The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  Chapter 32

  The apartment building had all the charm of Soviet-era Moscow, ten stacked stories of gray concrete whose windows were a patchwork of floral print curtains, miniblinds, and old-fashioned window shades covered in faded contact paper. Christensen checked the address on the unfolded piece of yellow notebook paper, then read aloud the brushed aluminum letters welcoming them to the St. Lawrence Martyr Senior Living Tower.

  “So this is it?” Melissa said.

  “Has to be.”

  Each apartment had a balcony, and some residents had done their best to add life to the structure. About half of the balconies were thickets of potted plants. A few had American flags hung from the railings. Christensen squinted and scanned, but only a couple of residents were outside taking advantage of the summer-morning sunlight that warmed even this soulless architecture.

  Visitor parking was along the remotest edge of the property, the assumption being that visitors were more likely to be ambulatory than the residents. Their collection of ancient and mighty Chryslers and Buicks and Olds 98s was arrayed along the parking aisles closest to the building.

  “Might have to pull a few strings, Dad, but I think I can get you on the waiting list here,” Melissa said. “Never too soon to think about the future.”

  Oh, callous youth. “You should be so lucky, ’Lis. Put it this way: In 30 years, I could be living on my own in a place like this, or I could be living with you, in your spare bedroom, with a prostate problem.”

  In the building lobby, they confronted a directory of names and apartment numbers, each with a corresponding button.

  “Here it is—914,” Melissa said. She read the name Vargas out loud.

  “BeeVee’s a doll.”

  Startled, Christensen and his daughter turned at the same time. Neither had noticed the stooped, pinkish man standing in a far corner of the lobby, near the 50-cent-a-pop blood pressure tester. His pants were pulled almost nipple high, and he tipped his houndstooth fedora.

  “She don’t get many visitors,” he said.

  Christensen extended his hand and walked to the old man, whose handshake was warm even though his skin felt cool. It was also dry and crinkled, like soft parchment. Christensen assumed he was the building’s self-appointed gossip mole, a lobby gnome. “Well, my daughter and I came to see Mrs. Vargas. Do you know if she’s home today?”

  The old man waggled his brushy eyebrows. “It’s Miss.”

  “Miss Vargas,” Christensen said. “Do you know if she’s home?”

  “Ain’t seen her go out,” he replied. “Morning van to the Giant Eagle market left fifteen minutes ago. She wasn’t on that, so probably.”

  “She’s expecting us,” Christensen lied. “We’ll just go on up then.”

  “BeeVee don’t get many visitors. You’re not family. She ain’t got family, not here anyway.”

  “Friends,” Melissa said. “Old friends.”

  The gnome studied them, wary. Christensen powered on, retreating to the elevator and jabbing the up button. Luck was with them as the elevator door opened right away. He and Melissa stepped quickly inside. “Thanks for your help,” Christensen called as the door rumbled shut.

  “That was kind of creepy,” Melissa said as they rose to nine. Each passing floor was announced by an electronic woman whose perky voice was calibrated for seniors with hearing problems.

  “I do believe he’s got a thing for your Miss Vargas.”

  “At his age?”

  Christensen smiled. He’d spent a lot of time in senior housing while researching memory and aging, enough to know it was a swinger’s paradise. “The way the actuarial tables play out, there’s usually one man for every two women when they get to this age. Lots of widows. The widower’s two-step, they call it.”

  “Cha-ching,” Melissa said.

  The door opened into an uncarpeted corridor, an accommodation for those in wheelchairs. A handrail ran the length of each side of the hall for those who were not. They stepped off the elevator.

  “You’re sure about this—wanting to talk to her?” he asked.

  Melissa squared her shoulders and took a deep, resolved breath. “Like you always say, ‘The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask.’”

  “You were actually listening?”

  His daughter moved down the hall, counting off the unit numbers as she passed. At 914, she didn’t hesitate or show any sign of having second thoughts, just stepped up and knocked three times. Christensen was just catching up when they heard the slide of a deadbolt and rattle of a chain lock. Suddenly the door was open, and it felt to Christensen like an immediate invasion of privacy.

  “Oh,” Beatriz Vargas said.

  The cautious woman in the doorway was striking for two reasons—the long, silver hair hanging loose over her thin shoulders and halfway down her torso, and the intricate rosary beads she carried in her left hand. They, too, were silver. A pewter-colored replica of the crucified Jesus dangled and swayed against the deep green backdrop of her summer robe. Her face was angular, with the high cheekbones of a model but the eyes of someone who had seen too much. They narrowed as she studied them, then, suddenly, widened in either fear or surprise, as if she’d suddenly seen a ghost.

  “Please.” The woman backed up a step. “I am not ready.”

  “I’m Melissa Christensen, Miss Vargas. I called last—”

  “Please, no,” the woman pleaded. “Go away.” She retreated behind the door and closed it halfway.

  “The adoption. My adoption. I need information,” Melissa said.

  Melissa was about to step across the threshold, but Christensen held her back by gently touching her arm. They were not going to force their way into this woman’s life, and they were clearly unwelcome.

