"Polonaise"

For the past hour Basia Skotarczak had sat so still she could have passed for dead.  Which was precisely what Warsaw crime boss Michal "the Stallion" Mroczkowski wanted Basia to be.

What FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd wanted was to get Basia moving.  She skirted the scanty remains of a gargantuan room service breakfast, plucked a pair of black hightops from beneath the luggage rack holding Basia's suitcase and crossed the hotel's VIP suite to place the shoes beside the younger woman's long, bony feet.  Basia must've been waiting for her cue.  She had a shoe on her right foot and was cinching up the laces as Dawna finished saying, "Time for us to head out."

The trial of the Polish gangster was in its second week and prosecutors were putting Basia on the stand in forty minutes.  Her testimony would mean a permanent end to freedom for Mroczkowski, Basia's ex-boyfriend, the ruthless but runty head of a mafioski family.  He was called "the Stallion" only to his pockmarked face.  Behind his back everyone, including Basia--especially Basia--referred to him as "Michalek Malenstwo"--Mike the Midget.  He'd claimed Basia as his woman four years before, right after her twin brother Tomasz recruited her to ferry stolen cars from the Baltic seaport of Gdansk to Terespol on the Belarus border.

Sixteen years old then, she was already huge, only thirty pounds and three inches short of her current weight of two hundred and thirty, height of six-foot-five.  Entranced, Mroczkowski had brought Basia into the Warsaw headquarters where he and his lieutenants ran the organization.  And when he wasn't enjoying Basia's body, he was doing his business in front of her, giving orders to Witek and Zigmunt and the rest of his thugs as if Basia's being a foot-and-a-half taller than him put her out of earshot.  Or maybe he misread the big woman's deliberate self-effacement --and her talent for prolonged silent immobility --as evidence of stupidity.

He'd made an even bigger mistake last spring, ordering the execution of Basia's brother without first blowing Basia away.

She'd fled to the American embassy and asked for asylum.  No way Basia qualified--political persecution wasn't her problem.  But the savvy Consul General passed Basia to the LegAtt, the FBI agent based at the embassy.  And the LegAtt saw gold.  The FBI had helped the Polish cops set up their Organized Crime Strike Force and was furnishing forensic assistance and use of the Federal Witness Protection Program.  Testify against Mroczkowski, the LegAtt and his pals told Basia, and we'll send you to live in the U.S., new identity, disguising surgery, the whole nine yards.

First time Dawna saw Basia, she thought the idea was crazy.  How'd they plan to disguise this girl?  By cutting six inches off her femurs?

Read the complete story in the September 2001 issue of ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE.