The Altar Girl (11 page)

CHAPTER 18

I
ATE A
late lunch at a Wendy’s in Rocky Hill. It boasted a highly visible parking lot surrounded by the Silas Deane Highway on one side and busy office buildings on the other. I parked near the driveway with the nose of the Porsche facing out. There was no way a van could block my exit or a couple of thugs could kidnap me without attracting attention.

After devouring a spicy chicken sandwich and a vanilla Frosty—a child’s size, just enough to take the edge off my stress—I called my friend Paul Obon. He ran the Duma Ukrainian bookstore in the Lower East Village of New York. He was my source for information on all things Ukrainian. I needed his help because I knew nothing about post–World War II DP camps in Europe. Our parents and grandparents didn’t discuss them, presumably to protect us from the pain and suffering of their past. But that always struck me as the partial truth. In fact, our elders preferred to keep this part of their lives shrouded in mystery for reasons unknown, or so I’d always thought.

Obon gave me the basics. After the end of World War II in 1945, five million refugees from the Soviet Union found themselves homeless in Western Europe. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed agreements at the Yalta Conference that required the repatriation of all Allied nationals, by force if necessary. The Soviet refugees consisted of slave labor moved to occupied Western Europe by Hitler, concentration camp survivors, and people who’d fled west during the war.

With the help of the Americans, British, and French, more than four million refugees—two million of them Ukrainian—were returned to the USSR promptly. The remaining homeless—including two hundred fifty thousand Ukrainians—refused to return voluntarily. The Americans, British, and French set up camps in Austria and Germany where they were allowed to live while the world decided what to do with them. The refugees were called Displaced Persons, or DPs for short.

The Soviets were obsessed with the repatriation of every single DP. Their fixation was rooted in two beliefs. First, they felt entitled to such a demand because of their disproportionate suffering during the war. Soviet fatalities totaled 20 million, compared with between 300,000 and 350,000 each for America and Britain. In fact, the average
daily
fatalities suffered in the USSR before 1943 exceeded the entire 130,000 deaths suffered by the Americans in three and a half years of war in Europe. The Soviet population shared Stalin’s bitterness. They felt their allies owed them a debt.

The Soviets were also motivated by their insecurity over their ideology. If the Marxist state was utopia, every citizen should have wanted to return home. The presence of a dissenter would have suggested otherwise, and that was unacceptable. Hence, the Soviets deployed foreign missions to Western Europe to help with the repatriation. “The Motherland would not be a mother if she did not love all her family,” they said.

The Americans, British, and French happily obliged the Soviets. Each country was dealing with its own postwar issues. None of the Allies wanted a refugee problem, but that’s exactly what they got. A British Zone military order proclaimed: “HMG do not recognize Ukrainian as a nationality. No recognition can be given to any Ukrainian organization or representation as such.” The Americans and the French agreed. Soldiers were ordered to use force to load refugees onto trains headed back to the Soviet Union.

Ukrainian DPs promised that they would resist repatriation “by all means.” One community gathered in a church to celebrate the Holy Mass for the last time. Word spread that they were planning to commit mass suicide. When soldiers arrived to intervene, a farmer approached an officer and handed him his axe. He asked the soldier to cut off his head, that he would rather die from decapitation than be sent back to the Soviet Union. Others did commit suicide, including a twenty-four-year-old man who’d learned his sisters had voluntarily returned to the USSR and ended up in a Siberian work camp.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff understood they were legally obligated to use force to repatriate the DPs, but they had little stomach for it. There was clearly a disagreement between the welcoming message being spread by the Soviet foreign missions and future life as the DPs saw it. What Eisenhower didn’t realize at the time was that the Soviet missions consisted primarily of agents from the NKVD, the predecessor of the notorious Soviet secret police, the KGB. And their agenda was altogether different from the one they advertised.

As soon as Obon mentioned the NKVD and the KGB, I immediately became suspicious they somehow had a hand in my godfather’s death. Most Americans would have thought it was a silly idea, I knew, and yet I couldn’t help myself. If you grew up a first-generation Uke in the free world, you heard enough horror stories about spying, persecution, and murder to believe the disciples of those organizations were capable of killing anyone, any place, at any time.

After my call with Obon, I met Roxy at a massive, crowded, and well-lit Stop & Shop parking lot. It was located five minutes from the Uke National Home in Wethersfield, the town that divided Rocky Hill from Hartford. I kept my eyes on the rearview mirror during the entire drive from Wendy’s. Once I spotted Roxy’s SUV, I circled around it and looked in all the vehicles surrounding it. She was the only one inside her car. All the other vehicles were empty.

I parked beside her, climbed into the passenger seat of her SUV, and nearly suffocated from the stench of bacon, garlic, and sausage.

“What the hell, Rox? It smells like Baczynsky’s Meat Market in here.” Baczynsky’s was a popular Ukrainian store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Roxy grinned. She cut a slice of Ukrainian bacon from a rectangular slab wrapped in onion paper with her pocketknife. The bacon was cured in salt and spices and commonly eaten raw. Unlike traditional bacon, Uke bacon had barely any trace of meat in it. It was almost one hundred percent fat, which is why it was called
salo
, the Ukrainian word for fat. I was never partial to the dish. I preferred to consume my fat in the form of dumplings. Roxy was eating hers with raw garlic. She was dipping the latter in salt, which she’d poured into a paper cup in her cup holder.

“This is my reward for driving to New York and back,” she said.

The blast of garlic breath from her mouth overpowered me. I struggled to breathe. It was worse than an elevator packed with men the morning after they’d gorged on Korean barbecue.

“You absolutely reek,” I said. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. I thought you were working at the Uke National Home tonight, too?”

