One of Our Own Page 3

“It’s a three-bedroom apartment,” Hernandez said. “She’s a crazy woman.”

  “She’s a crazy woman with paperwork. If you keep this up, she’s going to go straight to housing court. She’s already taken us to housing court. More than once. We don’t want to have it happen again.”

  There was no response at all, this time.

  “Listen to me,” Cary said. “The only reason you have a job at all is that you look legal enough on paper to give me plausible deniability. But you’re not really legal, and you and I know it. Nobody else knows it. Even Meera thinks you’ve got a legitimate green card. But you don’t, and I could do something about that if I wanted to.”

  “I am a very good worker,” Hernandez said. “I give satisfaction for money.”

  “You give me a pain in the neck. Now pay attention. I don’t want you talking to her again, not unless there’s some ordinary business. Fix the plumbing—and none of that crap you were pulling last year about taking forever to get around to it. Change lightbulbs. Keep the stairs clean. But don’t ever say a word to her about moving out of that apartment. Ever. Got that?”

  Nothing.

  “I’m going to hang up now,” Cary said. And he did.

  He pulled his office door open wide. She was impossible to miss, out there, on the other side of the frosted glass. Given her age and the shape she was in, Cary was surprised she could keep up the pacing for so long. He wondered what she’d told the security guard so that he let her pace and didn’t bother her. Cary was stuck there, too. You couldn’t have the security guard throw out a legitimate tenant. Even a legitimate tenant in a building you wished you didn’t have to own.

  He went out across the reception room and opened the door to the hallway. She’d tried the door when she first came up, but she hadn’t knocked. He wondered why not.

  He put on the best face he had. It wasn’t a very good one. “Miss Warkowski,” he said, “I thought I heard somebody out here.”

  She brushed past him and went right through into the reception room.

  “I’m going to talk to you.”

  “Well, yes, I assumed you needed to talk to somebody, but I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re actually closed. Everybody’s gone home for the night. I was just about to go home myself. If you could come back in the morning, there will be people here who could help you a lot more than I can—”

  The huge wiggling hulk of her whirled around.

  “I’m going to talk to you,” she said yet again. “And it’s going to be for the last time.”

  7

  Father Tibor Kasparian remembered everything about the day he arrived in America. He stepped out of the tunnel from the plane into a space so cavernous he could almost see the echoes. It was 1980. The Department of Homeland Security did not exist. The long lines for TSA screening didn’t exist either. He had a Greek passport, because the Greeks had been willing to give him a passport after he’d slipped into their country one night under cover of darkness. The Greeks liked the Armenians, more or less. At least both peoples belonged to the Orthodox Church.

  There was a welcoming committee waiting for him when he got through the checkpoint. There was a small priest from the archdiocese, another immigrant from Armenia. All priests had to be imported in those days, because it seemed to be impossible to get American boys to go to seminary. Tibor always wondered about that. Armenian priests could marry. What was the disincentive?

  There was also a small group of women from some kind of benevolent association. At the time, Tibor hadn’t been used to the American habit of forming these organizations of laywomen who were not directed by priests and did not intend to be. The women were all American born and raised, and they showed it in their every movement. The way they stood. The way they walked. The way they tilted their heads. Tibor had seen all that in the American movies he had watched over the years, but he had always thought that was just Hollywood. That was the day he discovered that American women behaved with authority and didn’t care who knew it.

  Now, crossing the last street before he turned onto the block for St. Catherine’s Church and School, he couldn’t tell if anybody walked with authority anymore. Maybe it was just the sleet and the bitter cold, but the people around him all seemed to be hunched. They were all closed off within themselves, as if they were trying not to be seen. Tibor sympathized. He wished he could close himself off and not be seen. It was as if, in the last two years, the entire world had blown up. Nothing was the same. Nobody was the same. Nothing made sense anymore.

  Sometimes I think Russ is making sense, he thought. He caught sight of the lit-up fronts of the church and the school. The buildings were halfway down the block and with all the security lights and safety lights going full blast, they drowned out the more timidly glowing streetlamps. There was a metaphor for you. The light of God was shining in the darkness. It was calling out to you.

  Forget Russ, Tibor thought, I am going crazy all by myself.

  He reached the steps of the school just as an enormous black van came down the street beside him. It kicked up a spray of wet from the asphalt and disappeared.

  Tibor rang the front doorbell and waited. A few seconds later, Sister Peter opened up. American nuns moved with just as much authority as all other American women. Tibor did not envy their bishops.

  Sister Peter practically pulled him through the doorway.

  “You look absolutely miserable,” she said. “You should at least have worn a hat. Well, don’t worry. I’ll get you a cup of coffee to warm you up. Or tea? I’d offer you hot chocolate, but the children have been drinking it, and I don’t know where we’re at.”

  “Is everybody still here?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Even your dog. And there’s a buffet out. I don’t know how you’ll feel about it. It’s mostly Mexican food, because of the children, you know. They’re not usually from Mexico these days, of course, but none of us has ever been to Central America. I think we’re just hoping the food will be similar. And maybe it is. Everybody’s been eating like crazy.”

