(Based
on an article in the Toronto Sun, April 2008)
My
name is Rachel Smith. I grew to know Nicolette
Astoia (also known as Nicky) and became one of her best friends when she first
arrived in Canada at the age of 28. I
loved Nicky like a sister, we were so close.
Nicky was a woman who loved the attention of men, especially if they
were cute, sexy, smart, hard to get, and there were plenty of them around. This was a well-known fact to all whom she
considered her friends.
When
she met Antonio, a through-and-through Italian stud, she became instantly
attracted to his dark good looks and charming personality and she began dating
him. The fact that he was happily
married with three young kids at home didn’t bother Nicky at all, at first. For his part, when Antonio (also known as
Tony) first laid eyes on Nicky, he knew she would be his and only his. Having a loving family already also didn’t
bother Tony in the least. He had always
gotten his way with the opposite sex and was determined to have Nicky as his
very own woman.
All
was going well with the pair when she met Andrei, a very handsome Romanian in a
bar in downtown Montreal. Being Romanian
herself, she liked Andrei a lot because they were so compatible and had a lot
in common. She also found that he was very
unlike Tony in terms of his personality and that was appealing to her, as well,
and they began to have a secret, torrid affair behind Tony’s back.
Andrei,
likewise, didn’t know anything about Tony in Nicky’s life because Nicky didn’t
bother telling him. After all, why rock
the boat? She knew that Tony did not
respond well to good looking male competition.
In fact, Nicky was certain that Tony was far too possessive of her to
ever want to share her with any other man.
So, on purpose, Nicky did not mention anything to Tony about Andrei’s
entrance into her life. She felt it was
better that Tony remain unaware of Andrei’s existence. Things went on this way for about three
months.
I was
starting to get worried about Nicky, with all the subterfuge going on, but I also
knew that she was a survivor and would be alright. She was just that kind of person. Nicky, besides wanting endless attention from
attractive men, meanwhile, had her own career to worry about. She had been a bona fide doctor in Romania
before coming to Canada. A year ago, she
had immigrated to Montreal (based on the sponsorship of her now-ex-fiancé,
Fredric) and had intended to work on re-qualifying as a doctor here in Canada.
Her
parents and two sisters, still back in Romania, were concerned about her too,
especially when she wrote to them, telling them about her two new
boyfriends. She made these boyfriends
sound like very casual relationships. Knowing
how badly her family might react to the news, she had purposely left out the
fact that Tony was married. Tony had
taken on the sponsorship role in Nicky’s life because he was very well off, and
was willing to at least partially support her since she was no longer being supported
by Fredric. Nicky fully expected that
she would eventually re-qualify as a doctor in Canada, so she was not worried
about being supported by Tony for the moment.
Besides, she had always intended to work and earn a living in any way
that she could.
But,
as luck would have it, hard times fell upon her and she suddenly needed money
badly. Unfortunately, Tony was very
frugal and stingy whenever it came to giving Nicky money, so she began looking
for a job as a waitress. What she found
instead was a job as an exotic dancer (a.k.a. stripper) in a men’s night club
called “The Roxy”. She kept telling
herself and her ‘gal pals’ that this was only a temporary part-time job, but
instead of working only part-time, she became a full-time stripper.
This was
not such a surprising development since Nicky was a very beautiful woman, with
long, luxuriant, golden blonde hair, deep blue eyes and ruby-red lips. She was not a trashy sort of woman however;
she was a classy woman that men admired and wanted to be seen with. It was actually easier and more convenient,
for Tony and his male friends to believe that Nicky was an actual stripper
rather than a doctor who was serious about her medical career. Or maybe, Tony just wanted to believe that Nicky
was in fact, a stripper, and nothing more.
Of course, if his wife, Celeste, were ever to do a similar type of job,
he would have had an epileptic fit and hung her up by her ‘short-and-curlies’. Men had to maintain their public standards,
after all. A wife and a girlfriend had
to be treated as two very separate things in a man’s life and he had to be able
to keep it that way.
Meanwhile,
Nicky’s family in Romania and her friends here, like me, in Montreal were
becoming increasingly worried about her because Andrei was still such a big
part of Nicky’s life, yet, he still knew nothing about her life as an exotic
dancer or about her relationship with Tony.
