The Ministry of Special Cases (18 page)

“Well, he didn’t break his own arm,” Kaddish said, his voice loud.

“No,” the officer said. “Likely he didn’t. And judging from your eloquently confused description, I’m sure it would take endless footwork to figure out who did. I’m sure it’s a crime as inexplicable as your own black eyes.”

“From my son. A different fight.”

“Do you know what time it is?” the officer said. “You can’t even get a pizza at this hour. If your toilet overflowed you wouldn’t think of doing anything but bailing until morning. Yet you stroll in here looking for
Sherlock Holmes to solve what can’t be solved. What I’m trying to be is polite. I’m trying to be nice in the middle of the fucking night.”

“It is not unsolvable,” Lillian said.

“It is with your husband’s version. Come talk to me, Mrs. Poznan, when you find out what really happened before you arrived.” Lillian knew with Kaddish that there could be another story, a new account introduced when they got back to the car.

“You took our boy once,” Kaddish said. “Why wouldn’t you do it again?”

The officer tore the back off the frame and pulled the photograph out. Raising his glasses again, he brought the picture up to his face and shook his head. “None of it makes sense, least of all the photo. This kid didn’t come from either of you.”

“Oh my God,” Lillian said, absorbing, horrified.

“It’s not my nose,” Kaddish yelled, referring to his own.

The officer nodded, still staring at the picture. “At least you can be thankful for that.”

THERE ARE FIFTY-TWO POLICE STATIONS
in Buenos Aires, eighteen
secretarías
, and seven different ministries. There are twenty-nine hundred registered lawyers working in the courts, three military branches, and one Pink House—the seat of government down the avenue, a palace where all answers lie. Lillian would find her way to every one of these places. She’d show up on every doorstep and catch every official by the collar.

Before heading home, Lillian and Kaddish made the rounds at four more stations. They didn’t corner the highest-ranked officers but the lowest, stuffing cash into the hand of a kid emptying garbage cans and slipping some bills to a mentholated policeman who smelled of alcohol poorly masked. Neither told them anything of value and Lillian watched as the drinker spoke to them with his hand clasped over the mouth of his mug.

Kaddish gravitated to the cheeks with burst veins, to the skinniest men in the biggest uniforms, to the officers of rank with bitten nails or bouncing legs. At the last of the stations he spoke to a nervous woman in sunglasses who carried a dog out the back door at 3 a.m.

This was Kaddish’s way they were trying. Already it had split into his way and hers.

They woke Cacho when they got back to the apartment and sent him off without a word. Lillian hung her empty frame back up in the hallway. Kaddish lit a burner for tea.

He put out the butter. He called for Lillian and she didn’t come. He poured the tea and poked around for bread. Kaddish found a baguette and split it. It made a cracking noise like wood.

The phonebook Lillian had taken off Pato’s nightstand; a class portrait from high school she’d gotten off the shelf. In the front of his bag there was a list of contacts on a syllabus marked survey of sociological theory. In two different pockets of the same pair of jeans, she found the numbers of girls written on napkins in a round flirty hand.

Lillian woke them all: Pato’s friends and their roommates and their parents, since most lived at home. She tried to sound upbeat, counteracting the truth and time of morning, contrasting the groggy, frightened voices on the phone.

They left her on the line to look in on children or wake up their folks. They hung up so that boyfriends could call girlfriends, and then Lillian would find the next number busy as Pato’s friends reached out to others in turn. Half the time Lillian wasn’t sure if she’d yet mentioned his name and already the conversation was over and the line gone dead.

With each call she became more desperate, and with that desperation her friends as well as Pato’s seemed to understand less. So she said it more clearly. “Missing,” Lillian said. “Kidnapped.” The words generated their own static, Lillian forced to yell. Lillian called Rafa’s and it was Flavia who answered. “Gone,” is what she said. “Pato is gone.”

Flavia let out a howl so deep it was the closest sound Lillian had heard to match what she was feeling. In response, Lillian let out a cry of her own. Lillian then heard Rafa advising. “Tell her we will call her,” he said, and Flavia said, “We will call.”

