The Prodigal Son(48)
They had had an extraordinary stroke of luck when Liam began enquiring from Immigration & Naturalization about a pair of Yugoslav refugees named Davina Savovich and Uda X: the man who had handled their case was still in the department, still working in New York City, and professed to remember them well.
His full name, he told the tape recorder, was Quinn Victor Preston, and eleven years ago he had been working with the Port of New York.
“The two girls had stowed away on an Italian freighter out of Trieste, and by the time they got to me, they were in a bad way. Davina spoke a little broken English — enough that I didn’t use an interpreter. They always screw meanings up, in my experience. Vina and Uda were Slovenes, which translates as the most western-oriented of the Balkan principalities that Marshal Tito combined under one government as Yugoslavia. There isn’t a lot of love lost between the various principalities, especially the ones where Muslims and Christians are pretty evenly distributed. Not a problem in Slovenia, which loosely comprises the Yugoslavian alps — few Muslims, if any.
“Davina struck me as highly intelligent,” said Preston, warming to his story. “Her English actually improved with every sentence we exchanged — I could see her mind filing away its grammar, always the hardest aspect of English for an eastern European. She was as thin as someone out of a Nazi concentration camp — skin stretched over bones, maybe eighty pounds. Uda was just as bad. They had no papers, and literally threw themselves on my mercy — I was the head honcho there at the time. Now I’m on airlines, a different world.”
He sat back and sipped his cop coffee without complaint — I & N coffee must be equally bad, Carmine thought, unwilling to hurry him. A man nearing retirement age, apparently living alone, and not the kind of man widows hunted — too much fat around the midline, too little hair, too uninspiring in the face, too shabbily dressed. He probably had plenty saved up, just didn’t spend it on trying to be a ladies’ man when the TV set could offer him sports and his refrigerator beer. Yet the adolescent Davina Savovich had made an impression.
He put his mug down. “They’d walked across the mountains — real alps! — to Trieste, hiding by day, moving by night. Stealing food when they could. They discovered that the Cavour was sailing for New York, and somehow got aboard. The first thing I checked out was whether Davina had prostituted herself to achieve it, but she hadn’t. As time went on, I understood better that sex was not how she preferred to attain her ends. I suspect she’d been gang raped somewhere, and it had turned her off sex, even as a tool.”
“It usually does,” said Carmine, topping up his mug.
“They asked for asylum in the United States of America,” Preston went on. “My rejoinder was to ask her how she intended to make a living if she was granted asylum. By working, she said, at whatever work she could find. Whatever she did, Uda would also do. Her plan was to go to one of the big hotels — as usual, the Park Plaza was the one she knew — and offer their services as cleaners. I knew the manager of a less famous hotel — the Grand Lion — and called him to see if his establishment could offer them employment. He — uh — jumped at them, thought they might be easier to discipline than Puerto Ricans.”
“Does that mean you ran a kind of racket, sir?” Tony Cerutti asked to freezing glares from many eyes — dumb, Tony, dumb!
It didn’t faze Mr. Q.V. Preston in the slightest. “I could only run a racket, sir, if I accepted kickbacks, and I did not,” he said calmly. “It is not, strictly speaking, the function of an I & N official to run an employment agency, but sometimes these things do happen through sheer accident. I had a friend. My friend had a hotel. I needed to reassure myself that any individuals to whom I granted visas would be honorably employed, and my hotelier friend had job vacancies. Hey, Preston!” He chuckled at his own little pun.
“But the girls were under age,” Tony objected. Tony, Tony!
“I knew that! However, they had no papers of any kind, and Davina swore she and Uda were twenty-one years old.” He shrugged. “I had two choices. Deny them asylum, which meant sending them back to turbulence and penury that could well result in their deaths. I do that every day, gentlemen, but it is never something I relish. My other choice was to send Davina and Uda to my friend with the hotel as bona fide workers.” His face screwed up. “I had such a strong feeling about Davina! That she’d manage, and one day be an asset to this country. Something I can’t say about many of the refugees who appear at my desk.”