The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  Vargas rethreaded her rosaries through the fingers of her other hand. “I cannot say for certain. But if the baby was healthy, the mother was transferred within a day or two. We would never see her again. The infants left after a week.”

  “I don’t understand,” Melissa said. “They didn’t leave together?”

  Vargas stared straight ahead, her eyes meeting no one’s.

  “I don’t understand,” his daughter said again.

  The possibility struck Christensen like a breaking wave. “They were taking the babies.”

  If Vargas had answered, or even nodded her head, the moment might have lost its power. Instead, she began reciting a prayer. “Dios te salve. María, llena eres de—”

  Christensen recognized the Hail Mary. Melissa interrupted.

  “Kidnapping them?” she said. “You mean, just taking the babies from their mothers?”

  “—gracia; el Señor es contigo; bendita tu eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tú vientre, Jesús. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amén.”

  Vargas cinched the next rosary bead between her thumb and index finger and prayed again in the strange monotone of Catholic incantation. “Dios te Salve, María, llena eres de gracia—”

  “Stop!” Melissa said. “Just tell us what was happening here. These prisoners—they would take their babies and send the mothers away? Make them disappear?”

  Vargas’s lips kept moving, the Hail Mary now silent but delivered with equal fervor. But she nodded her head in answer.

  “Then what happened to the babies?”

  As soon as Melissa asked the question, the answer must have come clear. Her mouth hung open as if her lower jaw had suddenly become unhinged. Christensen reached for her hand, but when he touched it she pulled it away.

  He turned to Vargas. “Are you saying this facility, this maternity ward at the military school—wait. If they were going to kill the political prisoners, they could have done that before they had their babies. So this whole operation was just—they were keeping the mothers alive until after they had their babies. Just so they could steal the babies?”

  Vargas nodded.

  Christensen shook his head, not wanting to believe. “Why?”

  “There were families, ranking Argentine military couples, who wanted babies but could not have them. Here was a reliable supply, available for adoption without complication. The government was unstable by then, and the loyalty of the military was critical. The gift of a child—you must know how grateful someone would be, how much loyalty that would buy.”

  Melissa stood up, pressing a hand to her mouth. Her face was as white as it had been the day Christensen found her bleeding in the tub, and he knew her expression from the many times he’d seen her sick. Vargas stopped long enough to point a beaded finger to a door along the narrow hall leading to her apartment’s small bedroom and the bathroom. Melissa hurried toward it and turned the corner. The door was still open when they heard her gag and retch.

  “I tried to warn her,” Vargas said. “On the telephone.”

  “Warn her?” Christensen asked.

  “She will feel no greater pain than the pain of knowing.”

  Chapter 35

  Ski Demski followed the scent of formalin through the marble lobby of the gothic Allegheny County Morgue, toward the row of tiny offices where the county’s thirteen meat-sackers worked. He understood the appeal of being a paramedic. He even understood why somebody would want to be the county coroner, which was still an elected office and came with the spoils of political power. The boss got a nice black Crown Vic with all the trimmings. But a deputy coroner? What kind of guy takes a $32,000-a-year gig pulling bodies out of the rivers or picking up road meat after a car crash? This one’s name was Hasch.

  He double-checked the name on the message slip the Braddock dispatcher handed him that morning and asked the first person he saw. “Looking for a Mike Hasch?”

  “Dahna hall, onna right,” said a tobacco-scented, gum-chewing woman with way too much makeup. “Big smiley face onna door.”

  Guy was eating at his desk, shoveling some stew or something out of a microwave container. Demski felt a little sick just thinking about it. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said.

  Hasch wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Braddock PD?”

  “Ski Demski. You want I should wait outside so you can eat?”

  Hasch put a plastic lid on his stew and stood up. “No, no. Appreciate you coming down. This won’t take but a minute, but I figured it’s something you’d wanna see.” From his desk drawer he pulled a small blue and green jar, unscrewed the cap, and held it out.

