Buried Strangers

Clovis beamed and his words began to flow. The child had been born with a full head of hair. You could see he was intel-ligent just from the way he moved his little arms and legs. His wife assured him that Raul resembled both his father and himself, although he definitely had his mother’s. .

Bittler kept his eyes fixed on Clovis and maintained a half smile. But he didn’t pay any more attention to what the anthropologist was saying than he did to the singing of the cicada in the garden. He had weightier issues to consider than a father’s twaddle about a dying baby. That, too, was a song he’d heard tens of times before.

But an anthropologist with access to the Indians of the Xingu? Now, that was entirely new, and it had set him to thinking.

“. . I’m not wealthy,” Clovis was saying as Bittler focused anew on the conversation. “I know operations of this kind are terribly expensive. I don’t even know how I’ll be able to pay you. Perhaps a little bit each month, with interest, of course. I’d be perfectly willing to sign any kind of a contract. I’d trust you to-”

“Don’t worry about the money,” Bittler said.

Clovis’s mouth opened in surprise. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

“The money. Don’t worry about it. It’s not our major concern.”

Bittler’s use of the word our was intentional. He wanted the anthropologist to believe that it was their problem, that they were going to have to work together to solve it.

“What is it then? Our major concern, I mean,” Clovis asked, grasping at the straw.

“Obtaining the organ,” Bittler said.

Clovis sank back in his chair. “Yes,” he said. “Dr. Levy explained the difficulty, but he also said you might. .”

Bittler let the silence go on for a while before he said, “Might what?”

A sparkle appeared in Clovis’s left eye, built to a droplet, started to roll down his cheek. He reached for his handkerchief.

Bittler continued to stare at him, making silence his ally.

“My son can’t wait, Doctor Bittler,” Clovis finally said. “We could. . lose him. He could die waiting for a new heart.”

“But surely, Dr. Oliveira, it is doctor isn’t it?”

Clovis nodded and swallowed.

“Surely, Dr. Oliveira, you know about the lists? Surely, you’re also aware that it’s illegal to remove an organ from a cadaver without the express consent of the deceased or the deceased’s immediate family?”

Clovis waved an impatient hand.

“I think it’s a stupid law. What harm can it do if someone’s already dead?”

Bittler nodded in agreement, but lifted his palms in a ges-ture of helplessness.

“A law, nonetheless.”

Clovis bit his lower lip and stared at the floor. Now there were tears running down both cheeks. He was a picture of misery.

Bittler, on the other hand, had seldom been happier. He was careful, however, to keep his features immobile.

“Perhaps. .” he said.

Clovis looked up.

Bittler pursed his lips, tried to appear as if he were giving the problem serious thought. “. . there is something that might be done.” But then he shook his head, as if he were rejecting the idea. “No, no, I couldn’t do it. It would involve breaking the law.”

“But you just agreed with me,” Clovis said. “Some laws are stupid.”

“Stupid, yes. But the penalties for breaking them are severe.”

“Tell me what you were thinking. Maybe there’s some way-”

Bittler waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll have to give it more thought. Can you come back on Thursday at the same time?”

Of course Clovis could.

“Couldn’t you give me some inkling,” he said, “of what you’re considering?”

Bittler shook his head. “That would be. . precipitate,” he said. “But keep your spirits up. By Thursday, I may have found a solution.”

Clovis’s eyes brightened. His shoulders straightened, as if some terrible burden had been removed.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

Of course you don’t, Bittler thought, but I do.

Chapter Thirty-six

Horst Bittler’s father, Otto, was a schoolteacher before the Second World War and the deputy head of an extermination camp by the end of it. A man much sought after by the Allied powers, he’d been wounded by the explo-sion of a mortar shell while fleeing from the Russian advance. The incident had left him with the use of only one eye, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The wound had so distorted his features that his face no longer bore any resemblance to photos that had been taken of it.

It helped, too, that prior to the collapse, Otto had ordered one of his prisoners, an engraver from Krakow, to prepare a set of identity papers. The papers identified Sturmbann-fuehrer Bittler as August Schultz, a Wehrmacht corporal and former farm laborer. Otto had rewarded the engraver by put-ting a bullet in his head.

The papers were good, but not perfect, so once he’d got-ten away from the Russians, Otto had gone to ground in Munich, taking refuge at the home of an old classmate. The classmate was not pleased to have Otto show up on his doorstep, but he was hardly in a position to refuse shelter. He had a past of his own to hide-and Otto knew it.

Eight months later, Odessa, the organization of former SS members, was finally able to smuggle Otto, his wife, Erika, and their two-year-old son, Horst, out of the country.

In Brazil, Otto reverted to his original name and managed to get a job in a factory that built refrigerators. He died in 1956, when Horst was twelve. Whatever else he’d been, Otto was a devoted father and the only person Horst Bittler had ever truly loved. His son was devastated by his passing.

Horst’s surviving parent was another case altogether. She was a shrew of a woman, obsessed with cleanliness and instilled with the conviction that no culture was superior to German culture.

Horst hated her to the very fiber of his being.

Along with his potato dumplings and cabbage, she dosed him with Schiller and Goethe, tapping her foot impatiently while he absorbed each morsel, forcing him to recite it aloud before ladling out the next one. He acquired, in the process, such distaste for literature that he read only scientific works ever afterward.

For her, there were no accidents and no excuses. Showing emotion was contemptible. Warmth was weakness. Non-Aryans were inferior. The sex act was necessary for repro-duction, but to take pleasure in it was filthy. Most people were not to be trusted. The old Germany, the Great Germany, was gone. Only cowards and weaklings were left. No one who survived was deserving of loyalty or support. It was wasted effort ever to help anyone with anything.

In later years, it often gave her son pleasure to reflect upon how wrong she’d been. The fugitive he’d met in the winter of 1977 turned out to be neither a coward nor a weak-ling, and helping him was anything but wasted effort. Had it not been for his pains in shielding the man’s true identity, and the financial reward that followed, Bittler might well have spent the rest of his life in a modest practice, eking out a living by treating patients on the national health scheme and being badly paid for it.

But fate had smiled on him, and here he was, three decades later, with a successful clinic that bore his name.

* * *

Doctor Horst Bittler rose weekdays punctually at seven and on weekends punctually at eight. He retired punctually at ten thirty, read professional journals for half an hour, and switched off the bedside lamp punctually at