buenos aires
august 2005
Rachel felt as though she were floating alongside her body. Here was the truth, spread out before her in three padded gingham photo albums with yellowed Scotch-taped labels, the ink from a decades-old felt-tip marker bleeding into the paper. 1973, 1974, 1975. A set of archival photo boxes printed with pink orchids.
Esme opened one of the albums. “This was Lorena and José’s wedding,” she said. Her words were unhurried. Mat stood above them now, one arm crossing his body and the other held to his lips in a fist, half-masking his expression.
Esme looked younger than Rachel had expected. Her grayish-brown hair was set into soft curls. She wore rimless bifocals and carried a scent of bergamot. Her lace-collared blouse was layered under a chenille sweater, the creases in her slacks crisp, and her leather loafers had a gold embellishment at the toe. She had a strong figure for a woman in her seventies. It was hard not to notice—Rachel had no other reference for what she might look like as she aged, until now.
As Esme handed her the photos, Rachel absorbed the images of Lorena as a young girl: at her First Holy Communion, as a teenager holding a stack of books, as a young woman sitting at a picnic table with several other people holding her baby boy. Rachel studied every detail of the photos: the stitch of Lorena’s jeans along her thighs, the curve of her wrists, her jaw, her hair, her breasts, her eyes. She longed to touch this woman, smell her, become small enough to climb into the pictures and nestle on Lorena’s lap.
Sorrow should have arrived, tears should have overtaken her, but Rachel was still floating along—fascinated, intrigued, propelled forward. Lorena was everything she’d dared to imagine when she opened her mind to the possibility. Before that day, you were with the mommy and daddy who made you.
Mari took a seat in a floral armchair across from them. Rachel was suddenly aware of the room—the woodstove, the little star-shaped pins lining the upholstery of the chairs, the stacks of music albums filling a bookcase against one wall: Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Benny Goodman, Beethoven. She breathed in the warm cinnamon smell of this modest house in Buenos Aires with its clay-tiled roof and iron gate. She’d missed out on this.
“My husband—your grandfather, Gustavo—he loved music,” Esme said in Spanish when she caught Rachel’s gaze landing on the vinyl records. “He didn’t play, but he loved to listen.”
Rachel nodded tenderly.
“Your ancestors were from southern Italy and the Basque region of Spain,” Esme went on. “Gustavo had a bit of German on his side too.”
“Here.” Mat emerged from the kitchen, set down a tray on a clear spot on the coffee table, then perched on the arm of the sofa. “Now that you’re in Argentina, you have to learn the proper ritual of maté.” He filled the maté with crushed dried leaves, then carefully poured in hot water and placed the metal straw. He sipped and passed it to Mari.
Rachel took a sip from the metal straw, and a bitter tea warmed her tongue. She handed the gourd to Esme and pointed to a photo of Lorena smiling up at a dark-haired man from a lawn chair.
“Who’s this?”
“That’s Claudio,” Esme said.
Rachel studied the deep set of the man’s eyes in the photo and Lorena’s expression as she looked up at him, full of something wild and knowing.
Esme set down the maté and stood up. She walked over to the letter holder hanging from the wall, its stenciled green vines winding around a little clock at the top. Hanging from a key hook below the bottom pocket were rosewood rosary beads, a plastic Jesus glued to the wooden crucifix. Esme pulled out a piece of paper from the letter holder, unfolded it and flattened it against her chest.
“Claudio was a good friend of your mother and José,” she said. “They all went to university together. He was very active, politically, during the junta’s reign. Lorena always had a calling toward activism too, like her father, and I think Claudio brought that out in her.” Esme folded both hands over the paper, then shook her head. She looked at Mari, deliberated a moment, then put the paper back in the holder.
Rachel reached into her bag and took out a journal in which she’d hastily stashed several of her own favorite photos.
“I brought these,” she said. “I thought you might want to see them.”
“Oh.” Esme touched her glasses and took them gratefully, setting them down one by one on the glass coffee table. Rachel recalled the kitchen table in Howell Grove, strewn with the contents of her adoption file, but pushed the memories aside as images of her own life mixed with Lorena’s before her eyes.
“Oh,” Esme repeated, touching her lips. She looked up at Rachel in awe, then back at the photos with an awkward blend of sentimentality and remorse. Mari handed her a tissue. “Look at this.”
