Kirchner pried up the card and saw an inscription: POLA DE ALLANDE. The same words were on a sticker on the souvenir itself. Kirchner thought of the end of The Shawshank Redemption, when Morgan Freeman’s view of a postcard’s beach scene becomes an actual view of the beach, and the camera passes through to find Tim Robbins there, barefoot, warmly greeting him as the music swells. He laughed out loud: This is where they went.

When his friend Fabien asked him where Pola de Allande was, Kirchner told him he’d learned that it’s in an area of Spain called Asturias, west of Basque country—so remote that it was one of the only parts of Spain not invaded by the Moors.

“Dave,” Fabien said. “That is where my family is from. You have got to be kidding me.”

They looked at a map. Pola de Allande is 44 miles from the town of Pravia, where Fabien’s grandfather was born.

“Dave,” Fabien said. “We go there. We find them.”

That afternoon, Kirchner booked two plane reservations to Madrid. Fabien would meet family he’d never met before, and serve as an interpreter for Kirchner. Before they had a chance to leave, Kirchner finally wore down the bank teller in Spain, who told him that Pauline’s account was closed. He gave Kirchner an old address from a town called Oviedo, the capital of Asturias. Using a reverse directory on the Web, Kirchner found six phone numbers at the address. He called each number one by one, using Fabien as an interpreter. Did anyone know an old man with a mustache and a porkpie hat who had a sick wife?

One person remembered. He said they used to go downstairs to Manolo’s tapas bar every day. They called Manolo’s.

“Sí! Sí! I know them!” Manolo told Fabien.

Fabien grinned and nodded at Kirchner.

“Of course I know them!” Manolo said. “But she died. She died two years ago. And he went back to his hometown. Pola de Allande.”

Kirchner couldn’t believe it was coming together so perfectly. Manolo even finally knew José’s second, matrilineal last name: Alvarez. Kirchner quickly typed the name José Barrero Alvarez into the Spanish Internet white pages and got two names. The first one they reached was José’s nephew.

“Ah, I’m really sorry,” José’s nephew told Fabien over the phone. “José died six weeks ago.”

“My heart sank,” Kirchner says. José had died the same week Kirchner first dropped through the roof hatch.

The same day, José’s nephew put Kirchner in touch with a woman named Isabel, a niece of José’s who had taken care of both him and Pauline in their final days. From Isabel he learned their story.

José Barrero Alvarez was a Spaniard who had lived in Cuba for 27 years, then moved back to Spain and finally to New York, where he hooked up with the Cuban expatriate community and met and married Pauline. Pauline Dean García was born in Cuba and stayed until the early sixties, when she defected to the U.S. and started a business in the garment district. They had no children, and spent thirteen years slowly trying to fix up the building on Fifth Avenue, which they bought at an auction in 1986 for $210,000. Isabel said it had been in terrible shape—they apparently got into a bidding war with another party and overpaid. The investment may have been their downfall: They eventually couldn’t pay the mortgage and the rehab costs. Pauline apparently did most of the demo and construction work herself—slowly, painstakingly.

The couple’s marriage was stormy, Isabel said, and when Pauline became ill, she rarely left the La-Z-Boy chair at night. She was superstitious, and she told Isabel she was afraid to die in bed. José suggested that they give up their buildings—she was too sick to work on them, anyway—and move back to his ancestral village in Spain.