“My friends—my fellow Americans—we do not have sufficient resources or sufficient manpower—even as agencies of the federal government—to make even a dent in the horrors of this new slave trade. No country alone or even in combination can eliminate this horrific scourge on civilization that organized crime is perpetrating. We must have a public and private cooperation and will power. We are met here tonight to ask you to help us by contributing as generously as you can to making our efforts effective. Staff people are now passing out brochures detailing the activities of involved organizations and pledge cards. Please be generous.”
Crutchfield resumes his seat and the Deputy Director of UNODC [United Nations Office on Drug and Crime] takes the podium.
“UNODC manages the United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Human Trafficking—especially women and children. The fund was launched in 2010 by then Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The Trust Fund supports the provision of on-the-ground humanitarian, legal, and financial aid to victims of trafficking, and provides members of the public an avenue through which they can donate to this important cause. I echo my counterpart tonight—Director Crutchfield—in my appeal for your help. As the only United Nations entity focusing on the criminal justice element of these crimes, the work that UNODC does to combat human trafficking and the smuggling of migrants is supported by the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols on trafficking in persons and migrant smuggling. And as fine and generous as the United Nations is, we need more help.
“It is the goal of my office to make the United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, an early and persevering success. While the best-known form of human trafficking is for the purpose of sexual exploitation, hundreds of thousands of victims are also trafficked for forced labor, domestic servitude, child begging, or the removal of their organs. Cases are seen in all parts of the world, and victims are targeted irrespective of gender, age, or background, although, of course, the poor and defenseless are most often targeted. Children are trafficked from Eastern to Western Europe to be used for begging or as pickpockets; young girls from Africa are deceived with promises of modeling, acting, or au pair jobs. But they find themselves trapped in a world of sexual and pornographic exploitation or in other servitude from which they cannot escape.
“Again, victims of trafficking are most often enslaved for vile sexual purposes, but they are also found in kitchens; cleaning guest houses, restaurants, and bars; or toiling in subhuman agricultural slavery. Tourism infrastructure creates markets for forced and exploitative begging, street hawking, prostitution, and other illegal activities. Children—especially those young enough to be virgins—are usually trafficked from diverse countries to the Gulf States—in particular Saudi Arabia—where virginity has a premium. And once robbed of virginity, the child may service dozens of men a day. Children are also kidnapped or sold by their parents from rural areas to urban centers for forced labor or sexual exploitation. Migrants smuggled from the Horn of Africa rely on the assistance of criminal networks to enter Yemen. They are all vulnerable to being robbed and exploited. And when they arrive in Yemen, they are very vulnerable to becoming victims of TiP [Trafficking in Persons] with all of the attendant evils and crimes.
“We in the United Nations worry about the increase in the number of girl victims who now make up two-thirds of all trafficked children. Girls now constitute fifteen to twenty percent of the total number of all detected victims—including adults—whereas boys comprise about ten percent. Perhaps our worst fears should be for the large percent of children held in captivity who are never detected. This observation is based on carefully gathered data supplied by 132 countries. The 2020 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons released by UNODC has revealed that the percent of all victims Chapter Two of human trafficking officially detected globally has been increasing by seven to ten percent a year.”
Devon Carlisle is walking to the podium to report on the role of philanthropists and humanitarians in combatting the massive worldwide problem when two cell phones rang. The honorees, Detective Sergeant Mary Margaret MacLeese and Detective First Grade Martin Redworth, rise from their seats grim-faced and exit the hall without explanation.
