The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  Still, unfortunately, a question.

  Chapter 37

  His heart was heavy as he set the long lens on the Falcon’s passenger seat, opened the door, and stepped out. Morning had dragged into early afternoon. Early afternoon was now late afternoon. The man and his daughter had been with Beatriz for several hours, and that was most unfortunate. He should have anticipated this. Now it was too late. This regrettable work was not in his nature, but it had to be done.

  As he stood, he felt the all-too-familiar stiffness in his knees and lower back. He was not a young man any more, and the hours of waiting and watching from the parked car had taken a toll. He reached into the glove box for the small bottle of Advil and took two. Earlier, to pass the time and stretch his legs, he had walked the perimeter of the property, looking for a way into the building other than through the lobby, where an old man in a strange little hat seemed to monitor every coming and going. He had found an unsecured door, so entering unseen would not be a problem.

  His only concern was whether Beatriz would open her home to him. Subduing the old boatman had been easy enough once he’d opened his door—the device was effective from a distance of up to twenty feet—but there were unintended consequences, and he was reluctant to use it again. With Beatriz, he would rely on their shared history to get inside. He was prepared for the possibility that she would not welcome him, of course, and he had everything he needed in his medical bag if she did not. The bag would not seem out of place in a building so full of seniors.

  He opened it again to inventory the crude tools inside. Duct tape, gloves, gag ball, hood. Restraints, syringes, sedatives. The device and its spare battery were as he’d left them, but his experience with the boat pilot had been unfortunate. He had meant only to subdue him, find out what he had told his nosy visitor, and warn him again about talking to anyone else. How could he have known the man was so fragile? But Beatriz was a different problem. She knew all of his secrets.

  He lifted a soft roll of crushed velvet cloth from the recesses of the bag and unrolled it on his palm, studying an assortment of lockpicks, just in case he needed to enter her apartment while she was out and wait for her return. He’d picked up skills he was not proud of as a boy in villa miseria, the Buenos Aires slums he had escaped through education. But they were skills nonetheless. He rewrapped the velvet and set the soft bundle in the bottom, then fastened the bag shut and lifted it, delighted again by its featherweight heft and portability. Then he waited some more.

  Oh, Beatriz. Quiet, brooding, beautiful Beatriz. When did you become so chatty?

  And suddenly, there they were. The man and the girl stepped from beneath the building’s portico canopy and into the golden afternoon sun. After hours indoors, they both shielded their eyes from the light as they moved toward their car. He lifted the long lens and tried to read their body language. The girl seemed cold, her arms clutched tight at her sides as she walked stiffly beside her father. He, too, seemed folded in on himself, but with the thousand-yard stare of a steer in the slaughterhouse chute. Their time inside clearly had been unpleasant.

  “Dear Beatriz,” he said out loud. “Dear, dear Beatriz.”

  He watched the Ford sports utility jostle over the parking lot’s speed bumps and onto the street. When it was out of sight, he stepped from the car. If he went up now, she might even open the door without thinking, believing, perhaps, that the man and his daughter had for some reason returned. He lifted the leather bag and set it on the Falcon’s polished chrome bumper, but took a moment to stretch in the warm afternoon sun.

  How would Beatriz greet him? Had the years softened her? His cheek began to tingle, and he lifted a palm to his face to quiet the nerves. Twenty-two years and the blow still hurt. Twenty-two years since she had slapped him and invited him out of her bedroom.

  He would see her there again, tonight, but the final word would be his.

  Chapter 38

  They rode without talking, an intense, meaningful silence that Christensen did not understand. Melissa had written the name of the woman she now believed was her birth mother on a piece of Vargas’s stationery, and she held it fiercely between her pale fingers, as if Julia Limon might flutter up suddenly and fly away. His attempts at conversation were met with one-word answers and suspicious stares. Barely a word as they followed Route 19 through Pittsburgh’s South Hills, nothing until they were through the Liberty Tunnel and crossing the Monongahela River toward Shadyside on the east end of town.

  “Are you angry?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “At me?”

  His daughter turned away and watched the river stretch to the east, past steel mills converted to postindustrial shopping malls.

  “Melissa, if all this is true—”

  “So you think she’s lying?”

  “No.”

  “Why would she lie?”

  “I think you need to take a deep breath and think about what you’re saying.”

  “Why would she lie?”

  “I can’t think of a reason. It’s just—it’s such a complicated situation, and we don’t know enough about it.”

  Melissa brandished the stationery, waving it like a flag in front of his face. “I need to know more.”

  He tried to imagine what she was feeling. True or not, the puzzle pieces of her life were assembling themselves into an image of breathtaking depravity. Political kidnapping? Detention? Murder? To Americans in general, to them in particular, those were distant abstractions, stories in newspapers with no real connection to their lives. But if his daughter had actually been born to a victim of that brutality? If the woman who’d given Melissa life had then disappeared into some dark and vicious nowhere?

  “I’ve got as many questions as you do,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “What are you saying?”

  She looked away again. They were almost to Oakland now, moving along the Boulevard of the Allies as it ran along a bluff paralleling the river. She was looking east to the bend in the Mon bisected by the Glenwood Bridge and the Homestead High Level Bridge just beyond, where the plane that carried her to a new life with Molly and him went down.

