The Ministry of Special Cases (41 page)

“Now you’re making my head ache,” Kaddish said. The doctor didn’t respond and Kaddish felt sick with the size of the favor he’d come to ask.

“Even the rabbi let me in,” Kaddish said. He opened the jacket, trying to show it off. The lining shimmered. “The rabbi let me sleep over. He gave me his suit.”

“Then there’s someone else who loves you, Poznan. Go back to him.”

“I recognize that you’re the last man I should turn to during my time of need,” Kaddish said.

The doctor nodded. “It’s for the nose I do it. If I could take that and leave the leftover Poznan outside, I would.” He unlocked the gate and, loosing the dogs off their leashes, led Kaddish around the back of the house, through a patio entrance, and into a wood-paneled den. There was a card table set up, and a deck of Spanish cards out on it, four hands dealt, as if Kaddish had interrupted a game. There were fresh logs burning high in the fireplace and a book was open facedown on the leather couch, a transistor radio stuck between the pillows at the side.

“Couldn’t sleep,” the doctor said. And, following Kaddish’s gaze, “You think I don’t read? Nothing like a novel to knock a man out. Been reading the same two pages of this one for a year.”

The doctor motioned for Kaddish to take a seat at the card table. He went over to warm himself by the fire. He crouched down and rested on his heels. “Was my man at the Fisherman’s Club to meet you?”

Kaddish picked up a card, the ace of swords, and tapped its edge against the table, turning it over and over again in his hand. It couldn’t be that he hadn’t spoken to the doctor since that morning. Kaddish pictured the doctor’s socks, his view from under the bench.

“Yes, he was there,” Kaddish said, “Thank you for that.”

“Then it was good news?”

“No,” Kaddish said. “It was bad. The boy is dead.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said.

“Me too,” Kaddish said. “I miss him very much.”

“I’d been wondering. I wanted to know what happened—I was hoping for good news.” The doctor stood up and joined Kaddish at the table.

“It’s actually a good-news question that I came over to ask.” Kaddish spoke while staring at the face of the card. “I need help paying a ransom. It’s for Pato’s release.”

He looked up at the doctor. The doctor looked back at him, displeased.

“Is it shock value you’re after? You can’t want that to make sense.”

“It’s Lillian,” Kaddish said. “She thinks the boy is alive. She’s found someone who swore, if a bribe is paid, that Pato could be gotten back.”

The doctor took the card from Kaddish’s hand as if ending the game. He swept the others up and shuffled the deck, contemplating what Kaddish had said.

“I have nowhere else. No one at all.”

“That’s readily apparent,” the doctor said. “Tell me, though. You’re sure the boy is dead?”

“Do you know about the flights? Do you know what they do with the missing?” The doctor stopped shuffling. He put down the deck. Kaddish wasn’t sure if he was acknowledging the flights or not. “They push them from airplanes high above the river. Unless there’s any way to survive it, I believe Pato is dead.”

Again the doctor said, “I’m sorry,” and then, looking toward the ceiling, “It’s hard to believe.”

“The navigator, the man at the pier, he said it’s the impact that kills them, that the water is like a brick wall when dropped from that height. Do you think,” Kaddish said, “is there any way a person could survive?”

“As a doctor,” the doctor said, “I think you’re asking a physics question.”

Mazursky got up and walked to the window. He put his hands behind his back and stared into the yard, though from Kaddish’s vantage point, and with the night outside, all that was in the window was a reflection of the fireplace and his own sad figure behind Mazursky’s.

“I can tell you this,” Mazursky said. “Assuming a great ability to swim or something floating by to grab onto; assuming also an extreme amount of strength and resilience—and tolerance to cold; beyond all that, and there are probably many more factors, just regarding the falling and the
speed and the resistance of the surface of water, it would come down to the perfect dive. Water is not a brick wall; it can be forgiving to a great degree. I think—and this all very rusty—I think the molecular structure is very similar to that of glass.” And, as Kaddish had tapped the card against the table, the doctor tapped at the window with a fingernail. Kaddish could hear the dogs run up from outside. “Have you ever looked at an old windowpane? Have you seen how the glass warps?”

Kaddish nodded.

“It’s the glass running, like a liquid. It happens over time.”

“That’s hope?” Kaddish said.