“I was about five years old in that one,” said Rachel, pointing to a picture taken in the backyard, her arms splayed out to the sides. “Pretending to fly, I guess. This is where I grew up.”
Esme marveled, shifting through the photos slowly. She stopped at a high school graduation photo—Rachel’s hair loose beneath the mortar board, lips closed in a smile—and set it down next to the photo of Lorena that Mari had first showed Rachel.
Esme beamed. “Oh, niña,” she breathed.
“The resemblance is incredible,” said Mat.
Rachel felt proud, like she’d done something remarkable just by living her life.
At the end of the pile was a photo of Rachel as an infant in a bassinet, her tiny arms reaching up toward her mom’s yellow hair. Esme stared at it for a long time. Rachel had a flash memory of the dresser drawer in her childhood bedroom where she’d kept the photos. It was filled with other things she’d left behind: a picture of her dad standing in the driveway in full military attire, squinting as the sun glinted off his buttons; a clipped newspaper article from one of her high school soccer victories; a crayoned, sticker-encrusted Easter card she’d made at six or seven that read I love you, Mommy and Daddy, Love RACHEL.
A lump formed in her throat.
“May I use the restroom?”
Esme nodded, pointed down the far hall.
Behind the closed bathroom door, Rachel ran warm water from the spigot and splashed it on her face. She cupped her hands and filled them repeatedly, staring at the flowers painted on the chipped tile. A tiny, delicate spider made its way down the wall of the standing shower. She unbuttoned her jeans and slid them down her thighs, pausing to run her palm over her birthmark.
When she stood up to wash her hands, Rachel half expected to see Lorena appear in the mirror behind her. Her strong, beautiful mother who hadn’t abandoned her after all, a mother for whom Rachel had always been enough. Indeed, she felt an intimate presence here now, as prominent as her angels or the blond ghost. It was what she was looking for.
She followed it down the hall into a small bedroom like a child wandering through a stranger’s house on a visit. She was still floating—she’d been awake for nearly thirty hours—and the crisp bed looked like a welcoming fantasy. On a rack of wooden pegs near the closet door, a collection of colorful printed scarves hung sorted on rings. Rachel lifted them one by one: a cream-colored silk with nautical designs, a green chiffon, nearly weightless. One had a ladybug, another a spray of hibiscus. Some were solid, others vaguely floral, a medley of hues bleeding into fabric. She felt the presence intensify.
“They were popular in the seventies,” said Esme, appearing in the bedroom doorway.
Rachel startled.
“Lorena always liked to wear them. She had a good sense of style. Simple, but confident. Some of these are mine, but many of them used to be hers.” Esme pulled an oblong caramel shift from a loop. “This one, for instance. This was one of Lorena’s favorites.” She took the scarf and draped it around Rachel’s neck. “It was the color of her eyes. And yours.”
Rachel touched the fabric. She watched Esme fold a navy silk into a triangle, tying it around her head. “I always wore them like this after going to the beauty parlor. I still wear these on Thursdays.” She pulled two large white squares from one of the last hooks.
“What’s that bible verse?” asked Mari, appearing beside them and twisting a purple scarf. “‘Wear the world like a loose garment’ or something?”
“That’s Saint Francis of Assisi,” Esme corrected.
Rachel sat down on the bedspread, holding both ends of Lorena’s scarf around her neck.
“There’s something you should know, dear,” said Esme. She walked over to where Rachel sat and took her hands. Esme’s skin was dry and warm. “Lorena gave you a name when you were born. She named you Ana.”
“Ana.” Rachel spoke the name for the first time, letting it live in her mouth for a moment, then breathing it in and out. Ana. She wondered if it was possible to have a wound so deep, so long-standing, that it required an entire second lifetime for healing.
“Poor thing,” said Mari. “She hasn’t slept.”
“Feel free to rest, child,” said Esme, gesturing to the bed.
Rachel laid her head against the pillow sham’s perfumed scent. The scarves hung in her line of sight, waterfalls of color. She felt the presence approach once more, and everything around her seemed loose, slippery, temporary. Even her name.
* * *
The splendors of Buenos Aires swirled like a carnival outside the taxi windows. The driver pointed vaguely in the direction of Recoleta Cemetery and Evita Perón’s tomb, then the Japanese gardens and the Casa Rosada. As the cab jerked and jostled through San Telmo to La Boca, tango dancers stroked the cobblestone with their bodies in an open courtyard flanked by buildings as colorful as tropical birds. A man in a coat was making a barrel fire; a woman’s ankle bracelet jingled as she panhandled, shaking her cup to a singsong “por favor.”
