Ice Cap: A Mystery (Jackie Swaitkowski Mysteries)

by Chris Knopf

  “They know about your situation?” I asked as we sat down at a table in the back of the restaurant.

  He nodded. “One of them’s my friend with the apartment. None of them are cops, so it’ll be another week before word gets to HQ. No biggie.”

  He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket he’d worn under his white parka and pulled out his casebook. So I pulled out my own notebook. Pages were flipped through and pens clicked and at the ready.

  “Thought those guys were from Ivor Fleming?” he said. “Congratulations, you’ve now moved up to a higher grade of criminal.”

  The waitress came over and we ordered drinks and dinner at the same time to minimize interruptions.

  After the drinks came, Sullivan referred to his book, then said, “It’s nice to be living near New York City. It’s such a melting pot of lowlifes representing every corner of the earth. Every ethnic group has its own organization and its own special turf. So how surprising is it that the Polish would have their very own mob?”

  “Not surprising at all. Depressingly,” I said.

  “They operate sort of like an independent subsidiary of the Russians, who are a lot bigger but sometimes need to work through other groups with connections in different countries and ethnic neighborhoods in the city. Since, like everything else, the mob has embraced globalization, you need feet on the ground.”

  He turned around his casebook and showed me where he’d checked two unpronounceable names spelled with all the diacritics that make the words look like centipedes.

  “Can we just call them Yogi and Boo Boo?” I asked, writing the real names in my own book, squiggles and all.

  “Fair enough. They been a team for a while. As I thought, basic muscle used to handle the day-to-day, leg-breaking, window-smashing, head-cracking requirements of your average organized crime operation. It’s not that challenging a career intellectually, but you get plenty of exercise and the opportunity to meet new people.”

  “So we don’t know who sent them,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Could be any one of several Polish or Russian bosses working out of Brighton Beach and other parts of Brooklyn. There’re a lot of scams going on, and a pair of neighborhood guys born in America would probably have plenty of work.”

  “So the Poles don’t have a niche, a specialty like bank robbery or undocumented pierogis?”

  “They’re technically into everything our original Italian American–style organizations are into, but the international dimension tells me they’d like import-export. I’m just a humble country cop, but this is my guess.”

  “So drug trafficking, money laundering, smuggling, anything involving transport.”

  “Right. A lot of stuff goes in and out of there under the nose of the Port Authority,” he said. “You can’t expect them to search every container, check every manifest. You’d have to talk to somebody who knows a lot more about that stuff than I do.”

  “I have just the man. The bigger question is why muscle me over Franco’s trial? Why would they want him put away so badly?”

  Our food arrived, and he waited till the waitress left to answer.

  “No idea, Counselor. Though we know just about everything in this case has to do with being Polish, with the exception of Ivor Fleming, who’s the only Dutch-Filipino gangster I’m aware of. At least we don’t have to waste our time with the Colombians or the Jamaicans, who scare everybody.”

  “You say ‘we.’ You and I can’t do anything about a couple of jamokes in Brooklyn.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “We’ll have to deal with them on our home turf. Which basically turns you into mobster bait. You should have protection.”

  “No,” I said, so quickly I almost cut him off. “I need my freedom of movement. I appreciate it, but I can’t be hamstrung like that.”

  He didn’t push it. We’d had this conversation before and he knew where it would end up.

  “But you do want me to escort you home?” he said.

  “I do. Just this once. So I can take a little vacation from the twitchy nerves.”

  He toasted me with his beer bottle, noticed it was empty, and waved it at the passing waitress.

  “You got it. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll try to jump you again.”

  “Maybe we will,” I said without questioning his definition of luck.

  17

  Knowing a cop is going to follow you home after a night out really puts a governor on the booze intake. All for the better. So we got through dinner sticking to safe, non–emotionally threatening subjects, and after Sullivan walked me to the outside door, shook my hand, and waited for me to wave to him from the top of the stairs, I still had plenty of vital energy left for another go at the computer.

  To my delight, there was an IM message waiting from UB45JK.

  “Our public databases are not as good as yours, but as far as I can tell there is no such person as Katarzina Malonowski. At least no one with that name who is 32 years old, born in Kraków the child of Godek and Halina, with a degree in economics. My friends over there who have friends who would know better than me say the same thing. I will try searching more, but have no high hopes. I have the pic you sent, which we can post to Facebook and other ‘Do you know this person?’ sites. That might work.”

  I wrote back, “Thanks so much for doing all that. One other place to look are chat rooms. Zina said that’s how she met Tad.”

  “That’s easy,” she wrote, a few minutes later. “Natrafić.czat.net.”

  “That’s easy?”

  “It’s nat.net for short. That’s the only site they use over here to meet people in Poland. You can chat in English or Polish. There’s a public forum for basic meet and greet, but as soon as things get going, you retire to a private room. Not my thing. No bunkers or cyborgs to blow up.”

  I thanked her again. “I owe you,” I wrote.

  “No worries. One thing you could do for me. Give Gyro a ham and cheese croissant. That’s what he always orders in Dystopriot Land, but it’s kinda hard to taste it virtually.”