Chapter Three
May 11–12, 2020, all night
The Carroll Street Bridge is one of seven bridges that cross the Gowanus Canal in Red Hook. Once, the canal and the parallel and right angle streets constituted a busy cargo transportation hub; the canal is now recognized as one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States. With the high level of development in the Gowanus watershed area, excessive nitrates and pathogens are constantly flowing into the canal, along with sewage from two dozen cities, further depleting the oxygen and creating breeding grounds for the pathogens responsible for the canal’s odor. With the canal’s wooden and concrete embankments, the strong tides of fresh diurnal doses of oxygenated water from New York Harbor are barred from flowing into the 1.8 mile long channel. Regular water quality studies have found the concentration of oxygen in the canal to be just 1.5 parts per million, well below the minimum 4 parts per million needed to sustain life. The greasy and murky opaqueness of the Gowanus water is so dense that it obstructs sunlight to one-third of the six feet needed for even aquatic plant growth. No plant growth guarantees no fish life. No fish life guarantees no bird life. The Gowanus Canal is a wretched failure as waterways go, and it has a reputation of being used as a Cosa Nostra burial site.
Rising gas bubbles betray the decomposition of sewage sludge that on a warm, sultry evening like the one that brings the two senior NYPD detectives to do their sworn duty, produces the canal’s notable mixed odoriferous source ripe stench. The sludgy depths of the canal conceal the remnants of the many years of its industrial past—unmitigated noxious dumping of cement, oil, mercury, lead, PCBs, coal tar, and other contaminants. In 1951, with the opening of the elevated Gowanus Expressway over the waterway, easy access for trucks and cars catalyzed industry slightly; but with 150,000 vehicles passing overhead each day, the expressway also deposits tons of toxic emissions into the air and down into the water beneath. The porridge dense pollution sits in the minimal flow, leaching off everything from toxic metals to abandoned drug stashes to human body parts.
Both Mary Margaret MacLeese and Martin Redworth think of themselves as hardened—seen it all, smelled it all, and have had some very sketchy things flash up in their faces. Nonetheless, they look pale and very ill at ease as they approach the crime scene proper bustling with cops who seem to have purpose.
Mary Margaret and Martin hold their composure enough to avoid humiliating themselves until one of the sewer workers hands Martin a crooked pole.
“Fish that one out,” the man says. “I got another one off to the side.”
Martin emits a groan and wants to run away—not to anywhere, just away. But he stands his ground, plants his two big feet wide apart on that ground, and stretches out the handle of the shepherd’s crook he has been given to get some distance and some purchase. He is doing fine. Then he catches what he thinks is a ghostly white arm and begins to move it to the east side of the canal where he is standing. It is not fast work, but steady; and Martin is feeling better about himself. Mary Margaret walks up to her partner and puts a generous clot of Mentholatum ointment under his nose.
The smell is strong and biting, but it serves to overwhelm the olfactory nerves to damp down the stench and has a minor smelling salt effect to wake a fainter up. He thinks he can make it now. Mary Margaret is a big strong girl; she finds her own shepherd’s hook and gets a solid purchase around the poor victim’s neck. Together the detectives work their newfound corpse to the edge of the canal.
As it so happens, Mary Margaret does not know her own strength, and she pulls the body’s head off. She turns green and begins to make retching noises.
“Don’t you go and puk
e, partner. I won’t hold up from that. Suck it up, girl!”
The vomit is slowly burning its way up her esophagus, and the smells from the corpses are becoming more toxic every second. He has to get the guy out of the sewage-laden—barely flowing—water before Mary Margaret faints and falls in and takes the corpse in with her. That would be the unkindest cut of all. Martin feels an escalating urgency to get the corpse out; so, he puts his back into his pull and moves the corpse up to the top of the canal. When Mary Margaret sees what he has accomplished, she reaches her limit and slides gracefully and noiselessly into the issue of 200,000 toilets. Luckily, she goes in feet first. It is all over for Martin as well, because he can see what she sees. His hook is deeply embedded deep in the center of the mid-abdomen of a corpse. He is pulling on small intestine, and guts spill out onto the ground—maybe fifty to sixty feet of them. Martin’s last conscious thought is that he has accidentally discovered the Creature from the Black Lagoon. One ME rescues Mary Margaret from a fate worse than death, and another hooks Martin with the shepherd’s hook Martin has been using on the now eviscerated corpse. When Martin slides up on the bank until he is lying supine beside the corpse—which has obviously been caught with his hook—he realizes that he is lying by the man’s slimy guts. And not just by them; he is on them. He faints again.