In the backseat, Rachel toyed with the cotton ball a nurse had taped to the crook of her arm with a Band-Aid after two vials of her blood had been sent off to the genetic bank at Durand Hospital for testing. Her body swayed alongside Mat and Mari as the driver wove through the city.
“Do you still want to see El Olimpo?” asked Mari. “It’s right near my sister’s apartment.”
Rachel’s stomach lurched with the taxi’s brakes. “Maybe tomorrow?”
“We’ve seen enough already,” Mat mumbled.
Rachel pinched the sleeve of his jacket and tugged gently.
“Are you mad or something?”
“Why would I be?”
“I don’t know. I just—it’s not my fault the test results came back the way they did.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t know we might have different fathers.”
“I didn’t either, obviously.” Mat scratched his chin. “I just feel like I didn’t know anything about my parents now.”
Rachel lapsed into English. “How do you think I feel?”
“It’s no one’s fault,” said Mari. “It’s just life.” She pulled Mat’s arm onto her lap and laced their fingers together. Mat looked out the window.
“Do you know how lucky I feel,” said Mari, “that my sister Marcela and I got to grow up together with our dad? I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have my sister.”
Rachel pulled in her lips.
“I just think you should hold your family close, no matter what the circumstances.”
* * *
Dinnertime arrived with the restorative sensation that an entire nation of women had been waiting to welcome Rachel home, that she’d somehow wildly exceeded the expectations of every guest who embraced her. Esme served salad, tender cuts of steak so rare they formed thin puddles of blood, and homemade empanadas. Plates were passed across a concert of conversations. Rachel sat next to Mari, sipping Malbec and trying to catch each word as the mothers and grandmothers reminisced. Esme’s friend Hilde picked stray flakes of pastry dough from the tablecloth with her polished fingernails.
“It didn’t start out as political,” Hilde explained in quick Spanish. There was a controlled ferocity about her. “When we first started demonstrating, it was just a grief walk. We had to do something. Remember, Esme?”
“We try to document everything they know and remember,” Mari whispered to Rachel. “The Abuelas are our living archives.”
On the other side of Rachel sat another found grandchild, Patricia. She leaned over to Rachel and spoke in slow, broken English.
“It took me a long time to understand that my grandmother just wanted to know me. She loved me, that’s all—she wasn’t trying to take me away from the family I grew up with. My father was in the navy, but he’s a good man. He’s no villain. He’s been a good father to me.”
“There are still hundreds of grandchildren out there,” said Mari. She looked around the table. “If we don’t find them soon, they’ll never have the chance to know their grandmothers.”
Rachel drew in a deep breath and caught Mat’s eye as he quietly cut through a piece of steak. She wanted to be closer to the part of Lorena that lived within him. Mat had touchstones to the past—scents, melodies, familiar locations—but she had nothing to guide her except her own instincts.
“What is it?” she asked. She didn’t want him to reject her. She didn’t want to do any of this alone.
Mat chewed thoughtfully, then shook his head. “I was just wondering if you had any plans for Christmas.”
* * *
Marcela, Mari’s younger sister, lived in an apartment that felt like the type of place Rachel would have lived had she grown up here—light peach walls, melon-scented candles, scattered paper lanterns throughout. Perhaps that was why she finally began to reinhabit her body upon entering it. From the silver stereo on the living room floor, a Lenny Kravitz song played at a low volume.
“I heard you have a sweet tooth,” said Marcela.
Rachel watched from the kitchen table as Mari’s younger sister steamed milk in a silver pitcher, then poured it into two mugs, a chocolate bar melting in each. “You’ll like this.” Then she held up a bottle of dulce de leche liqueur and winked, pouring it generously into two shot glasses.
“Los Pericos, por favor,” Marcela called to Mari, who sat on the futon couch with Mat several feet away. “And turn it up.”
The music stopped. Moments later, a reggae beat filled the apartment. Marcela bobbed her head. “One of these guys is the son of a disappeared parent.”
“In the band?”