  “VapoRub?”

  Demski dipped a finger in and pulled out a mentholated glob. When he was done smearing it under his nose, he said, “That bad?”

  “Not your guy,” Hasch said. “We snagged a floater out of the Mon this morning. Whole place reeks. Follow me.”

  The deputy coroner picked up a file folder from his desk and led him along the hallway, down some steps, and through the massive oak door to the cooler. The current tenants, four of them, were on gurneys parked head-in along one wall. Toe tags hung from every other big toe in the line. While Hasch pulled on a sweater and closed the door behind them, Demski counted the bottoms of seven bare feet and idly wondered what happened to the eighth.

  Hasch tugged a gurney away from the wall and into the center of the cooler. Demski knew from the mound in the middle that it was probably the fat blue guy he’d found in the illegal garage apartment the day before, but he checked the face anyway when Hasch peeled back the top sheet.

  “This is him, right?” Hasch said.

  “Same guy.” He read the toe tag to be sure. “Yup, Travis L. Brosky.”

  Hasch whipped the sheet off him like a stage magician and laid it across another gurney. Brosky was still blue and fat, but now he was naked, and had a giant Y incision from his shoulders down to his graying pubes. It had been sewn back together with stitches as subtle as the ones on a football.

  “You autopsied?” He pointed to the faded pink bypass scar he’d seen the day before. “Figured it was just a routine heart attack.”

  “Definitely a heart attack,” Hasch said.

  “So why autopsy?”

  Hasch shot him a Cheshire grin. “I’m not sure it was routine.”

  Hasch pulled a Bic pen from his pants pocket. He used it as a pointer, tracing circles around two small spots on Brosky’s chest. “See these?”

  Demski nodded.

  “Tiny little puncture wounds. And the flesh around them is inflamed.”

  “Meaning?”

  Hasch nodded. “We see them mostly with inmates. They use stun guns over at the jail for whenever somebody gets out of control. The little barbed electrodes are meant to hook onto the fabric of a perp’s clothes, but if the guy isn’t wearing a shirt … Kinda rare to see them in somebody’s skin.”

  “Wait,” Demski said. “Somebody zapped this guy with a stun gun?”

  “Looks that way.”

  Demski felt his assumptions crumble. “So that’s how he died?”

  Hasch shrugged then tapped the Y incision. “History of heart trouble. So yeah, that’s how he died. Maybe whoever did it just wanted to take him down for a bit, not kill him. But you tase somebody with that kind of history, shit happens.”

  Demski’s throat was dry. Maybe it was the cold. Probably not. He thought of the photograph in his case file, a shot of a distinctive footprints his investigators found on the concrete floor of the guy’s garage apartment, left there wet but dry by the time they found it. “Any guesses who might do something like that, or why?”

  Hasch shook his head. “Not my job,” he said, and retrieved the sheet to cover Brosky again.

  Demski watched it whisper down and settle into an anonymous white mound, knowing his life just got a lot more complicated. Why hadn’t he taken early retirement when he had the
chance?

  “You guys deserve a raise, you know that?” Demski said.

  Hasch picked up his file folder and opened the massive oak door. They stepped from the cooler back into the hallway. “Thanks, but it won’t happen.” His smile was wistful and wise. “Least not till they let dead people vote.”

  Chapter 36

  Pale and unsteady, Melissa teetered back into Beatriz Vargas’s living room. She’d splashed her face with water after vomiting, but hadn’t dried it. The dampness of her bone-white skin added to the overall look of stunned despair.

  “OK?” Christensen asked.

  His daughter nodded and sat beside him on the sofa across from Vargas. “Sorry,” she said.

  Christensen and Vargas hadn’t spoken much since his daughter fled the room. He’d sat in disbelief, watching Vargas work her rosaries and quietly beseech Mary, Mother of God, to pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen. Over and over, a hypnotic drone. “Have you told anyone else about this?” he interrupted.

  Vargas’s lips stopped moving, and she shook her head. Her hands drifted back into her lap, the beads still threaded through her fingers.

  “No one?” Christensen asked.

  “I know they’ve been looking for me,” she said. “The new government studied all this, these crimes, interviewing the people involved, even people like me who were just witnesses. The Sabato Commission. But they never found me here. Even if they had done so, it was too soon, too raw. I could not talk about it.”

  “So you’ve never said a word to anyone in twenty-two years?” Christensen said.

  “I have carried this myself.” She touched her beaded hand to a spot just above her left breast. “Until now.”

  Melissa cleared her throat. “So, I was one of these babies? My mother was a prisoner, handcuffed to a hospital bed until I was born, then taken away.”

  Vargas shook her head. “She was a prisoner, yes. But you were not born at the mechanical school. You were older, perhaps four or five years. I know nothing of your birth, or of her fate. By then I was gone.”

  “Gone?” Christensen said.

  Vargas fixed her eyes first on Melissa, then on Christensen. “I was given an opportunity to leave Argentina, to leave it all behind me and start a new life, here, in the United States. I took it. It was the hardest choice of my life, but I believe I made the right choice.”

  Christensen fished into his shirt pocket for the old photograph from his family album, the one showing a younger Michael Dorsey as a slightly drunken bridegroom. He slid it across the coffee table toward Vargas and tapped a finger on his brother-in-law’s face. Vargas picked it up and held it close.

  “Do you recognize this man?” he asked.

  Vargas’s face softened into a near smile. “A saint,” she said. “Every promise he made, he kept.”

  “Was he the man who arranged for you to come to the United States?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?” Melissa asked. When Vargas handed her the photograph, his daughter’s eyebrows rose higher on her forehead. “Uncle Michael?”

  The few facts Christensen knew were falling into a sickening orbit. He still didn’t know what was at the dark core of that universe, but he couldn’t imagine it was good.

  “I have a photograph as well,” Vargas said. She rose slowly, her movements deliberate. She walked across the room to a bookshelf heavy with classic literature. The book she removed from the shelf was tucked out of sight behind a collection of volumes by Gabriel García Márquez. Its threadbare cover was plain and brown and had no title. She sat back down and opened to the first page, which was covered with handwriting. A journal.

  Vargas plucked a Polaroid instant photograph from between its pages and held it out to Christensen. “The day I left,” she said. “Bullock Air Force Base.”

  The backdrop was the gray underbelly of an airplane fuselage. Its markings were American military. In the foreground, a loose knot of people faced the camera, not posed exactly, but assembled in a way that suggested someone was trying to commemorate the moment. A younger and strikingly beautiful Vargas stood on the tarmac with an infant in one arm and a child clutching her free hand. The child was a girl wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt.

  “Oh God,” Melissa gasped. She touched the child’s face. “That’s me. I remember that shirt.”

  Christensen looked closer, into the face of the child he and Molly welcomed into their lives just days after the photo was taken. But there was no time to reminisce. Questions were bubbling up faster than he could ask them.

  “Just to be sure, this is the man who arranged for you to come here?” he said, pointing to the figure standing on the photo’s far right side. Michael Dorsey was the one person in the picture not facing the camera. He looked like he was trying to shepherd the others onto the plane.

  “A saint, yes,” Vargas said. “He arranged everything.”

  “And him?” Melissa said, pointing to a man on the far left side of the picture. He was smiling, but his eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark Ray-Ban Travelers.

  Vargas swallowed hard and closed her eyes again. “The doctor who tended the mothers. I did not know him well, at least then, only that he was government. He came and went. But he knew about me, that I was the senior nurse. He is the one who made the proposal.”

  “The proposal to leave Argentina?” Christensen asked.

  “He asked to speak with me one day, privately. He told me there was going to be a difficult birth and wanted to make sure I was there to help. But he also said things were about to get very bad, politically, for anyone who worked at the hospital militar.”

  “Meaning what?” Christensen asked.

  “Argentina—the military government—was in trouble. The world was learning its secrets.”

  “The Dirty War?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he propose?”

  “A way out,” Vargas said. “He told me he knew a man who could arrange passage into the United States. My part was simple: to assist with this final birth, and to accompany the infant and another child until they were safely in America. Everything else would be arranged. My passport. My papers. Even a job at McGee, here in Pittsburgh. Everything documented and safe, a million miles from everything I knew. Not just my family, but everything I knew.”

  “Explain the difference,” Christensen said.

  Vargas tapped the face of the man with the sunglasses. “That is how he said it that day, when he called me aside. It frightened me. What I knew was terrifying—God forgive me, I had been a part of it. For two years, I had helped with dozens of babies. I have heard there were hundreds in all. I knew nothing, but I knew everything. I was part of it.”

  That’s how it happened, Christensen thought. This man, whoever he was, convinced Vargas she was going to be arrested, accused, perhaps, of helping steal babies from mothers kept handcuffed to the birthing beds. He offered to help her disappear, not as a threat, but as a chance to start a new life. Vargas must have felt she had no choice.

  “The two men,” Christensen said, “how did they know one another?”

  “I cannot say. They spoke as friends.”

  Melissa edged forward on the sofa. Christensen knew what was coming. She put her finger on the cotton-swaddled infant in Vargas’s arms. “Tell me about the baby.”

  “How much do you remember, child?” Vargas said. “About the journey?”

  “Almost nothing. A baby’s cries. Dark. Cold.”

  Melissa was breathing faster now, back in the panicked, violent moment when she and the others plunged into the icy river. Christensen reached for her hand. Vargas leaned forward and reached for the other. He noticed that the old woman was now crying.

  “Your brother,” she said, her lower lip quivering. “He slipped from my hand.”

  Melissa’s face froze.

  “I had you both, in the water, but I was sinking,” Vargas said. “We all would have drowned. So I—” She began to sob. “I could
not swim with two. God forgive me, I could not.”

  As Vargas struggled with the memory, Melissa adjusted to this new truth about herself that had bobbed to the surface as suddenly and unexpectedly as a cork. “I had a brother?” she said.

  “The baby—” Vargas’s voice emerged in a hoarse whisper. “Just two days old, but baptized along with you, thank God, the day before. They told me you were his sister. You were both to be adopted by an American couple.”

  “So the woman, the difficult birth you mentioned?”

  Vargas nodded. “I was told she was your mother. She begged to have you both baptized, so I found a priest to do it before we got on the plane.”

  Christensen reached for Vargas’s hand, completing a circuit that now bound the three of them together.

  “So you know who she was?” Melissa said.

  “Officially, no.”

  “There were probably no records of those births,” Christensen guessed.

  Vargas looked away. “It was the thing I found most troubling, the thing that convinced me it was wrong.” She picked up the journal from the coffee table and smoothed its cover. “It is why I kept this.”

  Vargas opened the book to its final pages, to handwritten text that differed from the pages that preceded them. Those notations were arranged in crude columns, a list.

  “When no one was watching, I always asked the mother to give me her name. I wrote them down here, in my diary. When their baby was born, I wrote down the date and the weight. No child should be born unnoticed.”

  She handed the book to Melissa, opened to the final page of the list. His daughter took it in her trembling hands, her eyes racing across several dozen names and numbers. They moved from the top of the page to the bottom, to the final entry in Beatriz Vargas’s cryptic roster. Her finger stopped on the final entry’s far left column.

  “This date—Dad, it’s the day before I came to the US.”

  Melissa traced the line straight across the page, past a notation about the newborn boy’s weight of seven pounds, two ounces, coming at last to the name inked in the column on the right-hand edge of the page. She whispered it first, then said the name out loud: “Julia Limon?”