  “I like Mexican food very much,” Tibor said. Then he thought: Mexican food made by Irish nuns in a Spanish neighborhood.

  “Listen,” Sister Peter said. “I know Sister Superior will say it herself if she hasn’t already, but I really have to tell you how wonderful I think it is that you’re taking part in this project. I know it seems useless sometimes, what with all those pictures on the news with children in cages and I don’t know what anymore. Not that we watch a lot of television, really, but you know what I mean. You can’t avoid it. It takes everything we have just to get these few children to some kind of safety. And you’d be surprised how hard it is to find sponsors.”

  “There are no sponsors in the local communities?”

  Sister Peter flushed. “A lot of the local families are mixed. Some of them are here legally and some of them aren’t. And ICE checks sponsors these days. And you can’t be a sponsor without oversight by CPS. Most of these families will do anything to stay away from CPS.”

  “It was called the Immigration and Naturalization Service when I came,” Tibor said.

  Sister Peter ushered him into the auditorium and pointed across to the benches. The small boy was there, methodically eating his way through a plate piled so high it looked ready to tip over. Pickles was sitting on his lap.

  “I think the food is very satisfactory,” Tibor said.

  Just then, Gregor Demarkian, who was standing a little off to the side of the group, looked up and saw him. Gregor leaned down to say something to Bennis, who was sitting in a folding chair, then stood up straight and started over.

  “Krekor,” Tibor said.

  “Did you make your weekly phone call?”

  Tibor nodded. “And it went on and on, Krekor. There have been developments.”

  “You mean he’s started to make sense?”

  “Tommy went up there for visiting hours today.”

  Gregor threw his head back. “Dear God. Does Donna know?�
�

  “If you mean, did she know before he went, Krekor, no. After he left, Russ called her and left a message on her machine. She won’t talk to him directly.”

  “Of course she won’t talk to him directly. How the hell did he get there?”

  “Russ believes he may have hitchhiked.”

  “Hitchhiked. To the state penitentiary.”

  Tibor was afraid Gregor was about to explode. “It is not safe, Krekor, I know that.”

  “Not safe? It’s outright suicidal. He’s fourteen. He looks twelve. He’s practically asking to get picked up by the worst sort of—I thought Donna had one of those tracking things on his phone.”

  “I think she thinks she has. I think she put one there, but Russ tells me there are things you can do about it if you know how.”

  Gregor rubbed his face. “And Tommy would know how. God help us. Look, come over and meet Javier. He’s a very interesting small person.”

  “The meeting has been going well? There is not any—antagonism? I am told that in some cases the foster families and the children do not mix, there is tension—”

  “There’s a lot of tension, but not that kind. And he loves your dog. Oh, and he also sort of loves Tommy. Hero worship 101. Like I said, come on over. We’re due to go home in half an hour. You should get something to eat before you go.”

  “Krekor.”

  “What?”

  “Krekor, maybe you should at least think about it. Going up to the prison to see Russ. He wants to see you. He wants to see everybody. He misses—everything.”

  “He ought to miss everything,” Gregor said. “What the hell else did he expect?”

  8

  Clare McAfee had wanted to change her name as soon as she came to America. Her Lithuanian name was too hard for Americans to say, and too hard for Americans to spell, and just not American enough. Clare had been twenty-two at the time. The Soviet Union had just fallen apart, and she didn’t care. She didn’t just want to leave Lithuania. She wanted to be American, with everything that implied in her then very confused mind. She thought the name thing would be simple. She’d read a million stories about people who had their names changed at Ellis Island. She thought it was just a thing you could do in the United States, like eating at McDonald’s or buying Starbucks coffee.

  All this time later, she couldn’t come to an assessment of the experience. She was still glad to be here and not there, but here had been both more and less successful than she hoped. On a career level, it had been very successful indeed. She had started at a small bank as a teller, moved up to assistant branch manager at a slightly larger bank a year and a half later, and then moved to the Mercantile Mutual Trust on a career track that led her right to where she was now, vice president in charge of commercial lending. This was the result of a confluence of circumstances. The United States was crazy on the subject of “equality,” and especially the equality of women. Women who had graduated from the very top universities were very expensive to hire. And anyone who had not graduated from the very top universities was so badly educated they were painful to listen to.

  To tell the truth, even some of the people who had graduated from the very top universities were badly educated. The president of the Mercantile Mutual Trust had graduated from Yale, and he knew less about American history than Clare had in first form. Clare didn’t know what was going on with that. Lord knows the Americans spent enough on education, far more than Lithuania ever had. They just didn’t seem to do much of anything with the money.

  What had been less successful had been Clare’s attempt to find a place for herself in New York. It was New York she had always imagined herself living in. It had turned out to be far too expensive, insanely expensive, so that even the tiniest little box of an apartment would have cost more money than she could make. If she’d found the same kind of job she had now, at the same salary, she might have been able to rent something smallish and derelict in Queens—but she didn’t want to live in Queens.

  Philadelphia was a livable second best, but Clare could never forget it was second best. And her apartment was beautiful. It was large, and new, and had three bedrooms and a beautiful view across the city. Still, people with jobs like hers in Philadelphia didn’t usually live in Philadelphia. They bought houses in the suburbs and invited people to cocktail parties they held next to their pools.

