Buried Strangers (17 page)
HORST BITTLER’S FATHER, OTTO, was a schoolteacher before the Second World War and the deputy head of an extermination camp by the end of it. A man much sought after by the Allied powers, he’d been wounded by the explo-sion of a mortar shell while fleeing from the Russian advance. The incident had left him with the use of only one eye, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The wound had so distorted his features that his face no longer bore any resemblance to photos that had been taken of it.
It helped, too, that prior to the collapse, Otto had ordered one of his prisoners, an engraver from Krakow, to prepare a set of identity papers. The papers identified Sturmbann-fuehrer Bittler as August Schultz, a Wehrmacht corporal and former farm laborer. Otto had rewarded the engraver by put-ting a bullet in his head.
The papers were good, but not perfect, so once he’d got-ten away from the Russians, Otto had gone to ground in Munich, taking refuge at the home of an old classmate. The classmate was not pleased to have Otto show up on his doorstep, but he was hardly in a position to refuse shelter. He had a past of his own to hide—and Otto knew it.
Eight months later, Odessa, the organization of former SS members, was finally able to smuggle Otto, his wife, Erika, and their two-year-old son, Horst, out of the country.
In Brazil, Otto reverted to his original name and managed to get a job in a factory that built refrigerators. He died in 1956, when Horst was twelve. Whatever else he’d been, Otto was a devoted father and the only person Horst Bittler had ever truly loved. His son was devastated by his passing.
Horst’s surviving parent was another case altogether. She was a shrew of a woman, obsessed with cleanliness and instilled with the conviction that no culture was superior to German culture.
Horst hated her to the very fiber of his being.
Along with his potato dumplings and cabbage, she dosed him with Schiller and Goethe, tapping her foot impatiently while he absorbed each morsel, forcing him to recite it aloud before ladling out the next one. He acquired, in the process, such distaste for literature that he read only scientific works ever afterward.
For her, there were no accidents and no excuses. Showing emotion was contemptible. Warmth was weakness. Non-Aryans were inferior. The sex act was necessary for repro-duction, but to take pleasure in it was filthy. Most people were not to be trusted. The old Germany, the Great Germany, was gone. Only cowards and weaklings were left. No one who survived was deserving of loyalty or support. It was wasted effort ever to help anyone with anything.
In later years, it often gave her son pleasure to reflect upon how wrong she’d been. The fugitive he’d met in the winter of 1977 turned out to be neither a coward nor a weak-ling, and helping him was anything but wasted effort. Had it not been for his pains in shielding the man’s true identity, and the financial reward that followed, Bittler might well have spent the rest of his life in a modest practice, eking out a living by treating patients on the national health scheme and being badly paid for it.
But fate had smiled on him, and here he was, three decades later, with a successful clinic that bore his name.
* * *
DOCTOR HORST Bittler rose weekdays punctually at seven and on weekends punctually at eight. He retired punctually at ten thirty, read professional journals for half an hour, and switched off the bedside lamp punctually at eleven, whether he’d finished the article or not. If he hadn’t, he’d make a tiny dot in the margin with a pencil, always with a pencil, never with a pen. He abhorred physical exercise, practiced no sports, took no vacations, and had an aversion to the
kultur
that his mother had spent years drumming into him.
Except for opera.
Horst Bittler adored the opera, especially Wagner, espe-cially Tannhäuser, which he always referred to by its full title:
Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg.
He’d never married, not because he was a misogynist, or because he had no interest in the other sex, but simply be-cause he was uncomfortable when anyone, man or woman, sought intimacy with him. In his younger days, when his hormones were still raging, he’d made occasional use of the prostitutes on the Rua Aurora, or in the neighborhood of the Jockey Club, but with the appearance of AIDS and advancing age, he’d taken to satisfying himself with mastur-bation. That, too, had a time allotted to it: before breakfast on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Like regular bowel movements, Bittler considered masturbation important to his health.
When he harvested an organ, he began the procedure promptly at midnight, always with his beloved Wagner play-ing over the loudspeaker system he’d installed in both of his operating rooms.
His lunch was served promptly at one and his dinner promptly at eight. He had seven luncheon menus and seven dinner menus, one for each day of the week, and they never varied.
