The Ministry of Special Cases (22 page)

Kaddish didn’t see things the same way.

“Who hasn’t passed through that office since the coup? A top lawyer—what’s that worth?” Kaddish said. “A top fucking general is what we need.”

“Don’t,” Lillian said.

“I will,” Kaddish said. “You’ve been there for a dozen years, and the best he comes up with is a shyster? Now that he’s got you dealing with stolen property and stolen babies, you’d think, for that alone, better favors were owed.”

“Never out loud,” Lillian said. She put her hands over her ears. “Once I whispered it to you. Don’t ever say that out loud, Kaddish, you’ll see us all dead.”

“Who says the outcome will be any different?” Kaddish said. “You gave that man the best years of your life.”

“No,” Lillian said. “Those I gave to you.”

“And mine went to you and Pato. And whether Pato wants to be or not, he’s my son too.”

“Who’s saying different?”

“I think you are. All the decisions are getting made like you’re in this alone.”

“I don’t have the strength for this, Kaddish. You promised me.”

“No. You promised
for
me,” Kaddish said. “Now I want an assurance of my own. I want to know you understand that almost a week has gone by and we’ve gotten nowhere. Visiting every police station in the country won’t make a difference and Gustavo’s lawyer isn’t going to tell us anything we don’t already know.”

“What is the point of this?” Lillian yelled. “What does this do?”

“The point is for you to understand that if we keep going this way we’ll end up roaming that building with the rest of the hopeless people who aren’t getting their kids back. You’re driving us toward the Ministry of Special Cases and I want you to know it. The system doesn’t work for anyone, Lillian, and it definitely never has for me. I still think, if we look the right way, we can find our son.”

“You don’t want to start pointing fingers,” Lillian said. “It’s a losing proposition.”

“If you blame me for opening the door, then say it.”

“I’m trying to find Pato the only way there is. If you have one of your schemes at the ready, tell me. If it’s something concrete, let’s do it right now. I’ll help you search the nursing homes for the last Jewish pimp with a policeman in his pocket and a marble in his head. You lead and I’ll follow. We’ll exhaust all your big connections. Go get a shovel and we’ll dig up one of your heroes tonight.” Kaddish said nothing. He didn’t have a scheme. All he had was what he knew, that the government wouldn’t help them. “If your plan isn’t ready, then put your coat on and let’s go. Otherwise we’ll be late for the lawyer—a lawyer we’d never get to without Gustavo’s name attached.”

Kaddish put his coat on, and finding the gold in his pocket, he dropped the two handkerchiefs on the shelf by the door. “That Gustavo’s an
hijo de puta”
Kaddish said. “A lawyer is a pitiful best from your best friend.” Gustavo wasn’t her best friend, he was her boss. Kaddish was coming with her so Lillian let it pass.

· · ·

The lawyer’s name was Alberto Tello, and there seemed to be a huge misunderstanding about what exactly he’d been hired to do.

“New York,” Alberto said. “Paris. For Jews there is Israel. If you want Spanish spoken, there’s Mexico. There’s Uruguay if you want Spanish spoken and to be close, but I don’t recommend it. This government has reach. Too many people go missing in the countries nearby.”

“You want us to leave the country?”

“I’m offering help.”

“Does Gustavo know this is what you’re doing?”

“He’s very concerned. He asked me to take care of you.”

“New York?” Lillian said.

“I mentioned it as an option. I told him I could get you on a plane today, get you settled. He said to arrange it if you decide.”

“That’s insane,” Lillian said.

“Often the families disappear as units, which makes it not very insane at all. It makes it actually smart. As for your estate, I’ll handle all of it. I’m to see that the transition is smooth.”

This was the funniest thing Kaddish had heard since their lives turned bad.

“Our estate?” he said. “Yes, Lillian, who will look after our holdings while we’re gone?”

“I know you have limited means,” the lawyer said. “I apologize. These are the terms we use.”

“I can find a travel agent on my own,” Lillian said. “What I need is a lawyer. If you’re willing to see us, you must be willing to help.”

“Yes,” Kaddish said. “Here’s your chance to tell us you’d help if only you didn’t have your own family to worry about. Then send us to the Ministry of Special Cases and we’ll be on our way.”

