The Ministry of Special Cases Read Free Page A

Congregations Cemetery, did not want to carry the tool bag or climb over the wall. He wanted no part of his father’s cockamamie and perverse and misdirected plans. At nineteen, a college boy Pato was learning sociology and history, important things that can only be taught in a university setting. He had no interest in the thuggish world Kaddish came from.
    To get anywhere with such a child, it’s best to do as Kaddish did and take Pato’s presence as acquiescence enough. Kaddish didn’t expect much more. For a boy who wants to see himself as tough and independent, who wants to believe, while in the presence of his father, that he’s a self-made man, certain emotions are confusing and shameful. Pato tried to keep them packed down. Despite the many traits that he couldn’t brook, the infinite points of disagreement, and the day-to-day ways he and his father would collide, beneath it all and defying logic, Kaddish was the father he loved. “Swing,” Pato said, pushing back against the marble. “Swing already. Let’s get this done.”

[ Two ]
    IT WAS ALWAYS LIKE THIS for Kaddish Poznan, always something gone wrong. He shook his head and, acknowledging nothing beyond that, spit between mounds.
    “It’s a body,” Pato said.
    “We’re in a cemetery. This is where they keep them.” Seeing that they were on the United Congregations side, Kaddish stamped his foot. “We’re standing on another right now.”
    “This one’s different,” Pato said, highlighting it. “You’ll notice, unique in its positioning, this one’s above ground.”
    “Where?” Kaddish said. He raised a hand to his brow to better see in the dark and knocked the flashlight loose from Pato’s grip. After fifty-two years in that city, Kaddish’s blindness was as sharp as his sight. He’d learned not to see any trouble that didn’t see him first.
    They’d chipped Two-Blades’ name away and left his headstone intact. They were back over the wall and on their way home. All Pato had needed to do was walk a straight line. Instead, he’d taken them down a row they wouldn’t have passed and had waved the flashlight around. Kaddish could have strangled his son right then—leave a second corpse with the first, God help him.
    Pato fetched the light and headed toward the body. He was already leaning in when Kaddish grabbed him hard by the back of the neck.
    “You’re going to touch it now?” Kaddish said. “You want your fingers all over it, because it’s so easy to explain how we came to be here in the middle of the night? Murdered—I see it same as you. But I promise, Pato, there’s no murderer out there. Everyone would be more than happy to have us volunteer.”
    This is why Kaddish didn’t want to see, and why he didn’t want to walk down the row to the body, because half looking from a distance was so much different from standing right over this kid.
    The body was a young man’s, belly up and shirtless. Its feet touched the ground on one side of the headstone and its head did the same on the other. The throat was slit clean and the body drained of blood. There wasn’t a drop to be found.
    “Somebody moved it here,” Pato said.
    “You think they’ve been moving themselves around the city? You think they pop out of the ground like tulips? The police kill them and dump them and the paper reports nonsense to go along. It’s a tragedy among tragedies. Now let’s get home.” Kaddish slipped between graves. Pato didn’t follow. “This is the single worst place in Buenos Aires to be standing.”
    “For us, yes,” Pato said. “And for this boy to be lying.” He then raised the flashlight and lit the Jewish stars and etched hands and Hebrew dates on the headstones.
    “Should we drag him to the car and drop him off in Pompeya? Is that the plan? Trust me,” Kaddish said, “if they want to start slitting Jewish throats, they won’t bother drumming up an excuse.”
    “How do you know he’s not Jewish?”
    Kaddish snatched