All of his employees were well aware of his regular sched-ule, and if they suffered a lapse of memory about where he was or what he was doing at any given moment, they could find that schedule clearly posted in his outer office. His sec-retary, Gretchen, screened all of his calls. One of her princi-pal duties was to assure he was never interrupted.
AFTER CLOVIS Oliveira left, Horst Bittler made a note in his agenda, registering the date and time of their next meet-ing. Then he called Gretchen and told her to summon Roberto Ribeiro. For the plan taking place in his mind, he was going to need a pilot, a very special kind of pilot, and Ribeiro was just the man to find him.
CLOVIS OLIVEIRA SAT BACK in his chair, his features contorted in disbelief.
“You can’t be serious,” he said.
“Oh, but I am,” Doctor Bittler said, “I’m absolutely serious.
It’s . . .” Clovis fumbled for a word. Preposterous? Out-rageous? Immoral? What Bittler was proposing was all of those things.
“ . . . something you should have thought of as soon as you were informed that your son was going to need a new heart,” Bittler said. “And you needn’t look so shocked. There’s nothing new about it. It’s been going on for more than five hundred years, ever since white men first set foot in this country.”
Clovis’s head started to throb.
“Just because people have been preying on Indians for five hundred years doesn’t make it right.”
“I wasn’t initiating a discussion on ethics, I was citing a precedent. More coffee?”
Clovis shook his head.
Bittler served himself from the pot, selected a single cube of sugar with a pair of silver tongs, and dropped it into his cup.
“Right or wrong isn’t the issue here,” Bittler said. “Practicality is. I’ve offered you an option to save Raul’s life.” He took a long sip of his coffee and stared at Clovis over the rim of his cup. “The choice is yours. It’s that simple.”
“It’s
not
simple. Not for me. They’re
people,
Dr. Bittler, people like you and me.”
Bittler’s eyes narrowed in exasperation.
“To compare Indians with you and me,” he said, “is ludi-crous. You and I, Dr. Oliveira, contribute to society. I’m a doctor of medicine. I do transplants. I save lives. You’re a doctor of anthropology. You teach, you write, you add to the world’s general knowledge. Indians, on the other hand, are useless. Of our species, yes, but otherwise creatures living lives unworthy of being lived. What do Indians do for any-one? People like you and me, indeed!”
The throbbing in Clovis’s head turned to a steady ache.
“You’re talking about murder,” he said.
Bittler waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.
“Do you call slaughtering lambs for their meat murder? Cattle for their hides? Nonsense! Inferior creatures have been put on this earth to serve superior ones.”
“Indians aren’t inferior creatures.”
Bittler snorted.
“Of course they are. They live, today, much as the superi-or races lived six thousand years ago. In all that time, they’ve made no progress in anything of note. Not in science, not in technology, not in medicine, not in philosophy, or art or lit-erature or music.”
“They have other values, other knowledge. If I were to put you down into the heart of the Amazon without any of your modern devices, you wouldn’t last a week.”
“I’m not talking about survival. I’m talking about the higher things in life.”
Clovis ran a hand through his hair, as if he could wipe away the confusion inside his head. The hand came away wet with perspiration. Bittler sensed his desperation, pressed his point.
“Reflect upon this,” the surgeon said. “Indians have no birth certificates, no death certificates. As far as the bureau-cracy of this country is concerned, they’re nonentities. Who would know, when they’re gone, if they ever existed at all? We’ll cremate their bodies, leave no remains. You have nothing to fear from the authorities. The risk of discovery is so small it’s virtually nonexistent.”
Clovis put his fingertips on his temples, pressed hard. Bittler didn’t give him time to think, kept pouring on the arguments.
“And then there’s your wife to consider. If your son were to die, and your actions could have prevented it, what do you think it would do to your relationship? Could you look her in the face again? Would she ever forgive you?”
Clovis closed his eyes.
“There must be another solution,” he said. “Perhaps if an Indian child died of natural causes . . .”
“You’re deluding yourself. There are certain requirements that have to be met. Allow me to enumerate them.” Bittler waited a beat and then continued. “First, the heart has to be the right size, which means it has to be removed from another infant. Second, it must conform to Raul’s blood and tissue type. Last, it has to be freshly removed from a living donor.”