  “This was a privately arranged adoption, right?” she said.

  Now Christensen understood. “You think we were part of this?”

  “You and Mom were part of it.”

  “Melissa, you can’t seriously think—”

  “You always told me how badly you wanted a child.”

  “And you think Molly and I would go that far? Or Uncle Michael would—”

  He stopped, suddenly and painfully aware of how little he still knew about Michael Dorsey’s efforts on their behalf. His brother-in-law’s answers so far had been maddeningly cryptic. “You don’t think he’d really be part of something like this, do you, ’Lis? Does that sound like him?”

  “I don’t know what to think right now,” Melissa said.

  Christensen lifted his foot off the accelerator and eased the Explorer onto the shoulder of the road. It was narrow and dangerous, and the traffic rushing past them was too close for comfort. Still, he felt an overpowering need to stop moving, to just sit and think and absorb the blow, to sift his daughter’s sudden doubts and suspicions and figure out what to do next. At the moment, there simply weren’t enough brain cells left over for driving, or anything else.

  “Dad?”

  He looked at his daughter, wanting to answer. But the words, when they came, felt all wrong. “I—we—didn’t know. About any of this.”

  She turned her face away again, staring at the river. “I want to believe you.”

  She wasn’t sure, and Christensen could remember nothing, not even Molly’s death, that had hurt him so deeply. Until that moment, this had been Melissa’s journey, a quest for answers about who she was and where she came from and how that might affect her unborn child. Now, at this dangerous crossroads, he realized she was watching him warily, wondering about the man who had volunteer
ed as her guide. Where was he taking her, and why?

  “I would never do anything to hurt you,” he said.

  His daughter turned to him, and even with her face in shadow he could tell she was crying. Melissa said it again: “I want to believe you.”

  At least he had that, and Christensen clung to that brittle scrap of faith like a life preserver.

  Chapter 39

  The hallway leading to 914 was brightly lit, an accommodation to the dimming eyes of its older residents. His feet fell on smooth floors, and the place seemed well kept. Beatriz had done well for herself, alone and so far from home. She lived comfortably.

  He set the bag down. This was his second time at her door. The first time, just after the man and his daughter left, he had knocked lightly and waited off to one side. He saw movement behind the peephole as her eye searched the hallway.

  “Hello, Beatriz,” he had whispered, but no answer came, and she did not open the door.

  Now it was late and dark, many hours later. He was tired and stiff and, truth be told, wondering again if he was capable of this. After his retreat, he had found a spot outside with a ground-level view of both the lobby and her ninth-floor windows. She had not left the building. Then, just after ten, her lights went out. Still, he waited an hour more until he was sure she was asleep.

  He lifted the velvet roll from the bottom of the bag and opened it to find the right tool. As a young man, he had been quite good at working locks. Opening locks and delivering babies were similar in that way, requiring, in most cases, only a few minutes of deft manipulation.

  His knees creaked and protested as he knelt, but he was sure no one had heard. He had watched from below as the residents turned in, their windows going dark one by one until, at last, Beatriz too had gone to bed. Now the hallway was as quiet as a tomb, and he worked with confidence knowing he would not be interrupted.

  When it was done, he rolled the tools into the cloth and put them back in the bag. He worked his hands into the surgical gloves, a routine once as familiar to him as breathing, and the arthritis in his knuckles seemed to ease. He wiped the doorknob with a cloth he had moistened with Mr. Clean. Grasping the knob, he lifted up on the door to relieve the pressure on its hinges and pushed his way silently inside. He retrieved the bag and set it on the floor just inside, and shut the door to 914 behind him. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark.

  Her bedroom was to his left, assuming that the last light she extinguished was beside her bed. He would need to be ready as he entered, so he bent to the bag—from the waist this time, so his knees would not pop—and removed the syringe and uncapped the needle. It fit neatly in his hand, and he moved his right thumb to the plunger as he neared the slumbering form. Her back was turned to him, and from her breathing he could tell she was deeply asleep. A simple wooden crucifix hanging just above her headboard stood out like a dark scar on the room’s white wall. He positioned himself for her reaction, then punched the needle through the comforter and sheet and into the round lump of her once-fine ass. When she jumped and rolled toward him, he clamped his free right hand over her mouth. He spoke in Spanish to calm her.

  “Hello Beatriz,” he whispered. “It has been a long time.”

  She struggled and tried to bite his hand, her eyes wild with fear. He had left the syringe stuck in her like a dart, and it broke off as she thrashed. There was nothing he could do about that until the sedative took effect. In the meantime, he pressed himself down to keep her in the bed, holding her lower jaw closed with his right hand.

  “Sh-sh-shhhhhh,” he said. “Easy now. We are old friends, you and I.”

  It took several minutes, but finally she went still as the narcotic washed her nerves. The movements of her arms and legs peaked and slowed and eventually stopped altogether. Her eyes never left his, though. It was almost like making love.

  “I came to talk to you, Beatriz. But if you scream or cry out, it will become very difficult for you. Do you understand?”

