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I picked the picture up and showed it to Boutros, whose hands had found their way into her mouth. She tore her eyes away from Lyn Vaughn and looked at it. “ Tia Marta,” she said around nine grimy fingers.

Another picture, the largest of all, showed Elena, the boys, and the girl, considerably younger, standing in front of a greener, lusher, muddier world that had to be El Salvador. They were all looking past the camera, laughing at something. The boy in the center had thrown his arms comfortably over his brothers’ shoulders.

No picture of the baby. No man to take it since she was born? There wasn’t much of anything to suggest a man’s presence. There wasn’t, in fact, much of anything at alclass="underline" a couch, two chairs, a low table. A closed door.

Through the door, a hallway, parallel to the street. Three bedrooms, one with three beds-the boys? — one with two-Elena and her older daughter? — and one, the tiniest of all, a penitential nun’s cell with a bare brown linoleum floor, an iron-framed single bed, and a four-drawer dresser of unpainted, unfinished wood, the kind people buy cheap, meaning to paint it, and never do. Surrounded by a pink plastic frame on top of the dresser, Marta’s face squinted apprehensively out at me, waiting for the next blow.

The mystery of the child’s hands was solved. Aunt Marta’s room apparently served as a trap for all the dirt that entered the house. There were dust rats under the bed, grit on the linoleum. It may be sexist stereotyping, but it seems to me that when a woman lets her space get seriously dirty, she’s usually depressed.

In the top drawer, rolled up into a sock, I found eleven hundred dollars in twenties and fifties. A lot of money for a maid. The child gazed up at me solemnly as I unrolled the sock’s mate and heard something jingle. Marta’s cache: a ring, another, a gold chain, a-

Somebody moaned, a constricted little vocal shiver with no force behind it. I looked at Boutros, but she’d dropped to her fanny on the floor, where she was rolling dirt ropes on the linoleum.

My spine went stiff, and the pain in my back wrapped itself around my middle, saddled me, and dug in the spurs. I closed my fingers around the sock and replaced it silently. For insurance, I picked up the saltshaker, which I’d been toting around with me, and zapped the child. A dirt rope went into her mouth, but she kept quiet. Easing the salt-shaker into my left hand, I pulled my gun out of my pocket, trying to keep my body between it and the child, and slid my feet toward the door. My shoes squealed on the linoleum. Boutros got up and slid along behind me. Her shoes squealed on the linoleum.

Okay, skip stealth. I sprang across the hall and into the boys’ room, gun extended, and kicked the door back against the wall. The child squealed happily at the noise. No one behind the door, no one in the room, no one in the closet, no one in the little bathroom.

I kicked the door again as I hurtled back into the hallway and slammed my back against the wall. Pulling both hands from her mouth, the child clapped them together. She was having a great time. I took three long steps sideways, hugging the wall, and then whirled and kicked the open door of the largest room, the room I’d taken to be Elena’s.

It banged against the wall and bounced shut behind me, but by then I was raking the clothes in the closet with my free hand, keeping the gun back, at waist level, pointed into the closet. The clothes swayed back and forth, hangers rattling. No one.

There were two beds, a queen-size one with a cerise coverlet in the center of the room and a smaller one, a child’s bed, up against the wall to the right. Boutros squatted Asian-style, bottom touching the floor, next to the larger bed and put a dark brown handprint on something white protruding from beneath the bedspread. A shoe.

It was a small shoe, a white canvas sneaker. It had a foot in it. It was perfectly still, as still as the foot of a corpse.

I put the gun in my left, reached down, and took hold of the corpse’s foot. Boutros scuttled backward, and the corpse said, “ Yaiiii.”

“Mr. Max give me,” Marta Aguirre said sullenly. She was even smaller than I’d expected, a shrunken, malformed woman who seemed to have been compressed unevenly by external pressure, collapsed inward like a tin can at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

She was sitting on her hands on the queen-size bed, and I was perched on the smaller one, the child’s bed, feeling oversize and overtired and stretched far too thin for any of this. Boutros, whose name turned out to be Tina, was in the living room, glued to the latest carnage from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You’ve already admitted you took the rings and the gold chain. Why would Max give you more than a thousand bucks?”

“For gold,” she said.

It was what she’d said before. I put a hand behind me and rubbed at the small of my back. Peter Pain immediately whammed me a good one. “Gold for what?”

“Surprise.”

“Well, you’re going to have to spoil it,” I said. She glowered at me, and I tried the direct approach. “What kind of a surprise? For whom?”

Her mouth shrunk at the corners like a poison kiss, giving her an expression of surpassing bitterness, the expression of something little and bent that lived in the dark under a bridge and frightened dogs. “ Maricon,” she said venomously. “Fancy boy.”

“You don’t mean Christy,” I ventured.

“New boy,” she said. Her right shoulder was a good two inches higher than her left. It made her look like a beast of burden.

“Marta,” I said, “did you ever see this new boy?”

She squinted darkly at me, assessing me and finding me wanting on some private scale. “No.” The word dropped like a stone.

“So let’s say you’re telling the truth, just for fun. You were supposed to buy gold for Max’s new boy?”

“ Make,” she said, packing a surprising amount of contempt into such a short word. “ Make gold.”

I closed my eyes and thought briefly about lying down. The bed was too short. “You were going to take Max’s money,” I said slowly, “and make gold for his new boy.”

“Stupid,” Marta Aguirre said. I was beginning to share Christy’s feelings about her. “Uncle make. Uncle make gold.”

“Your uncle,” I said, picking my way through the sparsest of verbal thickets, “is a goldsmith?”

“Wha?” Marta Aguirre said.

Maybe the bed wasn’t too short. “A jeweler.”

“ Si. Jeweler.” She nodded vigorously, in case si was beyond my powers.

“What was he supposed to make?”

“Stupid,” she said again. “Gimme.” She reached out a stunted hand, and I gave her the sock that had held the rings and the necklace. She fished around in it and pulled something out: a pack of military dog tags. “Make gold,” she said, explaining the obvious to an idiot. “Uncle make gold. For fancy boy.”

Steel dog tags. The steel chain taken from around Max’s neck. I got up, feeling stronger and more energetic than I had in days, and pulled Max’s wad from my pocket. I dangled a fifty in front of her, and when she reached for it I relieved her of the dog tags and read them. They said:

McCARVEY, JD SGT

AR5144597082

TYPE AB

ROMAN CATHOLIC