“Donor, you call him a donor?”
“It’s the terminology we use, Dr. Oliveira. And it doesn’t matter if the child is a him, or a her, as long as the other con-ditions have been met. Now, when I say ‘freshly removed,’ I mean it ideally should have been pumping away merrily no more than three hours prior to popping it into refrigeration. And it mustn’t be allowed to remain there long. It would be best if we could initiate the implantation no longer than two hours later.”
Clovis tried to interrupt.
“I—”
Bittler held up a hand to silence him. “After having cho- sen an infant of suitable size, we’ll have to run some tests. It isn’t just any heart that will do. A negative result would mean we’d have to move on.”
“To another baby? You’d kill a second baby?”
“There’d be no need to euthanize anyone other than the donor. The tests can be run while the children are still alive. The medical records you’ve supplied indicate that your son is what we call a universal recipient, so it shouldn’t be diffi-cult to match him up, but a choice of hearts is essential if we’re to be guaranteed of success. Initially, I suggest that we procure two infants.”
“Two?”
“Initially, yes.”
“The . . . euthanasia, when it comes, it would be . . .”
“Entirely painless. I can assure you of that.”
“And if I help . . .”
“The odds are extremely good that your son will soon be on his way to recovery.”
Clovis took a deep breath and met Dr. Bittler’s eyes.
“God forgive me,” he said.
“YOUR CONCERNS ARE UTTERLY without foundation,” Bittler said.
Claudia sat back in her chair and glared at him across the expanse of his desk. The man had always been arrogant, often insufferably so, but this newfound conviction in his own infallibility was a dangerous development.
“I’m only suggesting that we proceed—”
He didn’t let her get any further than that.
“You’re not suggesting that we proceed at all. You’re sug-gesting that we do exactly the opposite. And that, my dear Claudia, is an excess of caution.”
“With respect,” she said, her tone belying her words, “until the whole business with Tanaka blows over, I strongly advise that we—”
“If Tanaka had told anyone about our arrangement, his colleagues would have been at our throats by now.”
“I give you that. But what if someone else delves into Tanaka’’s recent investigations and comes to the same con-clusions as he did?”
“Impossible. He destroyed all the records.”
“He
told
you he destroyed all the records. The man was a blackmailer, for God’s sake. Do you think you can take the word of a man like that at face value? How about that swine, Ribeiro? Didn’t he tell you he’d destroyed that family’s furni-ture? Let’s kill him. Kill him now.”
“In good time, Claudia. Not now. Now, we need him.”
“We only need him if you persist in implementing this scheme of yours. He’s dangerous. Your plan is dangerous. That anthropologist is dangerous.”
“No no no, you have it all wrong. Can’t you see that using Oliveira will lead to less risk, not more?”
She crossed her arms, raised an eyebrow, and stared at him.
“You have no need to worry about Oliveira,” he said irri-tably. “He’s firmly within our camp.”
“That may be true at the moment. But what about after we’ve saved his brat? What then?”
“After we’ve saved his brat, Oliviera will have become our accomplice. If he opens his mouth to the authorities, he’ll have as much to lose as we do. Then, we’ll start offering him financial incentives. Soon, we’ll have him in a position where he’ll be supplying us with untraceable organs forever.
Some people aren’t moved by money.”
“In all my life, Claudia, I’ve only known one man who wasn’t.”
“And who was that?”
“The man whose picture is on the mantelpiece over there.
You’ve promised to tell me about him someday.”
“And someday I will. Not now. Do you want to hear the details of my plan or not?”
“Of course I do. It’s my career, my future that you’re play-ing with.”
“I’m not playing. Stop being petulant.”
“Petulant? Me?”
“And spare me your sarcasm.”
Bittler took out a handkerchief and started polishing his glasses.
“Tell me,” she said.
Bittler smiled and sat up straighter in his chair. He loved to talk, loved to impress people with his brilliance.
Claudia, on the other hand, wasn’t much for talk, never had been, not even as a little girl, not even before the accident.
THE FUNERAL seven-year-old Claudia Andrade’s parents had planned to attend was that of her maternal grand-mother.