  I assured her this would be easily accomplished. Then I took a chance.

  “I can tell him where you live, what you look like? What you do for a living?”

  It took a little while for her to write back, so I had plenty of time to kick myself for being so uncool and butting in where I didn’t belong.

  “Tell him to friend me. It’s all there,” she wrote, attaching the link.

  I instantly clicked on the link and there she was, though it was hardly all there. Her avatar was the only photo and the only personal information was “Live in my grandmother’s basement in New Britain, Connecticut.” And her name, Urszula Bednarczyk. Maybe that’s what she meant. As long as he had her name, he could get everything else. And she was probably right.

  When I logged off UB’s IM site, I called Burton Lewis on his secret cell phone, as always feeling privileged to have that access.

  “Hello, Jackie. How goes the war?”

  “You mean the fog of war? I have a legal question.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “How do I get into a private chat room?” I asked.

  “You don’t without a subpoena. Assuming the site has the standard privacy policy. The police could also obtain a search warrant. If they choose to use the information in court, you could see it during discovery.”

  “I can’t wait that long.”

  “Give me the particulars and I’ll see what our central office can do.”

  I told him about nat.net, which a quick search had turned up in a town outside Chicago, one of the largest Polish American communities in the United States. I spelled out the administrator’s unpronounceable name and told him I’d e-mail their privacy policy.

  “Sounds like you’re moving things along,” he said after I finished a broader briefing.

  “I wish I felt that way. It’s more like I have this tangle of stuff that I’m just poking with a stick.”


  “Do you feel more certain about Franco?”

  “Yeah. I’m certain he’s lying. I just don’t know what about.”

  After hanging up, I wrote to Randall and gave him the news on Zina, preliminary though it was. I asked if his man in Interpol could focus on identifying the photograph, something they should be a lot better at than UB’s social networks. I also told him I had UB’s name and did he want it.

  “Shit, yeah,” is the answer I got back about ten minutes later. So I sent it to him and suggested a trip on Facebook.

  I spent the rest of the night Googling the names of the two Polish goons, yielding very little at first beyond a few arrests in and around Brooklyn for things you’d expect. Assault, threats of bodily harm, stalking, property damage, none making their way to successful prosecution, probably for lack of reliable witnesses.

  Then I snuck in a back door of my own, unrelated to Randall’s application—a document file I’d stumbled on once that cataloged a variety of things, including the histories and current circumstances of convicted felons. I dropped the names into the search box and waited.

  Yogi’s last name popped up. It was attached to a guy doing life at Pendlefield Penitentiary. I cross-referenced it with Yogi himself, and there it was. Brother to Yogi. Pendlefield was a big prison, divided into lots of discrete sections to reduce unwanted communications between inmates. That Yogi thought this would be a swell destination for Franco meant something. Probably the obvious. It would be his last.

  After that, with my eyes burning with exhaustion, I went back to browsing travel and tourism sites, with an emphasis on anything displaying a coconut or attractive local people with open, welcoming arms.

  The place where I now lived didn’t look like it could be on the same planet as those other places. To reassure myself, I searched for summer scenes of the Hamptons and was rewarded by a flood of lush images of sun-burnt dunes, party tents, and greyhound-thin girls in bikinis, jewelry, and high heels. But even those seemed so fake. That wasn’t even the Hamptons I knew. They were just the distorted clichés of out-of-town photographers. Or maybe it was all a hallucination. Maybe the searing cold and slog of snow-choked roads and sidewalks out there was all there ever was.

  I checked the online weather report. Another big storm was on the way.

  Maybe this was a good time to go to bed.

  * * *

  Sam woke me up the next day by leaning on the back-door buzzer and waving at the pinhole camera. I could barely see him on the monitor through his vaporous breath and my ravaged eyes. Eddie was there, too, looking up at the camera like he knew what it was.

  I got out of bed and stumbled around the bedroom, finding whatever clothing was both in reach and suited to the purpose of modesty and warmth. The result was a T-shirt under a down vest, sweatpants, and fuzzy slippers. I cranked up the thermostat to help with the warmth part.

  I buzzed him through the outside door and waited for him at the top of the stairs. Eddie got there first, alternating between saying hello and sniffing all over the floor. Sam clomped up the stairs and handed me a bagful of coffee and sugary, puffy things from the real Italian place in the village.

  “The least I could do,” he said.

  “You’re right. You could do a lot more.”

  I let them into the foyer that used to be the reception area when the apartment was an office full of surveyors, and then into the kitchen, which had a table where I made him sit until I’d extracted the coffee and dumped the pastries onto a plate. From there we went into the living room, where there were opposing chairs, which only took a few minutes to clear of junk so we could sit down. Eddie occupied himself sniffing at the boxes and stacks of printed matter littering the floor.

  “Do you realize how little space you actually live in?” he asked, looking around.

  “Don’t start in, not at this time of the morning.”

  “Do you realize how much more life you’d have if you got up earlier?”

  “Is this why you came over here and woke me up? So you could be an asshole?” I asked him.

