Robert Knightly - The cold room

At noon on Tuesday, I met INS Agent Dominick Capra at Pete’s Tavern near Gramercy Park. About my age, Capra was short and wide-shouldered, with a thickened nose red enough to hang on a Christmas tree. That nose reddened still further when he chugged a double bourbon within minutes of his arrival.

‘Be a sport,’ he said, the fumes on his breath thick enough to ignite, ‘and spring for another.’ And another, and another, as it turned out.

Adele had cautioned me about Dominick Capra, and for good reason. Capra was obsessed with the criminality of the new immigrants and the threat they posed to the nation. He spewed bigotry with every breath.

‘First of all, there’s no Russian mob,’ he told me at one point. ‘What you got in Brighton Beach is a Jewish mob. And it’s bigger than the fuckin’ wops ever were.’ At another, he declared, ticking the items off on his fingers. ‘There’s a Rumanian mob, a Bulgarian mob, an Israeli mob, a Nigerian mob. There’s mobs from ten different parts of China. Hell, you could just make a list of the world’s busted-out countries and there’d be organized criminals emigrating from every fucking province.’

I didn’t react to Capra’s tirade, probably because my concentration was still focused on my little talk with Adele. But then Capra surprised me with something relevant and my focus shifted abruptly.

Illegal immigrants, he pointed out, aren’t hermits and they don’t live in caves. They live in ordinary communities, most commonly among individuals they knew in their home countries.

‘Bottom line, Harry, even if she was illegal, she should have been reported missing. This is especially true for your ex-commies. Before they’re here a month, the kids are in school, the family’s on Medicaid and they’re collectin’ food stamps. They know all the tricks and they’re not afraid of authority.’

‘What could I say, Dominick? I keep in touch with Missing Persons on a daily basis. If there’s anyone out there who cares about her, they’re keeping it to themselves.’

‘I believe you, Harry.’ Capra’s head swiveled back and forth, until he caught the attention of a waiter. Then he raised his glass. ‘Por favor.’ Finally, he turned back to me and said, ‘Look, you got two possibilities here, one pretty remote. Let’s take the remote one first. You don’t see much of this in the US, but every day, thousands of girls from across the third world are drawn into the sex trade against their will. Some are lured into it with false promises and some are purchased from their parents. Either way, these girls become virtual slaves.’

Capra tilted his head back and brought his glass to his mouth, draining the last few drops of Jim Beam. Then he grinned. ‘How’d ya like to be sold by your parents in Vietnam, taken to a mining camp in Burma, then forced to screw twenty guys a day? For nothing, right? You’re not even gettin’ paid.’

This was too much for me and I ignored the question. ‘What’s the other possibility?’

Capra thought about it for a moment, then said, ‘Lemme start by givin’ you an example. Four or five years ago, a nineteen-year-old girl, a Philippine national, broke her ankle jumping from the second-floor window of a townhouse. When she got to the emergency room, the docs noticed that she’d been beat to shit and called in the cops. According to the girl, Consuela Madamba, she was recruited in her home village by a woman representing an American employment agency. For a substantial price, to be paid from her wages, Consuela would be smuggled into the United States and guaranteed employment as a domestic. Consuela didn’t find out, until she got here, that her employer would be a Saudi family attached to the UN. She didn’t know that she’d be watched constantly, that she was expected to work sixteen-hour days, or that she’d be routinely beaten for the slightest failure to maintain the home properly.’

My thoughts flashed to Roach, the profiler, and his prediction: there’s a sadist in the mix.

Capra leaned over the table. Though his speech and mannerisms were unaffected by the alcohol he’d consumed, the light reflected from his dark eyes was sharp and fragmented. ‘Indentured servants, in colonial times, they only had to work a given number of years until they were free. These days, illegals have to keep going until the debt is completely satisfied. Plus, they’re responsible for their upkeep. Funny thing, Harry, but Consuela’s living expenses were always just a bit higher than her wages. Call it sharecropping for the new millennium.’

I thought about this for a moment, before asking the obvious question. ‘Why didn’t she just walk away? It’s a big country.’

‘First, she was carefully supervised. Second, her family in the Philippines co-signed for the debt. Third, the reason she got her ass kicked was because she tried to escape.’

‘But they didn’t kill her.’

Capra leaned back as the waiter set a fresh drink on the table before him. He looked at his whiskey for a minute, then caught a single drop running down the side of the glass on the tip of a finger. He brought the finger to his mouth and sucked appreciatively.

‘I see what you’re gettin at,’ he finally said. ‘You kill the debtor, you can forget about collecting the debt, which is something no smart businessman wants to do. On the other hand, shit happens now and again, after which you have to clean up the mess.’

Capra’s hamburger sat on a dish in front of him. Though he’d nibbled around the edges, it was clear that he was drinking his lunch. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, you told me that the international sex trade doesn’t operate much in the United States. What about those ads in the Village Voice, the ones for Korean, Thai and Vietnamese escort services?’

‘I didn’t say never, Harry. What are you gettin’ at?’

‘I want to know if you think my victim might have been a prostitute? We figure she was around eighteen when she was killed.’ I slid my photo of plain Jane Doe across the table to Capra, who stared at her for a few seconds before looking me in the eye.

‘Gimme a break, Harry. She was a dog, most likely she was the one who had to pay for it.’

I was still cooling down, when Capra glanced at his watch. ‘I gotta get goin’ in a minute,’ he declared as he chugged his drink. ‘I’m supposed to testify at a hearing this afternoon. But there’s one other thing I wanted to mention. In my opinion, the best way to reach large numbers of immigrants is through their newspapers. Forget about runnin’ from one neighborhood to another. You could be doin’ that for the rest of your life. Advertising is what works. I know this because we used local papers to pull off a number of stings. It was very effective.’

I had a sudden vision of shackled deportees being led, in a long line, toward a waiting airplane. Headed for home sweet home.

‘How many newspapers are we talking about?’

‘Maybe a dozen that cater to Eastern Europeans and Russians.’ Capra pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. ‘Another thing you might want to consider. Those foreign gangsters I mentioned? Well, they’re not civilized, not like your Italian gangsters. You run up against one of them, you shouldn’t expect him to act with restraint.’

Capra turned to go, but I held him with a gesture. ‘One more thing. The employment agency that placed Consuela Madamba with the Saudi family. Did you run them down?’

‘Yeah, we traced them to an apartment in the Bronx. It took about a week, by which time they and their workers were long gone.’

I went from my lunch with Capra to a news store on Second Avenue. I showed the owner my badge and asked a few questions about Polish-language newspapers.