by Scott Turow
The family was left penniless. Even as a child, Stern was aware of how much his mother loved the rare nights she and her father could attend the opera, when she displayed her opulent figure in a formal gown with a plunging neckline. It was probably melodrama to imagine that she had done any more than enjoy the admiring glances of other men, but with Stern’s father gone, she had immediate suitors. Without the kindness of those men, the family might have starved. Her most passionate attachment, to a lawyer named Gruengehl who represented one of the few anti-Peronist unions, proved their undoing and required them to flee again in 1947, when Gruengehl was jailed. With displaced persons throughout Europe clamoring for entry to the United States, and Argentina’s diplomatic ties to the US in question after the war, legal immigration was problematic. Instead, they traveled by train as far north as Monterrey, Mexico, from where they were driven across the border to Brownsville by a medical school friend of his father’s. His mother’s aunt met them in San Antonio and brought them home with her, by train again, to Kindle County.
Sandy Stern, Boy Illegal. In those days, the INS did not scour the cities for violators. He had many friends, Irish and Poles and Italians, who faced the same plight. The best advice was to mind your p’s and q’s and if you were ever arrested, bribe the cop, eminently possible in those days for any offense short of murder. Stern always kept fifty dollars cash inside his shoe. When he was drafted right after college, he felt none of the resentment of most of his fellow soldiers about conscription. The iron-headed manner of the military was laughable, but he woke every day knowing that he was now guaranteed to achieve a relentless ambition: He would become an American. He was sworn in as a citizen, along with Silvia, now his dependent after his mother’s death, only two months after his honorable discharge.
God save him, but he loves the United States. He’d had his hard times as a young man, and the terror of poverty and homelessness still dwells in him like something in the composition of his bones. But America, as it had done from its beginnings, had taken him in, allowed a frightened foreign boy to find his talents and to prosper.
“Clarice,” he says, calling Pinky by her proper name as he does perhaps once a year when he requires her attention. He receives it now, as she stares amid the raccoon blackness of liner and shadow. “We live in a great country. Never take it for granted.” He thinks a second about poor Argentina and adds, “Democracy and the rule of law are much more fragile than most Americans realize.”
She nods as if she understands.
Darkness now is creeping over BA, and Stern feels exhaustion taking hold, like some unseen masseuse loosening his limbs. In the taxi back, he fumbles with his phone until he finds Kiril’s number.
“Does Pafko know we’re coming?” Pinky asks, as he puts the phone to his ear.
“I asked Donatella to tell him.”
Kiril responds enthusiastically when he hears Stern’s voice.
“Ah, Sandy. You are here! Come tomorrow. Lunch.”
“I am with Pinky.”
“My savior! I want to bestow laurels on you both.”
Kiril’s predictable blather. Nevertheless, Stern finds himself looking forward to the meeting, as he did throughout the planning. He does not feel he has a score to settle with Kiril; however foolish, Pafko had the right to his choices. But something remains that Stern needs to know, even though he cannot say precisely what.
Given their frequent trips back to BA, the Pafkos have always kept an apartment in Recoleta, still—as it was in Stern’s childhood—the home to BA’s elite. The neighborhood has the air of the Upper West Side in Manhattan, with the tall trees and smart shops and cafés amid the six- and seven-story residential buildings whose many window air-conditioning units dribble moisture down onto the street. The Pafkos’ glass-doored building is a block from the stately old Hotel Alvear. The amiable elderly doorman shows them to the tiny elevator, and at Kiril’s door, a young woman about Pinky’s age receives them. She is perhaps Peruvian or Asian and is dressed in khakis and a polo shirt. It is possible she is an employee, a maid or an assistant, or Olga’s replacement, as she predicted. The way the young woman greets them gives no indication. From the door, she yells, “Pafko! Sus visitantes.” Your visitors.
Kiril insists on opening a bottle of Brazilian sparkling wine to celebrate now that they are all together, and tells Stern how well he is looking. It is Kiril, however, who appears noticeably better. He has tanned in the Argentine summer and even looks a bit trimmer in a pair of pleated bright blue slacks and a white-on-white shirt, short-sleeved and open at the collar.
“I understand, Kiril, that yet again, I am in your debt for your medical attention.”
Kiril demurs but clearly enjoys Stern’s gratitude. It leaves him in his favored role of grand importance. Pinky looks askance when Kiril makes no mention of her critical role in finding the defibrillator.
The living room here is the polar opposite of the house in Greenwood County, far more contemporary and more Italian than English, the other side of Donatella’s heritage. The tall windows of the living room are uncovered. There is good light and sleek furniture.
“So Sandy, what have you come so far to say?”
“Kiril, I feel obliged to encourage you to return to the US.”
“To go to prison? My lawyer here believes he can defeat extradition. And even if not, he says the Argentine courts move no more quickly than trees grow. Sooner or later, he says, the Americans will lose interest.”
“Even now, Kiril, I think that whoever represents you at home—and it cannot be us—but whoever your lawyer is could strike an excellent bargain on your behalf. Moses wants to be done with the case. And knows he would face a difficult appeal.”
“No, no, Sandy. I will not go back. I will have a good life here.”
“Word of your conviction will follow you quickly, Kiril.”
“For a financial crime? Selling stock for my grandchildren? This is a country where generals who disappeared thousands were received in polite society. The Argentines are not as idealistic as Americans. Have you forgotten? Besides, Sandy, they are very very proud of their few Nobelists. Here I will be treated as a returning hero. And I am certain to be more of a free man here than I could be in the US, even after I was released from prison.”
“And how is that, Kiril?”
He spreads his hands wide and smiles. “No Donatella.”
Stern stares. “She says you urged her to come down here.”
“What else? Had I told her to stay away, she would have been on the next plane.”
Stern’s guess is that Kiril is also somewhat disappointed, especially now that Olga has refused to join him in exile. Kiril and Donatella could not have dwelled together for so long without ambivalence being a dominant motif. Yet say what you like about never knowing the truth of anybody else’s marriage, the Pafkos’ elegant manners have concealed more than usual, especially the degree to which they lived in a state of open warfare from which neither, for fear of being the ultimate loser, could ever withdraw. Although it has required a criminal conviction to separate them, it is possible both might find themselves somewhat happier in their final years.
In contemplating things on the way down, Stern realized there is little that beckons Pafko to return. The jury verdict requires him to be dismissed from PT, and Kiril will never have any relationship to speak of with his son, or even Lep’s children, after the events of the last few years. Dara is her mother’s daughter and probably has long accepted Donatella’s view of things.
“I owe you thanks, Sandy. And you too, my dear.” He lifts his champagne flute toward Pinky, who has just stood up to help herself to another glass. Stern suspects that Kiril has forgotten her name, but Pinky is doing her best to ignore him anyway.
“I would have much preferred a complete acquittal, Kiril.”
“Yes, I too. I had my hopes up. But you had my side at every moment, Sandy. I could tell you never lost faith in my innocence.”
St
ern nods rather than say anything.
“I am not certain, Kiril, that you might not have been better served with another lawyer who did not know your family and to whom you therefore might have been more comfortable telling the truth.”
“I was stymied, Sandy, no matter who represented me. Donatella saw to that. I said I wanted to testify because I knew the prospect terrified her, the chance I might implicate her precious son. But she had kept the upper hand. I realized that whenever I stopped to think. She’d have backed Lep from the stand. Yet please recognize that I never lied to you, Sandy.”
“About being guilty of fraud, I grant you. But you were not straightforward about other matters. Olga?”
Pinky, who has been twirling her hair around her finger, is suddenly alert.
Kiril says, “Olga and I had nothing to do with one another for close to eighteen months. It was as much your questions about her as anything that made me reconsider the prospects for the two of us.”
This is a new low. Clients have blamed Stern for a lot during his legal career—losing cases that should have been won or cozying up to the prosecutors—but never for their infidelities. Even Kiril seems to recognize the absurdity of what he has just said.
