The Ministry of Special Cases (21 page)

There’s no reason to whisper in a parked car on a deserted street. Still, Lillian kept her voice to a hush.

“Only owls use the night better, Kaddish. I don’t know, though, if slinking about under cover of darkness will help Pato’s case. It seems the wrong message could be sent.”

“We don’t know yet that he’s innocent,” Kaddish said, keeping his own voice down. “And we don’t yet have a case to prove. As much as you blame me—”

“I don’t blame you.”

“As much as you do, I lay it on Rafa. He’s behind whatever trouble Pato’s in.”

Lillian didn’t care to share her opinion. She looked out her window into a rundown courtyard with a for sale sign hanging over the gate. It had one of those checkerboard patios she’d always dreamed of. With a little money, someone could do it up nice.

“What about the fact that his best friends ran off?” Kaddish said. “It means they did something, no? It means they’re guilty of something?” Kaddish gave Lillian a chance to respond. When she didn’t, he broke off whispering and yelled. “You must agree, because you’re here, right? You’re waiting with me? Agreed? You wouldn’t have come if not.”

Lillian, still in a hush, said, “I make the best of things. At home all I’d do is sleep.”

Kaddish flipped on the headlights, illuminating the all-night bookstore they’d been watching on the next block. He pulled the car out and headed for a bar by the Obelisco, where Rafa’s mother said her son
often sat. When they got there he put an elbow out the window and got himself comfortable. He dropped his cigarette in the gutter and let his hands go limp on the wheel. Kaddish was waiting—and waiting was now the order of their lives.

“How’s your face?” he said.

“I already feel like I shouldn’t have fixed it. How much better would it serve us if I’d left it a horror, putting fear into everyone we meet? Our own little junta—me and my nose. The pair of us broken, going around and spreading dread.”

There came the boy around the corner of Suipacha, pushing his way along. He walked with hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched, as if that noggin was weighing him down. Lillian recognized him first. She’d fed these kids, with their bottomless stomachs, on countless occasions—and still so skinny, every last one. As soon as Lillian pointed, Kaddish was out of the car and crossing the street.

Kaddish looked this way and that to see if anyone else besides Rafa was around. He crossed the street at a slant, the way one works in open spaces, on water and ice, in wide-open fields. The boy was oblivious. It takes effort, Kaddish thought, not to notice such purposeful steps, a coming-right-at-you walk on an angled path.

Kaddish had sacrificed stealth for speed, so different from the careful way he moved when erasing names. Stealth, though, was his regardless. Considering all the time these kids wasted talking about energy and auras, Kaddish felt Rafa should have been more sensitive to the very negative, very angry vibrations directed his way. Rafa didn’t pick up on Kaddish’s approach until it was impossible to miss and too late.

Kaddish hit into him low, head turned to the side to make full use of that heavy bull shoulder. Hitting and straightening and throwing his weight, Kaddish catapulted the boy hard and high up against a brick wall. Doing the best he could without standing on tiptoes, Kaddish reached up and pressed Rafa’s face against the wall.

“You know Pato Poznan, you his friend?”

“No,” Rafa said. He spoke through a squished mouth compressed into a kiss.

Kaddish was milking the fear out of this boy and it felt good after the constant frustration. It was the first chance he’d had to unleash some rage. Maybe that’s why Kaddish was so rough, why he pressed hard against the face until he heard the rasp of skin against brick.

“You don’t know him,” Kaddish said. “But I know you.” Kaddish could feel the boy’s pulse in the palm of his hand. He could make out an Adam’s apple bobbing around. It was hard to keep hold, scared as the boy was and sweating so hard. “It’s me,” Kaddish said. “Pato’s father.” Kaddish was about to lose his grip.

“You sure you’re his father?” Rafa said. “If you’re really his father, ask me again.”

Kaddish let go and the boy slumped forward, face-to-face with Kaddish before straightening up. Rafa touched his jaw tenderly and said, “You sure you’re you?”

“It’s dark,” Kaddish said.

“There’s enough light to see that you don’t look Poznan. You sound like you, though,” Rafa said. He stared at Kaddish’s nose. “Pato told us you guys had yourselves fixed, that you’d gotten yourselves neutered and spayed.”