Worse than a lack of progress was a loss of ground. Lillian knew with each interaction she was saying good-bye. What she’d intended was to let people know that Pato had been missing one night. Lillian wanted group concern and group support, the horror that Pato was a few hours
gone and the hope that he’d be a few hours back. What she hadn’t expected was a detail spun out of control. It wasn’t Pato taken they were hearing. In each telling it was as if her son had never been. The idea of absence had acquired its own fierce momentum. It was like snatching a ball from a baby and hiding it behind one’s back—there was the initial shock and then, like that, Pato was no more.

The phone was on a phone table, up against the same wall that held the little scalloped shelf. On the other side of that wall was the kitchen where Kaddish was fixing breakfast. Lillian grasped what she’d done and stopped dialing the next number. She replaced the phone in its cradle and, leaning back in the chair she’d carried over, she banged her head hard against the wall. Kaddish came running out. He asked if she was all right.

Lillian said she was not all right. She’d spread panic. She’d set off a great rolling-over across the city—arms thrown over bedmates, loved ones clasped tight. No one was out looking for Pato, no one coming to help. They were otherwise occupied with forgetting him. And it wasn’t only Pato—Lillian and Kaddish would be swept up in it too. Lillian had felt it over the phone, felt her own self turning tiny in their heads.

She apologized to her husband. She’d seen the family undone.

Kaddish wasn’t sure he believed her.

“Try any of the numbers,” she said. “Call anyone back.”

Kaddish did. He took the list and called Rafa. The boy’s mother answered, wide awake. “It’s Kaddish,” Kaddish said. The woman said nothing. Then he said, “Kaddish Poznan, Pato’s father.” In response there was some rustling, and eventually from Rafa’s mother came, “Please understand.” Kaddish couldn’t. Though she’d answer him no further, she didn’t hang up. Kaddish listened to her breathing for some time before putting down the phone.

“Try another,” Lillian said.

Kaddish didn’t need to. Kaddish got the point.

“You did the right thing,” he said.

“I did it all wrong and I should have known better.”

“Nonsense,” Kaddish said. And unsure of where she’d bumped it, he rubbed the back of her head.

Lillian said, “Your expertise is finally being called into play. It’s a situation tailor-made for the
hijo de puta.”
She looked up at him, her eyes open wide. “Except this time it’s on me, Kaddish.”

Kaddish gave her neck a squeeze.

“I’ve taken us over another wall. I’ve dragged this family into the one graveyard that everyone in this nation has agreed not to see.”

“It’s not the same. And even if it was, look how they come to me now after twenty-five years. Truth can be denied but it can’t be undone.”

“I shouldn’t have told.”

“The price of doing nothing would be harder to measure. However much I suffer for keeping the Benevolent Self alive, at least I suffer whole.”

“What about what Pato and I have suffered because of it? It’s the price the rest of us have paid that I’m afraid of.” Lillian waited for a response. “Maybe your truth would have done better had you held it dear, in secret and alone.”

Kaddish thought about it.

“How true is anything that only one man believes?”

Lillian had no control over the hours stacking up since Pato was taken. Every instant, she knew, could move him farther, bury him deeper, place Pato in endless ways more distant from home. She was almost at the point where she’d have to abandon her belief in innocent outs: that Pato had been released, found unconscious by a stranger, or dumped into a gutter only to stumble disoriented to a friend’s.

It was possible.

The officer had said, “Get the real story from your husband.” With Kaddish she could hope for an actual course of events so far from his initial version that it would leave Pato free.

Kaddish came down the hall with a towel around his waist. Lillian still sat by the phone and Kaddish, his hand wet from the shower, placed it on her cheek. “It will do you good,” he said. He puffed out his chest to show he was feeling rejuvenated and fresh.

“Fine,” Lillian said, and shifted in the chair as if intending to rise.
“Starting a night without Pato is as terrible as can be. Finishing it with no one to help us is too much to take.”

“How much worse for a family with no experience at being cast out? For everything there’s a reason. We’ll get Pato back. We’ll keep our heads.”

“The dead boy in the cemetery,” Lillian said. “When it was another family’s son—”

“We went back,” Kaddish said, “and he was gone. Anyway, a dead body in a cemetery is a different matter. A boy with his throat slit is already beyond help.”