“Not to lay my decisions at your feet, Sandy. I mean only that things came together at that moment, the idea of starting fresh down here with her.”
“You were planning on coming down here with Olga even if you were acquitted?”
“Exactly.” Bringing Olga and marrying her would be Kiril’s own revenge on Innis and Lep and Donatella, who had all punished him for his relationship with the woman. “But having set a course, Sandy, it was time to get on with it. A mistrial and another year of being roasted over fires of uncertainty—that was unacceptable. I had hopes of a complete not guilty—perhaps greater than you. And naturally, I would prefer the freedom to go back and forth between my two countries. But even were I acquitted, Sandy, it would be years—years I do not have—before people stopped looking at me with suspicion.”
“That surprises me, Kiril. I thought staying in control of PT was important to you.”
“When PT was seen only as the maker of a medication that is a remarkable advance in the fight against cancer, yes. But the company for most of the next decade will be enmeshed in litigation and struggles with the FDA. That is Lep’s mess—let him deal with it. And g-Livia will be my legacy anyway.” He takes his champagne down then in a single draft, then looks directly at Stern, as he adds, “It’s all a lie, you know.”
“About you altering the trial data? Yes, I understand.”
“Not merely the dataset. The medication. g-Livia? Donatella has told me for years that I did nothing but ride Lep’s coattails. And she would have said as much in court. But my son would have been entirely lost without my contributions. Believe me. The credit is properly mine.”
When Stern understands, he needs to stifle a gasp. Because only now does he finally comprehend Kiril’s motive for enduring the false accusations against him, and the nature of the bargain he tacitly made with his wife. If Kiril implicated Lep, Donatella would have testified that her husband was uncontrollably jealous of their son, knowing that sooner or later the scientific world would recognize that Lep made the principal discoveries underlying g-Livia. Mother and son would both say that Kiril was lying, not only to escape blame for a crime, but also to discredit Lep in order to cement Kiril’s false claim about his scientific achievements. So in the end, Kiril had decided to accept indictment and trial rather than lose the accolades he, yet again, did not deserve. For more than three decades, Kiril Pafko’s life had been built upon the lie that he is a genius, worthy of the Nobel, and thus capable of formulating g-Livia. He would risk prison rather than forsake that.
After a quick lunch, fish nicely prepared, Pafko hugs Sandy at the door. He is happy. That is what strikes Stern. At seventy-eight, Kiril—the poet, as Innis put it—sees his life as pregnant with welcome possibilities. Pinky lifts one hand lamely, says “Bye,” and without a backward look at Kiril precedes her grandfather down the corridor, waiting for him at the elevator.
Outside it may be 100 degrees. They look for a taxi, but on the corner Stern spots a tobacconist. In Argentina, like Europe, one can buy Cuban cigars, still embargoed in the United States. Stern had quit smoking as a kind of penance after Clara’s death, backslid eventually, and finally stopped cold after the cancer diagnosis. But now the appetite seizes him. Despite Pinky’s protests, he buys a Bolivar, a Robusto, and then goes to the café tables set up on a small tile patio adjacent to the shop. Pinky and he can have coffee and a pastry while he smokes. In the shade of the café’s black awning, the heat is tolerable.
Helen often commented that among the men she knew, Stern had few vices. He didn’t gamble, didn’t chase, didn’t drink to excess, didn’t spend for pleasure. But he loved tobacco. Even now, with his disease stalemated by g-Livia, he knows that in the final analysis, a pathologist is likely to conclude that it’s the cigars that killed him. But he relishes the moment, here where he started, conceding to pleasure, and in the company of this grandchild whose prospects others find dim and whom he loves without reservation.
She points at the cigar like a culprit.
“If you go back to smoking after this trip, Aunt Marta will be mad enough to try to rip my tats right off my skin.”
“Pinky, my love, I suspect that I will get no further than three puffs.”
