Tabula Rasa

Chapter 60

"When I asked for a favour, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind," Jessica said in her wry voice as the two of them crouched behind a pickup truck.

"I know," Calina replied, as she finished typing out her message to Matt. "But I told you - I need to do this."

Jessica leaned over to read the text on her phone and shook her head. "'Fighting bad guys, be home later.' Seriously? You couldn't have gone with 'Out for cocktails' or 'Getting my nails done'?"

"He knows I'm with you, so he'd never have bought that. Besides, I don't lie to Matt anymore."

"You could have just not said anything. He's going to kill me - this was supposed to be a quick and easy interpreter gig."

That's how it had started. After leaving Matt's firm, Jessica had led Calina to her office, where a woman was huddled in the corner of a battered couch. She looked to be in her late 60s or early 70s, and was swallowed up in a thick woollen coat that looked two sizes too big. Fingerless gloves covered her hands, which clutched a bent and twisted photograph.

"Who is she?" Calina had whispered to Jessica, shrugging out of her jacket.

"No clue. She arrived an hour ago, holding this." Jessica showed her a scrap of newspaper which contained an advert for her PI business. Scrawled next to it, in thick black ink, were the words:

Pleese help her.

"Someone sent her my way, but I can't get anything out of her except her name: Ema. I dialled up an interpreter service but she freaked out and tried to bolt. I figure she's undocumented and scared shitless of the authorities. She sounds like she's speaking Russian, so I thought you could help instead."

It wasn't Russian the woman spoke, but Rusyn, a dialect specific to certain parts of eastern and central Europe, including Slovakia, where the woman was from. It wasn't a language Calina was fluent in, but it was close enough to Ukranian and Russian that she was managing.

The woman also wasn't called Ema - that was the name of her missing granddaughter.

"When did you last see Ema?" Calina asked, enunciating each word slowly in the foreign language.

The woman broke down into quiet sobs as she answered. Calina listened carefully to the woman's pained response, and tried to control her own emotions in the face of such obvious fear and worry.

"What did she say?" Jessica asked when the woman eventually finished talking. She was leaning against her desk, arms folded, a scowl on her face.

"Ema has been missing a week. Its completely out of character, and Nela here,"-Calina patted the older woman's back as she continued to cry-" is worried sick. But she can't go to the police. You were right, they're here illegally."

Jessica grabbed a notebook off her desk and started scribbling. "Okay. I need info - where this Ema works, friends, boyfriends, hobbies. Get me everything you can."

Calina nodded and got to work. She coaxed Nela into telling her as much as she knew, interspersing her barrage of questions with platitudes that she wasn't sure she believed in:

It would be okay.

They'd find her granddaughter

They'd bring her home safely.

She knew it was wrong to make false promises, but she couldn't help it. She felt like she needed to say something. She wasn't used to dealing with a distraught relative. Someone so at the end of their rope they would risk turning to a stranger for help. Someone who looked up at her with watery, beseeching eyes and begged her to find her beloved vnúčka.