One of Our Own Read online

  There was a little chair next to the telephone table in the foyer. It was solid enough to sit in, but ornate in the way furniture was when Bennis didn’t expect anybody to use it. Gregor sat down and picked up the receiver.

  “John? Are you calling from Washington? Why are you calling on the landline? Nobody calls on the landline. I don’t understand why we still have it.”

  “It was the number I could remember,” John said. “Besides, I figured somebody would be home. I don’t mind talking to Bennis.”

  “You still haven’t told me what’s wrong.”

  “There’s nothing wrong,” John said. “At least, not exactly. Believe it or not, I’m calling for a friend. And no, I’m not in Washington. We’re on recess. I’m spending the holidays out in Bryn Mawr. At the moment, though, I’m downtown.”

  “All right. Downtown doing what?”

  “Like I said. Calling for a friend. Do you know who William Jefferson is?”

  “Of course I do. Took over as police commissioner after that whole thing blew up.”

  “The whole thing blew up,” John Jackman said. “Well, that’s one way of putting it. Biggest corruption scandal in the history of the Commonwealth and it happens while I’m on the job. Do you know I’ve introduced a bill to make private prisons illegal?”

  “I have been following your career, John, yes. But—is that back again? Is there another judge out there shanghaiing people to keep the prison populations up?”

  “No,” John said. “No, I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure how much you knew. You got shot. You were in the hospital. I understood you had a long rehab. I didn’t know if you were keeping up. Bill Jefferson thought you probably had been keeping up, which is why I’m making this phone call. He thinks you might not be interested in talking to him.”

  “I’m a little tired,” Gregor said. “This is sounding like gibberish.”

  “I’m supposed to reassure you that the department is no longer a cesspit of corruption, and it’s safe for you to deal with them.”

  “It was safe enough for me to deal with them when they were a cesspit of corruption. What’s going on here? Has he got a murder he wants a consultant for?”

  “Not a murder, no. It’s that thing that happened last night.”

  “The woman in the garbage bag,” Gregor said.

  “Exactly.”

  Gregor stretched out his legs. “You do realize, both of you, that I wasn’t actually there? It was Tibor Kasparian and Tommy Moradanyan who witnessed whatever that was? Tibor just called me and asked me to come on out and help. Meaning stand around and listen to the cops question them. I did see the woman and the garbage bag on the ground, but by the time I got there the ambulance men were there already. They were packing her up to get her to the hospital. I take it she didn’t die.”

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s that close?”

  “I don’t know where we’re at now,” John said. “The report I got said she was a complete mess, but that’s to be expected. You always want people to live, of course, but I think the issue here is the same whether she lives or dies. Things are kind of complicated. Jefferson wants some help.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Put him on.”

  “He wants some help down here.”

  “You want me to come down there.”

  “We’ll send a car. I take it you still don’t drive. We’ll send an unmarked, don’t worry. Just come down here and talk to Bill and the two detectives we’ve got working this. You don’t have to go on with it past that if you don’t want to.”

  “But you wouldn’t call me in if you didn’t want me to.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “How fast do I have to be ready?”

  “We could pick you up in twenty minutes.” There was a long pause. Then Jackman said, “You can’t have changed that much, Gregor. This is you. You’re up. You’re probably in a suit and tie already.”

  Gregor was in a suit and tie already. Gregor pulled his legs in and stood up. “All right. Just ring the bell when you get here. Do you know Bennis and I have a foster child? He came to us last night.”

  “Jefferson really does need help, Gregor. This really is a complicated situation.”

  “Just ring the doorbell. Actually come up to the door. I’m not going to keep everybody’s cell phone clear just so the cops can call me from the curb.”

  Gregor hung up. Then he went down the hall again to the back of the house and the kitchen.

  Javier and Bennis were still at the kitchen table. Javier had started in on fruit and cheese. He was handing thick slices of cheese to Pickles, who was sitting patiently on the floor next to his chair. Bennis was just putting down her cell phone.

  “That was Ed George,” she said as he came in. “He’s on his way over. He has paperwork.”

  “Hadn’t we decided we were going to make this a nice calm day, get acquainted with Javier?”

  Javier looked up. Pickles put her paws up on Javier’s leg and looked over the surface of the table. Javier reached for a strip of bacon.

  “What did John Jackman want?” Bennis asked.

  Gregor sat down and told her. His plate was still where he had left it, and still mostly full of food. He got a strip of bacon for himself and gnawed on it halfheartedly.

  “I think it’ll be all right,” Bennis said. “I don’t think he wants us to sign anything right this minute. I think the point is for us to read it over and then go get it signed in front of a notary. At least he said something about a notary, and he didn’t say anything about bringing a notary.”

  “And Lida isn’t here to try to introduce him to every gay man she’s ever met in Philadelphia so she can get him safely married and—I don’t know what she wants. I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean it to be like this. I really did mean to take the month off so we could concentrate on this.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Bennis said, leaning over to take yet another strip of bacon out of Javier’s hands before he could feed it to the dog.

