The Altar Girl: A Prequel

by Orest Stelmach

  She stared at me with a blank expression. “That is the second time you’ve ever disappointed me.”

  He was the love of her life. If he had survived, they would have been together, I thought. It had been inconsiderate and presumptuous of me to ask about him. I smiled sheepishly and tried to think of how to segue into the real purpose for my visit.

  The dismay in her eyes yielded to a gentle smile. It was more than endearing, it was a provocation. You are the child I never had, she seemed to be saying. All the knowledge I have is yours for the taking, if only you’d treat me with respect. If only you’d be as honest and forthright with me as I shall be with you. All these things she expressed by merely looking at me. This was her gift. This was why she’d commanded my unswerving loyalty when I was a child even though I hated every minute of PLAST, and wished I’d been hanging out with friends like all the American girls, assuming I’d had friends in the first place.

  “I think my godfather was murdered,” I said. “There was an entry in his diary on the day he was killed. The letters DP were written in bold ink. Do you know of anyone my godfather called by those initials? An American, a Ukrainian, a friend from a DP camp?”

  She took a second to think about it. “No. Obviously there’s your former father-in-law if those were Ukrainian letters. I never heard him refer to anyone as a DP.”

  “Would it be possible that was his nickname for a close friend from the DP camps?”

  Mrs. Chimchak considered the possibility. “DPs were the lowest rung of society in post–World War II Europe. We were the Untermensch, the subhumans. Being called a DP was an insult. In my experience, certain types of men enjoy insulting each other. ‘Hey DP,’ or ‘You’re just a DP.’”

  “You’re right. The closer some friendships, the more the men insult each other. I never thought of it that way before.”

  “It’s just that . . . DP camps are a painful part of our past. Most people who suffered through the camps, they prefer not to talk about them. They started new lives here. They had children. Their children have had children. They don’t want their families exposed to what they went through.”

  “That would explain why my father never talked about his life before he came to America, and, just today, my mother danced around the issue when I asked about it.”

  “As I recall from the New Year’s Eve balls in the early days, back when the joy of being Americans exceeded all our cumulative sorrows, your mother was always a good dancer.”

  “Will you talk to me about the camps?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything you’re willing to share, anything you’re not willing to share, that sort of thing.”

  She smiled and nodded. This was more like it, she was saying. I knew I’d come to the right person. I reached for a cookie in celebration, dunked it in my tea, and ate half of it. Then I ate the rest, sat back, and listened.

  She started with the salient facts. There were approximately two hundred fifty Displaced Persons camps in 1946. Most of them were located in Germany, a few in Austria, and one in Italy. The British administered approximately a hundred of them, while the Americans tended to most of the rest. Ukrainian refugees clung together.

  “My camp was in the American Zone,” she said matter-of-factly. “The first thing we did was get acclimated. Then we went about the business of creating our own society within the camps to help us survive as a community. We formed schools. There were about seven thousand Ukrainian children in the American Zone. We had fifteen hundred teachers. The children were battle-tested. They were used to moving and leaving home on a moment’s notice. They were used to bombing and shelling. So it wasn’t that strange for them to work in a classroom without tables or chairs. Without chalk or a blackboard. The children learned while standing. They wrote in pencil on window sills and on the floor.”

  She told me that the DPs created the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, and published a Ukrainian newspaper as well. A few men got jobs in military installations, in manufacturing plants, or as engineers with construction firms. But most sat around the camp speaking about hopelessness and dreaming of a better tomorrow. Meanwhile, a black market and barter system evolved.

  “Cigarettes were the gold standards in the Schwarzmarkt,” Mrs. Chimchak said. “One pack bought you illegal entry into Berlin. Two packs got you some bread, potatoes, or meat from a German farmer. Twenty-five packs might have won you a German radio, and thirty bought you a bicycle.”

  “Was my godfather a good scrounger?”

  “He was the best. Anything you needed, you went through him. The second-hardest thing for him to acquire was fresh fruit and vegetables. Food was scarce but we got our hands on it. But the diet wasn’t varied, and we all looked gray and lifeless. That didn’t stop us from being productive. We organized a theatre. Uncensored productions without the watchful eye of the NKVD. What joy! We focused on our religion, too. Orthodox, Catholics. Most Catholic priests made it out of the USSR alive. In the camps, most people attended Mass every Sunday.”

  She paused to sip her tea. Her hand trembled as she lifted her cup to her mouth. I hadn’t noticed any tremors beforehand, and was left wondering if this was an ailment or an indication of the emotional toll of recalling her past.

  “Did my godfather develop any enemies back then? Something personal, that may have lingered for decades?”

  Mrs. Chimchak laughed. It was a full, open-mouth laughter that showed her teeth. They were small, slightly stained, and ferocious looking. “Enemies? My God, child. It’s hard for you to understand, isn’t it? It seemed like we were the enemies of the entire outside world. But in the camps themselves? Please . . . You know what they say about Ukrainians. Put two in a room and you’ll get three political parties. Sure, there were politics. There were always politics. But we were too consumed with our survival to create grudges among one another.”