When the two much-chastened veteran detectives come to their senses, they find themselves to be the objects of near hysterical merriment. Had either one of them been able to find his or her gun in among the guts and other slimy things, there would have been a serious number of newly deads in that canal full of offal. As it is, all they can do is slip and slide up the bank and drag their out-of-this-world stench to where some angels have a crime scene tent shower up and going. They strip, heedless of their nudity, and rush into the shower together. The same photographer who got such great shots of them floundering among the body parts and writhing flesheating beetles is able to get viral YouTube videos of the two totally immodest and don’t-care cops.
Later that night, when the world’s worst job is done, Mary Margaret and Martin find the headquarters’ walls decorated floor to ceiling with very clear photographs. They do not even have the strength to pull the pix off the walls, let alone make a formal complaint about sexual harassment. In fact, Mary Margaret looks sadly at the decorated wall and to every cop Chapter Three and secretary in the squad room. She begins to laugh hysterically like the Mad Woman of Chaillot. That bit of buffoonery is contagious; and in no time, no one can stand up. Women have to rush to the bathroom, and the two detectives have made two dozen friends.
The most amusing thing about that exercise—if mass murder can ever be regarded as humorous other than gallows humor—is that the bodies in Gowanus Canal are not why the two elite detectives are summoned to the scene. A hundred feet further along the street is an entirely separate crime scene. Mary Margaret and Martin are late in arriving and encounter a moderately put out assistant chief of detectives. After explaining their involvement in the body dump site in the canal, he is mollified and proceeds to fill in what has gone on for the detectives who will take over the lead.
“Officer Danny O’Reilly drove up behind the van you see there. He thinks it is off somehow that the big van was driving along this narrow road in the middle of the night; so, he drives to the side of the van to pass and get the driver’s attention. He hears unmistakable noises of people banging on the side of the van and yelling. He pulls the truck over and asks the driver to get out. The guy does as he is told. Then O’Reilly asks him to open the back doors of the van. The guy says he doesn’t understand what the fuss is about; he just has some horses in the back. O’Reilly didn’t just fall off the turnip truck; so, he asks the driver how come his horses can talk. The guy shrugs and agrees to open the doors.
“O’Reilly moves the driver aside and takes a look inside. As he does, the world’s most terrible smell blows out at him. He says it must be what hell smells like—a mixture of human excrement, urine, BO, halitosis, and dead bodies—lots of dead bodies. It turns out that some of the bodies have been Wednesday’s Child dead for almost a week. Some eighty-six illegal migrants have been dead there for a while in that van. They all suffocated or died of dehydration or starvation. Their bodies are lined over there away from the canal because nobody can stand to be near the stench coming from that flowing cesspool. The truck was smuggling them along what we found out is one of the most important human trafficking routes in the world.
“A hundred twenty people were packed into a container measuring twenty-six feet by nine feet. The thirty-four survivors are all in bad shape. They are seriously ill from dehydration and lack of oxygen.”
“Where’s the driver?” Martin asks.
“As soon as the driver opens the doors of the vehicle, he hightails it out of there while O’Reilly has himself a good hard puke. Who knows where the driver went? Somewhere out there in the trash pile that the gentry call Red Hook. It didn’t take him half a minute to know what had happened. We got to talk to a few survivors before the buses came to take them to the hospitals in the area. They say they banged on the walls of the container for days to tell the driver they were dying, but he told them to shut up because cops would hear them when they cross through checkpoints.”
“Jeez, Chief, it buggers up my mind to think that those monsters could force people into such a cramped space. Why didn’t they fight back?”
“Because they paid to be smuggled, and the driver made them believe that this was just a temporary inconvenience. They never got out into air and never got any food or water for the better part of a week.”
“Do you mean that they actually consented to this kind of treatment?” Martin asks incredulously.
