The Organ Broker Read online

  “She did?”

  “Yeah. They’re in Boston. Phil’s gained weight and started having difficulty breathing, and he finally went to the doctor and then to a specialist and he didn’t even tell me for a day and a half.”

  “Mark,” I said, “it’s okay that you called me. It’s good.” It was well past eleven and it seemed like every apartment in the building across the street was lit up. I have no idea what any of them are doing in their apartments, I remember thinking.

  “He has cardiomyopathy.

  “Hmmm,” I said, feeling myself grimacing against the news. It felt like burning my hand on a stove.

  “You know? You know what that is, Jack?”

  “It’s an enlarged heart.”

  “Yes,” he said, crying more audibly then. “It’s an enlarged heart. It started last year. From a viral infection. And the HIV cocktail, the medicines had an interaction. Phil always takes his pills, every single morning, every night. People live that way a long time now. And it happened anyway and now he’s collecting fluid and they say because of the cardiomyopathy it’s very hard to treat. Congestive heart failure.”

  “What stage is it?”

  “Stage?” Mark repeated. “I think four. I think that’s the last one.” He was more subdued then, and seemed to have stopped crying.

  “It is.”

  “It is, right? How do you know?” Mark asked.

  “They won’t offer him a transplant because he has AIDS,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  I was silent again. I saw a light in an apartment across the way go dark. Oh God. Wallace’s heart must surely be for Philip. If Harold Lauer went searching for a heart for his sick son he would spread around some cash for information, and there are only a handful of people a search like that would lead to. One of them uses Florida cell numbers and gets most of his parts from me.

  “It’s so ironic,” Mark said. “He’s dying because he has a heart that’s too big.”

  “There’s nothing poetic about cardiomyopathy,” I responded softly.

  “Ironic, I said.”

  “Yes. I see.”

  “Jack … could you help him?”

  “Me?” The yellow alert went off in my head. “How could I help him?”

  I was sweating a little and could feel it beading up on the sides of my forehead.

  “My mom thinks that maybe you can help,” he said more soberly. It was then that I became instantly aware that Mark knew more about his “biological” than he had previously let on.

  “How, Mark? Why would Carrie think that?”

  “Because my mom says you did something once for a man named Billy Kimball.”

  I resisted reacting and went into damage-control mode, wanting to get a handle on what Carrie and Mark did or did not know about good old Jack.

  “I see,” I replied evenly. “So you haven’t been honest with me I guess.”

  “Not completely. I’m sorry,” Mark said in a voice that no longer sounded drunk at all.

  “What did Carrie say about it?”

  “She said that you both knew a guy in college named Billy Kimball, and after law school you somehow got him a donor for a kidney transplant and it saved his life but that you charged him a lot of money for it. There was a rumor that maybe you were some kind of kidney broker or something, but she wasn’t sure. She isn’t sure now either.” Hearing him voice that made me feel tired, like another round of changing phones, another flight to Johannesburg.

  “Well, she’s right.” I would not have said that to anyone else. “I got Billy Kimball a kidney back in the early nineties.”

  “You did? Can you help Philip?” he asked, choking up again.

  “Is that why you came to see me, Mark? After all these years, is that why?”

  “I wanted to meet you, Jack. I wanted to know you anyway.”

  “But was that why? Was that the reason?”

  He paused, and then quietly said, “That’s the reason for the timing, yes. Why I wanted to meet you now, but I swear it’s not the only reason I wanted to meet you. And I’m glad.”

  “Okay,” I said. At that moment I wasn’t sure if I would ever talk to him again. That’s another dirty truth. It wasn’t out of anger or a sense of betrayal—the kid just knew too much about me. That’s just the way I’ve become accustomed to doing things.

  “You’ll help us?”

  “I doubt I can do anything, but I’ll help you if I can. But you can’t discuss this with anyone.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “I just want to help Philip.” There was some silence again, and then he added, “You know, Jack, in the eighties, Reagan and them, they did nothing about AIDS at first. It was on purpose. They were glad it would kill off the gays.”

  “That’s not exactly true, Mark,” I said. I should go, I thought. I need a heart for a recipient with AIDS. What are the odds? … Royston. Mel Wolff and Kleinhans, I thought.

  Any indecisiveness I had felt about helping them was already waning. He is my son. Philip is his love, the way Carrie had once been mine.

  “Mark,” I finally said, “what are you going to do now?”

  “Do? Marry him. Before he dies.”

  “No, I meant what will you do now? Tonight. To be okay?”

  “There’s nothing to do,” he said. He sounded exhausted too.

  ◆

  I didn’t sleep well after that. First I sat down on my balcony and drank more Scotch. For eighteen years I had stolen from the poor and given to the rich. I was the Anti-Robin Hood. Eighteen years—enough time to age the best scotch whiskeys … with Wallace, with this proposition about procuring a heart for a dying rich kid with AIDS—it was about the money, but maybe it could be about a dying young man with AIDS and maybe that gave me the opportunity to finally do something right.

