Though the book had made Ramirez a millionaire, he had resisted the pull of the smart northern suburbs and still resided in the southern barrio of San Telmo. His building was a large Parisian-style structure with a courtyard in the center and a winding staircase covered by a faded runner. The apartment itself served as both his residence and office, and its rooms were filled to capacity with tens of thousands of dog-eared files and dossiers. It was rumored that Ramirez’s personal archives rivaled those of the government. Yet in all his years of rummaging through Argentina’s dark past, he had never digitized or organized his vast holdings in any way. Ramirez believed that in clutter lay security, a theory supported by empirical evidence. On numerous occasions, he had returned home to find his files in disarray, but none of his important documents had ever been stolen by his adversaries.

One section of the living room was largely free of historical debris, and it was there Ramirez received Gabriel and Chiara. Propped in one corner, exactly where she had left it the night of her abduction, was Maria’s dusty cello. On the wall above were two handwritten pages of poetry, framed and shielded by glass, along with a photograph of Ramirez at the time of his release from prison. He bore little resemblance to that emaciated figure now. Tall and broad-shouldered, he looked more like a man who wrestled with machinery and concrete than words and ideas. His only vanity was his lush gray beard, which in the opinion of right-wing critics made him look like a cross between Fidel Castro and Karl Marx. Ramirez did not take the characterization as an insult. An unrepentant communist, he revered both.

Despite the abundance of irreplaceable paper in the apartment, Ramirez was a reckless, absent-minded smoker who was forever leaving burning cigarettes in ashtrays or dangling off the end of tables. Somehow, he remembered Gabriel’s aversion to tobacco and managed to refrain from smoking while holding forth on an array of topics ranging from the state of the Argentine economy to the new American president to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, which, of course, he considered deplorable. Finally, as the first drops of afternoon rain made puddles on the dusty windowsill, he recalled the afternoon several years earlier when he had taken Gabriel to the archives of Argentina’s Immigration Office. There, in a rat-chewed box of crumbling files, they discovered a document suggesting that Erich Radek, long assumed dead, was actually living under an assumed name in the first district of Vienna.

“I remember one thing in particular about that day,” Ramirez said now. “There was a beautiful girl on a motor scooter who followed us wherever we went. She wore a helmet the entire time, so I never really saw her face. But I remember her legs quite clearly.” He glanced at Chiara, then at Gabriel. “Obviously, your relationship was more than professional.”