  It was incredible how much everything cost in America. She had this very good job, and full benefits, and a 401(k), and her little … side efforts … and it still wasn’t enough.

  Sometimes she thought she was balancing on the very point of a pyramid, and any moment now she was going to fall off.

  She didn’t keep the records for her side efforts at the office. That would be far too dangerous. She didn’t keep them on her computer, either. All she needed was to be hacked. She had a set of old-fashioned ledger books, carefully disguised to look like old-fashioned atlases. Maps of South-Central Europe. Topographical Guide to the Mediterranean Nations. She didn’t know if they would be effective if everything blew up, but at least they wouldn’t be all that easy to find.

  She was making notes in the ledger about the new complex going up on the edge of Society Hill when Cary Alder called. She was thinking they were going to have to restructure the mortgage in at least three places if this was going to work. Her boss might be an idiot, but he was not a fool about this kind of thing.

  She picked up the phone when it rang. She wasn’t surprised to hear Cary Alder. He called all the time. He was always afraid he was going to screw something up and his father was going to come back from the grave to murder him.

  “Listen,” Cary said. “She’s back again. Hernandez pulled one of his pieces of crap, and she’s back again.”

  Clare put down her pen. “We can’t afford to do this right now.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? I’ve told him and told him. He won’t listen.”

  “I have the semiannual audit in just two weeks. There shouldn’t be any problem with it. They’re not really looking for anything. But if we gave them any reason to be looking for something—”

  “She’s on the warpath. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  Clare closed her eyes and counted to ten. Then she counted to ten again, in Russian.

  “I wish you’d regularize your situation,” she said. “If I’d had any idea what kind of a mess you were in when we started this, we wouldn’t have started it. What do you do with all the money you get? I’ve seen your books. I’ve seen more of your books than you ever wanted to show me. Why you thought I wouldn’t check into all that—”

  “We’ve had that argument.”

  “I still want to know what you do with all that money. Even you can’t be spending it all. I’d understand it if you were addicted to gambling, or cocaine, or—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She wanted me to fire Hernandez.”

  Clare considered this. “That’s not necessarily a terrible idea. He won’t go to the authorities. He isn’t legal even if he pretends to be. He wouldn’t risk it in this climate.”

  “There are other considerations. I’ve … used him for a few things. Off and on.”

  “Used him.”

  “Things have to get done sometimes. You know what I mean.”

  “Do any of these things you’ve used him for concern me?”

  “Do you remember when the copper pipes were stolen? That big pile of copper pipes? We put in a claim on the insurance, and—”

  “He couldn’t have done that all by himself,” Clare said. “That stack of pipes was as tall as a normal house.”

  “I think he gets friends to help.”

  “So, on top of everything else, you got Hernandez to help you commit insurance fraud, and he brought in a bunch of people you don’t know, or sound like you don’t know. What happened to all those pipes?”

  “Oh, they’re back at the site. I wasn’t going to waste them. We pu
t in the claim and then had them hauled back there and said they were new ones, you know. There’s no point spending for them twice.”

  Clare was counting to ten in Russian again. This should have been simple. There was nothing to complicate it. Except that Cary Alder always complicated everything.

  Clare had never seriously considered what would happen if she got caught. She knew these things didn’t last forever. Everything unraveled eventually. Now she had to wonder if they would put her in prison, or just revoke her citizenship and send her back to Lithuania.

  “Did you ask her if she would rather move into one of the affordable apartments at the Alder Arms, or one of those places? It would be more expensive than she could afford, but it would be a nicer apartment in a nicer neighborhood.”

  “I tried that once. She wants her own neighborhood. But it wouldn’t work anyway. Those apartments are under the control of the city welfare agencies. You can’t just put anybody in there. You have to go through the agencies, and they’re all running their own hustles.”

  “Of course.”

  “I just called to let you know. I don’t see what we’re going to be able to do about it. Calm her down for the moment, maybe. If she goes to the housing authority again—”

  “Yes,” Clare said. “Yes, I understand the situation. When are you due to get the next scheduled payout?”

  “Monday.”

  “All right,” Clare said.

  “I’ll let you go now,” Cary said. “It’s like I told you. FYI.”

  The phone went dead in her ear.

  It was always so hard to know what to do next.

  But she was going to have to do something.

  9

  Tommy Moradanyan knew he was in for it as soon as Mr. and Mrs. Demarkian and Javier and Pickles took off for Cavanaugh Street in one direction, and Father Tibor grabbed his arm and took off for Cavanaugh Street in another.

  It was after nine o’clock by then, and the sleet had morphed into a full-blown ice storm. The neighborhood was deserted. The people who normally hung out on stoops and sidewalks had disappeared into shelters of one kind or another. The streets were deserted, too. Either the city had issued one of those no-vehicles-on-the-streets-without-serious-necessity orders, or drivers were being a lot smarter than they usually were. The sidewalks were slick. It was hard to stay upright on the pavement, and it was going to get harder.