The Ministry of Special Cases (27 page)

“Whatever’s been started, you won’t be in power at the end. Nothing lasts in this country,” Lillian said. “This won’t either. You’ll have to answer, all of you.”

Another bite, another sip, and, mulling over Lillian’s comment, he reset his hat on the top of his head.

“You’re right that nothing lasts in this country. But you also must know that in Argentina there is no reckoning. Here no one ever pays.”

THERE WENT KADDISH TEARING
out of the store, the string of bells tinkling in his wake. The sole of his shoe flexed as he caught the opposite curb and, lifting himself, pumping a fist, the package he held, in its festive wrapping, tumbled out of his grip. It flew end over end and burst open against the sidewalk, pastries spreading over the street.

Kaddish raced on toward his building, into it and up the stairs and through their front door.

“It’s Pato,” Kaddish said. Not Pato himself but word of Pato. It was, for Lillian, enough. She pulled on her pants and grabbed for a shirt. Kaddish tried to relay what he’d heard.

He had gone to the bakery. A woman in a corduroy blazer and smelling of perfume was finishing off a joke as she pushed past. The baker was up on her ladder, stacking
facturas
in a pyramid on a shelf.

“Flaco,” she said, to Kaddish, “where have you been?” She didn’t say another word until he took out his wallet, not another word until she was behind the counter, the register closed. She handed him his package. “I can’t take your money today,” she said. “Everything is free today.”

Kaddish accepted and was leaving, looking back over his shoulder as if she was going to change her mind. Then she said, “Come back with your wife.” Kaddish told her that Lillian wouldn’t. There was no way.
The baker climbed up the ladder; Kaddish tucked the package under his arm.

“Tell her,” the baker said as she returned to her stacking, “I was up in the office when they made your son gone.”

“I almost didn’t tell your husband,” the baker said to Lillian. “I saw him and almost didn’t say a thing. They’ll kill you for less. Your son isn’t my only customer gone. Oh, God,” she said, “I almost didn’t tell.” She turned to Kaddish. “If I’d let you go once, I’d have made it.”

“It’s all right,” Kaddish said.

“It’s not all right,” said the baker. “Not all right not to tell, and not all right now that I have. I’m a dead person. I’m involved and I will be dead.” She pulled her apron off and blew her nose on it.

Kaddish shook a cigarette out of a pack and offered it. The baker took two.

“I have my own kids,” she said. “How could I not say anything when I’m a mother? And as a mother who will leave orphans, why have I said a word? These, mind you, are the most sober of thoughts.” She blew her nose again and then leaned toward the flame Kaddish held. “At night, full of sorrow, I picture myself dead and think, Who will take the cookies from the oven when they’re done?” She snorted at herself and smoked.

A customer came in and the baker waved the balled-up apron at him. “Closed,” she said. “Closed for an hour.” The man looked from face to face and left.

The baker flipped over the open sign in the window, turned the lock, and all three went behind the tallest display case, where Lillian sat on a footstool. She leaned her head against Kaddish’s hip. He rested a hand against it, moving only to light cigarettes for the baker or himself.

On the night of the abduction, the baker had been upstairs in the office doing her bills. It was late for her to be working, later than she liked to stay awake.

“A baker rises early,” she said. “I saw a couple making out in the back of a car. I figured with parents in both apartments and no money for the
telo
, they’ve got the backseat. They were wrestling around, and I was smiling. I’ve got a good angle from upstairs, a view straight into the car. Right as I’m going back to my bills, giving them their privacy, the boy rears up for second, pulls back an arm, and gives the woman a few quick punches to the face. Businesslike punches, not from anger.” She stopped to demonstrate for them. “It’s then I see the boy is very much a man, ten years older than I’d thought. He sits up higher, not rushed at all, and he starts punching these longer, lazier punches. I could see that the man was explaining something with the slow punches, admonishing the girl.”

“It was a girl?” Lillian said. Her stomach dropped.

“I still say girl,” the baker said. “I thought even through the punching that it was a girl, but that was leftover from the making out, from the first glimpse. It was,” the baker said, “a boy a shaggy-haired boy.”