“Not really,” Chief Morgan says. “Their consent to be smuggled—and paying a premium to be smuggled—does not mean that they have necessarily consented to the treatment they received throughout the process. These poor but hardworking migrants are vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation, and their lives are often put at risk. Many of them have been through it more than once only to be deported back to their native countries. Many of them have relatives who didn’t survive their attempts. Literally, thousands of smuggled migrants have suffocated in containers, died of dehydration and starvation in deserts, drowned at sea, or were murdered by the monsters who run the trade in human beings. The survivors told us sickening stuff; they were crammed into windowless storage spaces—the last of which was this putrid van—forced to squat in urine, seawater, feces, and vomit. They were deprived of food and water and even the chance to catch some fresh air. At sea, people die and their bodies are discarded like so much trash. On land—if the survivors are lucky—the corpses get thrown out on the roadside. The poor smucks in this van did not even get that much. They had to sit right there with bodies of friends who died upwards of a week ago and quickly decomposed in the heat and humid dank air created by a hundred and twenty sweating bodies.
“They started banging on the walls of the van about five days ago. Some of them went nuts and began screaming. All of the children and the really old ones died several days ago. It was hell on earth. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my twenty years on the job. I’ll never stop having nightmares. Mary Margaret and Martin, this is your only case until we catch the SOBs that run this rotten business. I don’t envy you for this assignment, but you are our two best dicks. Get them!”
Chapter Four
May 13, 2020
The public is invited to join the boys and girls in the orphanage for a celebration of the Holy Day of Obligation—the Assumption of Mary, Advent 2020. Every child has prepared a notebook of his or her drawings of the saints and of what they envision a family to be like.
The Wednesday’s Children are decked out in their Sunday finest and carefully coached to smile constantly, to be very polite, and to be helpful. They are instructed to ask the visitors about themselves and to avoid talking overmuch about themselves as orphans. They are sternly fo
rbidden by the nurses to tell any visitor about the less-than-pious circumstances of their births or how they came to live in the orphanage.
Most of the visitors and guests come from the nearby neighborhoods of Red Hook. Red Hook is an area of South Brooklyn where only twenty-seven percent of the people speak English a little or even not at all. This section of Greater New York is regularly described as one of the worst neighbor-hoods in the entire United States. It is also known as “the crack capital of America.” A week before the gala celebration at the orphanage, the principal of one of the public schools was killed in the crossfire of a drug-related shootout while looking for a pupil who had left his school without permission and had wandered into the mean streets.
Red Hook is the site of the Red Hook Houses—the largest public housing development in Brooklyn—which accommodates more than 6,000 residents crowded into small, poorly maintained apartments. The 1930s were the nadir for the neighborhood. The location now occupied by the Red Hook Houses was the site of a shack city for the homeless—called a “Hooverville”—in honor of the despised U.S. president at that time. Red Hook as a whole and the Red Hook Houses in particular are ringed by a nearly impenetrable barrier of slums. No child or woman would ever consider stepping out of one of the project buildings in the dark; and police do not come in the night except in the direst of emergencies; and then only with a small army of officers to watch each other’s backs.
Among the visitors to the orphanage is a small group of well-dressed Asians and Eastern Europeans. As they maneuver around among the orphans and the nuns, it is apparent that all of them defer to a small, intense Chinese woman of indeterminate age who introduces herself as “Mrs. Chang.”
“What a charming group of children, Sister,” Mrs. Chang says after introductions are made. “We in the Carroll Gardens Saint Mary’s Star of the Sea Church on Court Street are much impressed and eager to help in your wonderful work. As you are no doubt aware, Carroll Gardens is heavily Irish; and our attendance at Saint Mary’s is suspect because of our non-Caucasian and Eastern European ethnicity. We hope to make friends and to become a welcome part of the neighborhood. We have been talking among ourselves and think a contribution to your Wednesday’s Child project would be a good way to get started.”
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