Disappeared

by Colin Falconer

  The twins were crying, more urgently now. Keep calm, Gabriella. She got up and warmed their bottles in the kitchen. Eva had been sick with a fever, and the doctor had prescribed some medicine to bring down her temperature and help her sleep. She mixed a few drops in her bottle and laid her down in her cot. Within minutes she was asleep again. It was Simone, as usual, the fussy one, who would not settle.

  Gabriella sat with her on the sofa, gentling her back to sleep.

  Try not to think about Reuben. Try not to think about what he's done.

  She heard the scream of brakes in the street below. Simone woke up and started crying again.

  “Shh, baby, shhh,” Gabriella crooned to her.

  She heard the crack of plastic explosive. They had blown out the lock on the building's security door. It made her start and Simone thrashed her arms and legs in fright.

  She rushed to the window. There were two cars slewed across the street, their headlights on. Ford Falcons, standard issue for the police. An armed man was lounging on the bonnet of one of the cars.

  She felt a cold stab of fear. No, they must have come for someone else.

  She heard boots on the stairs.

  She looked at the clock. Ten past three.

  Someone was hammering on the door. Simone screamed even louder. Gabriella snatched up the telephone, her hands shaking.

  ***

  Reuben woke from a black sleep. A telephone was ringing somewhere in the house. Carmen groaned and rolled out of bed. He heard her stumble into the other room and grope for the receiver in the dark.

  Reuben heard her say, “Shit,” very softly, and then, to him: “It's Gabriella.”

  “What?” Reuben turned on the bedside lamp. It took a moment for him to remember where he was.

  Por Dios. Look at the time!

  “It's Gabriella!' Carmen repeated, her voice shrill.

  Gabriella?

  He threw himself out of bed, snatched the receiver out of her hand. He could hear one of the twins screaming in the background. “Gabriella?”

  “Reuben! The police are here!'

  He rubbed a hand across his face. Perhaps he was dreaming this. “What?”

  He heard shouts and a loud crash in the background, like someone was trying to kick in the door.

  The line went dead.

  Chapter 22

  THERE WERE THREE men in the patota, the arresting squad. They were armed with automatic pistols and wore green army-issue bullet-proof vests underneath their civilian clothes. Once inside the apartment they made little noise. One of them came towards her, his pistol held in front of his face. He had a moustache and wore a black zippered jacket. “We are looking for Reuben Altman.”

  Gabriella could not find her voice.

  “Where is he?”

  “He's not here,” she managed.

  The man nodded to his colleagues. One of them checked the bedroom, the study, the nursery. She heard him throwing open doors. The other ran into the kitchen and kicked open the French doors that led onto the balcony.

  Simone was screaming in her arms, red-faced. But Gabriella's thoughts were for Eva. Her instinct was to run and snatch her out of her cot, to protect her. But a voice in her head told her to do nothing: she had given Eva the sedative just a little while ago, it was possible she might sleep through this. Perhaps they would notice her. If she was arrested, where would Eva be safer? Here, or in some police cell?

  One of the gunmen emerged from the bathroom. “He's not here.”

  The other came in from the balcony, also shaking his head.

  The man with the moustache jerked his head in her direction. One of the men threw a hood over her face, the other snatched Simone out of her arms. Gabriella screamed. Her wrists were cuffed behind her back and they pushed her towards the door.

  “Simone!'

  One of the soldiers drove a fist into her stomach and after that she stopped screaming; it was a struggle just to breathe. They dragged her down the stairs and bundled her into a car.

  ***

  Stephen Barrington was woken by a loud explosion. He jumped out of bed and went to the window. “What is it, Stephen?” his wife said.

  He slipped on a dressing gown. “There's two cars in the street. There's a man standing beside one of them. I think he's got a gun.”

  They heard heavy boots on the stairs and Stephen experienced a thrill of fear. He had heard about the death squads, the disappearances. But that was in another Argentina, a long way from Recoleta. Or so he had thought.

  Someone was kicking in a door on the other side of the landing. Mercedes gasped and reached out for him. Stephen came back to the bed and put an arm around her shoulders. They heard the sounds of the struggle.

  “It's the Altman's,” he said. I should go out there, he thought. I should go and help them. He heard Gabriella scream and instinctively got to his feet.

  Mercedes clutched at his arm, pulled him back onto the bed. “Don't go out there.”

  “We have to do something.” But now he found he could not move.

  “There's nothing you can do. They have guns. They'll take you too!'

  Luca was crying in the next room. Stephen went to fetch him, brought him back to their bed. “They have young children,” he said.

  “So do we.”

  It was over, as suddenly as it had begun. He heard shouts from down in the street, went back to the window, saw one of the cars drive away. Another man tossed two green plastic bags into the back of the other Falcon. Then it, too, sped off.

  Mercedes closed her eyes and murmured a silent prayer to the Virgin. Luca was still crying, softly, in the bed.

  “I'm going to see what's happened.”

  “Stephen!'

  “I'll be right back.”

  The door to the Altman apartment hung on its hinges. All the lights were on. The telephone had been torn out of the wall but otherwise there were no signs of a struggle. Stephen looked for bloodstains, was grateful to find none.

