4 Angel Among Us

by Chaz McGee

  The two younger nuns cooed their agreement like a pair of turtle doves and then subsided into an embarrassed silence.

  Calvano was such a dog. He was blatantly giving the young nuns the once-over, appraising what his gender had lost when they joined the convent. He stopped ogling long enough to ask, ‘Did you find out anything of interest? Will any of them talk to us?’

  ‘Yes and yes,’ the old nun said primly. ‘We have a meeting room where we hold receptions for church functions and there are two people waiting there to speak with you.’

  Maggie looked back and forth between Father Sojak and the old nun. ‘That’s efficient. Have they been waiting there for us all day?’ She seldom resorted to sarcasm, and for good reason. It made her sound mean.

  ‘I had Heather fetch them when we saw you pull up,’ the older nun said quickly. ‘They have been here all day, yes, but only because we have encouraged them to stay until we could reach you. We did not want them disappearing again.’

  It was a lousy cover story. I knew that whoever had volunteered to speak to the police had been whisked from the room downstairs at the same time one of the younger nuns had dashed below to warn everyone to remain quiet until after Maggie and Calvano left. But the cover story was accepted without question.

  ‘Well, take us to them,’ Maggie said, sounding more than a little suspicious that they were cooperating so willingly.

  ‘I could summarize what they told us,’ the nun named Heather said in a nervous voice. ‘If you don’t speak Spanish, I would have to be there anyway to translate.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell us what they told you?’ Maggie said to her. ‘And then we will go question them ourselves. Between the two of us –’ she nodded toward Calvano – ‘we know a little bit of Spanish.’

  I had no idea if this was true, although I suspected it was an exaggeration.

  ‘There is a man in our congregation who says that someone approached his wife asking if they could buy her baby,’ the youngest of the nuns said. She looked appalled at her own words. ‘He was quite upset about it.’

  ‘I’m not following,’ Maggie admitted.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ The other young nun said. ‘Arcelia Gallagher is pregnant and now she’s missing.’

  ‘Are you saying you think Arcelia Gallagher sold her baby?’ Calvano asked skeptically. ‘According to her husband, this was their dream come true.’

  ‘That’s what we thought,’ the nun named Heather said timidly. ‘But a woman waiting to see you will tell you that the same thing happened to her. An American man approached her and offered her money for her baby. She told no one but Arcelia Gallagher about it, she says, and Arcelia was quite upset. She told the woman that it was time to stop rich Americans from preying on her people.’

  ‘Did she say where she was when she was approached?’ Maggie asked.

  The nun looked apologetic. ‘I didn’t think to ask. But you can ask her for yourself.’

  ‘Let’s go then,’ Maggie decided, rising. ‘I want to talk to these people myself.’

  As everyone followed Maggie’s lead and rose to go, the old priest stirred in his chair, opened his eyes briefly, looked straight at Calvano and muttered, ‘You better have wiped your shoes this time, Adrian. I’ll not have mud in the rectory.’ He fell back asleep again.

  We all stared at Calvano. He shrugged and smiled, looking – just for an instant – like the reluctant altar boy he had once been.

  ‘Figures,’ Maggie mumbled at Calvano as they followed the nuns and priest out of the sitting room door. But no one else noticed what I had seen – while everyone’s attention was on the old priest, one of the younger nuns had hurried ahead, down the hall. No doubt to warn the others.

  But Father Sojak and the nuns had made one mistake when they devised whatever plan they had in mind to assuage their consciences while still protecting the people below. They had forgotten that Calvano had attended the church as a child and would know every nook and cranny of it. Just as they were attempting to hustle him out a back door, Calvano paused at the entrance to the basement.

  ‘Hey, I remember that door.’ He laughed. ‘We used to steal cookies from the pantry in the rectory and then run down to the basement to eat them. There was some freaky stuff down there, if I recall.’