Kaddish went to get dressed.

When she was young and the three of them were happy, in the days when Pato was still crawling around on the floor, Kaddish had said, “Let’s have another.” They were in bed in the dark when he’d proposed it, and Lillian had said, “Not now. In good time.” “What if that time doesn’t come?” Kaddish had wanted to know. And when Lillian didn’t answer he’d said, “Two kids is better. What if one drowns?” Horrible. Such a thing to say.

In remembering, Lillian felt the last of her innocence ground down. She picked up the receiver and dialed Frida.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Frida said, the first clear line. Lillian found herself heard before she’d spoke.

“It’s Pato,” she said. And Frida gasped, Frida knew.

Lillian said it anyway, because it was true, it was fact, because her heart broke.

“Gone,” Lillian said.

Then there was silence. A new time started, a clock that ticked both forward and back. From then on, Lillian breathed twice as heavy, felt twice as hungry, and swore to fight twice as hard. She accepted then that to others Pato wasn’t, and it was up to her to make it so Pato was. It was as if she were pregnant with a full-grown son.

Kaddish was thinking that Lillian should eat and she should shower. Then, Kaddish thought, they could go their separate ways. He had his
own clock to keep to. If they didn’t get Pato back soon, Kaddish believed his son would be dead. He’d seen the men in the suits. He’d seen the way they held Pato’s arms. It was Kaddish who had listened to the sound of five men breathing as the elevator made its descent.

He had no more time to fiddle away in police stations. And he wasn’t going to work his way through the system. Kaddish knew better. To believe their bureaucracy functioned normally was the same as believing the world was flat and that heaven started at its edge. There was no straight path. Bureaucracy in Argentina is round.

If they searched as Kaddish wanted, finding Pato could be as easy as spinning a globe. Continents and countries a world away are, on the other side, so close. So close, Kaddish felt, that it’s amazing to find that the Russian and the Chinaman look different at all. Same with power. Top and bottom, high society and low. What is hidden from view, Kaddish knew, is where the hierarchy curves. Out of sight there is always a place where the two ends meet.

Kaddish needed to get out on his own, to search for the seam where the seedy underground was sewn to the seat of power. He’d find his way to the place where criminal and general, pimp and president, meet. It was not only that he believed it, what other choice does a man like Kaddish have?

Lillian was going to wash off the night—may it be the last one like it. She would scrub it away and see it run down the drain. This is how she’d live her own fairy tale. Every morning would be the first morning, Pato’s presence fresh. This was the plan she came up with as night waned and day approached.

Lillian took off her clothes and looked in the mirror. She pressed at the bags under her eyes. “One night,” she said out loud, this was the toll of one night.

The rest of the face she was used to, this other woman with her differently bad nose, a wishbone of a thing. Lillian was thankful then for Dr. Mazursky Look at the tired eyes on this new woman’s face. Lillian had wanted to be beautiful, it’s true, but at least she’d come back different.
Now she had the luxury of looking at the exhausted, worn face she saw in the mirror and pitying someone else. Poor woman in the mirror. Lillian was glad it wasn’t her.

She stood in the shower with the water beating on her face and the temperature turned hot. She felt flushed and light-headed. Reaching for the soap, she noticed her hand shaking and felt it in her shoulders too. With the shake came a sound echoing off the tiles. It was the woman from the mirror, weeping.

She showered that way, body heaving, wailing unbroken.

She toweled off through racking sobs and, after managing toothpaste onto bristles, brushed her teeth. How it slowed a person down. Complications. It would further tangle up her day.

Her rib cage ached as she pulled on stockings and tried to catch the hook of a bra. She buttoned a blouse, zipped up a skirt, and sat on the edge of the bed.

It was her first real sitting that was not driving and was not waiting and was not the confrontation of search. Her blouse was already in need of changing for the tears falling and the open mouth running and the dripping of her nose. She reached for the tissues. Maybe it was best to allow this outpouring for a minute or two. Get it out and move forward, only a small recess for racking sobs, Lillian’s chance to indulge.

Lillian rocked and wailed and felt her whole body running out of her face, through eyes and nose and mouth. She wondered if she could die this way, if so much of her could leak out that nothing remained.