A middle-aged man in a smart blue suit approached the Roque children. "I knew your father, he was my superior officer, a monster, a brilliant guerrilla fighter." The next words took shape with difficulty. "You know they killed my wife, brother, several friends . . . "
He handed over a business card that confirmed a strange transformation: Carlos Bettini, former Montonero guerrilla, was now director of Argentina's national airline.
The Roque children, Manes, Ivan and Martin, aged 31, 28 and 23 respectively, presented themselves before a Buenos Aires appeal court in April for a face-toface encounter with the man who ordered the death of their father, Julio "Lino" Roque.
A philosophy graduate and secondary school headmaster, Roque was also the number three leader in the Montonero guerrilla movement, which launched a sustained assault on Argentina's political and military rulers in the early 1970s.
Roque's Manual for the forma- tion of Cadres was a sacred guerrilla text which turned up in subversive safe houses from Chile to El Salvador.
The Montoneros were an odd rebel outfit, cobbling together socialist ideals and nationalist rhetoric, all in the name of Juan Peron, Argentina's leading statesman who personally repudiated the Montoneros when he retook power from the army in 1970.
Roque, aka el Monstruo (the Monster), died during a botched arrest attempt in May 1977. Manes Roque, then 10 years old, went into exile in Mexico with her mother.
At five years of age, Manes lived in a state of constant tension, recalling late-night house searches and guns pointed at her mother's head.
Two decades later Manes was a film student in Mexico City and visited the Zapatista rebels in south-east Mexico, making a documentary about rebel women. She met Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista's charismatic military chief.
"It was like meeting my father again," she said after the emotive encounter. Manes offered Marcos a copy of her father's manual.
"Don't worry, I have it," he said. Manes decided that her next documentary would be about Comandante Lino, her father.
Last year she returned to Argentina and tracked down her father's students, lovers and former guerrilla comrades, capturing 22 hours of testimony.
Several miles of taped footage failed to uncover the identity of her father's killer until a thick brown envelope arrived in the post. The package contained a copy of an interview granted to an Argentinian magazine by former navy captain Alfredo Astiz.
Astiz described his most dramatic encounters in the line of duty, under orders from his commander, Admiral Emilio Massera.
"I killed Lino Roque," he told the interviewer, "It was a tremendous shootout, they almost hit me in the leg." The "they" Astiz referred to was Manes's father, who defended his hideout alone against 200 troops with helicopter backup.
After four hours of combat Roque had run out of ammunition. He burned down the house to destroy documentation within and swallowed a cyanide pill.
Astiz, Massera and other army killers were tried and imprisoned, but eventually released by weak civilian administrations. Astiz was rehired by the navy last year as an intelligence adviser while former junta leader Massera boasted about his "direct line" to military intelligence.
Laws of due obedience and a full pardon guaranteed impunity for past crimes. But an appeals court judge recently agreed to hold informal hearings to help relatives investigate the whereabouts of their lost loved ones.
Manes's mother was less than enthusiastic about her children returning to Argentina for the hearing. "She's worried that the disappearances are going to happen again," said Manes.
Most of the lawyers, judges and investigators involved in the appeals procedure, held during March, had received death threats.
The entrance to the appeal court was blocked by about 300 protesters, mainly members of HIJOS (Children for Identity and Justice and against Forgetting and Silence).
There were placards demanding the trial and imprisonment of Massera, while hundreds of police surrounded the protesters. The hearings have no punitive capacity and declarations are not made under oath.
On the second floor of the appeals court a Swiss embassy representative chatted to Mr Ragner Hagelin, father of Dagmar, who was murdered by the regime in 1976.
The court convened and everyone squeezed into five narrow benches inside a stuffy room where busts of philosophers, a grandfather clock and volumes of past court recommendations lined the walls.
Massera was already inside, dressed in a navy suit, thin wisps of grey hair neatly groomed into place. He sat with his back to the relatives, facing five judges and a stenographer.
"This hearing serves only to help reconstruct Argentina's historical memory," said judge Riva Aramayo, urging Massera to deliver information on the fate of the disappeared.
"I am not going to declare," said Massera, a phrase he repeated 150 times over the following eight hours, as each question brought only silence. Outside the court gate the volume of the HIJOS protest grew by the minute, as firecrackers and whistles almost drowned out the proceedings within.
Several breaks in the process allowed witnesses to see Massera face to face each time he entered and left the courtroom. At 73, he looks tanned and strong, but his voice cracked as the questions passed from polite lawyers to outraged relatives.
Then it was Manes's turn. Pale and nervous, she took the microphone.
"My name is Maria Ines Roque, daughter of Julio Roque. Mr Massera knows perfectly well where the remains of my father are. It's the only detail we don't have. Why won't you tell us where he is buried?"
Silence followed.
"I am not going to answer," said Massera, hunching further forward in his red velvet chair.
A loud scuffle began outside the court building as police, with batons flying, moved in on protesters and arrested 40 people. One student leader was hauled into a police van, beaten for 10 minutes, then set free, his face disfigured from the blows.
The nation's TV cameras captured every detail. I accompanied a group of four deputies who raced down to the court entrance and watched with indignation as the last protester was hauled away.
"Get them in and get out of here," snapped a man in a dark suit, who gave orders to the uniformed police.
"Who are you?" asked Alfredo Bravo, an opposition deputy who himself was kidnapped during the dictatorship.
"Don't bother me, I have things to do," the police agent responded.
Massera's bodyguards brushed down their scuffed jackets and smoothed their hair after co-ordinating the repression with the police. An eerie silence replaced the lively drums of an hour before.
The silent police chief of today looked just like the unrepentant admiral from 20 years ago. With an entire generation of dissidents wiped out, Argentina's state terror apparatus requires only an occasional televised baton charge to remind citizens that power still grows from the barrel of a gun.
Manes had one further task to complete before returning to Mexico. She applied for state compensation through a government fund that rewards victims of military rule. The process has divided its beneficiaries.
"I could never accept money for the death of my son," Elisa Landin told me. Her son disappeared inside a military barracks in 1976.
"I see it as the state beginning to take responsibility for the 30,000 deaths, a minimum reparation for the damage done" said Manes. The rate of payment is £140,000 for each child who lost a parent during military rule.
"I suffered this trauma and I have to learn to survive it, to convert this search into a permanent struggle for memory without letting it destroy me," concluded Ms Roque, acknowledging the need to remember and the right to forget.