  Something had struck a chord but I couldn’t place it. I took a few breaths and remembered.

  “You said the second-hardest thing for him to acquire was fresh produce. What was the hardest thing for him to get?”

  “That which could not be scrounged. Freedom. A destination. A new home for everyone who refused to go back to the old one.”

  I nodded.

  “That is what we lived for,” she said. “And we dreamed our dreams in a constant state of fear. The ghosts of concentration camps loomed large. There was residual fear from the war—the fighting—but mostly there was constant fear of repatriation. It was there, in the back of our minds, from the moment we arrived. But then the Americans and the British authorized the use of force to send DPs back to Ukraine toward the end of 1946. The stories of their violence spread and we knew things would only get worse.

  “Violence? What kind of violence?”

  “The British and American soldiers were given orders to herd people onto trains to send us back to Ukraine. When we refused, they hit us with their rifles. In our stomachs, our backs. They cracked foreheads open. They told us we were going back one way or another. They had orders.”

  “And they beat DPs? Allied soldiers actually beat refugees?”

  Mrs. Chimchak nodded solemnly. “There were two types of soldiers. The men from the European campaigns who’d fought the Germans were horrified. I watched battle-scarred veterans with tears in their eyes slugging DPs with their rifles. A black American doctor by the name of Washington. I will never forget him. I saw him leaning against a shed as they herded us on board crying uncontrollably. Tears rolling off his cheeks. You see, these were the same trains that had been used to bring survivors from the concentration camps back to civilization. Back to freedom.”

  Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Her words sank in.

  “Who was the second type of soldier?” I said.

  “The new recruits. They had no wartime experience. They bonded with postwar German socie
ty, the people who hosted them, provided them services. To them we were DP scum and while there were exceptions, most of them didn’t shed any tears when they were ordered to use force for repatriation. The new American soldiers hated us as much as the locals did.”

  I imagined an American soldier happily slugging a malnourished refugee to force him or her to board a train. A knot tightened in my stomach. I loathed the thought of any American having done anything evil, especially during the war when our country had helped liberate Europe. It was silly, naïve, and unrealistic, and I didn’t care. We were the lucky ones. We were Americans. We were supposed to stand for absolute good at all times.

  Then the image took on a new dimension. Mrs. Chimchak entered the picture.

  “You saw this Dr. Washington?” I said. “If you saw him, it means you were there. It means you were one of the DPs loaded onto the train. It means you were repatriated.”

  She looked at me with her signature expression—sheer and utter inscrutability. I sat waiting for a segue to more personal revelations, but instead she smiled again. “I was very young, and very naïve.” She reached across the table and took my hand in both of hers. Donned an earnest expression, the kind I’d never seen her wear before. “Now . . . Your godfather was murdered. Let’s talk about how you’re going to find the killer.”

  CHAPTER 20

  I FIRED A series of questions at Mrs. Chimchak about my godfather and her belief that he’d been murdered. The queries came streaming from my mouth in no particular order. Why was she sure he’d been murdered? Did she have any suspicions about who might have killed him? Did my godfather have any enemies? When I paused for a breath, she cut me off with a raised hand, and said she wanted to get some more tea before we talked further.

  “Don’t be too eager, dear.” She patted me on the shoulder as she stood up from the table. “There’s an old Ukrainian proverb: He who licks knives will soon cut his tongue.”

  While she went into the kitchen, I savored a most pleasant adrenaline rush. My former father-in-law was certain his brother had been murdered, and now Mrs. Chimchak had revealed that she thought he’d been killed, too. Not only that, she’d volunteered her belief. My childhood mentor, the woman I respected more than anyone else in the world, had come to the same conclusion. Sweet validation! I wasn’t imagining a crime to keep myself occupied because I’d lost my job and hadn’t found another after six months of searching. I wasn’t suffering from delusions and fantasies. My instincts had been spot-on.

  Mrs. Chimchak’s revelation, however, wasn’t the only reason for the uptick in my spirits. She’d expressed no disappointment over my absence, showed no evidence of harboring a grudge for my failure to communicate with her for more than twenty years, and hadn’t hidden her joy in seeing me. She was, as she’d always been, inscrutable yet real and true. She was the complete opposite of my mother. For the first time since I’d returned to Hartford, I had an urge to linger in someone’s home.

  She returned with more tea and cookies. As she refreshed the table, I decided to lob a grenade, the kind I threw at company executives to keep them on their toes. In this case, I wanted a spontaneous reaction to a question that bothered me.

  “Was my godfather a good man?”

  She lifted her eyebrows a smidge, enough to reveal the question surprised her. She thought about it for a moment.

  “To my knowledge, he had no family. And there are no friends in business. Solitary people can become a bit self-absorbed. ‘The church is near but the road is icy. The tavern is far but I’ll walk carefully.’ That was your godfather. His life was about him and his pleasures. Not an evil bone in his body but if I had to pick three people to share my foxhole, he wouldn’t have been one of them.”