  She did not react, so he repeated the question. At last she nodded.

  “Good, good,” he said, and lifted his hand.

  He caught her scream the moment it escaped, and clamped down tighter this time.

  “You disappoint me, Beatriz,” he said, working his gloved hand into the medical bag for the gag ball. He palmed it, removed his hand again, and popped it between her teeth as soon as she opened her mouth again. Using a precut piece of duct tape, he sealed it tight and stepped away, knowing now that she could not move or cry out.

  “I had hoped we could talk, Beatriz, to catch up on the time that has passed. It has been much too long. I mean that. Our parting was abrupt. But we will talk before we are through here.”

  She was helpless, completely vulnerable. He thought back to the times when she opened herself to him willingly. She had aged, but better than most. Her hair was still long, but mostly white now. Even if he wanted to take her now, he knew the risks of confusing business with pleasure. He was not here for pleasure.

  Still, he took a moment to trace his gloved fingers along the contours of her sagging breasts. Even in the dim light he could see her eyes wide as saucers, wondering where this might be headed. He hated to disappoint her.

  “So, Beatriz,” he said. “You have had visitors today?”

  She shook her head from side to side. He smiled.

  “No? A man and his daughter?”

  She glared at him, through him, with those wide saucer eyes. He knew this could end only one way, and he would need to make it uncomplicated and tidy. The thought made him quite sad. But first he needed to know just how talkative she had been.

  Chapter 40

  They were alone together in Christensen’s home office after everyone else was in bed, sifting links, searching the collective consciousness of the Internet. Melissa moved her chair closer to his as he Googled the landscape of his daughter’s emerging past. Into the search box he typed: “Argentina and ‘Dirty War’ and—”

  He paused. “That school,” he asked, “the one where she worked, where they took the pregnant women. Do you remember the name?”

  “A mechanic’s school,” his daughter said. “Navy. Hospital militar.”

  He typed the words “mechanical school,” hit the Enter key, and waited. His computer searched and retrieved. In less than three seconds, they were staring at a screen filled with possibilities. Amnesty International position papers. Reports from the Argentinian government’s Sabato Commission. Conclusions of a US Senate subcommittee on human rights abuses in Argentina. Something called “The Vanished Gallery.” An obituary for journalist Jacobo Timerman. A sales site specializing in books about the Dirty War. A doctoral thesis from a political science student in Texas incomprehensively titled “The ‘Madwomen’ Memory Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—A Case of Counter-Hegemonic Communications Developed by Mothers of Disappeared People from Argentina.”

  Puzzle pieces spilled into the room, some assembly required. Both the past and future beckoned Christensen and his daughter to follow, link to link, site to site, clue to clue.

  “Whoa,” Melissa said.

  Christensen scrolled down seven pages of bright blue hyperlinks.

  “Finding information won’t be a problem, I guess,” he said.

  “Start at the top,” Melissa said. “Print everything.”

  Christensen fetched a ream of paper from a nearby file cabinet and loaded the whole thing into his laser printer. For the next two hours, they raced through cyberspace, traversing the world’s network of computer servers, gathering information that not only affirmed Beatriz Vargas’s claims about the ghastly operation carried out at the Campo de Mayo hospital at the Argentine Navy’s notorious School of Mechanics, but told the same story of repression, kidnapping, and murder in more vivid and sickening detail. Melissa read the pages as he searched and printed, saying little besides “Oh God” and tugging tissues from the box on his desk to blot her eyes.

  At 1:47 a.m., Christensen printed the re
levant pages from the final linked website and watched them whir out of the laser printer, hot when he touched it. Instead of adding them to the two-inch stack already in Melissa’s hands, though, he picked them up and began to read. It was the introduction to the doctoral thesis.

  “On March 24, 1976, a military coup installed in Argentina one of the bloodiest dictatorships that the American continent has ever seen. A group of mothers, whose daughters and sons were kidnapped by military death squads and literally disappeared between 1976 and 1983, decided to join forces to search for them. None of these women, now known as Madres de Plaza de Mayo, had any previous political experience, and most of them were housewives who, for the first time, stepped from their domestic and private worlds into the public arena. They had to learn everything, and starting with nothing but their pain, anguish, anger, and courage, they managed to build the movement which posed the only visible resistance to the dictatorship.”

  Christensen read about the group’s trademark white headscarves and the placards they carried bearing the faces of their disappeared children. Every Friday, they carried those placards to May Square in Buenos Aires, which faced the government palace, to demand a full accounting of the missing. He tried to imagine the anguish that still brought them to the square each week despite the passage of years and the conclusion of all investigators that their children were dead. “The grieving mothers have become Argentina’s collective conscience, the embodiment of the democratic government’s stated policy of ‘nunca mas’—never again.”

  The rest was a gibbering academic overview of the group’s efforts—sometimes effective, sometimes faltering—to communicate its message of loss and hope and undying love to the rest of the world. They stayed visible, that was the main thing. They also made a point of denouncing the repression before national and foreign governments and placing occasional newspaper ads to remind Argentinians of the unresolved questions about the country’s desaparecidos.