POLONAISEFor 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. He