He warms the cigar in the light of his first match, then with another draws the flame to the tip. Even the first touch of the nicotine to the tender membranes of his mouth makes him dizzy. He holds the smoke there and exhales, then sets the cigar in an ashtray, savoring the richness of the flavor. Only old Bordeaux deliver the same depth of tastes throughout the mouth. He will have a puff or two more, assuming he’s sure he’ll be able to stand up afterward, and then never again. He has been saying that about so many things that have given him happiness. But he allows himself no sentiment, no sadness.
Pinky, however, appears morose, shaking her head as he lifts the cigar again. She touches his hand, which she has been doing far more often lately, and says, “I don’t want you to die, Pops.” Amazingly, she is close to tears.
Stern suddenly recalls Peter crying the same thing in panic at the age of five or six. The remark devastated Stern, because he wanted to soothe his child, but could not really do it without offering an evasion Peter would later resent.
Pinky, though, is not asking him to change the nature of existence. She is merely saying that she will miss him. He encloses her hand in his.
“That is a very kind thing to say, Pinky. But that is not a reality we seem to need to face today.”
She studies her grandfather. She has such beautiful green eyes. The family lore is that she takes after Clara, but Stern realizes only now that he is sitting in BA that those eyes are his mother’s, who had similar coloring to Stern’s wife.
“Are you scared of that, Pops?”
“Of dying? I enjoy living, so I am reluctant to go, Pinky, but I am not certain that is the same thing as fear. Certainly, I feel a bit more comfort today, since I answered the question that drove me down here. It was very selfish, I realize.”
“Meaning what?”
“I have concluded I would rather have lived my life than Kiril’s. Nobel Prize and all.”
“No shit,” says Pinky, for whom it is easy to choose Stern as a better grandfather. Yet the question he had put to himself is not as simple as Pinky sees it. One night, while Marta was preparing for another long evening of research for one of her crosses, she remarked matter-of-factly, ‘I really missed the boat with this career. With law.’
Hearing his daughter say that petrified Stern, fearing he’d misled her in some way that had kept her from discovering a better destiny for herself.
‘How so?’ he asked.
‘I should have done science,’ she said. When she entered college, Marta had been heading in the same direction as her ol
der brother and was intent on medical school. She had the aptitude, perhaps more than Peter, but in her father’s house she’d developed a fascination with sorting right from wrong, and ended up in Political Theory. ‘Science is where the truth is in our world,’ she said that night in the office. ‘What once belonged to religion or philosophy is now the business of science. That’s where we’ll learn what’s really unknown about being here on Earth.’ Stern had realized she was correct the moment she’d said it.
“I do not dismiss the importance of Kiril’s scientific contributions,” Stern tells Pinky, “even if they have been greatly exaggerated. It may well be that the principles and discoveries he has had some hand in advancing turn out to be critical to the course of humanity for the next century or even longer. The same will never be said of my work.
“One of the tragedies of Kiril’s life, Pinky, is that he has such large gifts as a treating physician. I tell you that from experience. That part of Kiril that people like Innis and Donatella talk about all the time, his great talent for convincing you of what he wants to believe, gives him a unique ability to engage the psychological element of healing. He could have been like some guru or shaman, the doctor people traveled thousands of miles to see. But they do not give Nobel Prizes for that, and so apparently those abilities were not adequate to match his grand vision of himself.
“And that is what stands out to me. Even if he really were entitled to all the laurels bestowed on him, Pinky, it is plain that Kiril has found his life disappointing at some base level. All these lovers? This insatiable hunger for recognition for its own sake? It is still true, Pinky, that even if our best efforts as humans are expended in aid of others, and even though we deeply need their love, we still live with no one more than ourselves. And recognizing that, I feel I have had better company than Kiril.”
Though often puzzled by irony, Pinky understands this comment perfectly and laughs out loud, but in another moment she has subsided to a gloom that leaves her studying the marked surface of the round black café table. Pinky has been badly unsettled by their interview with Kiril. The minute they were out the door of Pafko’s apartment, she had uttered several obscenities. Kiril is a lot to absorb, Stern knows, especially for someone like Pinky, who is far more sheltered than she realizes. She has starred in her own pornography, but she hasn’t yet accepted that humans are neither innately good nor bad.