Human Solutions

by Avi Silberstein

  “The food does help,” I admitted, gnawing on a drumstick.

  “The food,” she said, “is just the beginning. I took a course in happiness as part of my psychology degree. We took a group of people and measured physiological responses to different situations—we wanted to see what it was that actually made people happy. Eating food was one of the top ones. I’m going to show you another of the ones that had a high response.”

  “What was number one?” I said.

  Elena started the engine. “Music was one of them,” she said. “Not number one, but number four or five.” She put a cassette into the deck and turned up the volume. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but the music was cheerful.

  “This is in English,” I said, accusingly.

  Elena shrugged. “You don’t have to know what everyone’s singing about all the time.”

  It turned out we were going to the airport. Elena led me to arrivals, where glass doors automatically swept aside and weary travelers were greeted by their loved ones. She left me there without any further explanation. I had resigned myself to giving up control, and did not even ask. I watched couples reuniting, families reconstituting themselves, and friends laughing. Elena returned with a large piece of cardboard. She produced a tube of lipstick from her purse and used it to write her name in block letters on one side of the cardboard. She wrote my name on the other side.

  “Here,” she said, handing to me. “I’ll go first.”

  And then off she was again. I watched her wind her way through the security line-up, through the metal detector, and then disappear from sight. There was a flight arriving from Buenos Aires, and a trickle of people began emerging from the sliding doors. First the hurried businessmen, not a hair out of place, then the wealthy women, gone to Argentina for a shopping excursion, and then a larger mass of people. I held up my sign expectantly, peering at the doors, and there she was. It was like I was seeing her for the very first time. She swept her gaze from side to side, finally letting her eyes land on me. Her eyes opened wide, and she took in a large breath.

  “Elena!” I called out, waving the sign in the air.

  “Javier!” she said, stumbling towards me on her high-heeled shoes.

  We met in a tremendous embrace, annoyed travelers streaming around us like a river rock—solid and permanent.

  “You’re here,” she said, softly. Here was a woman who had run a Manipulation to cheer me up, and there was not much more I could ask for from someone.

  It was my turn next. I was an actor first and foremost, and more at home pretending to meet someone at the airport than actually meeting them there. I went through security and waited for the next flight to arrive. It was the Miami flight, full of bronzed faces and unseasonal clothing. I watched as they did customs and then joined their ranks as they trudged towards arrivals. And there she was again, this time pulling her high-heels off to more easily run towards me, this time letting herself be picked up and swung around. This time I could hardly bring myself to let go—I had released my hold on the side of the swimming pool and grabbed on to her instead.

  TWELVE

  The next night, I was taking Elena out to dinner. I drove over to her apartment building and walked into the lobby.

  “And who might you be calling on?” said the same doorman as before, with an irritating smile.

  “I’m here to see Elena.”

  “Which of the—”

  I interrupted him by holding up a warning finger. “Don’t,” I said. “Just call her room, and tell her I’m here.”

  The doorman wheeled around and picked up the phone. He turned his back to me and spoke into it. Then he turned back to face me.

  “I’m sorry,” said the doorman with a sneer, “but Elena is not able to leave her room right now.”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  The doorman picked up the receiver and had a brief conversation with Elena. “If you must,” he said, handing me the phone.

  “Elena,” I said, “I hear you’re not well.”

  “I’ve received some terrible news.” She sounded like she had been crying.

  “Let me come up—sometimes it helps to talk about these things.”

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “I’ve been crying, and I’m a mess.”

  “But Elena …”

  It continued like this for a few minutes. Eventually, she agreed to let me come up when I offered to get some take-out.

  “Tell me about this news,” I said, once I had returned with the food.

  “I need to eat first,” Elena said, her face pale. “I haven’t eaten in hours. I feel like I may faint.”

  I rummaged around her kitchen until I found some plates and cutlery. I filled two glasses with water, arranged the sandwiches on a tray, and brought it out into the small dining area.

  Elena ate with a fierce determination, and I chewed slowly, as if hoping to balance things out. We went to the living room and sat down.

  “It’s about my son,” Elena said.

  “Claudio,” I said.

  Elena smiled for the first time since I had arrived.

  “Claudio,” she repeated. She started to cry.

  “I told you Claudio was off at boarding school, right? Well, the program is actually called the ‘Intensive Boarding School.’ Students are sent off to live in a place called Colonia Alemana. The highest-quality education in the country, it said on the brochure—and it had an endorsement on it from the Minister of Education.”

  The name sounded familiar. Elena explained that Colonia Alemana was a utopian village in Chile’s central valley. It was not far from Santiago—four hours or so by car. It was run by a German, Peter Wenzel.

  “A friend of mine whose daughter is part of the program called me this afternoon.” Elena said. “Her daughter told her that this Peter takes the boys into his room at night and … touches them—does things to them.”

  She hiccupped and then started crying again. I went to the washroom and brought back some tissue.

  “Let’s get in my car and drive over to there right now,” I said.