“I do have a son, and I do worry,” the lawyer said. “But that’s not the reason I won’t start a dossier for you.”

“Then what is it?” Lillian said.

“It’s that there’s one of me and every day more people like you. I’m not smart enough to win these cases and I don’t have heart enough to keep losing them again and again. My talent lies in getting families out and finding them countries where they can stay. That’s the compromise
I make. I offer small comfort to a lot of people in the time it would take to do nothing on a grand scale for one.”

“You have tried, though?”

The lawyer nodded.

“And the ones you fought for, did they get their missing back?”

The lawyer shook his head.

“I had a married couple abducted from their apartment. The army secured three city blocks before they went in. Dangerous a mission as it was, they remembered to bring a moving truck. They took the couple and then they took everything else. They stripped the place to the floorboards. Do you know how many people see such a thing—how public that is? They closed down a neighborhood and then carried the people out along with their couch, the radiators—they took the kitchen sink. And still the habeas corpus was refused. The army said, ‘Not being detained.’ That’s how all my dossiers came back: ‘Not being detained,’ no matter how absurd.”

“What about witnesses?”

“I haven’t had a decent corroborating witness outside the family yet.”

“And you never got anyone back? Not one?”

“One,” the lawyer said. “And that was by fluke and still a sad story. The habeas corpus was refused, a ‘Not being detained’ like the others. It was the father who tracked the body down at the Forensic Medical Corps morgue.”

“Dead?” Lillian said.

“Yes,” Tello said. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t stories where the opposite is true. I’ve heard of people released in all manner of ways and a habeas corpus issued to a person who hadn’t asked. The one thing I can tell you is that this government runs on paper. If they want they can erase someone in a day, everything—birth certificate, diplomas—all of it expunged, co-workers swearing they’d never met. They’ll undo a future and a past in one blow. What you need is to make your son exist on paper. You need to get something official written down. If they own up to arresting him, they may also own up to the possibility that you’re due him back and in one piece. That’s really the key.”

Kaddish said, “What goes in must come out?”

“Paper is proof. They’ll lie about everything and make up the rest. The only thing they cower in front of is the filled-out form. If you build up to something, if real progress is made, I’d try for the habeas corpus. Otherwise, as you already said, it’s the Ministry of Special Cases. A success can be had there, but it’s like getting water from a stone.” The meeting had ground down. Kaddish and Lillian stood. “If you change your minds,” he said, “you know where I am. Bring a packed bag and a passport and I’ll see you both safe.”

Lillian spent Friday night in her chair by the window, watching the corner around which Pato might turn. Kaddish watched TV too loudly drank too much, and smoked until the taste in his mouth went stale. He went into the kitchen at ten-thirty to freshen his drink and only came out again just before midnight, carrying a salad in a bowl.

“I’ve mashed potatoes,” Kaddish said. “I’ve burnt you a steak.” His own he took bloody, touching it fleetingly to the griddle.

“I’m fine,” Lillian said.

Kaddish laid out place settings and served the rest of the dinner. He said to Lillian, “Come eat.”

“If we’re having Friday night, let’s have it.”

Lillian put three candlesticks in the center of the table. Two candles for Shabbos and the third a
minhag
from Lillian’s house. Some mothers light an extra candle for each of their children. Lillian’s mother had lit one for her, and Lillian did the same after Pato was born.

At least she had for the first weeks until Kaddish had used them to light one too many cigarettes, until he’d made her feel it was nothing but superstition, nonsense to light candles when they did nothing else.

Kaddish hadn’t felt like he was being a brute. He had no use for laws that saw him a bastard, and less so for traditions passed on. Let them take the rules that made him
mamzer
and outcast and use that extra candle to push them deeply up their collective ass.

“You have to do that before dark,” Kaddish said.

“Now you’re a stickler for things you don’t believe in?”

“It’s the one Jewish tradition I keep—a hypocrisy that traces back.”
Lillian held his gaze. “It can’t hurt to light a candle for Pato.”

“No,” Kaddish said. Lillian put out a hand for his lighter and he gave it to her. “Sounds more Catholic than Jewish, but no.”

Kaddish stood quietly while Lillian lit the candles and then covered her eyes. Because of the bandage, the whole of her face was hidden but for her mouth. She mumbled the blessing and she made a wish. They sat at the table and Kaddish had to admit—strange compliment though it was—that he’d not seen her looking better since Pato was taken.