Kaddish hadn’t asked. He grabbed the denim collar of the boy’s jacket and dragged him across the street. He forced the boy into the back of the car.

“Can we just clarify something?” Rafa said. “Because dragging folks into cars is an unusually sensitive matter these days. If you’re a Pato’s-dad-sounding cop and you’re going to kill me, I’d like to know right now so I can have a fucking heart attack in the backseat. I can feel the fucking pains in my arm already.”

“I’m his father,” Kaddish said, “for real. And I still might kill you. His mother you also know, and she will be assisting in killing you if need be.” Lillian turned and nodded. The boy seized up, even more terrified, and actually clasped a hand to his chest.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. The boy looked to Kaddish. Whatever recognition
he was working on was wiped away. Lillian smiled warmly but it only pushed at the bandage, forcing closed swollen eyes. Rafa read it as a wince. Something dripped.

Lillian turned on the inside light. “You don’t look so great yourself,” she said.

Rafa leaned forward to see his cheek in the mirror, scraped raw. There were also beads of blood forming two neat lines. Rafa wiped them away.

“We have questions about Pato,” Kaddish said.

“You could have called me,” Rafa said.

“We did,” Lillian said. “You were supposed to call us back.”

“Your mother is distraught,” Kaddish said.

“You talked to my mother?”

“We visited your mother. We were looking for our son’s best friends, but they seem to have run away.”

“There’s nothing I can tell that you don’t already know. Nothing since Pato called me from jail.”

“When?” Lillian said.

“It was before,” Rafa said. “After the concert and after the weekend, but before they took him again. He said you were coming to the station to get him. He was supposed to meet up with us later and he never showed. We called your house and no one answered. We went over last night to pick him up, and your freak neighbor wouldn’t open the door.”

“You see?” Lillian said, interrupting. “You see the locked door?”

“I see that idiot Cacho didn’t tell us anyone came by.”

“We went back to my house to decide what to do. And then you called, and there was no other choice. We were worried—we are—for our friend. We had nothing but the worry and we ran.”

“Not very far or very well,” Kaddish said. “It was pretty easy to find you. A pitiful fugitive. You only made it one day.”

“I was hiding just fine. I only came out for a game of foosball and a Coke.” Rafa looked into the rearview mirror and blinked. “If I knew where Pato was, I’d take you. I’d give my life for your son.”

“If we can arrange the trade, we will.” Kaddish watched the boy in the rearview mirror. He passed back a cigarette and lit another for himself.

· · ·

Flavia sat on the carpet in the middle of the room. She had the front of her hair tucked behind her ear. Her knees were pulled to her chest and she wore a modest peasant skirt that was spread out around her. She’d always been friendly to Lillian in the past. She wasn’t now. She sat there looking scared.

The walls of the apartment needed painting and there was no furniture in the room but for two park benches facing each other in the center. There was a clump of grass still clinging to one of the feet. It was clear no one had lived there for some time.

Lillian and Kaddish sat together, bodies touching. Rafa was stretched out on the bench across, with a leg thrown over the side.

Flavia got up and went into the kitchen to turn off the water before it reached boiling. She brought back the kettle and put it on a burnt spot on the rug where the acrylic fiber had melted down. She again set her skirt around herself. She passed the maté to Lillian and then hit Rafa so that he sat up.

“Pato has done something wrong,” Kaddish said. “You’ve done something wrong. Somewhere, somehow, you and your friends have broken a rule.”

“Pato has
not
done something wrong,” Rafa said. “We have not.”

“There’s a reason,” Kaddish said.

“The reason is no reason.”

“How about you make one up?” Lillian said.

“I think they took Pato because it sounded right to them, because he followed the last person and set up the next. That’s how it spreads, like a virus. It’s enough to get sneezed on by the wrong man.”

“Nonsense,” Lillian said.

“Don’t be a fool,” Kaddish said.

Rafa took the maté from Lillian. The
bombilla
clinked against his teeth as he drank. “Do you really want to know what we’ve been up to?”

“Yes,” Lillian said.

“During uncertain times Pato and Flavia and I discussed a government so paranoid that it would one day hunt us for fearing such a
situation would come to be. We’re conspiracy theorists who’ve been stripped of our conspiracy. Fearing this would happen is our biggest crime.”

