Falls the Shadow (11 page)

I suppose at this point I need to recount the first of my visits to Dr. Bob. Remember I mentioned gratuitous violence?

“Uh-oh,” said Dr. Pfeffer cheerily as he peered into my mouth. “I see an abscess. And that’s not the bad news.”

With his hands still in my mouth, I replied, “Arruuuarrheearrgh.”

“It’s cracked, you see,” said Dr. Bob. “Your lower-right first molar. This one there.”

He gave it a tap with one of his instruments and I tried to kick out the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

“It must have been the gun across your jaw that broke it. The crack is what’s causing the abscess, bacteria crawling like hungry spiders down the gap until they find a cozy home in your gums. I would love to save it, nothing I like better than a good endodontic procedure, but what can I do with a cracked root? Out it must come.” He gave a pickpocket’s giggle when he said this last part, delighted by the possibility of separating my tooth from my mouth. “Is that okay with you, Victor?”

“No chance to keep it?”

“On a chain around your neck, possibly,” said Dr. Bob, “but not in your mouth.”

“What about the gap?”

“Oh, we’ll take care of that, don’t you worry.”

“Too late.”

He pulled back, his eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “Do you want us to get another opinion? I could ask Tilda, but she usually agrees with me.”

He laughed, that car-alarm laugh. I glared.

“Really, Victor, don’t look so worried. It’s all quite routine, and there really is no choice.”

“I suppose if you say there’s no choice.”

“That’s right, Victor. We all must do what we must do.”

“Okay, then.”

“Good. Great. Yes. And there is no reason to wait, is there? No time like the present to take control of a situation. Lucky for you I have a hole in my schedule.”

“Lucky for me.”

“Let me call in Tilda, and we’ll begin.”

Almost immediately the massive figure of Dr. Bob’s hygienist appeared in the doorway, like some dental Valkyrie sent down to gather in my mortally wounded tooth. Behind me I could hear the unnerving clank of metal, the fitting of fixings, the ominous taps as a syringe was filled.

When all his preparations were complete, Dr. Bob gave a nod. Tilda leaned over me and gripped each of my biceps with her huge hands. Her woody scent covered me like a blanket.

“This part won’t hurt much,” said Dr. Bob. “You’ll only feel a little pinprick.”

He jabbed a sliver of metal deep into my gum and jabbed it again and then again as I writhed beneath him on the examination chair and my gum and lip turned to slack, lifeless rubber.

“Calm down,” said Tilda as she pressed my arms hard into the chair and smothered my upper body with her chest. “Don’t be such a silly man,
ja
. This is the easy part.”

Dr. Bob, in the middle of my extraction, was in the middle of a story, and neither was going well.

The story was about a farm family in Colombia, whom he had happened to meet while doing volunteer dental work in Bogotá. The daughter was a beautiful fourteen-year-old who had caught the eye of a local drug lord. The drug lord had demanded that the family deliver the girl up to him when she turned fifteen. The father had complained, the drug lord had shown little patience for complaints, the father came to Dr. Bob because half his teeth had been knocked out by a baseball bat.

“His mouth was a mess,” said Dr. Bob. “Worse than yours, if you can believe that. I speak Spanish fluently, and still I could barely understand a word he was saying.”

Maybe it was because your hands were in his mouth, I thought but didn’t say. First, I didn’t say it because his hands were in my mouth, and second, I didn’t say it because the extraction wasn’t going well at all and I was too terrified to speak. At the outset he had gripped my tooth with his pliers, prepared to start muscling it out of my jaw, and after the first hint of pressure, something came free. Boy, that was easy, I thought, remembering what I had heard about Dr. Bob’s gentle hands, and then it came again, the “Uhoh,” and a nervous giggle.

I proceeded to search the walls for diplomas.

“It’s fallen apart, Victor. Your tooth, it has come undone. The damage was worse than we thought. This makes it a little more inconvenient. Tilda, I’ll need the narrow forceps, please.”

