Washington, D.C. is the American political stage on which private grief becomes public action. In the Capitol, Congressman Sal Burnstein receives a concrete mission to investigate Clara Stauffer and the Nazi escape network; the city also frames the novel’s account of U.S. power, whose Cold War support for anti-communist military regimes helps enable state terror in Argentina.

The Capitol and Burnstein’s purpose

On May 21, 1946, Sal Burnstein arrives at his Capitol office ten minutes before a scheduled meeting. The room has the standard furnishings of Democratic representatives’ offices, left unchanged by Burnstein. In the first drawer of his desk lies a family photograph that, the narrative says, explains him completely. He turns it over to read his mother’s inscription, “Korczyna, 12 de abril de 1919,” a date and place he has revisited hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times.

The photograph holds a family history marked by absence. Burnstein’s older brother, Elyahu, had emigrated to the United States in November 1918 after returning from the war and learning that his fiancée had married someone else. Their father, Abraham, was killed the following January in a pogrom in Korczyna. The attackers invoked the accusation that Galicia’s Jews supported the Soviets and opposed Polish independence, but Abraham was religious and orderly, and had little sympathy for the revolutionaries who had overturned the tsarist empire. The mob destroyed his shop, dragged him through the streets, and hanged him without asking questions. In Washington, the photograph preserves the intimate history behind Burnstein’s political resolve.

From personal memory to a mission

A meeting arranged by Sammy brings Burnstein together with Meg Williams, who asks what he knows about Spain and whether he has heard of Clara Stauffer. An hour later, he thanks Meg with an embrace and two kisses. Her proposal has given him more than a possible course of action: it supplies a defined mission, a practical objective, a real setting, and a named adversary. The account presents this encounter as the point at which his grief acquires a political target.

Meg warns that success is uncertain and that the work will be expensive. Burnstein accepts the risk and cost, telling Cohen that money is the one resource they have in abundance. That afternoon, he asks his secretary to find a photograph of Stauffer, described as a Spanish woman of German origin and a leader in the Women’s Section of the Falange, living at 14 Calle Galileo in Madrid. Three weeks later, the portrait Abby has obtained through an American embassy official sits in the same desk drawer as the Burnstein family photograph. The arrangement makes the investigation a continuation of memory rather than a departure from it: the image of the family’s loss is placed beside the image of the woman Burnstein has been tasked to pursue.

A wider history of American power

The novel sets this congressional investigation beside its broader account of U.S. policy in Latin America. It describes the National Security Doctrine as a Cold War approach that treats military dictatorships as instruments in the struggle against left-wing movements. In this account, Washington’s support for authoritarian governments has consequences beyond diplomatic alignment: it gives political cover to repression.

The narrative traces Argentina’s expanding violence to measures taken even before the 1976 coup. On February 5, 1975, President María Estela Martínez de Perón issued the decree that established Operation Independence, ostensibly a military campaign against guerrillas in Tucumán. In practice, the operation divided the country into five military zones and granted their commanders sweeping authority to repress those labelled subversive. Brigadier General Acdel Vilas described its purpose as cultural as well as military; the campaign consequently targeted civilians, including teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and religious figures in San Miguel de Tucumán. The book presents this campaign as a precursor to the intensified repression of the subsequent dictatorship.

Repression and its consequences

From the spring of 1976 through the autumn of 1982, the Argentine dictatorship forcibly disappeared thousands of people. Because many bodies were never recovered, estimates vary; the account gives an approximate total of 30,000 victims. It describes a clandestine system divided among task groups responsible for abduction, secret detention, torture, executions, disposal of bodies, and the removal and reassignment of children born to detained women. Among its most extreme practices were the death flights, in which living prisoners, bound and drugged, were dropped over the open sea from military aircraft.

The terror began on the night of March 24, 1976, when hundreds of illegal arrests took place. The novel connects this violence to the predicament of people seeking safety abroad: Mexico received the largest number of Argentine exiles, while Spain, paradoxically, became the second-largest destination just after Francisco Franco’s death. The contrast extends the meaning of Washington beyond the Capitol. It is both the location where Burnstein turns personal remembrance into an effort at accountability and the symbolic center of a foreign policy whose anti-communist priorities, as the book argues, helped sustain the conditions in which state violence could flourish.