In fact, it was a minor miracle that he remained unaware of these
things. Andrei, though he actively hid a
darker aspect of his personality from Nicky, was a potentially very dangerous
character whenever he became angry or upset.
Nicky’s sister, Antoinette, who had met Andrei briefly on a short visit
to Montreal to see Nicky recently, suspected that Andrei was not the kind of
man who dealt well with stress in his life.
Having met him briefly myself, I could attest to this fact. Andrei had his own ‘issues’ to deal with, but
these issues were mostly regarding his cohorts with whom he was in
business.
They knew
all about Andrei’s ongoing affair with Nicky, but could not mention knowing
this fact to Andrei, for fear of upsetting him.
Andrei had a very bad reputation for beating up people who delivered any
kind of ‘bad news’ to him, which also included things that other people weren’t
supposed to know anything about. In
addition, Andrei’s associates were sure that if Nicky’s activities at the Roxy
and her relationship with Tony became known to Andrei, he might very well
explode in rage and take it out on the person nearest to him. Things went on like this for another three
months.
Finally,
Nicky decided that she had to leave Tony.
All of us, who were close to Nicky, thought that she was far too good
for Tony anyway, and I agreed. She was
tired of always having to play ‘second fiddle’ to his wife and kids. But, more to the point, she was terrified
that he might find out somehow about her affair with Andrei and take it out on
her violently. She felt that Tony was
extremely likely to do something violent to her rather than accept defeat at
the hands of another man who was competing for his woman.
So,
as a result, one night, she took off for Sudbury, Ontario at 2 am, fearful of a
horrible confrontation with Tony. She
was very much afraid that Tony would track her down and make her pay dearly for
betraying him with another man and then leaving him. But, she had a strong will to survive and her
instincts told her that leaving Tony was essential to her physical and
emotional health.
However,
she still wanted to be with Andrei and missed him very much when she couldn’t
see him. As far as I know, she saw him
briefly just before leaving Montreal and that was the last time she was seen by
anyone, us girls included. After she
left for Sudbury, none of her friends ever heard from, or saw, her again. Another close girlfriend, Anastasia (a.k.a.
Ana), made numerous inquiries regarding her whereabouts, but to no avail. Nicky was nowhere to be found. Ana thought that Tony had finally caught up
with Nicky and had either killed her or hurt her badly.
No
one had seen or heard from Nicky in the last couple of months since she had
left Montreal. No one knew whether she
was alive or dead. The only evidence of
her that was left behind was found on frozen Lake Ramsey in Sudbury in mid-January
the following winter. Her red cashmere
scarf and a leather glove were found by police on the ice near the north
shore. Her new red Mazda-3 was found
parked close by the shore with the keys still in the ignition. A note in her handwriting, addressed to
Andrei, and her cell phone, were both found on the front seat of her car.
This
beautiful Romanian woman, a talented doctor who had been forced to work as an
exotic dancer to survive until she could become a doctor again, had completely
disappeared. Nobody knew where she had
gone or whether she was still alive – no one except her killer, that is. Now, it would be up to the police and private
investigators (hired by her friends) to find out what had happened to this most
beautiful, sexy and talented woman.
Could
she have changed her identity and become someone else? If so, she would have had to make major
changes to her face and hair because she was not a woman that people could
easily forget. Could she have returned
to Europe anonymously somewhere, not informing her family of this fact? If that were true, then Interpol would
probably have her picture and pertinent facts circulating around and would be
trying to track her whereabouts there. Could
she have even committed suicide? This
did not seem at all to be a likely option, since she was not depressed and did
not believe that suicide was a solution to anything.
In
the absence of any other plausible explanation, it was becoming obvious that
she had met with an untimely death by the hand of another, and that her body
had been cleverly hidden away where no one would ever find it. Only time would tell if Nicky’s body would
ever be found and restored to her family, if, indeed she had been murdered. Until then, her whereabouts would remain a
mystery to all who had known and loved her during her all-too-brief stay in
Canada.
published by Authorhouse, copyright 2011, Anne Shier. All rights reserved.
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