And then the rocking began as Dr. Bob, hairy forearms flexing with effort, gripped the disparate parts of my shattered tooth with pointy-nosed pincers and pulled and yanked and heaved and hauled, all the time continuing with his story.

“It was a sad tale the father told, so sad that I could not stand by and do nothing. I had to do something. I felt obligated. I guess it’s just the way I am wired. And so, after I fixed up his teeth as best I could, I took a week of vacation and had him lead me to the lair of this drug lord.

“A day on a bus, a day on a mule cart to get back to his farm, a full day in the blinding heat to climb the mountain to the east, to descend the other side, and to hack our way through the jungle. It was a struggle for me, I am used to cold weather, but I soldiered on. At the edge of a clearing, we crawled as close as we dared. Through binoculars I could see a road and a wall and a gate and a château perched on the edge of a hill. There was a picnic with children going on behind the wall. Men with machine guns patrolled, fancy cars drove in and out. There were balloons, I seem to recall, and a plane. Aha.”

His hands jerked out of my mouth. In the teeth of his pliers was a bloodied sliver of bone and root.

“We’re making progress,” he said as he dropped the sliver into a metal tray with a clink, “though it’s hard to see with all the blood. Spit.”

I spat. Leaning over the no-longer-white sink, I took the opportunity to rub my tongue over the half-extracted tooth. Like Dresden after the bombing, shattered walls, narrow shards of chimneys rising above the smoking wreckage.

“Once more into the fray,” said Dr. Bob as he reached into my mouth. Tilda gripped my narrow shoulders with her massive hands. Dr. Bob placed his foot upon my chair for leverage. “Let me see, what next? Ah, yes.” I felt something clamp onto my mouth, my jaw shivered from the pressure.

“I was also at the time doing dental work in the American embassy,” said Dr. Bob. “The usual services for embassy personnel, you understand, scaling and filling, picking out bits of jalapeño. Foreign Service types tend to trust only Americans with their teeth, and it merely takes a few brisk walks in Bogotá to understand. After my visit with the farmer, I began sifting through my embassy clientele. You get a sense of a person when he or she is in the chair. Grip a tooth, I often say, and you get a grip on a soul. Steady now, yes.”

My head rose up under his pull, my neck strained to stay attached, and then my head snapped back into the headrest. Another sliver of bone, another clink.

“I knew what I was looking for. A certain nonchalance, a certain lack of evident responsibility, usage of last names only in hearty greetings, oversize laterals and cuspids. It didn’t take long to find him. A doughy-faced man with a rumpled suit and blasé gaze, who said, whenever he spied me, ‘Good to see you again, Pfeffer.’ We got to talking, the usual dentist-to-patient pleasantries, as we are doing now, Victor. Offhand conversation about the weather, the wine. And then I mentioned a trip I had recently taken, a hike and a climb, a chance to see the real Colombia. And a strange sight I had come upon, a clearing, a château heavily guarded, trucks rumbling in and out at all hours—yes, that part I added, a little color to keep up interest—and a plane. Let me tell you, Victor, his gaze wasn’t so blasé anymore. Brace yourself, boy.”

A grunt from me, a gasp of satisfaction from him. Clink.

“Open up, open up, we’re almost done. Yes. I see you.” He dug once again into my jaw. “When he left the office, his teeth were bright and shiny, and in his shirt pocket lay a map, complete with GPS coordinates. And so I had done all I could do. Nothing left but to hope. Hold tight. Ah, yes.”

Clink.

“We’re almost done. I see another shard. Hold on, this one’s deep. Just before I was about to leave Bogotá, the farmer came back to have his teeth inserted. He was very happy with his new mouth and happy that the prob lem with his daughter had been solved. Apparently there had been a secret military operation, bombs had been dropped—bombs, Victor, and napalm—the entire clearing had been turned to cinder. The drug lord’s reign of terror was over, and the farmer’s daughter was now engaged to a local butcher. To show his gratitude, the farmer brought me a sack of green coffee beans and a live chicken. Have you ever tasted chicken, Victor, cooked up just moments after it has been killed and cleaned? It tastes different, richer. A little like snake. Grab hold, Tilda, I need some help.”