  “We don’t mean any harm, Miss Vargas. We’ll leave if you want us to,” he said. “But we wouldn’t be bothering you if it wasn’t important. We need your help.”

  “I cannot help you,” she said.

  “You witnessed my baptism.” Melissa unfolded her photocopy of the baptismal certificate and held it out as proof. “You signed, right here at the bottom.”

  Vargas verified her signature with a quick, wary glance.

  “I signed hundreds,” she said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Help me.”

  “I cannot.”

  Melissa was crying now. “Please.”

  Christensen reached for the photocopy and took it from his daughter’s wavering hand. He found the date at the bottom, and pointed it out to the woman in the doorway. Time to roll the dice.

  “The day after you signed this, you got on an airplane,” he said. “An American military airplane.”

  It was a hunch, he knew, but Trey Brosky had pulled a woman from the river that night, along with two men and a little girl.

  “I signed many,” she repeated.

  “This was different. You left Argentina the day after signing this one. It was probably one of the last things you did before leaving behind your home, your family, everything you knew, and coming to this country to start a new life.”

  Melissa stared at him. Christensen realized this was news to his daughter.

  “Leave this alone,” Vargas said. “No good can come of it.”

  “Please tell us what you can,” he said. “It would mean a lot to my daughter. She’s expecting a baby and needs information.”

  He’d made his case the best he could. He wouldn’t push it any further, even for Melissa. The three of them waited in silence, the story untold but still an undeniable presence. Christensen could feel it now, standing between them and the woman hiding behind her half-closed door. Her eyes were shut now, and they stood there for minutes, hours, days.

  When Beatriz Vargas finally opened her eyes, she made the sign of the cross and raised the tiny pewter Jesus to her lips. Then she opened the door.

  Chapter 33

  She had been his lover, at least during the first few weeks after they arrived. Alone toget
her so far from home, displaced survivors of so much, they found in each other’s arms the sense of place they had lost. If they had stayed behind—and, of course, this would have been impossible for him, but still—he might have taken her as his mistress. As it turned out, their passion flared and then died as they moved off into new and separate lives in the United States.

  He wondered how Beatriz had aged—she was always a beauty. The first time he saw her was on his first day at the hospital militar. She was wearing the white smock of a maternity nurse, and her dark hair was gathered into a braid that hung nearly to her waist. She seldom smiled, and she walked as if she were carrying some strange and invisible weight—a burden that never seemed to defeat her, but instead only highlighted her strength. More than two decades had passed since he had seen her. Time can change so much.

  A shuttle van rumbled into the parking lot and swung wide before stopping at the building’s portico. He raised the long lens and watched the driver help half a dozen residents unload their groceries into wire pull carts. They disappeared one by one into the building’s lobby, pulling their loads like old mules in harness.

  He checked his watch. The girl and her father had been inside nearly an hour. They had found the boatman, who had proved unfortunately fragile, but whose passing was just as well. One less concern. He was not surprised that they had found Beatriz; she had always lived in plain sight and under her own name. She had nothing to hide once Michael Dorsey walked her immigration paperwork through the system.

  He was surprised she was talking to them for so long, or at all. Perhaps Beatriz was simply charming her visitors before sending them away without answers?

  Perhaps not.

  He would ask her, and she would tell him the truth. If not at first, then eventually. The number of people who might learn his identity was growing by the day, and he needed to prepare for any contingency.

  To pass the time, he remembered the last day he and Beatriz spent together. He had made love to her all afternoon in her first small apartment. When they were done, as she fed him tangerine slices on the mattress on her floor, he told her for the first time about his wife and young daughters, that they would be arriving by American military transport the following week. He had assumed she knew.

  He remembered putting a finger to her angry, quavering lip, assuring her that their affair could continue: “It changes nothing.”

  He remembered, too, the sting of her hand as she slapped him hard and ordered him out, saying “Esto cambia todo”—it changes everything.

  As he watched now from his car in a far corner of the parking lot, his cheek, the one she had slapped, began to tingle. He imagined striking back, and felt embarrassed that it made him hard. Through the fabric of his slacks, he rubbed his thumb across the head of his cock and felt it jump. It is so true, he thought—nothing is more exciting, or more dangerous, than a woman who knows your secrets.

  Chapter 34

  Beatriz Vargas was telling her story with the deliberate pace of someone negotiating a high ledge. English was her second language, but that wasn’t the only reason she spoke so carefully. Christensen poured himself a fourth cup of coffee from the insulated carafe.

  “I will make fresh,” Vargas said.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Please go on.”

  For the first hour, she’d talked mostly about her privileged childhood as the youngest child of a Buenos Aires banker. She’d grown up in the city, but spent weekends riding horses on an idyllic country estate. Her two brothers were bankers, her mother a woman of great education and refinement. Politics? She supposed her father was involved, but to him it was all just business and not something he shared with his children, or at least his only daughter. He had steered her toward a career as a nurse, and—

  “I wonder if we could fast-forward a little,” Melissa prompted. For the past thirty minutes, she’d been fidgeting like she was the one hyped on caffeine even though she was only drinking water.

