Buried Strangers

“Initially, yes.”

“The. . euthanasia, when it comes, it would be. .”

“Entirely painless. I can assure you of that.”

“And if I help. .”

“The odds are extremely good that your son will soon be on his way to recovery.”

Clovis took a deep breath and met Dr. Bittler’s eyes.

“God forgive me,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-eight

“Your concerns are utterly without foundation,” Bittler said.

Claudia sat back in her chair and glared at him across the expanse of his desk. The man had always been arrogant, often insufferably so, but this newfound conviction in his own infallibility was a dangerous development.

“I’m only suggesting that we proceed-”

He didn’t let her get any further than that.

“You’re not suggesting that we proceed at all. You’re sug-gesting that we do exactly the opposite. And that, my dear Claudia, is an excess of caution.”

“With respect,” she said, her tone belying her words, “until the whole business with Tanaka blows over, I strongly advise that we-”

“If Tanaka had told anyone about our arrangement, his colleagues would have been at our throats by now.”

“I give you that. But what if someone else delves into Tanaka’’s recent investigations and comes to the same con-clusions as he did?”

“Impossible. He destroyed all the records.”

“He told you he destroyed all the records. The man was a blackmailer, for God’s sake. Do you think you can take the word of a man like that at face value? How about that swine, Ribeiro? Didn’t he tell you he’d destroyed that family’s furni-ture? Let’s kill him. Kill him now.”

“In good time, Claudia. Not now. Now, we need him.”

“We only need him if you persist in implementing this scheme of yours. He’s dangerous. Your plan is dangerous. That anthropologist is dangerous.”

“No no no, you have it all wrong. Can’t you see that using Oliveira will lead to less risk, not more?”

She crossed her arms, raised an eyebrow, and stared at him.

“You have no need to worry about Oliveira,” he said irri-tably. “He’s firmly within our camp.”

“That may be true at the moment. But what about after we’ve saved his brat? What then?”

“After we’ve saved his brat, Oliviera will have become our accomplice. If he opens his mouth to the authorities, he’ll have as much to lose as we do. Then, we’ll start offering him financial incentives. Soon, we’ll have him in a position where he’ll be supplying us with untraceable organs forever.

Some people aren’t moved by money.”

“In all my life, Claudia, I’ve only known one man who wasn’t.”

“And who was that?”

“The man whose picture is on the mantelpiece over there.

You’ve promised to tell me about him someday.”

“And someday I will. Not now. Do you want to hear the details of my plan or not?”

“Of course I do. It’s my career, my future that you’re play-ing with.”

“I’m not playing. Stop being petulant.”

“Petulant? Me?”

“And spare me your sarcasm.”

Bittler took out a handkerchief and started polishing his glasses.

“Tell me,” she said.

Bittler smiled and sat up straighter in his chair. He loved to talk, loved to impress people with his brilliance.

Claudia, on the other hand, wasn’t much for talk, never had been, not even as a little girl, not even before the accident.

The funeral seven-year-old Claudia Andrade’s parents had planned to attend was that of her maternal grand-mother.

En route, their car was broadsided by a truck. Both were killed. It drew newspaper headlines at the time, the irony of their being on the way to a funeral and winding up at their own.

Claudia’s brother, Omar, two years younger, was a mama’s boy, deemed too young to attend the double burial, so Claudia, the one who’d always avoided her mother’s embraces, was the one who got lifted up over the coffin.

“Kiss your mother good-bye,” her uncle Ugo told her.

Claudia did as she was told, dutifully pressing her lips against the dead woman’s cheek. Her mother’s flesh was cold. Claudia reacted by making spitting noises and rubbing her mouth. Everybody knew that Claudia was a strange little girl. They didn’t blame her. They blamed Ugo. He was the one responsible for causing a scene, and the Andrade family hated scenes.

Claudia’s next brush with death occurred two weeks before her thirteenth birthday. She’d been living, then, with her great-aunt Tamara and had been walking home from school.

Omar was running half a block ahead, his pencil case in one hand, constricting his penis with the other. He was des-perate to get to a bathroom before he peed in his pants. He crossed the street in front of the house, flung open the gate, and ran up the steps, ignoring the family dog, a little dachs-hund named Gretel.

The dog dashed out of the open gate and ran to greet Claudia.

Happy barks were cut off by a loud thump and a wail of pain. The car that struck her, a black Ford LTD with tinted windows, never slowed down. Whether the driver was a man or a woman would remain a mystery. The cops weren’t about to waste their time trying to hunt down someone who’d done a hit-and-run on a dog.

Gretel’s battered body came to rest in the gutter at Claudia’s feet. The dachshund was still alive-barely- bleeding from the mouth and panting for breath.

Claudia put a hand on the soft, reddish-brown fur. She could feel Gretel’s heart, fluttering, fluttering, and then, sud-denly, it stopped. Claudia shuddered. Her head began to spin. She sensed a shortness of breath, an increase in her heartbeat, a sharpening of her senses.

It was. . wonderful.

They buried Gretel in a corner of the backyard. Omar cried at the funeral and planted a cross of two sticks bound together with kite string. Claudia squeezed out a tear or two, more to make Omar feel guilty than from any sense of loss. Head down, hands over her eyes, she found herself thinking. . thinking.

Would they catch me if I killed the neighbor’s dog? How about our cat?

It was then and there, standing over that little mound of earth, that Claudia Andrade decided what she was going to do with her life: she was going to become a doctor. No one got closer to death than a doctor did. No one had a more continuous and intimate look into last moments.

And last moments, for thirteen-year-old Claudia Andrade, were profoundly exciting, more than boys, more than parties, more than clothes, more than jewelry, more than anything. She bought a box of razor blades and started experimenting with small creatures, seeing just how much she could lop off without causing immediate death. Sometimes she’d bind up the stump of a leg, or sew an incision after removing some-thing from inside one of the little bodies. She’d stuff cotton into their mouths and bind it in place with adhesive tape to stifle their screams. One time she cut into a pregnant guinea pig and the babies came pouring out, six in all, almost at term.

Almost wasn’t good enough. They were dead within a matter of minutes. All of her other subjects died, too,