The folder to the far left contained something new. The document inside listed two rows of names. By the fourth line Batya understood: the names were of the dead pimps and prostitutes buried in the Barracas Al Sur cemetery, the one Zwi Migdal had recently purchased. She thought of Nettie, an outcast buried outside the fence before this acquisition of the special cemetery for the tme’yim. The column next to the names noted how much Zwi Migdal paid for headstones for its members, the pimps. The dead girls had none, of course. The one time Batya had visited Nettie’s grave, on the thirtieth day of her passing, the name on the wooden sign had already been washed off by rain.

Batya forced herself to close the file before she risked being caught. She checked the corridor and, seeing no one there, returned to root in the wastebasket for a discarded pencil under the sheets of carbon paper Moskowitz had crumpled and some letters he had torn in half. Finding no pencil, Batya was about to return the garbage back to the wastebasket when she changed her mind and tucked a handful inside the newspapers she was taking away.

In the privacy of her room she checked her loot. It wasn’t hard to put together the few torn letters and to smooth out two pale used carbon papers showing Moskowitz’s handwriting. Batya couldn’t see anything of interest in these documents, but they might help her curry favor with Señor Rosenberg. She rolled the pages and wrapped them in a handkerchief, then crawled under her bed and squeezed the roll of letters into the tight space in the wall.

A week later, Batya paused at the top of the stairs to examine the goings-on in the pavilion. She felt a smile taking over her face at the sight of Señor Rosenberg sitting alone at the same table he’d occupied the first time.

He was back!

Batya touched her forehead as if she’d forgotten something and rushed back to her room. She must retrieve the roll of papers while he wasn’t there to learn of her hiding place. Praying that no one would search her room in the coming thirty minutes when she would be dancing, Batya tucked the papers in a slit in the mattress where she sometimes placed gifts of money until she was alone and could hide it.

“Have you given some thought to my proposal?” he asked her later, when they were shaking her bed—he fully dressed, she in her lace bustier, with her Spanish shawl still tied around her hips.

“How can you get to my father? Their shtetl is very remote.” In fact, she had no idea where the family’s new shtetl was. They had been forced to move yet again, and the name of the village on her father’s second envelope that had arrived through Rafael meant nothing.