2007 - The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

  “Well, you’ve come to the wrong place. This is a police station. We arrest those who commit crimes. Parents will not find innocent sons here.” A scratch to the chin, a look at his watch. “I apologize if peon Rangel didn’t make it clear, but your son isn’t in custody.”

  “Thank you for your time,” Kaddish said. They were finished there. He put out his hand for the ID.

  “I can’t return an altered document,” the sergeant said, “especially to an individual who isn’t the rightful owner. Send”—another glance at it—“send your Pablo to pick it up and explain its condition, and I’ll return it to him.”

  Kaddish offered a second thank-you, like a curse under his breath.

  Outside in the false dawn of streetlights, Lillian and Kaddish felt it simultaneously, though neither admitted it to the other. The sergeant had sent them out with their first shard of doubt. It reminded Kaddish of the fancy lady in the hospital with the splinter in her foot. Whenever he took a breath, tried to shift that doubt or bury it deeper, it was as the doctor had theorized. It splintered and splintered in endless directions.

  [ Twenty ]

  THE PICTURE FRAME WAS VELVET-BACKED and made both for hanging and standing. When Lillian extended its arm, a silk ribbon went taut, anchoring the frame on the officer’s desk. Lillian had placed it where a loved one’s photo would sit. In fact, she’d set it next to one of his own. After an interminable wait at the second station, Lillian and Kaddish had been seated in two chairs facing the officer at his desk.

  The officer lifted the frame and the velvet arm fell forward against his fingers, a touch Lillian hoped familiar even if he studied an unfamiliar face. Then he raised his glasses and rested them on his head. Bringing the frame closer, he looked to Kaddish and then Lillian. She offered a warm smile.

  Lillian believed deeply in the importance of these details. If she placed the picture in the right spot, he would reach for it and see the boy in a familiar way. If she was ready when he looked her way and smiled a warm smile during the worst moment she’d ever known, he would feel a bit of warmth toward her and in this way change their fate. He would walk off to some room and return with her son. The officer could stop it at the start. Lillian would hold no grudges and count this day as the happiest of her life.

  The officer lowered his glasses and placed the picture face down. He took hold of the desk and rolled his chair closer until his stomach hit.

  Kaddish and Lillian made the same motion. They wanted to meet this intimacy and better hear what he had to say. Except their chairs were not on rollers. Planted firmly, each made a subtle jerk forward and stopped dead.

  “Maybe if you tell me again,” the officer said.

  “We’ve told you twice already,” Kaddish said. Lillian pressed a hand to his knee and mustered another warm smile. The officer was unperturbed. “How many lady cops are there?” Kaddish said. “Call the one who released the boy into my care. I’ve already been here tonight.”

  “What you’ve told me is that you were having a fight with your kid and then the mystery police snatched him. Your local station has no idea what you’re talking about so you figure, during a time of national crisis, that I sent my people across town to bust into your house and bring your son here. We’re twiddling our fucking thumbs waiting for highschoolers to roust.”

  “University,” Lillian said.

  “All this you back up with an absent neighbor’s testimony.”

  “It’s not my neighbor’s word alone,” Lillian said. “The police left their mark. He’s waiting at our house right now nursing his wounds. Let’s call him. You’ll see.”

  The officer didn’t reach for the phone.

  “Fast work by those police, stealing boys and beating neighbors all before you could get home from work.” The officer had taken some notes and he looked at his timeline. While he did this, he raised up the corner of his mouth, bearing teeth. “Yes? A matter of minutes for all that to get done. Efficient. Very efficient, those mystery police.”

  “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.”

  [ Twenty-one ]

  THERE ARE FIFTY-TWO POLICE STATIONS in Buenos Aires, eighteen secretarias, 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.<
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  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 Havia who answered. “Gone,” is what she said. “Pato is gone.”

  Havia 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 Havia 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 deputa” 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.