Marcela nodded. A flourish of brass lifted above the melody. She topped off the drinks with foam and sprinkled them with chocolate shavings. Then she fixed a little tray of alfajores and placed the cookies and the mugs on the table in front of Rachel. On the counter, an unopened miniature cereal box of sugary Zucaritas flaunted the familiar face of Tony the Tiger on a blue backdrop. Marcela followed Rachel’s gaze, picked up the box, and placed it down on the table in front of her.
“You like these?” said Marcela. “Take it.”
Rachel smiled at her lap. “Thanks.” The small kindness overwhelmed her.
Marcela sat down in the chair beside her.
“I went to that excavation site once,” she said, sipping her chocolate. Her black rhinestone earrings danced below her curls, which were just like Mari’s but short and asymmetrical. “It was so depressing. Seriously. Qué quilombo. Why would my sister want to take you there?”
“I want to learn more about my mother.” Rachel touched the scarf draped around her neck. Lorena’s presence seemed to linger all around, just out of reach. Rachel sipped the drink, creamy and delicious. “Weren’t you curious to see the place you might have been born?”
“¿Por qué? It’s too tragic. You should be celebrating instead. You just found your brother.”
“What are you filling her head with?” Mari called from the futon.
“I’m just saying.” Marcela got up to retrieve the liqueur glasses and handed one to Rachel. She did a little dance and raised a toast before swallowing it. “There’s plenty of despair if you go looking for it. Remember when they found bones in a trash can outside the naval school?”
“God,” said Rachel. She sipped the liqueur.
“I’m serious,” said Marcela. “I’ve seen those cell walls. There’s an engraving on one of them—it looks like a prisoner scratched into the cement with their fingernails—that says ‘Ayúdame Señor.’ I’m telling you, it’s no good for you to see that.”
Rachel imagined herself as an infant in Lorena’s arms, crouched in some dark, hidden place.
“Believe me, I get it,” Marcela went on. “I got to grow up with my dad and sister, thank God, but I still go to therapy once a week. Most of the people in your situation—the ones who were lied to—they have to be really careful about their mental health. You’re not the only one. A lot of adopted people didn’t know their real parents were desaparecidos.”
“How many of them didn’t even know it happened?”
Marcela shrugged. “Look, you can feel bad if you want to, but you’re better off looking toward the future, in my opinion. You’re more than just the lies people told you. You found your truth now. You should do something with it.”
The words buoyed her; they seemed familiar. “Like what?”
Marcela stirred her coffee. “Your appropriator, the guy who stole you. He was in the military, right?”
Rachel opened her mouth. Marcela made her dad seem distant, like a foreign criminal.
“Yes.”
“Well, no offense,” said Marcela, sipping, “but fuck that guy.”
“Marcela,” scolded Mari.
“What? I’m serious. He did all this, lied to you, and then he threatens Mari? The guy’s bad milk.”
Rachel felt a hitch in her gut. “What do you mean, he ‘threatened’ you?”
“It was nothing,” said Mari, rising to approach the kitchen table. “It was just a phone call, that’s all. It could’ve been worse.”
A fury far beyond anger or rage surged in Rachel like a stark white light, blocking everything out. She thought of Mari’s business card and heard her dad’s voice in her head that day on the porch: It’s impossible.
“What did he say to you?”
“It wasn’t a big deal.” Mari put her hand on Rachel’s shoulder. “We expected it might happen. He knows what he did—he was probably just trying to get a feel for the extent of what we know—but he positioned it as though he was protecting you. Leaving New York early was just a precaution I took.” She glanced over at Mat. “We thought it would be safer, given the circumstances.”
“He’d be in the oven if he ever came down here,” said Marcela.
Rachel’s skin was hot. She clenched her teeth.
“Come on,” said Mat, standing up. “Finish up the coffees, let’s head over to the escuela.”
“Forget about that place,” said Marcela. She pulled a flier out from beneath a banana-shaped magnet on the refrigerator door and slid it across the table toward Rachel. “Where you should be going is to the escrache with me.”
On the flier was a photo of a clean-cut man in a suit, his eyes dark as black beans. He looked polished, successful—like some executive at a midtown investment bank. Beneath his picture was his name and a list of his affiliations: he’d been a military officer and part of two operational groups at clandestine prisons—Club Atletico and El Olimpo. Across his face was the word genocida, printed like a rubber stamp.
Rachel tipped her mug to swirl the last of the melted chocolate at the bottom and polished off the drink. Anger coursed through her veins like a drug. She flipped the flier over. On the back, in large font, was the header: If there’s no justice, there’s escrache!