  The master bedroom had been ransacked. The bedding lay on the floor, the wardrobe doors hung open, the closet drawers were upturned. They must have been looking for something.

  The study looked as if a bomb had gone off. They had ripped it apart. The desk drawers lay on the carpet along with every single file in the walnut three-drawer cabinet. But not one scrap of paper remained. Stephen supposed the contents were in the two plastic bags he had seen one of the men throw into the back of the Falcon.

  He went into the nursery. A pink rabbit gazed wonderingly back at him through the wooden bars of the cot, a mobile of zoo animals trembled a few inches from his face. Transfers of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck grinned from the pale blue walls.

  He was about to leave the room, but then he saw the blankets move.

  Por Dios!

  He reached into the cot and pulled back the pink rug. The infant had somehow wriggled under the covers. She was wearing a pink flannel jumpsuit and her cheeks were bright pink with fever, her hair damp and tousled. Her toothless mouth was slack, the rise and fall of her breathing barely discernible. Stephen stared, trying to comprehend the circumstances behind this discovery. How had she slept through all this?

  He picked her up, gently. He heard a noise behind him and turned around, startled. His wife stood grey-faced in the doorway.

  “Now what are we going to do?” he said.

  Chapter 23

  THE MEXICAN EMBASSY was on Arcos Street, a colonial building in the Spanish style with a modest garden in front. Police had been posted on the street corners. Reuben saw them and hung back in the shadows, waiting long, desperate hours for his chance. It was almost dawn when one of the guards slipped away to get a light for his cigarette, leaving his post for a moment. Reuben took off his shoes and sprinted across the street. He rang the bell by the wrought iron gate, dodging back into the shadows below the wall to avoid being seen.A guard swung open the gate and Reuben slipped inside.

  ***

  The room was lit by a
naked bulb hanging from a flex. Angeli stood beside the torture table, smoking a cigarette. “Gabriella Altman,” he said.

  Gabriella could not see his face, they had blindfolded her. “Where's ... Simone?” she said. Her lip was cracked, where one of the men had hit her, and watery blood oozed down her chin. “Where is ... my baby?”

  Best for now, he thought, to let her wonder. Perhaps later, if she proved stubborn, they might use the infant as a bargaining chip. “Where is your husband?”

  “I don't ... know ... where he is.”

  Angeli sighed. “Señora Altman, I am not a brutal man, not a monster. This situation gives me no pleasure. Do not make me hurt you. Just tell me where your husband is.”

  She tried to spit at him but her tongue was too swollen. The spit dribbled from her lips and ran down her neck.

  He took a fistful of her hair and lifted her head from the table. “Now, I want you to listen to me, Gabriella Altman. We want your husband, not you. Tell us where he is and all this can be over.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Reuben Altman has committed serious crimes against the state. He is part of a Zionist conspiracy against Argentina. Your country. In such circumstances you no longer owe him the loyalties that a wife normally gives to a husband. Do you understand? Now then, let me ask you again, where is he?”

  Gabriella whimpered some reply.

  “I didn't hear that, Seňora Altman.”

  “Where is ... my baby?”

  He let her head fall back onto the table. Somewhere down the corridor a man was screaming.

  There was another man in the room. His name was Turturro; he was tall and thin and he looked like a chemist. “Continue,” Angeli said to him and he walked out of the cell, slamming the heavy metal door behind him.

  Chapter 24

  “WE CANNOT KEEP HER HERE.”

  It was dawn. Mercedes stood by the picture window, holding the child. Behind her the skyline of Buenos Aires was silhouetted against a sky of fire and charcoal. Stephen was still in his dressing gown, pacing the room. Luca was finally asleep, tucked into their bed.

  “What else can we do? We must take care of her until one of the family comes for her.”

  “They may not even know she's here.”

  Stephen went to the cocktail cabinet and poured himself another brandy. His hands were shaking. He still could not quite believe what had happened. Buenos Aires was the most British city in all South America; the railways had been built by British engineers, its utilities developed with British expertise, its hinterlands opened up with the help of British business and British banks. For a time there had even been a thriving Welsh community in Patagonia. There was a store called Harrods on Florida! Now this. It was like having the Nazis in London.

  This sort of thing happened in Hitler's Germany, in Stalin's Russia. It seemed impossible that it was happening here, in a security apartment in an exclusive barrio of Buenos Aires. He had read about it of course in La Naçión and the Buenos Aires Herald, knew people who had had cousins or uncles abducted by unidentified men.

  But it had never seemed real until now.

  “What do you think has happened to the Altmans?” she asked him.

  “I don't know, perhaps they are just going to disappear - like all those people they write about in the Herald.”

  “This poor child.”

  “There must be relatives. Someone will come back for her today. We'll just have to keep a watch on the apartment.”

  “I'd better go out and buy some infant formula for her,” Mercedes said.

  Stephen decided to go back into the Altman apartment to fetch baby clothes, diapers, toys. He had only been back a short while when they heard men moving about on the landing. The police had come back.