En route, their car was broadsided by a truck. Both were killed. It drew newspaper headlines at the time, the irony of their being on the way to a funeral and winding up at their own.
Claudia’s brother, Omar, two years younger, was a mama’s boy, deemed too young to attend the double burial, so Claudia, the one who’d always avoided her mother’s embraces, was the one who got lifted up over the coffin.
“Kiss your mother good-bye,” her uncle Ugo told her.
Claudia did as she was told, dutifully pressing her lips against the dead woman’s cheek. Her mother’s flesh was cold. Claudia reacted by making spitting noises and rubbing her mouth. Everybody knew that Claudia was a strange little girl. They didn’t blame her. They blamed Ugo.
He
was the one responsible for causing a scene, and the Andrade family hated scenes.
Claudia’s next brush with death occurred two weeks before her thirteenth birthday. She’d been living, then, with her great-aunt Tamara and had been walking home from school.
Omar was running half a block ahead, his pencil case in one hand, constricting his penis with the other. He was des-perate to get to a bathroom before he peed in his pants. He crossed the street in front of the house, flung open the gate, and ran up the steps, ignoring the family dog, a little dachs-hund named Gretel.
The dog dashed out of the open gate and ran to greet Claudia.
Happy barks were cut off by a loud thump and a wail of pain. The car that struck her, a black Ford LTD with tinted windows, never slowed down. Whether the driver was a man or a woman would remain a mystery. The cops weren’t about to waste their time trying to hunt down someone who’d done a hit-and-run on a dog.
Gretel’s battered body came to rest in the gutter at Claudia’s feet. The dachshund was still alive—barely—bleeding from the mouth and panting for breath.
Claudia put a hand on the soft, reddish-brown fur. She could feel Gretel’s heart, fluttering, fluttering, and then, sud-denly, it stopped. Claudia shuddered. Her head began to spin. She sensed a shortness of breath, an increase in her heartbeat, a sharpening of her senses.
It was . . . wonderful.
THEY BURIED Gretel in a corner of the backyard. Omar cried at the funeral and planted a cross of two sticks bound together with kite string. Claudia squeezed out a tear or two, more to make Omar feel guilty than from any sense of loss. Head down, hands over her eyes, she found herself thinking . . . thinking.
Would they catch me if I killed the neighbor’s dog? How about
our cat?
It was then and there, standing over that little mound of earth, that Claudia Andrade decided what she was going to do with her life: she was going to become a doctor. No one got closer to death than a doctor did. No one had a more continuous and intimate look into last moments.
And last moments, for thirteen-year-old Claudia Andrade, were profoundly exciting, more than boys, more than parties, more than clothes, more than jewelry, more than anything. She bought a box of razor blades and started experimenting with small creatures, seeing just how much she could lop off without causing immediate death. Sometimes she’d bind up the stump of a leg, or sew an incision after removing some-thing from inside one of the little bodies. She’d stuff cotton into their mouths and bind it in place with adhesive tape to stifle their screams. One time she cut into a pregnant guinea pig and the babies came pouring out, six in all, almost at term.
Almost wasn’t good enough. They were dead within a matter of minutes. All of her other subjects died, too, but few of them so quickly. One brown hamster with a white belly suffered the loss of all four legs, but kept eating and drinking, and lingered for eleven days.
Finding subjects to experiment upon wasn’t difficult. After the owner of the local pet shop started getting suspi-cious, and refused to sell her any more hamsters or guinea pigs, she’d hang around outside of supermarkets, looking for families who were giving away kittens, or she’d pick up small dogs on the street, luring them into the toolshed when her great-aunt was out shopping.
After sustaining a number of bites and scratches, she took to wearing heavy workman’s gloves to protect her from the animals’ teeth and claws. She kept them, and the instru-ments she called her “surgical tools,” under a pile of firewood stacked up against the back wall of the shed.
When it came to somewhat larger animals, and the cotton and adhesive tape didn’t keep the victims quiet enough, she started cutting out their tongues. And when that proved insufficient, she went to the library, got out a book on vet-erinary science and learned how to cut vocal cords. Fortunately, Tamara was more than a little hard of hearing. She only once happened upon her great-niece while she was at work, and that was when she came into the shed to look for a pair of gardening shears. Claudia was busy with a six-week-old kitten at the time.