It felt like a winch was raising my jaw. My eyes rolled, I almost blacked out before my head snapped back. Clink.

“I think we’re done. Open up once more and let me check. Yes. Yes. Clean. Done. And the blood is flowing nicely. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?”

I was about to answer with a spicy bit of invective when Dr. Bob said, “Spit.”

I spat.

“This is why I became a dentist. To be able to aid patients in need, to stop their suffering, to make their lives just a little bit better. I want you to know this, Victor, I need you to know this. All I ask for in the world is a chance to help. You’ll have to come back in a week.”

I tried to say something, but it came out like mush, and after a while I just stopped.

“Absolutely,” said Dr. Bob, as if he had understood every word. “Now, Victor, I need to warn you. The blood will clot over the hole. That is good. It protects the wound, it aids in the healing. Do nothing to disturb the clot, or the consequences can be dire. Do not prod it with a toothpick, do not worry it with your tongue. Cigarettes, alcohol, carbonated beverages like pop can all disturb the clot. Do you understand?”

I nodded, felt for the wound with my tongue.

“Good,” he said. “Tilda will finish up. See you in a week.”

He ripped off his bloodstained gloves, tossed them gallantly into the biohazard bin on his way out of the office.

Tilda, whose broad back was to me as she worked over a counter, spun around. In each hand, wielded like weapons, were little boxes covered in cellophane.

“Stop your whimpering and make a decision,
ja
,” she said. “Which color for your toothbrush, green or blue?”

I was still licking my wound, literally, when the social worker assigned to my pro bono case, Isabel Chandler, pulled up in front of my office building in her jaunty yellow Volkswagen. She smiled brightly at me and said those sweet words all men are longing to hear.

“What happened to your face?”

“Let’s just go,” I said.

We were off to visit my four-year-old client, Daniel Rose, and his mother, Julia, to check out their living conditions, to ensure that Julia was taking proper care of her son, and to impress upon her the need to show up in court at the assigned times and to follow all recommendations of Children’s Services.

“She should be home this time,” said Isabel. “I called just before I left to make sure she remembered. She said she’s waiting for us.”

“Which means she won’t be there,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“She won’t be there,” I said slowly.

“What’s with your mouth?”

“I lost a tooth.”

“You ought to find it, before the rest of your mouth collapses.”

“Thank you for that.”

“Julia better be there,” said Isabel. “The judge is losing patience.”

“I’d say the judge’s patience with Julia is already lost.”

“I meant with you,” said Isabel.

“Hey, I’m here, aren’t I?”

“The judge wants more from you in this case than just showing up. She wants you to give her a solid recommendation about what’s best for your client.”

“I’m having a hard enough time keeping my own life straight. How would I know what’s best for a four-year-old?”

“That’s the trick, isn’t it?”

“I’ll just do whatever you tell me to do.”

“No, see, Victor, that’s not good enough. I have to consider the best interests of everyone involved, including Julia and the state. You, on the other hand, have only Daniel’s interests to consider. And you have enough time to learn what you need to learn, that is if you’re willing to put in the effort. Are you, Victor?”

“He’s my client,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“Pretty much everything,” I said.

“Okay, then. So this tooth thing, did it hurt much?”

“Like two squirrels fighting in my mouth.”

“Yikes.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We weren’t headed too far away, just over the Schuylkill River, past the University of Pennsylvania, into the heart of West Philly.

Isabel parked on the street, near a small bodega and a Chinese take-out place, its counter swathed in Plexiglas. It was a crowded, jaunty West Philly neighborhood, some of the row houses cracked and run-down, some brightly painted, with AstroTurf on their porches. Kids played, old ladies sat on folding chairs and surveyed their domain, a dragon on the sign of a tattoo parlor sneered at passersby.

Down the street we walked together, in our suits, with our briefcases. We would have looked less out of place in hula skirts.