“Was it Pato?” Lillian said. It was an odd mix of feelings, Lillian wishing that it was her child hit in the face.

“I couldn’t see that much, but owning a shop is peculiar that way. Your customers, there are so many—yet you know them from the subtlest things, a bit of hair, a familiar motion. The shape of a head.”

“Of a nose,” Kaddish said.

“How many times have I seen Pato make his way in here, rubbing the sleep off his face? It was dark and there was the other man blocking, but I knew. I spent many hours pretending otherwise. I spent a few days trying to convince myself. And I’m sorry for that.”

“My God,” Lillian said.

“When was it?” Kaddish said.

The baker showed them the dated stubs from the checks she’d been writing.

“I stayed on my knees all night in that office. The whole of it wishing that your son would come in.”

“There was only one man?” Kaddish said. “There had to be more.”

“There were more,” she said. “The punching one got out and spoke to a man in a hat. I couldn’t tell if they were arguing or not, but the one with the hat waved his hands a lot, as if excited, and then he put his hat on the roof of the car. That’s when three others came over.”

“Four altogether?” Kaddish said.

“Five,” she said. “Five, plus Pato, beaten in the car. The one who did the hitting got back in, and the three who arrived last got in the other doors.”

“And the hat,” Lillian said, the bird-feather man still in her head. “Were there feathers?”

The baker looked baffled, and Kaddish caught her gaze.

“Where is Pato right then?” Kaddish said.

“The floor, I think,” the baker said. She looked deeply ashamed when she said this, as if this was the worst part. “I think under their feet on the floor. That’s when I figure, if I can see them they can also see me. It’s also when I notice that the car is a Falcon, a green Falcon, and I duck. When the car started up I peered over the edge of the window. The man, the fifth man, reached for his hat. He didn’t lift it so much as hold it as the car drove out from underneath, so that he was left with his arm sticking out and the hat in the air.”

“And then?” Lillian said.

“Then nothing. He put the hat on and walked in the other direction, in the direction of your building. He just walked off down the middle of the street like anyone.”

“And you?” Lillian said.

“I was working with a banker’s lamp. I yanked out the plug and stayed on my knees in the dark, and—I told you already—I wished until morning that your son would come in.”

KADDISH RAN HOME AGAIN
to gather up the papers, to grab Lillian’s purse, and to call Tello, the lawyer, to see if he had any advice. Lillian stayed back with the baker; she wouldn’t leave her side.

When the baker went for a new apron, she brought two, and together they reopened the store. Lillian was happy to try out the baker’s fantasy to pretend, with every swing of the door and sound of the bells, that it was her Pato shuffling in. Lillian took orders and wrapped up pastries while she waited for Kaddish to get back. It was as she pressed down a piece of tape and sent another customer off with his breakfast that she understood how part of their problems came to be. Everything in the whole damn country comes wrapped up like a Christmas present, cotton balls, a bar of soap, the
medialunas
with which she’d sent the customer home. “The land of pretty paper,” Lillian said. “Everything full of promise until you peel the wrapping away.” The baker only nodded and opened the register to make change.

The Ministry of Justice was peopled with brittle, unfriendly workers who had actual answers to questions posed. The workers gave off the impression that information might be communicated to them and that such information might merit eventual consideration. It was still a
government office, but a level of efficiency was apparent. Lillian saw people working everywhere she looked. And one spinsterish clerk was, in answering her, actually kind. The mood among those waiting was no cheerier than over at the Ministry of Special Cases, but there was a marked difference in how those assembled waited. Missing from their faces was the flat affect of those who know there’s no hope of getting anything done.

Before the baker had turned the sign in the window of her shop, she’d packed a hard leather case with thermos and maté and wrapped up enough pastries for a family often.

“You have high hopes for our appetites,” Lillian had said.

“There will be other people there. It does no good going stale.”

The baker hadn’t said a word since they’d arrived at the ministry. She didn’t offer a single stranger a pastry. She sat stock-still, the leather case hugged to her chest. At the bakery, she’d seemed liberated by her admission, excited to be free of her secret and to have done right. At the Ministry of Justice, Lillian thought she might be slipping into shock.

