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Kaddish’s rules: a verbal agreement, deals closed with handshakes, should always be made over figures written down. Dr. Mazursky circled to the other side, planted his hands against the paper, and, leaning in, read the number upside down and raised his head, eyes wide.
    The doctor had a wronged look about him. Kaddish couldn’t tell if he’d gone too far, so he halved the number, crossing it out and writing down the new figure. “Half off today,” Kaddish said, backing up to his initial price.
    “So much?” the doctor said.
    “So much is much less than the first figure.” And then he used the name he was being hired to save. “You’ll agree, Dr. Mazursky?”
    “It is hardly a few minutes’ work.”
    “What you are paying for is the discretion that you so prize. I provide respect for the dead and confidentiality for the living.” With some flamboyance, Kaddish tried out, “Dr. Mazursky, what I offer is a face-lift for the family name.”
    The doctor seemed to be considering. It was a considerable sum.
    “With inflation,” Kaddish said, “by the time I get downstairs, I’m already losing money.”
    The doctor stepped over to the counter. He lifted the top off a jar and fished out a cotton ball. “All right,” he said, pressing the cotton to the mouth of a bottle of iodine. “Hold still,” he said. Mazursky swabbed the iodine across the base of Kaddish’s neck, carefully painting a cut that was not there. The doctor blew lightly on the tincture. He put a plaster over the spot, the red of the iodine reaching out from underneath on all sides, and called for the nurse.
    “One more thing,” the doctor said, taking a finger and smoothing the edge of the bandage down.
    “Yes.”
    “About Toothless Mazursky. About that name in particular. My father, until the day he died, had, but for a single gold crown, a full set of teeth.”
    “I wouldn’t doubt it.”
    “I am a cosmetic surgeon.”
    “A national service in Argentina.”
    “A ruckled mouth, my father would never have.”
    “A nickname is all,” Kaddish said. “It’s only a nickname.”
    “Quite,” said the doctor.
    Pulling on his undershirt, Kaddish poked his head through with a ready idea. “They were a tough bunch, the Society members. Maybe he left the other guys toothless, is what it was.” Kaddish threw an uppercut and checked it mid-swing.
    “Maybe so,” the doctor said. He was not amused.
    The nurse returned, this time without knocking. Kaddish started on the buttons of his shirt and the nurse headed straight for the table. In a practiced motion she pulled a length of paper as long as a man. The roll whistled as it unfurled, and then she zipped the paper across the metal teeth. Already in a ball—no joy on her face—she stuffed it into a garbage built into the counter. Kaddish watched his numbers disappear.
    The nurse replaced the lid on the jar. There was a chart next to the jar that didn’t have Kaddish’s real name.
    “Charge him for a biopsy and an office visit,” the doctor said. Kaddish raised an eyebrow. He pressed at the bandage on his neck and then at Lillian’s checkbook in his pocket. He didn’t currently have his own.
    The nurse looked from the counter to the examination table and back to the counter.
    “The specimen, Doctor?”
    “I’ll label it myself.”
    The streetlights were on before dark, and Kaddish wondered if they came on earlier over here. He walked along the doctor’s tree-lined street, on the fancy side of town, far from Once and his apartment and the rest of the Jews—Jews that came here to visit Dr. Mazursky because they heard the Gentiles visited him, and the Gentiles visited because they like a Jewish doctor on a high floor. A beggar sat in a doorway. In this neighborhood he looked twice as poor. Kaddish fished for change but had passed before he came up with something small. He walked on andspent the money on a
Clarín
, scanning the front page and shaking his head. Everything is coming