  Vargas folded her hands and put them in her lap, covering the pewter-colored rosary. Her eyes fell. “I am sorry,” she said.

  “No, it’s fascinating, really,” Melissa said. “I’m just not sure what it all has to do with the adoption.”

  “A fair question,” Vargas said. She looked around her neat living room. Its decor was not that of a woman who came of age in America after World War II. No patterned fabrics or delicate porcelain or fussy little souvenirs. It was full of original art and rough wool blankets and well-seasoned leather. In one corner, displayed like a cherished heirloom, was a hand-tooled saddle—a remnant, no doubt, of her childhood among horses.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Melissa said. “I just—”

  “Our stories are bound up together, you see. To understand what happened, how you came here, you also need to know how such a thing was possible—how I could leave behind my country, my family, to start a new life in this country.”

  Christensen set his cup on the coffee table that separated Vargas and her stiff wooden chair from the two strangers on her small sofa. “What kind of nurse?” he asked.

  He felt something unspoken pass between them, and Vargas nodded. “Maternity.”

  With that, the conversation turned a corner. Melissa apologized again and sat back. Vargas leaned forward.

  “La Guerra Sucia?”

  “The Dirty War?” Melissa said.

  “How much do you know?” Vargas asked.

  “A little,” Christensen said. “Tell us.”

  Vargas took her time, looking first at Melissa, then at him. He could see a word forming on her lips, a question: “Desaparecidos?”

  He again looked to Melissa for translation. She echoed Vargas in English: “The disappeared?”

  “You cannot understand my choice unless you understand what was happening,” Vargas said. “Those were brutal times for anyone living in Argentina. Everyone was vulnerable.”

  “To?” he asked.

  “The brutality. Repression. The junta was so afraid—they came at night, scuttling around like beetles, always in their clumsy cars, those Falcons. When they took someone for questioning, they seldom returned. They just … disappeared.”

  “Who came at night?” Melissa asked.

  “The military men. Grupos de tareas? Do you know this phrase? Task forces? The secret army of kidnappers. You must understand this, this atmosphere of fear. During those years, 30,000 people”—Vargas snapped her fingers, and both Christensen and his daughter flinched—“vanished. Taken from their homes or offices to one of the detention centers. Imprisoned. Tortured. Then ‘transferred.’ That was their word.”

  Vargas repeated it with undisguised contempt.

  “Transferred?” Melissa said.

  “Desaparecido,” Vargas said. “Murdered. We know this now. We knew it then, here.” She touched her heart. “But it took many years, many tears until they had evidence.”

  Christensen had the sensation of falling. He and his daughter had come looking for answers. He wasn’t yet sure how, but he sensed they would leave forever changed.

  “There was a place in Buenos Aires, a military base,” Vargas said. “A mechanical school for the Navy. When the military took power in 1976, the start of the Processo, the school became something else.” She waited. “The Sabato Commission? You are familiar with it?”

  They shook their heads. “Much later, under President Alfonsín, they discovered what went on there. But I knew.” Vargas lifted her right hand. Christensen could see the rosary threading in and out of her fingers as she made the sign of the cross. “God help me, I knew.”

  “You worked there?” Christensen guessed, and Vargas nodded.

  “There was an infirmary, women only,” she said. “I was reassigned from the hospital Downtown. I was told to report there three days a week to help with births and infant care. I had no more choice than the mothers I tended.”

  Vargas closed her eyes and bowed her head, and Christensen wondered if she was praying. When she spoke
again, it was as if she was describing the scene flickering on the back of her eyelids.

  “There were two rooms on opposite sides of the main corridor. One side, the smaller one, was for the babies. A dozen bassinets, but only the sick ones stayed more than a few days. But there were always a few.”

  “Explain something,” Christensen said. “This was a school for Navy mechanics? Why would there be a maternity operation at a place like that?”

  Vargas slowly opened her eyes and fixed them on his. “Security.”

  “But why?”

  “It was one of the detention centers,” she said. “There was a small military hospital there. The nursery, it was small but functional. And on the other side of the corridor, that is where the mothers were kept. Some of them were kept for months, for the final trimester, until their baby was born.”

  Something about the way she used the word “kept” got Christensen’s attention. “They weren’t there by choice?”

  Vargas shut her eyes again and studied the scene. “Each bed—they were steel hospital beds, quite sturdy. One does not forget the sight, or the sound, of handcuffs rattling against those metal bed frames.”

  Her words were like wasps, a sudden menace in the room. “Wait,” Melissa said, “these women were handcuffed to the maternity beds?”

  “Who were they?” Christensen asked. “What had they done?”

  Vargas opened her eyes again, back in the here and now. “Subversives. That is what the government men told me when I began work there. It was a war, remember, and these were prisoners of war. Some were political prisoners, but the junta made no distinction. Subversives were every bit as dangerous as soldiers. And the children of subversives—”

  “But they handcuffed them?” Melissa said. “In a maternity ward?”

  Vargas nodded. “From the moment they arrived until the baby was born. And then the mother was transferred.”

  The words suddenly had a chilling resonance that Christensen felt more than heard. “Transferred,” he repeated. “You mean—?”