“What’s escrache?” Rachel asked.
Mari took the flier and folded it in half. “It’s an event organized by families of the desaparecidos—mostly the kids. It’s a way of calling out the officers who have never been held accountable for what they did.”
“They go to the torturers’ houses,” said Mat.
“And what do they do there?”
“Make a statement,” laughed Marcela.
“It’s all completely sanctioned,” said Mari. “They have permits and everything. But we’re still not going.”
“It’s just a way of not letting the junta forget what they did,” said Mat.
“Like a shaming?”
Marcela nodded excitedly.
Mari narrowed her eyes at her sister. “Marcela takes after our mother,” she said. “It’s a bad idea.”
Marcela turned to Rachel. “Don’t you want to do something? You should take your life back. It’s yours now.”
Rachel just wanted to move forward, to be closer to Lorena. Maybe this was what Lorena would have done. The liqueur shot had taken hold. If Rachel went to this man’s house, perhaps she could get just a little bit closer to her mother somehow.
“I want to go,” she said.
“I don’t think you’d feel comfortable there,” said Mari. “It can get a little crazy.”
Mat nodded. “You may not be ready.”
“Besides,” said Mari. “I have an appointment at the Abuelas’ office this afternoon.”
But Marcela was already putting the mugs in the sink, slipping on her jacket and handing Rachel hers conspiratorially.
Rachel took her Magic 8 Ball key chain out of her backpack and shook it. “Should we go to the escrache?”
without a doubt.
Marcela shrugged. “Put your batteries in, Matías.”
Mari looked at Marcela warily. “Take her if you want, but stay out of trouble.”
A destructive buzz lifted Rachel as she trailed Marcela and Mat down the street. Near the university, a hydrant trickled icy water into a large puddle on the sidewalk. Commuters exited the Subte silently as the group descended into it, their steps falling in rhythm with a panhandler shaking a can of pesos.
They got off at the last station and took a bus through an upscale residential neighborhood, disembarking just as the sun broke through a cloud. A large banner tied between two telephone poles announced: If there is no justice, there is escrache! To the right, a landscaper dragged thick branches of a lime tree to the curb, ripe fruit still dangling like Christmas ornaments. Mat plucked a lime as they walked by and handed it to Rachel. She sniffed it, then put it in her backpack. In the distance up ahead, music from a radio was drowned out by snare drums and brass. Gilded drummers in full regalia—double-breasted turquoise tailcoats, marching band hats, gold-trimmed satin pants, shirts covered in sequin patches in the shapes of peace signs, butterflies, and little white headscarves like those the grandmothers wore—lined the gathering crowd. The farther they walked, the denser the crowd became. A stilt-walker had a barrel suspendered around his waist and painted with the words Anda Suelto—on the loose.
The crowd chanted: Alert, alert, alert the neighbors! Next to your home lives an assassin! Next to Rachel, a woman about her age wore a tight black shirt that revealed the underside of her pregnant belly, painted with we remember. Her pace fell in line with the crowd. This street carnival-parade-protest—full of noise and energy—would bring her closer to Lorena somehow. Exhilaration took hold.
“Are you okay?” asked Mat.
She nodded and linked her arm with his. She was propelled in the direction of instinct, her feet keeping time with the drumbeats. A young man with a can of spray paint crouched on the asphalt nearby. He stenciled large fingerprints on the street, then painted the torturer’s name followed by the words: You’re surrounded.
Two girls ran up ahead of the crowd as it progressed. At each telephone pole, they took turns boosting one another up, like cheerleaders doing a stunt, attaching yellow metal traffic signs to the pole with wire and string. Warning, the first sign said, In 500 meters lives a genocidal man. They posted another at 400 meters, then 300. The snare drums rolled.
She imagined leading the parade to her house in Howell Grove, the home of the blond ghost. You’re surrounded, she thought. She tripped over a shallow curb, then regained her stride.
At 250 meters out, a kid with a small sponge roller brush and a can of yellow paint wrote neatly on the cobblestone street: A torturer lives at 1955 Condarco Avenue. Rachel looked around at the crowd of hundreds. Someone dressed as a clown carried two signs that read Basta Yanquis and Patria sí, Colonia no!