  “Nah, I could do that anytime. I got a note from Ivor. Hand-delivered to my mailbox. He wants a sit-down.”

  I took a sip of the cream-and-sugar-infused coffee, which remarkably was still quite hot.

  “Interesting. Any other details?”

  “That’s all it said. A personal note from the man himself. Evil little gnome that he is.”

  “So how does that happen?” I asked.

  “We sit down with him.”

  “Out in the open with lots of witnesses. A sharpshooter with his sights trained on Ivor the whole time.”

  “Don’t know any sharpshooters.”

  “We’ll just tell him there’s one,” I said. “Good enough.”

  “I have a much cooler idea,” he said.

  “One that couldn’t wait until after eight o’clock?”

  “No. The sit-down is scheduled for nine. You’ll want to be better dressed. Though we can do it from here.”

  I almost choked on my latte. “What are you talking about?”

  “Skype. The perfect solution. Voice and video, a face-to-face with no danger of anyone shooting anyone else. Twenty-first century, baby. You do have the application?”

  I drew the collar of my shirt to my throat as if the camera was already on me.

  “How do you know about Skype? You don’t even own a computer. What happened to Sam the Luddite?”

  “I don’t need a computer. I’ve got a grown daughter. I Skype her once a week from a soundproof booth in the Southampton library. A little jerky, but clear enough. Very cool shit. Ivor was all over it. He doesn’t want to get shot any more than we do.”

  I pointed the mouth of my latte at him.

  “You’ve been cooking this up for a while,” I said. “Thanks for the warning.”

  He squinted, the closest thing he ever got to a sign of regret.

  “I probably should have told you, but you’d only just fret over it the whole time. This is better. No time for fretting. But you ought to take a shower and fix yourself up. You don’t want Ivor thinking you’re a slob,” he said, looking around the room again.

  I huffed loudly but did as he asked, keeping my hair dry under a shower cap but otherwise giving myself the full treatment. I emerged not only clean, but professionally suited up.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” said Sam. “We’ll keep the camera at about waist up, so you can lose the pumps if you want.”

  We went across the hall to the office and my computer. With a little rearranging of the stuff on my desk, we were both able to sit in front of the screen and be inside the camera frame. Eddie did some more sniffing, then curled up on one of the few naked patches of carpet.

  “This is too weird,” I said. “Sit-downs are supposed to be in a private room in the back of an Italian restaurant.”

  A few minutes later a little box popped up telling us we had a Skype call coming in from General Resource Recovery. I accepted the call, expanded the window, and suddenly had a dark-faced, balding little guy in an open-collared silk shirt and wraparound sunglasses, with a Doberman pinscher sitting next to him, filling the screen.

  “Hello, Ivor. Hi, Cleo,” said Sam. “Como estas? Ivor’s the one in the sunglasses,” he added to me. I was glad Eddie was asleep on the floor, though who knows if dogs can see other dogs on a computer screen.

  “Mr. Acquillo. I wish I could say it’s a pleasure to see you again.”

  His speech had a Spanish inflection. I remembered from my research years ago that he was born in the Philippines, a mix of Dutch and Asian.

  “Same here,” said Sam. “It’s only because we seem to have a situation.”

  “And you are Miss Swaitkowski?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m part of the situation.”

  “I think this can be easily resolved,” said Ivor, putting his arm around Cleo, who continued staring into the screen. My appreciation of the Skype idea soared. “It se
ems to be on account of faulty information.”

  “Really,” said Sam.

  “I accept the responsibility,” he said. “I sent my associates to call on Miss Swaitkowski, mistakenly thinking she was still in the real-estate business. I want to expand my home in Southampton, which will require a hearing with the appeals board. You came highly recommended, but now I hear you’re into a different thing.”

  “I am,” I said, temporarily losing all doubt over the career change.

  “I’d like this to end here,” said Ivor. “You’ll have no further contact from us, and we’ll forget about the manhandling of my security personnel.”

  All of us but Ike, I thought.

  “Fine with me,” said Sam. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

  “We’re not,” I said.

  “That’s good. Then we’re agreed. Let’s make this the last time we need to have a conversation,” he said, and with that, we saw him lean over his keyboard, and with a single tap, he was gone. I quit out of the application just to make sure.

  “So that was easy,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “It was too easy. He’s lying.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “No, it’s not. It means something.”

  “To the Buczek case?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But it’s where I’d look.”

  “Sullivan told me to stay away from Fleming.”

  “It’s not up to him,” he said. “You’ve got your own job to do.”

  “That’s the theory.”

  * * *

  We talked some more while finishing off the fattening breakfast. Then Sam and Eddie left me to my own devices, which started with a quick change out of the nice clothes and into the ones that made me so thankful I worked in a one-woman office.

  I kept the lipstick and mascara on, though. Why not.

  Then I stared out at the windmill across the street and tried to read my own thoughts, conscious and otherwise. It wasn’t a long deliberation, because the first impulse that seemed to have some sense attached to it found me at my computer keyboard writing to Randall Dodge.