She blocked what she was doing with her body, folded the razor she was using as a scalpel, slipped it into her pocket, and claimed she’d found the mutilated animal on the street. She was successful in convincing the old lady that she was attempting to save its life, mostly because Tamara didn’t want to believe otherwise.
Six years later, Claudia was cutting into her first corpse at medical school. Shortly after becoming a surgeon, she met Dr. Bittler. Their relationship had been going on for almost five years, and in that time Claudia had been content.
Her employer didn’t care how she harvested organs, and as long as she did it cleanly and efficiently, he left things like the choice (or even the use) of an anesthetic to her. They’d seldom had occasion for conflict.
Until now.
BITTLER PUT his glasses back on his nose and began out-lining the details of his plan.
“Are you familiar with the FARC?” he asked.
“They’re a gang of Colombian rebels and drug lords trying to overthrow the legitimate government in Bogota. What have they got to do with anything?”
“Roberto has found us a pilot. This pilot has his own air-craft and makes his living by supplying the rebels with arms. They pay him in cocaine. He brings it back here and sells it to the major drug dealers. According to Roberto, the man sells himself extremely cheaply and has no morals at all.”
“Two peas from the same pod, eh?”
“Exactly. Now, this pilot, whose name is Manolo Something, and Roberto, will fly into the airstrip at Posto Leonardo, the administrative center for the Xingu reservation. The pilot will be posing as a reporter and Roberto as his photographer. The two of them will ostensibly be preparing an article for the
Estado de São Paulo
on the tribes of the Xingu.”
“No one will believe that idiot Roberto is a photog—”
“I agree. No one will. But no one except Oliveira is going to have any contact with him. All flights into or out of the Xingu reservation have to be authorized by an official of the FUNAI. Oliveira has that power. He’ll meet the aircraft and immediately guide Ribeiro into the forest.”
“And then?”
“Oliveira claims there’s a river where the Indian women from various tribes come to bathe in the cool of the night. No warriors accompany them, but they bring their infants. Ribeiro waits for the right moment and—”
“When is all of this supposed to happen? The Oliveira boy’s heart—”
“—could give out at any time, I know. There is need for haste.”
“And how about the other Indians? The relatives of the children you’re planning to snatch? Doesn’t Oliveira expect them to kick up a fuss?”
“He believes they’ll blame another tribe. Apparently, it’s not uncommon to steal women and children. The Indians do it all the time when they feel their numbers are getting too small. More children and more women lead to more warriors, and more warriors lead to greater success in their little con-flicts. Anyway, that’s how Oliveira explained it.”
“And suppose they don’t blame another tribe? Suppose they play by white men’s rules and file a complaint with the authorities? What then?”
“I asked the same question. Oliveira says he’ll promise them an investigation and then destroy the paperwork. He’ll also say, if anyone asks, that the journalist and the photogra-pher couldn’t have had anything to do with it. He’ll swear he was with them all the time.”
“What happens if they’re seen boarding the aircraft with the infants?”
“Oliveira will accompany them back to São Paulo. If they happen to be spotted, he’ll claim the children have been exposed to a contagious disease, one that Roberto was suf-fering from, but failed to inform him about. He’ll say he has to take the children for urgent medical treatment. Then he’ll hold them for a week, return them, and try again.”
“By which time it might be too late for his son.”
“True. But it’s unlikely that anyone will see them. They’re bringing lights to illuminate the runway, and they’ll take off in the dead of night.”
“And no one will find
that
suspicious?”
Bittler smiled a smile so superior that Claudia wanted to lash out and slap him across the face. “Newspapers have deadlines. They wait for no man. Such is the life of journal-ists and photographers.”
“What happens if we don’t have compatibility between Oliveira’s son and one of the infants?”
“Bad luck for the Oliveira family, but not a problem for us. As a matter of fact, I rather hope we
don’t
get a suitable heart on the first try. Then we’ll have to go back again and maybe again. The more Indians we take in the first round, the bet-ter, the more committed Oliveira becomes. You see? I’ve thought of everything.”