’re small, and they only turn up where nobody else’ll go. A daughter house of the Poor Clares, I think. They’re all R.N.’s or nurse practitioners, plus they’re all cross-trained in mucky stuff-agronomy, sanitation. They jump out of airplanes too. A far cry from the penguins. They have a rest house someplace in Jersey. Just a sec, I’ll get it for you.” Clunk and rustlings. “Yo. It’s in Chester, Pee Ay.” She read off the address. “By the way, speaking of the cabbies …”

Marlene brought her up to date, closing with her visit to the Twenty-fifth Precinct and her conversation with Clancy. Marlene heard the scratch of note taking. “Oh, also,” she added, “you’ll be interested to know I saw Jimmy Dalton up there schmoozing with a couple of dicks, waving his stinky-” “What?”

“Jimmy Dalton at the Two-Five. I thought-” “Thanks, Champ-look, keep in touch, this is great, gotta go.” She left Marlene staring puzzled at the dead phone. She pushed down the button and called Harry Bello.

Hector Roberto Chajul y Machado, aged twelve, slipped from the basement room in the rectory of Old St. Patrick’s, where he had passed the night, and walked north on Mulberry Street until he came to Houston, where he turned east. He paused at the corner and, as he did habitually, turned to see if someone was following him. He saw no one and went on his way. He saw no one because the man who was following was very good.

The boy entered the Lexington Avenue IRT subway station on Houston. In the dank underground, he checked to see that he was unobserved and then darted under the turnstile. He took the Lex up to 116th Street, left the subway, and walked to a tenement at 117th Street. At the third-floor front apartment, he listened carefully at the door, as he had been taught. There were no sounds. He drew out a key that hung around his neck by a long, dirty string, opened the lock, and went in.

From his perch on the stairwell, one floor above, Harry Bello heard the boy cry out. In an instant he was down the stairs and through the door. Like most tenement apartments, it had a railroad layout, living room, kitchen, and a narrow hall leading to two bedrooms and a bath. The place had been tossed, and crudely too. The couch in the living room had been overturned and slashed, the small television knocked off its table and tossed into a corner. Harry moved into the kitchen.

Hector was in the center of the room, surrounded by ruin. The refrigerator and the pantry had been emptied, the food containers broken and spilled onto the floor, which was covered with a swill of liquids, rice, corn flakes, dried beans, and broken crockery. The counter drawers hung open, their contents scooped out and strewn in piles beneath them.

The boy cried out when he saw Harry and grabbed a long knife from a pile. He charged but slipped on the mess and fell to his knees. Harry stepped on the knife, knelt, and hugged the boy to him.

“Listen! I’m not here to hurt you. I didn’t do this. I’m Lucy’s godfather. Soy el padrino de Lucy. Comprende ? Lucy!”

Hector stopped struggling. They both stood up. Harry asked, “Do you know where your mother is?”

He nodded. “She’s working.”

“You got a number?” Nod.

“Okay, let’s call her.”

“The lady say not to call.”

“Yeah, well, this is an emergency. Give me the number.”

Harry called and got an irate woman who told him that Corazon had not shown up for work that morning, and that she was highly inconvenienced, and that as far as she was concerned-

Harry hung up. “Hector,” he said, “I’m going to look around here for a minute, and then you and me are going to go up to Lucy’s house and you’re going to stay there for a while. And then we need to go get your sister and bring her back to the City. I think you all need to stay at Lucy’s until we figure out who did this and who’s after you.”

“The soldiers,” said Hector.

“Yeah, them.” Harry started to go through the trash from the kitchen drawers. People whose equipage does not run to desks and filing cabinets use kitchen drawers as a depository of sorts. Harry found a bank book, electric and phone bills, but no pay stubs and no personal papers. He also found two keys on a ring, which caught his eye, because they had red embossed-tape labels on them. The labels read “800 18 Fr” and “800 18 B.” He thought for a while and then made a phone call, and asked a cop he knew to use the reverse-number directory on the phone number he had just called. The cop gave him an answer. He grunted thanks, and when he left the apartment with Hector the keys were in his pocket.

Shortly after passing the Joyce Kilmer service plaza on the New Jersey Turnpike, Harry thought of the keys. He reached them out of his pocket and tossed them to Marlene, who was in the passenger seat of the tan Plymouth.