  Elena shook her head. “They made me sign something when I registered Claudio. Some paper that said that, in order to accelerate his learning, his boarding there would need to be in complete immersion. That is, no visits or contact allowed for the four months of the program. Just letters that they mail us once a week, and that we can reply to. That friend of mine—she drove there a few weeks ago just to visit her daughter, and she was turned down at the gate. She said there were guards with guns.”

  I tried to remain calm. I thought about Claudio, but only for a second—then I began running through potential Manipulations. There’s a hole in every fence, a weak link in every chain. There’s always a crack to slip through.

  “Can I use your telephone?” I asked.

  She showed me to the phone and then left me there. I called Julio and Rodolfo and asked them to come to an emergency meeting tomorrow at noon. I gave Julio the basic facts so that he could do some research.

  I went back to the living room, where I found Elena picking at the leftovers.

  “Let’s play a game,” I said.

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s called ‘There’s something you should know about me.’ ”

  Elena looked at me with her eyebrows drawn together. “You start,” she said.

  “I do have an acting studio,” I said. “But I also run an organization called Human Solutions.”

  Elena raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s unlisted, unincorporated, and unlicensed. Just a small group of us who work together to make things happen for our clients.”

  “Things?” Elena said warily.

  “Say someone wants a newscaster to fall in love with them,” I said, “or their boss to start showing them some respect.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You didn’t tell me this until now?”
r />   “I’ll meet with the rest of the team tomorrow first thing and then call you.”

  Elena shut her eyes tightly.

  “Have you called the police?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “Good—just wait till I call you in the morning,” I said. Her eyes didn’t seem focused properly. “Are you going to be okay?”

  Elena looked at me sadly. There was no way she could answer that just yet.

  THIRTEEN

  When Julio and Rodolfo arrived at my office the next day, I was already on my third cup of coffee. “Tell us what you found out,” I said to Julio. I tried to sit down but found it impossible to be still.

  “I spent all morning at the library,” Julio said as he flipped through his notes. “Going through microfilm from as far back as the 1960s, and then some recent newspaper and magazine articles. And then the gold mine—a particularly well-researched exposé in El Mercurio that got right into the meat of it.”

  “And?” Rodolfo said.

  “Colonia Alemana is a cult,” Julio said. I walked over to the window and leaned my head against it.

  It was created in 1961 by an ex-Nazi named Peter Wenzel. Uncle Peter, as he asked all the colonists to call him, was an Evangelical preacher who had been kicked out of Germany for founding an orphanage and subsequently molesting the children there. He moved to Chile and bought up an abandoned 4,400-acre property. He brought 10 Germans with him—the original settlers—and, within a couple of years, another 230 Germans, most of Wenzel’s original congregation, had flocked to the Colony. These days, there were more than a thousand residents.

  The Colony grew exponentially, and it currently housed several apartment complexes, a school, a church, a bakery, and a hydroelectric power station.

  “Here’s the thing,” Julio said, leaning forward. “Has Elena called the police?”

  “I told her to wait until she heard from me,” I said.

  Julio sank back into his chair. “Good,” he said. “Because it turns out that our fine dictator, General Pinochet, is pals with Uncle Peter. They’ve got some sort of cozy relationship—I couldn’t find out exactly what’s going on, but the exposé suspected something big.”

  “This one’s not for us,” Rodolfo said, shaking his head. “This is not some guy who wants his boss to stop harassing him or some woman who wants the weatherman to fall in love with her. This is serious—life or death.”

  Julio lifted his stack of papers and shook it. “I have to agree with Rodolfo,” he said. “I don’t care how much this woman is paying us.”

  “Elena is not just any woman,” I said.

  They stopped what they were doing and looked at me.

  “I like her,” I said.

  Julio gestured with his hand for me to continue.

  “We’ve been going on dates,” I said.

  Rodolfo leaned forward. “Have you—”

  “Please,” I said.

  “You’re in love with her,” Julio said.

  I glared at him. “I’ll do this one on my own if I have to.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Julio said.

  “We won’t decide right now,” I said. “Why don’t we just investigate some more for now?”

  Rodolfo shrugged and looked at Julio.

  “Call Elena,” Julio said finally. “Explain why she shouldn’t call the police. I’ll see what else I can dig up.”

  Rodolfo said he would drive out to the village outside the Colony and pose as a reporter. He would ask the villagers about the Colony and explore the surrounding area.

  “Do you remember Tibor?” I said.

  They nodded.

  “I’m going to go have a talk with him.”

  FOURTEEN

  A few years ago, a man walked into my office. “I want to kill a man,” he said.

  I held up a hand. “Out.”

  “Please,” he said. “I beg you—let me explain.”

  I gave him five minutes, and he thanked me profusely. He sat down and crossed his legs at the ankles. Then he began telling me his story.

  Tibor was born in 1930 in the Romanian hamlet of Nusfalau. His parents ran the general store. Barrels of beans and flour and potatoes were crammed into every corner. The villagers brought in their empty bottles of vodka, and Tibor’s mother refilled them. Tibor’s father spent all day in the fields. Evenings, he would pore over the ledger books, calculating profit margins and payments.