  3

  Edmund George showed up before the police did, which meant he had to have been just around the corner. He was wearing a fedora over a black cashmere coat and a plaid cashmere scarf. He looked like a model for GQ magazine, the Absolutely Youngest Partner in the Absolutely Most Prestigious Law Firm in the world. The chances were he wasn’t that young. There had been a few lost years back there when Gregor first met him.

  He came through to the kitchen with his attaché case held out in front of him. He put the attaché case on the kitchen table and surveyed the wide spread of food there. Then he sat down in front of the nearest empty space.

  “Good morning,” he said to Javier.

  “Buenos días,” Javier said.

  “He looks better than the last time I saw him,” he said to Bennis. “Is that Father Tibor’s dog?”

  “The general consensus is that he’s using it sort of like a therapy dog,” Gregor said. “Tibor doesn’t mind, and the dog makes Javier happy, so—”

  Bennis put a cup and saucer down in front of Ed. “Eat all you want,” she said, “but do us a favor and don’t feed the dog. Javier’s been feeding her all morning. She’s going to end up throwing up all over the living room.”

  Ed ignored the food and started to take papers out of his attaché case. “These are mostly from the Department of Homeland Security,” he said, “and that’s just busywork. I don’t know why they think we’re all going to be safer if we fill out enough forms, but they do. I’ve looked into the whole thing about Javier’s background, and I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Do we really know much of anything about the backgrounds of any of these children?” Gregor asked. “This is the part of all this I don’t understand. They come up here, ‘unaccompanied minors,’ they call them. Who knows where they’re from or what they’ve been through?”

  Ed George shrugged. “Gregor, most of these kids, they may be unaccompanied, but you can talk to them. They’ll tell you where th
ey’re from. They’ll talk about their lives at home.”

  “You can’t verify any of it,” Gregor pointed out.

  “No, you can’t,” Ed said. “But you can punt. You at least have something to say. Angela Gonzalez from Honduras. Jose Gomez from El Salvador. It gives you something to write down and it makes everybody feel better. Unless you’ve had better luck than the rest of us, we don’t even have a last name for this one.”

  “I wonder if we just couldn’t make up a last name for him,” Bennis said. “We could call him Santamaria, because he’s always sitting in the Mary chapel in church.”

  “He’s going to have to have a last name for school,” Ed said. “What are you using there?”

  “Demarkian,” Gregor said. “It seemed like the most sensible thing to use.”

  Ed shook his head. “You might as well use that on this stuff. I’ve been fudging it for weeks now. They haven’t been happy with me. That’s why you have all this, now. I’ve been putting off doing it until we could decide what to do about a surname. And it’s not safe to let it go too long.”

  “We really have to worry about that,” Gregor said, feeling completely disoriented. “Do you realize how many people this neighborhood has brought over from Armenia just since I came back to live here? Never mind before that. I can remember all kinds of snags and problems and I don’t know what else. Armenia was under Soviet control for a lot of the time. But I don’t remember anybody ever worrying about raids from immigration.”

  “It’s a new world,” Ed said.

  “Is it just because he’s, you know, Spanish?” Bennis asked.

  Ed shook his head. “It’s everybody, everywhere. Except Canadians. Nobody seems to care about the Canadians. But we’ve got a guy in the office doing immigration from the UK, and they’re threatening one of his guys with deportation over a DUI from 1982. Granted it was a pretty spectacular DUI and the guy spent a month in jail, but we’d never have had that kind of problem even five years ago.”

  “Sister Margaret Mary said they keep watch for ICE vans over at the school,” Bennis said. “They’ve never had ICE there, but some of the other schools in the city have. It seems insane to me.”

  Ed George got another sheaf of papers out of his attaché case. It was smaller, but also more official looking in some way. Gregor picked it up and looked at it.

  “Department of State?”

  Ed took the sheaf of papers back. “We’re going to try something. If it doesn’t work, it can’t hurt us. If it does work, we’re going to be able to protect Javier here, at least in part. We’re going to make his visit official.”

  “Whatever Javier’s story,” Gregor said, “I don’t think he was the Honduran minister of agriculture.”

  “And we don’t know who his parents were, so we can’t say his father was the Honduran minister of agriculture, either,” Ed said. “We’re also stuck with not knowing his country of origin. But maybe that’s a good thing. We’re going to guess that he’s Mexican.”

  Gregor nodded. “That’s the most logical thing, if you think about it. I’ve been thinking that he can’t have come far. He wasn’t hurt or abused. That’s almost never the case with kids who take the long trek up here from Central America. They get preyed on.”

  “My interest is that the Jesuits have an educational exchange program going on with Mexico,” Ed George said. “Javier is actually a little too young to qualify, but it’s like everything else in his case. We don’t know his age, so we can fudge it a little. I’ve talked to the Maryknoll nuns down at the border and the sisters here and the head of the program in Philadelphia and we worked something out. You can use Demarkian as his last name. That’s all right. That won’t matter. But from now on we have to be consistent. This at least has to look good.”