Lillian wanted to tell the baker to pace her panic. It would be days, she expected. The baker might be forced to join them for some time before she could do her part.

Lillian was surprised then when a stern-looking man in an undertaker’s suit approached them and quietly led the baker away. “Thank you,” Lillian said, reaching out just in time to touch the small of her back.

Lillian’s fingers tingled the whole time the baker was gone, so intense was the idea that Pato’s story was being told, that a case was being built, and that Pato might, as the bird-feather man explained, be moved from darkness back into the white world. She sat there and shivered. Kaddish stayed planted at her side, a crushed and empty pack of Jockeys clenched in his fist.

Kaddish was having a stretch in his seat when he caught sight of the baker rushing across the room, giving them a wide berth. Even at this distance, Kaddish could see the sheen of sweat on the woman and a distinctly gray pallor to her skin. He tapped Lillian and, taking his cue, she turned. Lillian found what she was supposed to be looking for as the
baker, who could not resist, stole a glance their way. The baker caught herself caught by Lillian. She put a hand to her mouth and rushed off, nearly in a sprint.

Lillian begrudged her nothing. The baker could turn into a stranger like all the others. She could deny Pato ever was for having remembered him now.

Kaddish pulled off the leather top of the maté case the baker abandoned, as if he’d just been given it as a gift. Before Lillian could even figure out what to do next, the man in the dark suit returned, carrying a clipboard.

“I want to go over something,” he said, matter-of-fact. “And there are statements for you to fill out and sign.”

“There is a case?” Lillian said. “There’s a habeas corpus?”

The man lowered his clipboard and gave Lillian a hangdog look.

“There will be an investigation into the claims. If there is merit, a writ of habeas corpus will be issued.”

“Just like that?” Lillian said.

The man turned the clipboard toward her. “Fill these out,” he said, “and sign.”

It appeared to Gustavo that all they did was hug. If Lillian was in the office, she and Frida were locked in an embrace. Gustavo had returned from a lunch meeting with a bit of a tilt to his step. He’d walked in to find the two of them pressed together and Frida cooing, “A good sign. It will end well.”

“Is he back?” Gustavo said.

The women separated. It was baffling to Lillian that Gustavo needed to ask. How could the answer ever be anything but obvious? Frida would bolt upright in bed, she’d know in her sleep if Pato was home. Frida went back to her desk and Lillian started for hers. “So much to catch up on,” was all Lillian said as she sat down.

Gustavo scratched at his ear.

“Lillian,” he said. And Lillian looked up.

“Hard to believe the sea change it makes. It’s only a nose, but you
come in here more stunning each time.” Gustavo kicked at the leg of a radiator. “Could we talk in my office?”

“What is it?”

“It’s a private matter,” he said.

“Then I’ll only have to repeat it to Frida after. You know we share everything between us.”

Gustavo gave another kick to the radiator and rubbed at his neck, doing his best to emphasize that he was torn. “Then stand up,” he said. “At least stand up and come over here.”

Lillian stood up and went over.

“What is it, Gustavo?”

“It’s not a time for messing about.” Gustavo paused, expecting Lillian to interrupt him. “We have powerful clients, some of them.”

“Yes,” Lillian said. “You’ve built up quite a reputation. Many delicate situations handled well. Top-notch.”

“It’s not just your own life at stake,” Gustavo said. “You’ll get us all killed.”

“I will?” Lillian said. “That’s what you think?”

“I’ve had a call from the general. You stole his number. You took it from me, Lillian.”

“They stole a baby. Someone stole my son.”

Gustavo shook his head. “You knew there’d be repercussions.”

Lillian didn’t even blink.

“You must have,” Gustavo said.

They stood there, the two of them, staring.

“You’re going to have to do it by yourself,” Lillian said. “It’s the one time I can’t do your work for you.”

“I promised him,” Gustavo said.

“I need this job, Gustavo. My family won’t be able to survive without it. We’ll end up on the street.”

Gustavo looked to Frida. She held his gaze and he turned back to Lillian.

“I won’t understand,” Lillian said. “It’s wrong. Don’t do it.”

Gustavo pursed his lips. “You’re fired,” he said.