“It’s possibility, is all,” the doctor said. “Technically, or maybe theoretically, and maybe that doesn’t even hold, but if I were to get the timing right, the pressure right, the angle of entry—and maybe it would take all of eternity—I should be able to push my finger through, to dive through glass.”

“And?”

“And likewise, if everything were perfect, it would be possible to dive from a great height and cut seamlessly through the surface of the water, to rise up, and swim off.”

“Nothing is ever perfect, though,” Kaddish said.

“No,” the doctor said. Then, turning, smiling, he closed one eye and studied Kaddish. Kaddish knew the doctor was looking at his nose, that he was going to say,
Except for your nose, the only perfect thing
, but the doctor didn’t make that joke again.

“I still need the money,” Kaddish said.

“For what? To let your wife pay a ransom for nothing? You’re going to give it away?”

“Yes,” Kaddish said. “It’s Lillian’s turn. A thousand fortunes promised her and none delivered.”

“Touching,” the doctor said, “and not at all sensible.”

“It’s my own ransom that I’m paying. The price Lillian exacts for forgiveness. And it’s only fair. Why shouldn’t she have her chance? Everyone deserves one hopeless scheme.”

“If you recall, I didn’t pay when I owed you money. You can’t expect
me to come through now.” The doctor rejoined Kaddish at the card table. “It’s bleak, Poznan, the coffers are empty.”

“Then feed me to the sharks,” Kaddish said. “Put me in touch with the people you gamble with and borrow money from. Help me get into the same high-quality rich-man debt as you. That’s all. A fair shake when it comes to self-destruction. Class fucks both ways, Doctor.”

“Two problems,” the doctor said. “The first is that the people I deal with will kill me when you don’t pay, either after they kill you, as interest, or before, as a warning. Both possibilities leave me dead—something I’ve been working tirelessly to avoid. The second is, you have no value. They don’t want to get paid back, they want debt to accrue and assets to seize.” The doctor motioned to the room and the house around them. “There is no value to you, Poznan. A fortune lent to make a claim on a chisel and hammer isn’t going to do.”

“If my wife were here, she’d say, A man who’s made so many different fortunes over the years must be able to point us toward one.”

“Actually, it’s how many you lose that matters, and I’m a fortune in the hole.” The doctor rubbed his face in his hands to wake himself up and then turned his bloodshot eyes to Kaddish. “Your expectations are too high. I’m a plastic surgeon. A specialist. I think you’re looking for the country doctor. Marital troubles and bunions and toothaches no longer come in one man.”

“No,” Kaddish said. “But you’re a stubborn
hijo de puta
, and they generally know how to survive.”

“Is it a pep talk you’re after, Poznan? Tell me what it is you need that I can give you. Otherwise let me fall asleep on my book.”

Kaddish took out the paper from Lillian and laid it on top of the cards.

“Jesus,” the doctor said. “Even the greedy have gotten greedier. That’s a lot of money to ask when they won’t deliver you a son.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if they did, though?” Kaddish said.

“Enough of that,” the doctor said. “We’re figuring now. Practical. What is it you can do?”

“I can get the money,” Kaddish said.

“If you had a way, you wouldn’t be here,” the doctor said, frustrated. “We need to deduce, to think from the abstract to the specific. The money is the end point, not the start. Back up in your head, Poznan. What is it they’re asking?”

“For ransom,” Kaddish said.

“Fine,” the doctor said. “And if one needs to pay a ransom, what would be the best way to get it?”

Kaddish snatched back the paper.

“Tell me what you want me to say,” he said, “and I’ll say it. If you’re hinting, I don’t know.”

“How did we end up with this government in the first place? Not the coup. The coup is like saying money when you mean ransom. The people of our beloved country, why did we let it happen?”

“Did we?” Kaddish said.

“No government can do anything to a nation when the whole nation wants it otherwise.”

“I guess, terror,” Kaddish said. “Before they took Pato, I think I’d have said it: Worse than this government was the violence and the terror. If it hadn’t touched my family, if they’d stayed out of my home, I’d say we were better off now.”

“When the rebels were running wild and making chaos, how did they finance it?”

“Kidnappings,” Kaddish said. “Kidnapping and ransom.”

The doctor leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head.

“You want me to kidnap someone?”