  “So the State Department will think Javier is here on an educational exchange program?” Bennis said. “And that will protect him from ICE?”

  “Sort of,” Ed said. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about the raids. If ICE decides it wants to swoop in somewhere and check everybody’s documentation, there’s nothing we can do about it. And they sometimes pick up people who are here perfectly legally but can’t prove it. After all, can either of you prove you’re in the United States legally? I couldn’t. I don’t carry my birth certificate around and I keep my passport in my safe-deposit box. And if ICE does stage a raid and scoop him up with a bunch of other people, he won’t necessarily be given a chance to phone you. Assuming he knows how to phone you.”

  “We’re getting him a cell,” Bennis said.

  “In that case, if he suddenly goes missing, you’re going to have to go looking for him. If I were you, I’d make sure somebody walks him to and from school every day. And the office is all set up to go looking for him if he gets snatched. But what this will do”—Ed pointed at the State Department paperwork—“is make him not exactly undocumented. He’ll have paperwork he can carry and you’ll have paperwork you can keep, saying he’s part of this program. But it would be a really good idea if you could hurry.”

  “Why?” Gregor asked.

  “Because,” Ed said, “we probably can’t get this backdated. He’s supposed to have done all this before he ever crossed the border. And we’re not going to send him back down there to cross the border again, so we’re going to have do a few dipsy doodles so it isn’t clear that he came in illegally first. You fill those out today, if you can. When I come back to get them, I’ll bring a notary from the office. And I’ll come back at six.”

  “I’ll do them,” Bennis said quickly.

  Out in the hallway, the doorbell sounded, playing the first few notes of “Für Elise.”

  “I’ll get it,” Gregor said.

  TWO

  1

  Meera Agerwal got to the office late, still sick, and still in a very bad mood. The sick was even worse than it had been the night before. She had taken ibuprofen before she left home, and also had a cup made from one of her mother’s special tea packets that was supposed to cure everything because it was Indian. She had no idea what was in the damn thing, and she didn’t care. Her head was pounding. Every muscle in her body ached. She seemed to have both fever and chills at once. Then, to tear it all, she was finding it nearly impossible to balance on her high heels. There were two things that were better in India than in the United States: you didn’t wear high heels with a sari, and it didn’t get this kind of cold.

  The girls in the office were already seated at their computers and talking away, jabbering nonstop about nothing that mattered. They all had pictures in frames on their desks. The frames were cheap and thin. With one exception, the pictures all seemed to be of animals. The one exception was on the desk of the only woman in the office with children. She had a girl and a boy, and they were posed together in front of a backdrop that looked like sky. The rest of the photographs were all of dogs and cats. The girls talked about the dogs and cats as if they were children.

  Meera had her own little office. It was nothing much, but it distinguished her from the girls out there, in what was called the bullpen. She sat down and put her purse on her desk. Her ankles ached from negotiating the sidewalks. The city was still full of ice. She put her head in her hands and tried to steady herself. Any American in the company would have stayed home on a day she felt like this. That was why Meera was here. If they’d wanted an American, they would have hired one.

  Rita Antonelli came in without knocking. They were supposed to knock. Meera wanted to scream.

  “Miss Agerwal?” Rita said. “Are you sure you’re all right? You look like you’re feeling worse than you were last night.”

  Meera put her hands down. “I am feeling all right,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Well, I don’t mean to bother you, but your mother called,” Rita said. “We’ve been a little worried, because it was really long distance. She said it wasn’t anything important, but—”

  “I will call her back,” Meera said. Except she w
ouldn’t. She wasn’t about to call Mumbai from the office phone. She wasn’t about to call Mumbai from her cell phone while she was in the office, either.

  “Well,” Rita said, hesitating. “She did say she would call back. And she said she had some good news. I took the call. She sounded happy.”

  For God’s sake, Meera thought. “We need to file the rent receipt reports today for the places downtown,” Meera said. “I need you to start putting them together and sending them to me, and I’m going to go over them so they can be corrected before they’re officially filed. I don’t want a repeat of last month. There were so many typos, Mr. Alder could barely read them. And we’re going to have to make an eviction list.”

  “I always think it’s sad,” Rita said. “Evicting people at Christmas.”

  “It’s not at Christmas, it’s after Christmas. And everybody will get the usual thirty days.”

  “Still.”

  “Mr. Alder is a lot more lenient than I would be,” Meera said. “Some of these people, it’s incredible. It’s as if they thought apartments sprang up out of the ground like grass. It costs money to build an apartment building. It costs money to run it. Where do these people think the money comes from?”

  “Yes,” Rita said, looking uncomfortable. “Yes, well—”

  The phone on Meera’s desk rang. Rita looked infinitely relieved.

  “I’d better let you take that,” she said, and fled the office.

  Meera picked up. “Hello,” she said.

  If her head hadn’t been pounding so badly, she would have realized that her mother couldn’t have called with good news. The times were all off. God only knew how late it was in Mumbai, or how early. Meera could never keep it straight. But her mother never called her at the office, either.