Robert Knightly - The cold room

‘To confess?’

‘Yes, to Father Manicki. They were chaperoned, as usual.’

‘Chaperoned by a man?’

‘This time, yes. But sometimes they’re accompanied by an older woman.’

I told myself to chill out, to wipe that smile off my ugly face. The nun’s confident tone might be no more than the natural outgrowth of an assertive personality. ‘Now, you said you spoke to her. Would you describe the circumstances?’

‘When the girls came into the church on June twenty-second, I was busy arranging the weekly flower delivery. There were five of them, including the girl you’re trying to identify. Though I had no real plan, I decided to stay inside the church while they confessed, hoping for an opportunity to speak to them alone. That chance presented itself at the very end when their minder left to use the bathroom. I knew I wouldn’t have much time, so I kept it simple. I spoke Polish, telling them my name, and that if they ever needed help, they should come straight to Blessed Virgin and we’d protect them.’

‘Protect them from what?’

‘I’m sorry, I forgot your name. Would you repeat it?’

‘Detective Corbin.’

‘Well, Detective Corbin, if you drive out to Blessed Virgin at six o’clock this evening, in time for the Polish mass, you can see for yourself.’

‘That, Sister, will be no problem at all. But there’s just one more thing I’d like to know for now. Did you by any chance catch the girl’s name?’

‘No, I’m sorry. This was my first approach and I spoke to the girls as a group. Not that I see how it matters. I’m certain of my identification because the girl had a curious way of looking at you out of the corner of her eye, just as she does in the photograph that appeared in the paper.’

The community of Maspeth, in Queens, is heavily industrialized, like virtually every other New York community bordering the waters that surround Manhattan. In this case, the water is Newtown Creek, a polluted canal that feeds into the East River. The joke among cops who work near the canal is that a body dumped into the water at sundown will dissolve before morning. I’d never had the good fortune to view a body pulled from Newtown Creek, but I’d been close enough in midsummer to experience the foul odor that seeps from its oily waters any time the temperature rises above eighty degrees. Newtown Creek was an industrial dump site for a hundred years before the first environmental laws were written. Somehow, the near-miraculous rehabilitation of the Hudson and East Rivers has passed it by.

I drove across Newtown Creek that Sunday afternoon, on Metropolitan Avenue, from Brooklyn into Queens, continuing on through the industrial heart of Maspeth and into a primarily residential neighborhood near Fresh Pond Road. The homes were modest here. Semi-detached and two-family for the most part, they bore flat roofs and were sided in a textured vinyl that made only the faintest stab at a wood-like appearance. But their yards were neatly kept, the tiny lawns mowed, the shrubs carefully trimmed. In one, the path to the front door was framed by a trellis overgrown with pink roses. In another, a woman bent over an enormous hydrangea, cutting the purple blossoms and transferring them to a laundry basket at her feet.

Blessed Virgin Roman Catholic Church was as modest and well tended as its neighbors. The stone tower on its northern face rose only a few feet higher than the surrounding homes, and the statue of the Virgin in its churchyard, though crude enough to pass for lawn furniture, was freshly painted.

There were people gathered outside the church when I walked down the block. As they were universally Caucasian, I gussed they were arriving for the Polish mass, as I assumed there’d already been masses conducted in Spanish and English. The Roman Catholic Church in New York is committed to satisfying the demands of believers from nations as diverse as Rumania and Botswana. In the vernacular.

I scanned the crowd as I passed the face of the church, looking for a group of young women escorted by a single man, but found only the expected gathering of families. I was headed for a narrow wood-frame addition jutting from the church’s northern face. Blessed Virgin Outreach was run from this building and that’s where I was to meet Sister Kassia.

The large room I finally entered was given over to a motley collection of couches and upholstered chairs. Hand-me-downs, without doubt, their wildly mismatched fabrics, colors and patterns might have filled a manufacturer’s sample book. The effect was homey, nevertheless, with the chairs and couches arranged in small groupings that afforded a bit of privacy. Sister Kassia was sitting on one of the couches, speaking to a woman who sat next to her. In her late twenties, the woman’s face was swollen and discolored, with one eye closed altogether.

When I shut the door, the nun turned to look at me for the first time, and I knew, instantly, that I’d been right about her take-no-prisoners attitude. Her nose was pointed, her mouth pinched and turned down at both ends, her chin sharp enough to punch holes in sheet metal. Two deep grooves rolled up and out from the bridge of her nose to echo the sharp hook of her pale eyebrows. Beneath those brows, her hazel eyes were as round as an owl’s. They appraised me without apology.

Finally, the nun turned to half whisper a few words to the woman on the other side of the couch before crossing the room. Late in middle age and a good thirty pounds above her best weight, she nevertheless moved with grace, coming at me with her shoulders squared, offering her hand for a firm shake.

‘Mr Corbin?’ she said.

I nodded my head. If she didn’t want it known that I was a cop, that was okay by me. ‘Why don’t you just call me Harry,’ I suggested.

‘Fine. Now I’m going to need a few minutes here. I have to get Flora settled.’

‘Actually, I was hoping to speak to Father Manicki before the mass got started.’

That brought her up short and she paused to reassess the big cop who towered above her. I met her gaze without flinching, the message I wanted to send quite simple. When Sister Kassia picked up the phone to call me, the entrance to the maze had closed behind her. There was no going back.

‘Father Stan’s in the sacristy, putting on his vestments.’ She pointed at a door to my right that fed into the church. ‘He won’t be happy to see you just now.’

‘Father Stan’s not gonna be happy to see me any time,’ I said. ‘Most likely, he was against your calling me at all.’

She smiled then, a thin and grudging smile to be sure, but a smile nonetheless. ‘You’re very astute, Harry, but don’t judge Father Stan too harshly. Our position here is very delicate. It seems the archdiocese approves of Blessed Virgin’s outreach to the undocumented, as long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.’ I couldn’t help but think of the bosses in the Puzzle Palace. They didn’t care if you ignored a suspect’s civil liberties, as long as you didn’t get caught.

‘Tell me, Sister, does the parish offer this Polish-language mass on a weekly basis?’

‘Every Sunday.’

‘And Father Stan, does he usually conduct the mass?’

‘Almost always.’

‘These women you spoke of, can I assume they show up?’

‘Most of the time, they do.’

‘I see. Now, I’m not a Catholic, so I don’t know the customs all that well. But does the priest who performs the mass go outside to greet his parishioners as they leave the church?’

‘He does.’

‘Thank you, Sister.’

I discovered Father Manicki in a small room at the end of a narrow hallway. He was standing before a closet that held a variety of robes and brightly colored vestments. There were two children in the room with him. I would have made them for altar boys in an earlier era, but these two were of mixed gender, the girl a foot taller than her companion.