  “We had goats,” Tibor said. “I was nine years old only when I started taking them out to the mountains—first thing in the morning, always with a sandwich in my pocket for lunch. When I was fourteen, I had to start wearing a yellow star on my coat. We all did. It was the most shameful thing that could ever be done to them, my parents said. To me, it was just a star. Then we took a long train ride—my family and all the other people in town who wore stars. We arrived in Mauthausen, and lined up at the gates to a concentration camp in front of a tall man.

  “He was like an orchestra conductor, waving his arms this way and that,” Tibor said, demonstrating. “When he gestured to his left, the person went to be burned alive. When he gestured to his right, they went to dig holes to bury those people. When it was finally my turn, the tall man hesitated with his hand up. My life was a coda. Then his hand turned to the right. I would be a digger.”

  Barely surviving on a morsel of bread and a cup of watery soup, Tibor quickly fell ill. One day, while digging, his coughs spattered the white bodies with blood. A guard grabbed him roughly by the collar and took him to see Dr. Koehler.

  Tibor was taken into a room that was stark and white. Surgical implements cluttered every surface. The walls were decorated with body parts. A shrunken ear here, a shriveled penis there.

  “Dr. Koehler performed operations and amputations without anesthetic on those of us in the concentration camp,” Tibor said. “He wanted to see how much pain a person could endure.”

  I grimaced and shook my head.

  “His favorite thing? Injecting victims straight into the heart. With gasoline.”

  But Tibor knew none of that then. He was fourteen. He was lying on a hard cot. Dr. Koehler put his slight hands on Tibor’s head and tied his hands and arms down. Then his feet and legs.

  Tibor turned his head. He saw a glass jar full of liquid. The air above the jar was wavy, and he knew what that meant. Dr. Koehler plunged a syringe into the jar and slowly pulled back on the stopper.

  Dr. Koehler approached the boy. He raised Tibor’s shirt. With his cold fingers, he probed Tibor’s chest.

  “Did you know that I did this to your father?” he said.

  He found the spot he wanted. Between the ribs. Poised the needle above the now-heaving chest.

  “And your mother,” Dr. Koehler said.

  Tibor shut his eyes tight. He tried to think about Nusfalau, before yellow stars and the trains, when it was just soccer and hard candies.

  “Then an alarm sounded,” Tibor said, “and men rushed into the room.”

  “The camp was liberated,” I said.

  “No, no,” Tibor said. “It was just an air-raid alarm. But I was untied by a guard, and I ran back to the barracks. The next day, we were liberated.”

  Tibor was taken to a displaced persons camp. He convinced an official there to issue him a passport and took the next ship out of Europe. The ship steamed across the Atlantic and down the coast of Argentina. It traversed the Strait of Magellan and docked at the Chilean port of Valparaíso.

  “I’ve been living here in Chile for almost forty years,” Tibor said. “I own a small corner store a few blocks from here, and I’m a happy man. But, a week ago, I went to the hospital to visit a sick friend of mine, and there was a patient in the bed next to him who looked very familiar. It was him. Dr. Koehler. He didn’t even change his name—I had a look at his chart when he was asleep.”

  He had raged about this to everyone he knew, and someone had told him about Human Solutions. After hearing about his encounter with Dr.
Koehler at the concentration camp, I agreed to run a Manipulation for him. It was not an easy decision—but Tibor told me he had changed his mind—he only wanted to talk to him. I understood that he was saying this to protect me. The Manipulation was fairly simple. Rodolfo found out who Dr. Koehler’s early-morning nurse was, and he mapped out her schedule. Then we got one of my students to spill a vial of blood in the hallway and lie on the ground. When the nurse came by, the student pretended he was a visitor who had slipped on a pool of blood. He held his head and moaned a bit, and the nurse gave him a hasty examination. Then she sent him down to the ER and mopped up the mess.

  With those fifteen minutes of added time, Tibor approached Dr. Koehler’s bed. He stuffed a sock in the old man’s mouth and put tape over it. Dr. Koehler awoke with a start. His eyes opened wide. Tibor tied the man’s arms down, and then he sat down on the bed next to Dr. Koehler.

  “Remember me?” he said.

  Dr. Koehler shook his head.

  “How about now?” Tibor said. He opened his bag and pulled out a syringe. He removed it from its plastic casing and then produced a small canister.

  “How about now?”

  Dr. Koehler shook his head again. Slower this time.

  Tibor opened the canister and waved it under the old man’s nose. He lowered the tip of the syringe into it and drew back on the plunger. The syringe filled with the liquid. His hands were shaking. Dr. Koehler shut his eyes tightly.

  “How about now?”

  FIFTEEN

  I went to see Tibor. He still owned and ran the store a few blocks away from my office. The young woman working at the till picked up the phone to tell Tibor I was here to see him. When he came down, he looked worried.

  “There’s a problem?”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” I said.

  We walked out of the store and into a throng of tourists. “There’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “I just came because I need some help. I’m working on a Manipulation.”

  “Of course,” he said. “For you, I would do anything.”