“I am,” she said with glee. “This old-timer who plays bingo likes to put his hand on my ass and remind me he has no heirs. Like he’s going to put me in his will if he gets some, whatever that means at his age. I’m going to get up close and personal with him today. Ha!”

“Remember you laughed just now when he tells you he likes your perfume.”

Roxy stopped chewing and frowned. “Oh, shit. You think?”

I managed a laugh under the circumstances. “No, I don’t think so. Garlic breath is like body fat. Men tolerate their own but don’t like it on their women.” I glanced in the back of the SUV and saw a dozen or more brown shopping bags. Inside, I spied rings of kielbasas, other sausages, and breads in the bags, along with jars of condiments and boxes of mysterious delicacies. The cooperative store at the Uke National Home stocked food from New York and sold it to the Hartford crowd for Easter. But first, someone had to drive to the City and buy it.

“Since when do you do the run to New York?” I said. My father had made the runs to supplement his income—or lack thereof—when I was little. Our car would smell like deli counter for weeks.

“Since the guy who used to do it had a car accident and lost his license.” She lifted the slab of bacon in my direction. “You want some of this, Diana?”

I cringed.

Roxy grinned. “It’s never too late to acquire a taste.”

“Great. I believe in delayed gratification, though. I’m trying to save some orgasmic experiences for my golden years so I have something to look forward to.”

Roxy cut another piece of
salo
. “Saving your orgasms is a mistake. You need to live in the moment.”

“I’m glad you said that. Here’s what I’ve been living today.”

I told her about my call with Obon. “Did your uncle ever talk to you about his experience in the DP camp?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t talk about those days. I mean he was a kid after the war. In his teens, right?”

The DP camps had been filled with children, many of whom had been brought to Germany and Austria as slave labor for the Nazi regime. My parents had been among them.

“He was a scrounger,” Roxy said. “That’s all I know. We watched that movie with Steve McQueen once. The one with him on the motorcycle with all those famous actors as prisoners of war.”

“
The Great Escape
?”

“Yeah. That’s the one. He told me he was like the James Garner character, only more handsome.”

I chuckled. “Yeah. He wished.”

A black sedan rolled by. A man with dark features stared right at us. He let his eyes linger, then looked away nonchalantly. He was either staring randomly or purposefully trying to appear uninterested. Roxy must have seen him and thought the same thing because she sat silently beside me, eyes glued to the tail of the Subaru. Two men with leather jackets got out and walked into a Chinese restaurant in the mall. There was no one else in the car, and the men didn’t look over their shoulders in our direction.

“Uh-oh,” Roxy said.

My blood pressure spiked. I realized I must have missed something. “What?” I looked from the restaurant to the car and back to the Chinese place again. “I don’t see anything.”

“No. Look up. At the sky.”

I glanced above and beyond the strip mall. A colorless moon hung low in the shape of the blade of a sickle, reminiscent of the symbol of the Soviet Union.

“It’s a Stalin moon,” Roxy said.

It was one of the first things Mrs. Chimchak had taught us at PLAST camp: beware the night of a Stalin moon, for nothing good ever happened when the symbol of communist persecution hovered over the planet.

We sat quietly for a moment. I wanted to get Roxy’s reactions to what Marko had told me about her uncle, but I didn’t want to offend her by suggesting he was a sleaze. In my experience as a forensic investment analyst, it’s best to persuade the other person to come to the desired conclusion by herself.

“What kind of guy was your uncle?” I said.

Roxy had started to wrap up her bacon. She gave me a quizzical look, as though saying I knew him as well as she had, and it was a stupid question.

“No,” I said. “I don’t mean was he nice and religious and did he really care for you and all that. I mean, did he have integrity? Did you trust him?”

Roxy shrugged. “Personally, I never had a problem with him. And my parents. I think they understood what kind of business he was in and it was just in his nature to, you know, exaggerate a bit. But there was never anything malicious about it.”

“Exaggerate what? Can you give me an example?”

“He was always buying and selling. Once he sold us a kitchen table he said was an antique made by some famous guy. Later when my father tried to sell it back to him, it turned out it was by the famous guy’s brother and it was worth half what he thought it was. But that’s how all those antique guys are, right?”

“But I thought he had a good reputation. I thought he knew his stuff.”

“He did know his stuff. And he did have a good reputation. But if you knew my uncle, you knew to take it with a grain of salt.” Roxy rolled down her window and tossed the rest of her salt onto the asphalt. “And if you didn’t know him, I’m sure he was no worse than all the other people in his line of work.”

Roxy’s assessment was hardly a ringing endorsement, and disturbingly consistent with the shady picture Marko had painted.

“You ever accompany him on any strange deliveries?” I said.

Roxy twisted her body and stored the remainder of her bacon in one of the larger shopping bags behind her. “I never went with him on any deliveries. He was super secretive with all that stuff. I helped him with his groceries and with contractors for the house. You know, HVAC and plumbing, maintenance and repairs and the like. Why?”

I told her about the midnight delivery in Avon, leaving out the part about Marko providing security. There was no need to mention his involvement.

Roxy shook her head. “That’s really, really weird. He didn’t have a storefront because the overhead wasn’t worth it. He did most of his work through auctions, swap meets, and by referral. But I never heard of any midnight deliveries.”

“So what do you have for me?” I said.

Roxy started the car. “I got the name of his accountant. Gave her a call and confirmed she’s got his books.”

I raised my eyebrows. “She?”

Given Marko’s description of my godfather’s sexual tendencies, the revelation that his bookkeeper was a woman conjured more unholy visions.

Roxy nodded. “It’s the Razor Blade.”