“I don’t want anything,” the doctor said. “I haven’t even said the word. It was your idea.”

“That’s the government’s dirty business. For me to disappear someone,” Kaddish said. He couldn’t.

“Do not confuse the two,” the doctor said. “This disappearing is an evolutionary refinement, a political variant to an industry Argentina has always held dear. It’s the junta that destroyed the kidnapping trade. They think they’re idealists, and evil always follows when people stop taking cash. It’s a capitalist truism. Beware when your leaders can’t be
The doctor knit his browsbought. If they really were ransoming Pato, I’d give a sigh of relief. I’d say there was hope for us all.”

“It’s too big,” Kaddish said. “I couldn’t do it.”

“Not to save your own son?”

“It’s
not
to save my own son,” Kaddish said.

“Your wife believes it is.”

“I was born into a house where people were bought and sold. You come from the same place.”

“It could be over in a day,” the doctor said. “It’s a simple transaction.”

“Nothing goes simple with me. To tear a hole in another family, even by accident,” Kaddish said. “A kidnapping gone wrong is murder.”

“Murder is a category of intent,” the doctor said. “You think I don’t end up with bodies of my own? They come in for their noses, their tits. I could tuck tummies, if I wanted, all day and all night. Do you think I haven’t buried ladies, mothers of small children, who only wanted a little less crinkle to their smiles? Does that sound like murder to you? Come, Poznan, such risks are part of every undertaking. People kill every day just driving their cars.”

“I really can’t risk any life but my own,” Kaddish said. “Worthless as it is, it’s all I can gamble. I don’t have the stomach for this.”

The doctor held up his hands. “I was asking, not advocating. No one is recommending that you commit a crime. I was simply making a cultural observation. If you’re after easy money, it’s my feeling that the sole resource with guaranteed value, the only thing a good Argentine won’t piss away, is family. We’ll burn down all our forests and drown ourselves in lakes of cow shit; we will rape this blessed land of plenty until we’ve squeezed out every last peso and not give a fuck. But for sisters or sons, for our dear mothers, a ransom will be paid.”

The doctor turned toward the fire. Kaddish followed his gaze and both stared at the logs, at the flames dying down and the fitful burn to the coals.

“What is it, then,” the doctor said, “that your delicate constitution can handle?”

Kaddish stared, Kaddish thought.

“Cemeteries,” Kaddish said. “Bones.”

The doctor knit his brows and, considering, nodding slowly, he brightened up. He reached across the table and gave Kaddish a good solid pinch on the cheek.

“Where else but in Buenos Aires would such an idea make sense?”

Kaddish shrugged. He wasn’t sure any idea had been proposed.

“Well done,” the doctor said. “In this city the dead are worth more than the living. In Buenos Aires bones will work just as good.” The doctor smiled a warm, almost loving, smile. “Here bones can be ransomed too.”

HOW IS IT THAT A MAN
who’d strolled down Avenida del Libertador countless times did not once in his life end up visiting the Cementerio de la Recoleta, a treasure in Buenos Aires and one of the most famous in the world?

For Kaddish, it was a sense that he’d had since boyhood. It was a matter of pride. He didn’t need to see how much better the dead lived than the living. He had no reason to pay any notice to the opulent city they’d built within that cemetery’s walls. The tops of the soaring monuments and mausoleums were enough for Kaddish. With a wall between himself and the rest of the Jews for most of his life, Kaddish had always felt he should be allowed his own graveyard to deny.

When the doctor had asked Kaddish, “Whose bones?” the answer was at the ready. The general was the first person Kaddish mentioned; when that garnered no reaction, Kaddish suggested the wife.

“There’s a fortune behind her,” the doctor said. “You couldn’t pluck a better name from the society pages if you tried.”

“Her father’s dead. He’d have a grave in this town for sure.”

“Now I believe you haven’t been to Recoleta. Everyone in Buenos Aires knows that crypt. This is high profile, Poznan. If you don’t get killed doing it, it’s turning into one hell of an idea.”

“You think this can work then?”

“If you’re going to do such a thing, I don’t think you could dig up a better man.”

Kaddish swung his stiff leg forward in a counterclock step. He held one hand to his chest, as if his heart might go, and the other to the small of his back, as if it too might fail him and was causing great pain.