At 200 meters, the girls posted another sign, then another at 100 meters. Police barriers were erected along the sidewalks as they drew nearer. Behind them, uniformed officers stood in a line. In front of the barriers, mere feet away, a group of people held a cloth banner across the line of cops: in service of impunity.
Oh, sung the crowd. Que se vayan todos . . .
“You doing okay?” Marcela yelled.
Rachel shrugged. “I’m fine.”
Marcela smiled. “You should come work at the Archivo with us.”
The chants grew louder as the two girls posted a sign for 50 meters out. More police officers were present—a line of female cops who, to Rachel’s relief, looked amused, as though they didn’t personally object to the display.
Look at yourselves, you’re all a part of it! The crowd chanted. It’s not just the cops, it’s the whole institution!
The two-story house at the torturer’s address was covered in plastic tarps. A member of the crowd fired a paintball gun; red paint splattered at a tarp’s center. An older woman, one of the mothers of the disappeared, approached the barrier wearing her white headscarf.
“You had the balls to torture and kill,” she cried, “but you don’t have the balls to come out now? Show your face, you bastard!”
“Is he in there?” asked Rachel.
“Hell no,” said Marcela. “He knew this was happening today. Probably took his family to his country house or something. We’re nothing but an inconvenience to him.”
Another paintball bullet was fired, and a splash of white paint stained a tarp.
Marcela chuckled. “So let him get a little cramp.”
Oh, sung the crowd. Que se vayan todos . . .
Rachel approached the police barrier. A gust of wind caught one of the tarps and lifted it briefly away from the house, revealing a glimpse of the interior through a downstairs window. She’d grown up in a house not much different from this one, the daughter of a military officer—yet she’d been born in a prison, daughter of a victim. The person who lived beyond this window could be Lorena’s torturer or her father’s colleague and friend. A twisting sensation suddenly gripped her core. Did she belong outside this house or in it?
A group of preteens banged pots and pans with wooden sticks. The cool metal of the police barrier warmed beneath her grip. Inside her eyelids were images of sequins and splashes of paint.
Colonia, no! Someone shouted with fervor. A wave of vertigo hit. Something was wrong with her ears; she was losing her balance. The sugary liqueur rose in her throat as she spun through the crowd, disoriented, swiveling from one face to another until she found Mat’s. The previous weeks caught up to her in a flash—Mari’s call, Lorena’s photo, her dad’s face that morning on the porch, the test results—and she landed in her body with full force, as though she’d just disembarked from an intense roller-coaster ride. It was all happening at once. She caressed the fibers of Lorena’s scarf with her thumb and forefinger. Nausea came like a storm surge.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
Marcela tugged her expertly through a crowd of bodies, tennis sneakers and boots to a miraculous patch of open grass. In an instant, Mat was at her side, his hand on her shoulders. The drumbeats carried on. They moved together to the fringes of the crowd and headed back down the street toward the bus stop. Mat draped one of her arms around his hunched shoulders.
“I’m sorry, girl,” said Marcela, rubbing her back. “I shouldn’t have made you come. You don’t have to be part of this fight just because of what happened to you.”
“Shh,” Mat said. “Just let her be.”
Rachel eased all her weight onto the cold metal bus stop bench.
“It’s not your fault,” Marcela said.
Rachel looked up at her, grateful. Marcela answered her ringing cell phone just as a bus was arriving.
“Yeah, she’s here,” Marcela said. She looked at Rachel, then lifted the phone. “It’s Mari. She wants to talk to you.”
Rachel took the phone. “Hello?”
“Rachel? I’m at the Abuelas’ office with Tomás, one of the attorneys. Can I put him on?” Mari’s voice was hastened, breathy. The bus lowered in front of them with an exhalation of exhaust, and the door flapped open.
“Okay,” said Rachel.
Through a muffled transition, a man’s nervous voice emerged.
“Miss Sprague?” a voice said in English. “We received your DNA results from Durand. Are you able to come by the office so that we can share them with you?”
Rachel looked up at Mat. “They have the test results. Can we go there?”
He glanced around. “Let me find us a cab.”
“Yes,” Rachel said. “We’ll come now.”
“Very good,” said Tomás. “And there’s something else, Miss Sprague. I’m afraid it’s a bit urgent. You’ll want to get here as soon as you can. There’s a woman here—she showed up unexpectedly, arrived at the office by herself this morning. She says she’s looking for her daughter.”