“Here,” she said when we reached a corner bar called Tommy’s High Ball.

“What, are we going for a drink first?”

“That might not be a bad idea, but no.” She motioned to a door next to the tavern entrance. “Julia lives with her boyfriend and Daniel in a single room above the bar.”

“Nice wholesome environment.”

“It’s a home,” she said as she rang a buzzer beside the door.

While Isabel waited for an answer, I opened the door to Tommy’s High Ball and glanced inside. Not too crowded, not too smoky, not too dark. It wasn’t quite a clean, well-lighted place, but it seemed friendly enough. A few men sat at the bar, a group of men played cards in a booth in the rear. And just to the left of the door, beneath the neon signs in the window, two men hunched over a chessboard while a third man stood and watched. One of the players pushed a piece forward before turning his head and looking at me.

Cragged face, red bow tie, black porkpie hat. Horace T. Grant. Of course it was.

I was about to raise my hand and shout out, “Hey, Pork Chop,” when Horace T. Grant did something strange. He looked at me, raised one eyebrow just enough to let me know he recognized my face, and then turned back to the board without a word.

Well now, I know how to take a hint, and I remembered what Horace had told me about anonymity as he devoured his chickenpox muffin, so I didn’t yell out or wave or even wait there for him to look again my way. I turned back to the bar, nodded at the too-tall bartender with the shocking white hair who was giving me the eye, and slipped back outside, where Isabel still waited at the door.

“She’s not answering,” said Isabel.

“She’s not there,” I said.

“Maybe the buzzer’s broken.”

“It’s not broken. Did you try the door?”

She looked at me, looked at the door, pressed it open.

We climbed the stairs, dark and damp, the smell of stale beer and cigarettes leaking in from the bar, and reached a painted wooden door on the second level.

Isabel rapped the door lightly with her knuckles. Rapped it again.

Nothing.

I knocked less lightly, pounding at the wood with the bottom of my fist. “Ms. Rose,” I yelled. “I am Daniel’s court-appointed lawyer. We have come for a court-ordered visit. Ms. Rose, you need to open up.”

Nothing.

“She’s not here,” I said.

“But she promised. She said she was waiting for us.”

“She doesn’t want us in her life. Or maybe, more interestingly, somebody else doesn’t want us in her life.”

“Too bad,” said Isabel, taking out a phone.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m calling the judge. She’ll issue a bench warrant.”

“And then what? How soon do you think the police will get around to looking for her? And when they do start looking, and if she does get picked up, then what? What happens to Daniel?”

“What would you have me do?”

“Follow me,” I said.

“Where to?”

“Just follow.”

I climbed down the steps, pushed through the front door. Isabel hesitated a moment before following.

At the corner Horace was leaning against the brick wall of the bar, a chessboard and box in his hand. I walked by him without so much as a nod. I knew where I was going, I had already traced the route on a map in my office. I turned right, turned left at the next intersection.

These were all row houses now, more in disrepair than those on the commercial street, cracked porches, peeling paint, trees shriveling in the little plots of land between the cement of the sidewalk and the asphalt of the street.

And there it was, a quiet house on a quiet block, shades drawn, lights out, nothing.

“Go on up and knock,” I said to Isabel.

“Who’s in there?”

“Go on up and see.”

She gave me a look, as if I had grown antennae, as if I had transformed before her very eyes into a different species, and then headed up the stoop. This time I followed her. From inside we could hear a television going.

Isabel rang the buzzer, waited a bit, then rapped her knuckles gently on the door. She looked at me, I showed her a fist, she gave the door a bang.

A woman answered, T-shirt and jeans, short dark hair, dark eyes, a crying baby on her hip. With the door opened, she shouted into the house, “Turn down the damn TV,” before turning her attention to us. “What you want?” she said angrily, and then grew quiet when she took in exactly who was there before her, Isabel with her suit and briefcase and me standing beside her.

“Hello, Julia,” said Isabel.

“Crap,” said Julia Rose.