Last Sunday, as I walking down the street from my apartment to the corner drugstore, a young guy and an old woman approached me and put a Sprint cameraphone in my face.
The young man said,
"Have you seen this woman? She's my sister and she's missing."
The old woman started to say something in a broken mix of English and Greek, but the young man cut her off.
I answered with an honest "no", though I've got a typical Asperger's inability to remember faces outside of context. Once in college I introduced myself to a girl in my dorm as she sat in one of the of lounge chairs- we chatted it up for a few minutes- and then I returned, and because she had changed chairs, I went and introduced myself again.

"You live in that red building right," the man said, pointing to the two story brick building that I've been renting a one bedroom in for the last 4 years.
"Yes."
"We think that's where they're hiding her."
Now I know the apartment and I know the eccentricites of the family that owned it- in particular a long stream of close, contentious relationships with various neighborhood kids of indeterminate ethnicity who seemed to be perpetually on the stoop, hanging out at all hours. I don't exchange more than a few words with them, and both of us seem to like it that way- our main interaction is them protecting me from "Nana," the building's friendly, but perhaps too aggressively friendly pit bull that they are convinced I am deathly afraid of. I don't particularly like Nana (she's clumsy and ill-trained and strikes me as sort of the sort of dog that could do a lot of damage unintentionally- she has a habit of jumping up on people and landing on the wrong body parts), but I'm not afraid of her, and there's little more humiliating than being protected from canine attack by a twelve year old girl.
I'm sorry, I've lost the thread of the story- you must forgive my rambling. At any rate, my landlords were eccentric, but they didn't seem like kidnappers- and neither did the one other tenant in the building. Something about the statement bothered me, so I simply said I didn't know the woman and went on my way to the convenience store. When I came back, I found the old woman and the young guy staring at me and at the apartment from a stoop across the street.

I found the whole distressing, but a tad fishy. Why were they asking me? Were they trying to scam me in some way- I asked a few friends about the matter, and they remarked that I did the right thing by not getting involved (though it made me like one of Kitty Genoverse's neighbors)- it sounded vaguely similar to a scam to get into people's apartment buildings that I'd seen warnings about a year ago. Phil Nugent suggested that I show them how camera phones could also be used to call 911 if they felt she was in danger, something they implied but didn't say outright. I decided eventually to call the police myself, and after and a minute and thirty seconds of no response (cops don't respond quickly to non emergency calls on a Sunday Afternoon) I was connected with an officier who cut me off midway through my recounting of the events with an exact description of the young man and the old woman. They had been going around the neighborhood doing this for several weeks- and no they weren't part of any scam, but the girl had left her home voluntariliy, and didn't want to see them. They have apparently approached a number of buildings with similar accusations,but other than that are quite harmless, just distressed. I was glad that I stayed out of it- though it would be a great beginning for a cheap hitchockian thriller-there's a diviision between the heavily interconnected families who rent out the buildings in the neighborhood, and have deep roots here- (my landlord once bragged to one of the stoop girls that he could identify the location of any building in Astoria just by see the stoop- and proceeded to prove that on an array of camera phone pictures the girls produced.) and the various yuppies intruding and gentrifying the area.

Speaking of camera phones and intrigue- I finally have photographic proof of the clowns who show up occaisionally on my block. These are literal men in clown costumes, complete with big shoes, face paint, and brightly colored outfits, and they always look vaguely pissed off- like Bill Murray at the beginning of Quick Change. I don't know if they're professional party clowns, (in which case, why are their costumes so dirty?) or something else- but I at least can prove to people they exist. Photo will be posted by tonight.