  He put his hand out and grabbed the knob. A wave of fear rose in the priest and the nuns. They froze, waiting for his next move.

  ‘What’s the basement used for now?’ Calvano asked. He opened the door and stuck his head into the darkness, peering down the steep steps. ‘If I recall, there’s a room big enough to park the Queen Mary in down there.’

  ‘Oh, we just use it to store furniture we collect to give to the poor,’ Father Sojak said hastily. He was good. He opened the door to the basement wider. ‘Would you like to take a look?’

  ‘No,’ Maggie said impatiently, even as Calvano answered ‘yes’. They stared at one another, both annoyed.

  ‘The people waiting to talk to you have waited for hours. They can wait a few minutes more,’ Father Sojak said calmly. ‘Follow me.’

  That crafty old fox. He had faith indeed. He let them calmly down the stairs into the basement hallway, flicking on lights as he did so. Their footsteps echoed behind me in the hallway as I hurried ahead, wondering what had happened to the room of illegal immigrants. As I approached the door to the great room, I felt a wave of fear so thick I could not believe that Maggie and Calvano could not sense it as well.

  From the outside, the room looked like just another basement storage area. It was dark from the outside and, on the inside, beds and other furniture had been piled against the entrance so that it was nearly impossible to open the door even a crack. The stacked mattresses made it completely impossible to see inside the door windows as well. It was a good cover. If Maggie and Calvano really wanted to enter the room, it would take a long time to clear a path. They’d likely give up before long.

  The fear of the people inside that room was remarkable. So was the silence. Entire families huddled together in the darkness, seeking out beds and blankets to provide themselves with cover. Parents held their hands firmly over their children’s mouths so that they could not make a sound. Young mothers held their nursing babies to their breasts, pre-empting their cries. The men smelled of sweat and fear. The women held their breath. It was as if the entire room breathed in and out as one as they waited, knowing from the light leaking in under the door jamb from the hallway that they were on the verge of discovery.

  I realized, then, in that instant how little these people had and how very much they were willing to risk in order to start a new life for their families. They were willing to huddle in the darkness like animals just to have a second chance. And in that moment, I found myself rooting for them. I prayed that Maggie and Calvano would walk by.

  But the sounds outside the door made it clear that they had stopped at the entrance to the room. All around me, fear and memories too terrible to share rose up. The people huddled in the darkness of the room trembled and their children clung to them, seeking comfort, frightened by their parent’s fear.

  ‘This is it,’ Calvano announced. He laughed. The doorknob rattled and the door inched inward, but immediately knocked up against a barrier of furniture. Calvano gave up and shut it. ‘You are not kidding. If you need any more furniture, and I can’t say it looks like it, my mother’s trying to get rid of a bunch of ugly crap from her sister’s house.’

  Father Sojak laughed. ‘Oh, we’ll take it. You’d be surprised how many people need help these days.’

  ‘Come on,’ Maggie interrupted them. She was getting impatient. ‘Let’s go back upstairs. I need to talk to those people.’

  ‘Of course,’ Father Sojak said. ‘Did you want to look around anywhere else?’

  ‘No,’ Calvano said. ‘My partner’s the impatient type.’ He laughed and Father Sojak joined in, just two men laughing at the foibles of women.

  Boy, that Father Sojak was good. I only hoped he
would stay on the side of the angels.

  Their footsteps echoed in the hall, growing fainter as they left the basement room behind. I could feel the fear receding with the sound of their footsteps. People begin to breathe once again. Still, no one dared say a word.

  Their relief, though silent, was immense. They were safe, at least for now.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Upstairs, in a room filled with plastic tables and chairs, a nervous-looking Hispanic man sat at the center table, while a younger Latino woman with curly hair and eyebrows plucked to thin arches waited nearby to be questioned by the police. I wondered if they had simply been nominated to throw Maggie and Calvano off the track of those who hid in the darkness below them or if they really did have knowledge of Arcelia Gallagher.