Flavia shook her head in disappointment, as if she’d been supervising until then and Rafa had just failed. “This boy here, sadly, is the closest we have to a radical. Does he sound like a mastermind of anything to you?”

“No,” Kaddish said. “He doesn’t.”

“We can’t help you,” Flavia said. Her face was expectant and Lillian took note.

“But we can help you,” Lillian said.

Flavia didn’t hesitate. She launched right in. “You have to get rid of his address book and his pictures and find his diary and any letters he wrote. You have to destroy everything that ties anyone—any of us—to your son.”

RHYTHM AND REPETITION
had no effect. Neither did choreographed motion, the flexing of specific muscles, or meditative challenges such as staying completely motionless or staring at certain objects until reality fell away. Lillian spent the dawn hours with a teaspoon cradled in her palm, focusing on palm and spoon, spoon and palm, until the lines were blurred, and still no one called. She had come to the conclusion that it was all nonsense but the numbers. Nothing but the counting seemed to make the phone ring. She sat in the wing-backed chair, counting up to thirty and then back down. The call came on nineteen, Pato’s age—another sign. She was out of the chair, the telephone to her ear, saying, “Hello,” and then “Hello,” again. When she heard no answer, she held out the receiver with both hands and yelled “Pato,” into the mouthpiece.

“It’s me, Gustavo,” Gustavo said. There was confusion in his voice. He hadn’t intended to draw out Lillian’s desperation. It was an intimacy he wasn’t meant to hear.

Confused herself, Lillian looked around for a clock and then to the watch on her wrist. Finding it, she understood it wasn’t the time but the day she was looking for. It was Friday. Friday with Gustavo, her boss, on the phone.

She hadn’t spoken to him in a week, hadn’t been to work in a week—and then again to the watch—or was it only four days? When had they been out to dinner, eating spinach, drinking wine?

“How are you, sweetie?” Gustavo said. “How are you doing with it all?”

“Fine,” she said. “Bad.”

Lillian looked out the window and after, for comfort, at Pato’s shelves. Such a smart boy. And kind. And full of surprises. She came up with a nice memory to calm herself. She thought about Pato staying out all night with his friends, and stopping at the bakery on his way home. He’d bring back a dozen
medialunas
wrapped in patterned paper and warm to the touch. Lillian would wake and smell them from bed, and know her son was home safe. In high school, before he turned surly he’d still get up in the mornings and drag himself downstairs. It was the first errand Kaddish sent Pato out alone on, the list and the money pinned to his shirt. He couldn’t have been more than five. When he didn’t want to go, when he didn’t understand how this responsibility had fallen to him, Kaddish had explained it simply. “That’s why we had you,” is what Kaddish told him. “To get pastries is why you were brought into the world.”

Lillian remembered one thing and forgot another. She was on the phone with Gustavo. She should have been listening; Gustavo was always full of advice. Lillian tried to pick up a thread but he’d already stopped talking. He might have hung up.

Out of the silence, Gustavo said, “How long have we been friends?”

“I don’t know,” Lillian said.

“It wasn’t easy to get you in,” he said. “I had Frida calling people all day. No one’s willing to help, and definitely not a lawyer of Tello’s caliber. You’re fortunate he’s agreed to get involved.”

Gustavo stopped talking again.

“Thank you for calling,” Lillian said.

“You just feel better,” Gustavo said, as if she was home sick. Lillian held the phone tight. “And don’t worry about the bill. It’s taken care of.”

“Where am I going?” Lillian said.

“Where are you going? What does that mean, Lillian?”

“I lost the address,” she said. She looked around for a pen. “And the name, and”—she started crying—“I don’t know what you’re saying. I’m having a very hard time.”

“All right,” Gustavo said. “Fine, Lillian.”

She put the phone into the crook of her neck, raised up a shoulder, and tilted her head. She scratched a pen against the back of a pad, testing her readiness, listening as best she could.

We not only discover who our real friends are in an emergency, we also discover who we consider, in our hearts, to be our real friends. Lillian honestly hadn’t thought about Gustavo until she’d answered the phone. And she didn’t expect any more from him than what he’d offered. Gustavo wasn’t Frida. He wouldn’t risk his life for Lillian any more than she’d risk her own to save his. The limits were mutual and clear.