The door closed and the aircraft began to move. Someone, a man a few feet away, was reciting a prayer. Someone else was retching with fear. There was a strong smell of vomit and human incontinence and gasoline.

“So the rumors are true, then?” I said. “There are no parachutes in the Argentine air force?”

A woman started crying. I hoped it wasn’t Anna.

The plane engines roared. Just two of them, I thought. A C-47 Dakota, most likely. You often saw them heading out over the River Plate. People sitting outside the Richmond would look up from their newspapers and their coffees and make jokes about these airplanes. “There goes the opposition,” or “Why can’t Communists swim in the River Plate? Because their hands are tied together.” The floor underneath me began to vibrate loudly. I felt the plane accelerate, and we started our takeoff. A few seconds later, there was a lurch, and we were airborne and the vibration settled into a steady, droning rhythm. The plane began to climb. The woman crying was almost hysterical by now.

“Anna?” I called. “Is that you? It’s me-”

Someone slapped me hard across the face. “No talking,” said a man’s voice. He lit a cigarette, and suddenly I remembered why I was a smoker. The smell of tobacco is the most wonderful smell in the universe when you’re facing death. I remember being shelled in 1916 and how a cigarette had got me through without my losing my nerve or my bowels.

“I wouldn’t mind a smoke,” I said. “Under the circumstances.”

I heard a man’s voice murmur something from the opposite end of the aircraft and, a few seconds later and much to my surprise, some fingers pushed a cigarette between my lips. It was already alight. I rolled it into the corner of my mouth and let my lungs go to work on it.

“Thanks,” I said.

I tried to make myself more comfortable. It wasn’t easy, but I hadn’t expected it would be. The cord around my wrists was as tight as the skin on a fat snake. My hands felt like balloons. I managed to straighten my legs, which weren’t tied, and kicked someone else. Maybe I would kick a shark in the eye before I drowned. Always supposing I hit the Rio and lived. I wondered how high the pilot was planning to go before they started bailing us out.

Minutes passed. I was down to the filter. I spat the cigarette out of my mouth and it burned my shoulder before ending up on the deck. I hoped it might hit a pool of gasoline and cause a small fire. That would teach them. Then what sounded like a handful of gravel hit the fuselage. It was raining. I took a deep breath and tried to steady myself. To make peace with myself. Negotiations opened slowly. I told Gunther he should think of himself as one of the lucky ones. How many others had ever managed to escape from the Russians? I was still telling myself how lucky I was, when someone interrupted my winning streak and opened the door. Cold air and rain blasted through the guts of the plane with a sound like the roaring of some terrible cloud-monster. A minotaur of the skies that needed to be served with regular human sacrifice.

It was impossible to guess how many human sacrifices were planned. I thought there were at least six or seven of us on that plane. With the door open now, the engines seemed to throttle back a little. There was movement all around me but, so far, no one had tried to move me toward the door. There was some sort of commotion and then a naked woman fell on me. I could tell she was naked because her breast squashed against my face and she was screaming. As they hauled her off me, I decided I had to say something or I’d be telling it to the seagulls.

“Colonel Montalban? If you’re there, speak to me, you bastard.”

The woman who was screaming started begging them not to kill her. It wasn’t Anna. The voice was older, more mature, huskier, not well educated. It was hard to say more about her voice because, suddenly, it was not there, and I sensed she wasn’t there, either.

Behind me, a man was praying the same prayer over and over again, as if the repetition might make it count for more in the long line of prayers that were already winging their way ahead of us to the divine waiting room. From the speed of his prayers and his breathing and the way his position changed, I guessed he was next in line to the door. And even as I was thinking this, he was gone, too, his final scream, as he was bundled out of the plane, lost forever in the slipstream of eternity.

I tried to shake the blindfold off my eyes but it was useless. I might as well have had no eyes at all. Only I wished that they had stopped up my ears as well, as they deported the other men and women, one by one, through the open door of the plane. It was like having a front-row seat in the dress circle of hell.

I bellowed like a man roasting on a spit, cursing their mothers and their fathers and their bastard children. I told the colonel what I thought of him and his country and his president and his cancerous wife, and how I was going to have the last laugh because only I knew what he and she had dearly wanted to know, and that I wasn’t going to tell him anything now, not even if they did throw me out of the plane. I told them that I was spitting in all their faces in the knowledge that at least I was going to die knowing that I’d thwarted their stupid schemes. Someone slapped me. I ignored it and kept on talking.

“A month from now. A week. Maybe even tomorrow. You and that dumb blond whore are going to ask yourself if Gunther really knew what he said he knew. If he really could have told you what you wanted to find out most in the world. Where you can find her. Where she’s been hiding all this time. Don’t you want to find out, Colonel?”

I heard a woman scream several times before the open door silenced her permanently. Some sadistic part of my brain tried to persuade me that there had been something about her scream that had seemed familiar. Her perfume, too. But I wasn’t buying it. I hadn’t any more reason for thinking Anna was on the plane than for believing the colonel was. If she had done as I had told her and gone to stay with a friend, there was every reason to suppose she was all right.

Someone snatched off my blindfold. I was just in time to see two of my mustachioed friends carrying a man to the open door behind the wing. Mercifully, the man was unconscious. He was wearing just underpants. His hands and his feet were tied and he looked like he’d been badly beaten. Either that or his face had been stung by a whole jungleful of bees. The less said about his toes the better. The two who threw him out of the plane probably thought they were doing him a favor. One of them pulled a filthy handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wiped his brow. It was hard work. Then they looked at me.

“What did you expect?” said a voice behind me. “I warned you to leave it alone.”

My neck was painful from when I’d been slugged but, gritting my teeth, I turned my head into the pain to meet the colonel’s eye.

“I didn’t expect to find what I found,” I said. “I didn’t expect the unthinkable. Not again. Not here. This is supposed to be a new world. I didn’t expect it would be just like the old one. But you know, now that I’ve seen your national airline and how it handles double-booked passengers, suddenly it doesn’t seem quite so surprising.”

“This?” He shrugged. “It’s easier this way. There’s no evidence. No camps. No bodies. No graves. Nothing. No one can ever prove anything. It’s a one-way ticket. No one comes back to tell the tale.”

“Who were they, anyway? Those people who disappeared just now.”

“People like you, Gunther. People who asked too many questions.”

“Is that all you’ve got against me?” I got a grin going and tried to make my mouth hang on to it, like I still had an ace up my sleeve. It didn’t feel right. My lips were trembling too much, but from here on, a show-and-tell was all I had going for me. If he decided I was bluffing, I was in for a flying lesson. He knew it. I knew it. The two stooges by the still-open door of the Dakota knew it. “Hell, I’m a detective, Colonel. It’s my job to ask too many questions. To stick my nose in where it’s not wanted. You of all people should know that. Everything’s my business until I find out what I’ve been hired to find out. That’s the way this racket works.”