“I added a layer of gauze,” Lillian said. She smoothed the ends of the tape down against her cheeks. “A bit of clean dressing on top always brings out my eyes.”

Kaddish went and opened a bottle of wine, trying to maintain the spirit. He poured for both of them and quickly drank. He wasn’t about to say a prayer.

“It’s not hypocrisy,” Lillan said of the candles. “It’s what lapsed Jews do in times of trouble. They make amends and beg help from God.”

“I’m not going to, if that’s all right.”

“To ask?”

“To beg,” Kaddish said.

“That’s all right.”

Kaddish ate and Lillian didn’t. She sat with her lips pressed tight as if Kaddish might try and feed her off his fork.

Kaddish said, “Please, Lillian.”

“What if he walks in right now and finds us like this, having a feast, drinking wine?”

“He’ll think we were keeping up our strength so we could find him, and it will be the sweetest moment of our lives.”

“But we won’t have found him. It doesn’t look right. I’m not even watching from the window; he’ll take us by surprise.”

Kaddish nodded. He stood and went into the kitchen. He returned with another place setting, the wineglass rolling in an arc around the plate.

“There,” he said, and set out the dishes, folding the napkin, putting the silverware in line.

Lillian’s bottom lip shook. This is why she had long ago married him, these were the things he could do.

Kaddish sat. Lillian took the wine bottle and filled Pato’s empty glass.

“He can’t really surprise us,” she said. She pointed to the scalloped shelf where Pato’s keys rested next to the gold. “What if he gets back when we’re out looking?”

Kaddish got up again and went to the front door. He turned the key in its center, unscrewed the knob, and pulled the door open a few centimeters. “Who’s left to kidnap with our son already gone?”

Kaddish sat down at the table and cut a piece from his steak. He reached over to set it on Pato’s plate.

Lillian stopped him. “I won’t ask you to take it that far.”

“And the door? You’ll be able to sleep with it open?”

“Better, if anything. Better if I manage to sleep at all.”

This time Lillian stood up. She went around the table and kissed Kaddish on the back of his neck, lingering there.

Kaddish stayed frozen. He was trying to keep that kiss in place. It was the same kind of energy with which Lillian tried to move her son around the corner time and again.

After dinner they had coffee, Lillian in her chair and Kaddish in front of the TV. They stayed up until the candles went out, with Lillian glancing over, watching to see which one would go out first, praying it wasn’t her son’s.

When Kaddish turned off the television and went to the bedroom, Lillian followed. When he sat down on the corner of the bed, when he unbuttoned his shirt and pulled his undershirt over his head, when he leaned down with a grunt to pull off his socks, he was hoping in the least selfish way he knew how that Lillian might replace that kiss.

And she did. She pressed her lips to his neck.

It was like it had been when Pato was a newborn, like making love with Pato’s bassinet by the side of the bed. It was a mix of passion and wonder and, for Kaddish, recognition of responsibility and consequence in the world.

THE CRY WAS SO STRONG
, Kaddish sprinted down the hall to meet it. He found Lillian in the bathroom with the bandage in her hand. It was clear from the side as he stared at his wife in profile, clear before she turned to face him head on.

Again Lillian screamed with despair and, when she said it, Kaddish only nodded. What was there to do but agree? How else to respond when Lillian said, “I’m beautiful!”

Mazursky had done a magnificent job by Mazursky’s standards. The swelling and the black eyes did little to hide it. Lillian was transformed. Transformed, and even in Kaddish’s imaginings he’d never pictured this. He’d thought so always but now, to look at her, Lillian was right. She was nothing short of beautiful.

“Murder,” Lillian said, her old nose gone, Pato missing from the mirror. “To change a face it is murder.”

Lillian stopped at the fountain as she crossed the Plaza de Mayo. It was turned off and empty even of rainwater, so that when she threw her coins in she heard them hit and watched them roll. Lillian wasn’t sure of the rules, if it was the fountain or the water that counted, or, as a homeless woman walked toward her, if the money had to sit for any length of
time. A wish is a wish, is what she decided. On her way to the Ministry of Special Cases, Lillian would take what she could get.