  Maggie and Calvano decided to speak to the older man first. Although he had volunteered to speak to them, at least according to the nuns, he looked angry and uncooperative when they joined him at his table. The younger nuns took a seat on either side of him, stereo translators. The one named Heather spoke for the Hispanic man first.

  ‘He is quite upset that you are holding Aldo Flores in jail,’ she explained after his reply. ‘He keeps asking when you are going to take him to jail and keep him there, too.’

  To her credit, Maggie looked embarrassed. ‘Please tell him that we apologize for these actions. We did not agree with imprisoning Mr Flores. We have no intention of bringing him downtown. If he will speak honestly to us, and give us a way to get back in touch with him in the future, he has our word that, for now, our conversation will stay between us.’

  The young nun translated Maggie’s words but the older Mexican man did not relax. I didn’t blame him. But, gradually, with coaxing from the two young nuns, the story that emerged was this: two months before, as his wife had been shopping at a small grocer’s in their neighborhood, an American man wearing a dark jacket and a Philadelphia Eagles baseball cap had gestured to her and asked if she spoke English. When she nodded yes, he had held out a fistful of thousand dollar bills and waved them at her. ‘These could be yours,’ he’d said. He nodded toward her swollen belly. ‘I have a client who is interested in adopting a child. He is willing to pay thousands of dollars for yours. You could start over and live in a big house with servants and be just like an American,’ he had told her.

  The man telling the story looked even angrier as he repeated the American’s words. He did not like that the American had taken his wife for a fool who was willing to sell not only her baby, but her heritage, for a fistful of dollars.

  ‘What did this man look like?’ Maggie asked, and waited as one of the nuns translated.

  The man shook his head. His wife could not remember much more and he would not permit the police to question her. He had sent her somewhere else with their baby so that they would be safe and he was not telling them where. He did not want the same thing happening to her as had happened to two other women in their community. She had told him before she left all she knew about the man who had offered her money for her baby. ‘He was American and angry, as American men often are,’ she had told her husband. He added that the American man had not argued with his wife when she refused his offer, but had spat the Spanish word for whore at her and stomped away.

  ‘The man knew a little Spanish?’ Calvano asked. The Hispanic man looked at Calvano with contempt. When translated, his answer became, ‘I would not call the ability to dishonor women as speaking my beautiful language. Many Americans have picked up the worst of our colloquialisms. That does not mean they speak our language.’ The nun had imitated his dignity with perfection and Calvano looked properly ashamed at the rebuke.

  ‘Did your wife see where the American went after he walked away?’ Maggie asked him.

  The man said, no, his wife had been quite upset by the encounter and had fled home, calling him on the way to report what had happened. They had discussed telling someone, but were afraid to approach the police. They told themselves that the man was just passing through, looking for someone desperate for money, and would keep going. Who were they to try to stop him? But now, the man continued with an abashed expression, he wished that they had done more. Perhaps they could have spared others pain? Perhaps the American had taken the two missing women?

  After several more questions about the time of day the man had approached his wife, and if she had noticed him before that day, and other attempts at extracting even the smallest detail about the encounter, Maggie and Calvano let the man go. He had promised to stay in touch with the nuns and would be available if they needed him further. Neither Maggie nor Calvano looked convinced that he would follow through. They were certain, as I was, that he would join his wife wherever she had gone for safety as soon as he could, now that he had told them what he knew and his conscience was clear. But they were unwilling to take him into custody officially. They did not want Gonzales throwing him in jail, too. One Aldo Flores on their consciences was enough.

  The young woman with curly hair waiting to see them held something in her arms that she jiggled with an automatic efficiency as they approached her table. It was the baby that, according to the nuns, a man had tried to buy from her. Apparently, having had someone try to take it from her once, she now intended to keep it as close as possible to her in the future. The baby was wrapped in pink and white blankets and though it was no more than a few months old, tiny gold studs had been affixed to its ears.