  Her depiction was consistent with my brother’s revelations, except for the part about no evil in his body. I considered his plan to buy my mother’s heirloom for a fraction of its worth to be pretty darn evil.

  “Something changed fifteen months ago,” Mrs. Chimchak said. “I knew from his lifestyle. I knew from doing the accounting for his business. I did his books, you know. Of course you know. That’s why you’re here. I once had twenty-one clients, small Ukrainian businesses, but most of them have died. Three of the children who inherited their father’s trade kept me. A plumber, an appliance repairman, and a beekeeper. I have three clients left. One of them was your godfather. Did you know he was my client?”

  An awkward silence followed. I didn’t know what to say. It was the first time Mrs. Chimchak had shown a momentary memory lapse, repeated herself, or digressed. Although they were minor observations, they reminded me of her true age.

  “How did his lifestyle change?” I said.

  The question snapped her out of her stupor. She rubbed her thumb and forefingers together. “The fancy televisions, the Cadillac—”

  “But he bought it used, didn’t he?”

  “He may have bought it used, but it was new to him. It was still a Cadillac. That wasn’t all. He took several trips out of the country. And he had a table at Fleming’s in West Hartford. He had a whole new wardrobe, too. I told him some of the clothes made him look like Liberace but he didn’t care.”

  Fleming’s was the area’s top steakhouse. It was notoriously expensive, frequented by those with expense accounts, deep wallets, and a taste for the finest. I tried to picture him at his own table, dressed like Liberace, being served by an elegant waitress intent on emptying his wallet.

  “Godfather had a table at Fleming’s? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Mrs. Chimchak’s expression didn’t change. “I know this only because he mistakenly included a month’s worth of receipts with his business receipts. I say it was a mistake because he was very upset when I asked him about it. He paid cash for his meals and didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

  “Why the secrecy?” I said.

  “And where did the money come from?”

  “I thought his business might have taken off.”

  “He made between twenty-one and thirty-six thousand dollars during each of the last three years. He owned his house so there was no mortgage, but still . . .”

  “Thus the secrecy,” I said. Donnie Angel’s words rang in my ears yet again. Tell me what you know about your godfather’s business. “He had an alternative source of income.”

  “I should say so.”

  Perhaps that explained why he paid my brother, Marko, to watch his back during a midnight delivery to Avon.

  “Any ideas?” I said.

  “He knew only one business. He had to be selling something old. Something precious. Something people wanted that only he could get them. But I don’t have a clue exactly what it was.”

  “And you never saw any receipts for anything unusual?”

  “No. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that profitable. The one thing I can tell you is that it all started after he took a trip to Crimea.”

  Crimea was an autonomous republic in the south of Ukraine surrounded by the Black Sea.

  “Why Crimea?” I said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. When he first told me he was going on vacation to Sevastopol he looked tense and anxious. He didn’t act like someone going on vacation. But when he returned six days later he was a bit more relaxed. And within a month, I’d say, he turned downright cheerful.”

  Sevastopol was a port city in Crimea. It was a tourist attraction, and the home of the Ukrainian and Russian Black Sea naval fleets.

  “Then it seems logical to assume that whatever he sold,” I said, “the arrangements were made there and then. Which suggests he was selling something from Ukraine, if not Crimea itself. I didn’t see anything extraordinary in his house. Though there was all that furniture . . .”

  “That had been around forever. They’re nice pieces but not enough to stop renting the attached house, buy a Cadillac, travel to Europe, a
nd eat steak four times a week.”

  “Four times a week?” I shook my head. “So we don’t know what he was selling, whether he was accumulating inventory, or selling these pieces one by one.”

  I thought of the heist of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and recent suggestions that a Hartford-based mob had done the job. That was the type of inventory that could change a middleman’s life. Perhaps my godfather had been selling stolen decorative arts or furnishings from Ukraine. It was a natural deduction given his line of business, Donnie Angel’s interest in what I knew, and the job my brother had done for him.

  “We also don’t know what he did with his cash,” Mrs. Chimchak said. “He didn’t trust banks. He kept a minimum balance in his checkbook for expenses, tax payments, and the like. For appearance’s sake. But you can bet he kept the majority of his profits in cash in his house. Did you check under the mattresses when you visited his home with Roxanne?”

  Someone who didn’t know the Ukrainian immigrant community might have been surprised, but I wasn’t. Most people, like my parents, managed their funds like every other citizen. But some didn’t. A friend of my deceased father’s had kept his life’s savings under the floorboards of a closet. When a fire broke out in his apartment building, he ran inside to rescue his money and burned to death.

  “No,” I said, and to my own surprise added, “but we should have. I should have thought of that.”

  Mrs. Chimchak nodded and I knew she was thinking of the same incident involving my father’s friend. “Yes. You and Roxanne probably should give the house a thorough once-over.”

  “Would you come with us?”

  “No. It’s not my place. This is a family matter. Roxanne was his niece. You were his goddaughter. That’s not a place for an old spinster. Besides, my back and my knees . . . I can’t move around as well as I used to. I have a hard time with stairs, you know.”