  This time the Altman's home was systematically ransacked and everything of any possible value was looted. Stephen watched them from the window as they loaded the television and sound system into the boot of a green Ford Falcon. They took everything, even the contents of the medicine cabinet.

  All the rest of that day they waited for one of the Altman's family to show up. By mid-afternoon, when no one had come, Stephen went down to the lobby. The front door with its heavy wrought-iron security grille still hung on its hinges. The lock had been blown off with plastic explosives. He saw two men watching him from a car parked across the road.

  Just on evening the caretaker, a tall, hatchet-faced man in his late fifties, came to screw the hinges back on the door to apartment 401. A new security door appeared in the lobby. No one in the building ever mentioned the Altmans again. It was as if it had never happened.

  ***

  The entire day had been taken up with the Altman affair. His men had raided the Altman Group's offices in the banking district earlier that day, were still trying to piece together the maze of wire transfer records, corporate charter and loan documents and internal memos linking the Montoñeros with the Altman Financial group.

  Jacopo and Arturo Altmann and other members of the Altman family had been interrogated at various times during the day and it appeared that the information they had been given was correct and that these Jews had betrayed their adopted country. The Altman Group had interests in insurance, shipping and two refrigeration plants, as well as a forty per cent share in two estançions outside Córdoba and had even organised loans and credit facilities for a number of venture companies closely linked to the current military government.

  They had also handled almost twenty one million dollars raised through bank robberies or ransom demands by the Cuban-backed Monteñeros. Jacopo Altman had invested this money on their behalf in property in Miami and Tampa. Last month the Altman Group had transferred $142,000 in interest through a numbered account in the Banco de Guadalajara in the Cayman Islands to Havana where the Montoňeros had their headquarters. They had used these funds to buy weapons.

  Angeli looked at his watch. It was late and he was tired. He had spent the last sixteen hours working on the case. It was only then, as he was looking through his files, that he noticed something very interesting about Gabriella Altmann. An idea occurred to him; he wondered that it had not occurred to him before. He supposed he had been too pre-occupied with the financial intricacies of this Altman affair, the way a man can become too engrossed in a crossword puzzle on a train and forget his stop.

  He picked up his heavy leather briefcase and hurried down the concrete steps to the basement.

  The guardroom consisted of no more than a desk, a row of metal filing cabinets and a stained bench with a kettle and a few chipped cups. The men ate their lunch from it, but at busy times it served as an additional torture table.

  Turturro was sitting at the desk typing up a report. There was a blood on his shirt. Another man, a guard, was making coffee.

  They snapped to attention when Angeli came into the room.

  “Gabriella Altman,” Angeli barked.

  “Yes, colonel,” Turturro answered.

  “When you searched the apartment, did you find an infant?”

  “Yes, Colonel, she was ...”

  “Where is she?”

  The sergeant fumbled on the desk for his keys and hurried out of the door. Angeli followed him. Turturro unlocked the door to one of the cells. There were clothes - men's and women's - strewn around the floor and dried bloodstains on a wooden table in the middle of the room and on the cement floor. This was the room where suspects were brought for their initial interview.

  The child had been left on a blanket in a corner of the room. She was screaming and kicking. She wore only a simple cloth diaper - soaking wet - and a white vest. She was blue with cold.

  “Idiot,” Angeli snarled.

  “Colonel?”

  Angeli grabbed Turturro by the collar and hurled him against the wall. He slapped him hard across the face. “The child is innocent.”

  “But we ...”

  “In the sight of God she is an innocent! No matter what her parents have done, she is blameless
. And you treat her this way?”

  A trickle of blood spilled from Turturro's lip and down his chin.

  “Have you no pity?” Angeli said. He went to the corner, bent down and scooped the child up in his arms. “Get me a blanket.”

  Turturro rushed to do as he was told.

  Angeli felt awkward holding the child. He had no idea what he should do to make her stop crying. He knew she needed to be fed and cleaned at least. She smelled vile.

  Turturro returned with a rough brown blanket. There were bloodstains on it. Angeli snatched it from him. It would do, for now. “Get out of here.”

  Turturro fled.

  Angeli stared at the tiny creature writhing and yelling in his arms. “Shhhh,” he whispered. “Everything is going to be all right. You're safe now.”

  Chapter 25

  “IS SE¤ORA ANGELI still in her room?”

  Antonia stared at him, astonished. “Yes, señor, she has not ...”

  “This child needs to be washed and fed.”

  Antonia accepted the screaming and filthy bundle he thrust in her arms as if he had given her a dead dog. “But señor, we do not have ...”

  “I don't care how you do it. Just do it.” He nodded towards the older man in the white jacket who stood open-mouthed by the door. “Send Jorge here to buy whatever you need. When the child is properly dressed and wrapped in a clean blanket, bring her back to me. And make sure she is no longer crying.”

  Antonia nodded.

  “I shall be in my study. And Antonia ...”

  “Señor?”

  “Not a word of this outside this house. You understand what will happen to you and Jorge if I discover that you have failed me?”

  Antonia turned pale. “Si, Señor Angeli.” She hurried away.

  He went into his study, continued working on the files in his briefcase. He looked at his watch several times. By the time Antonia returned it was evening and he had turned on all the lamps in the room.