  Most women attempting to establish rapport with a new mother would coo over her baby or ask questions about it. Maggie did not even try. She gave it a cursory glance to establish that it was there, and confirmed that it was the baby the man had tried to buy. The young mother was shy and it took much coaxing to get her story out of her. In the end, she was able to tell them that when she was approached, she had been pushing a cart filled with fresh produce as she gathered food for her family’s evening meal. It was just two weeks before her eventual delivery date, and the man had come out of nowhere, frightening her as she stood on the sidewalk between two specialty shops.

  ‘I thought he was going to rob me,’ she said. ‘But then he showed me a big stack of money and said that he would make me rich if I would give him my baby. I told him that I would never sell my baby. That he was sick and must go away. He got angry. He said I would have many more babies. That I should be smart and make money from them.’ Her voice cracked as she described the man’s behavior. One of the nuns patted her on the back until she regained her composure and continued with her story. The man had spat on the ground beside her feet and stomped off, angry that she had refused his offer.

  ‘I would never give my baby to someone like that,’ the woman protested, as if Maggie and Calvano thought she had intended to sell her child. ‘I would never sell my baby to anyone, but especially not to a man like that.’

  Under the questioning, she revealed that the man had been only a little taller than she was. He had been wearing a brown leather jacket and a baseball hat. She did not remember what the hat had looked like. She could not remember much about his face, except that he had angry eyes and his mouth was cruel. A sketch artist would not be able to do much with that, and neither Maggie nor Calvano looked hopeful. But at least she had watched the man leave and had seen him get into his car and drive away.

  ‘Do you remember the make and model?’ Calvano asked eagerly.

  The woman looked confused when the nun translated. ‘It was a big car,’ was all she could offer. ‘It was silver and would take much money to buy. It is the kind of car that rich people drive.’

  It wasn’t much, but it was something. There weren’t that many wealthy people in my town. It was either the politicians, the mob bosses – or the pair of movie stars who lived on the edge of town.

  ‘When did you tell Arcelia about what had happened?’ Maggie asked the girl.

  She had told Arcelia about the man and his offer about two weeks ago, and Arcelia had asked her questions just as they were doing. She had told them the same
things she had told Maggie and Calvano. The man had been driving a silver car, like rich people drove, and he had been angry at her for refusing his offer.

  ‘Did you get the feeling that Arcelia knew who you were talking about?’ Maggie asked. She looked at the nuns and said, ‘It is very important that you translate the question exactly.’

  The young mother took Maggie’s question seriously, mulling it over before she answered. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I believe that Mrs Gallagher knew who I was talking about. I think this because she grew very angry and started talking about how people with money thought they owned the world, thought they owned us, and that they must be stopped.’

  ‘What did she say she was going to do to stop them?’ Maggie asked.

  The woman shrugged when she heard the translation of the question. ‘She did not tell me what she was going to do,’ she explained. ‘But I thought she was going to talk to the man. I got the feeling that she was going to tell him he must stop trying to buy babies in our town.’

  Maggie and Calvano looked at each other. While they had learned more than they had expected, the information could lead them nowhere. The man had approached the women several weeks apart, which meant he was a local or at least staying in town. On the other hand, all they really had to go on was that he wasn’t very tall and he drove a silver car.

  Still, it was better than nothing and nothing was all they’d had to go on until now.

  ‘If you hear of anyone else with a similar experience, we need to talk to them,’ Maggie told the nuns. They nodded solemnly.

  ‘What she really means to say,’ Calvano explained, ‘is that we need you to question each and every one of all the other women illegals who are pregnant or have young babies to see if they were approached by the same man. If so, we need to speak to them ourselves. This could be our most important lead.’

  Maggie looked startled but said nothing. She knew Calvano was right. If the illegal immigrants in town would not speak to the police, they had no choice but to use the nuns as their go-betweens.