  I had been alone for so long until Mark found me and I again felt like a part of things. I loved him, I supposed. I still barely knew him but I loved him anyway. I couldn’t bear the thought of Mark having to lose him, to feel that pain, when I knew that I happened to be about the only person on earth who could actually prevent it from happening. They were probably using me—Mark and Carrie—but I didn’t blame them for it. It made sense. And it evoked a great sense of outrage from me to think that perhaps I could not prevent it—that I was required to live in such an unfair world. I could get Philip a heart, I thought, and I could save him. I could get the money and the absolution. I know that is convoluted logic and in a way just a rationalization so I could get my fee, but that’s what I thought. Mark being alive in the world, and beautiful and kind and having actually come from the one love I had ever been a part of, that made me determined to save Philip for him. I lay in bed that night for hours, unable to sleep, feeling like a timer had been started.

  ◆

  It was the fifteenth of July when I went with Mark to Cornell Presbyterian Hospital to visit Philip. Mark and I met at a coffee shop at 68th Street and Second Ave. and walked over together. The walk was mostly silent but for the sounds of traffic and the city. The sky was clear and the air was warm and sticky. When we entered the building, security asked us for identification and we both showed the guard NY State driver’s licenses, mine bearing the name Jack Campbell. They didn’t record anything or make us sign in. For some reason they just wanted to make sure we could drive. I guess no one intending to blow up the hospital is a licensed driver.

  The Lauers lived in the East Seventies, and I suppose that’s why they brought Philip to Cornell. Cornell is part of NY Presbyterian and has a good cardiac unit, but they don’t do heart transplants. Those procedures are done at Cornell’s sister hospital, Columbia, on the Upper West Side. The doctors and administrators had already decided that this one doesn’t make the list so it didn’t matter.

  We found him in an ICU, which was not a good sign. Philip was in a bed in a small section of the cardiac wing. He was in a private room but the walls were all glass. It made it feel as if all the patients were sh
aring one big suite, like in a college dorm. The rooms were very small and the bed, patient, and connected tubes and IVs and catheters and measuring devices took up most of the space in each, making the patient look sort of like a fly, stuck in the middle of a small and mostly white spider web. When we entered Philip’s room he shifted his gaze to us and no one spoke at first. Mark leaned in and kissed his cheek and sat in the chair beside him and took his hand and held it. I remained standing by the doorway. Philip’s eyes were alert and bright, but his coloring was bad. He looked slightly gray and ashen, somewhat yellowish, and it made him appear older. He was bloated and puffy and didn’t look all that different from some of the patients I’ve seen in late stage renal failure.

  “Who are we suing?” I asked.

  “I’m starting with God,” Philip said in the rumbling baritone voice of someone who had just awoken.

  “Good luck serving him,” I added.

  “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  “My mom is coming to New York, Jack,” Mark said. “She’s coming down to see you,” he said to Philip.

  “Is she?” I said casually, and nodded my head. Carrie. She’d be a good advocate for him, actually. She might even get him on the list, not that it would matter. He’d just languish there for months and no committee would ever decide to give him a healthy heart, no matter who his father was. From what Philip and Mark related from the doctors it sounded like they could probably extend his life several more months by installing an L-VAD but it’s a temporary fix. No one lives on an L-VAD for more than a year, usually less.

  ◆

  If it was only a few years earlier I could have gotten him on a plane to China. We could have gone there with a suitcase of American currency and paid off every fuck with his hand out without somehow attracting enough attention to be thrown in prison. We could have saved this kid, this sharp and cool kid who did nothing wrong other than get sick. They wouldn’t put him on the list in New York because he has AIDS despite the fact that every single one of those doctors knew that with a healthy heart he could live for ten or twenty years.

  Carrie.

  Could she possibly still exist somewhere? Do people still exist when they leave your life and you don’t see them or speak to them or touch them and twenty years go by? Is she brilliant and funny and beautiful only now with softer edges and some wrinkles in the corners of her eyes? Does it still say “justice” on her lower back, in Chinese? Did she have an entire life, all completely outside of those two years we spent together in New York so long ago? The thought of it was overwhelming. I excused myself to go and make a call. I didn’t want to have that particular conversation while wandering through public hallways, so I left the building. I made my way down Sixty-eighth, and turned right and then north onto York Avenue. He picked up on the first ring.

  ◆

  “Wallace, it’s Jack.”

  “Been waiting to hear from you. Are we going to do this?”

  “The guy who needs that part, the big replacement part, he’s from New York?” I had to be certain.

  “How do you know that?” he asked, casually.

  “You said early thirties, rich family …”

  “That’s right, Jack,” he said, quietly and suspiciously.

  “What’s the guy do for a living?”

  “Jack—”

  “Just tell me what he does.”

  “You’re starting to make me uncomfortable again, Jack. Why are you asking me questions like that?”

  “Wallace, for ten years we’ve done very well together. I’ve never even asked you to have a social drink. I’m not asking for a meeting or your fucking home address, so don’t get jumpy. Just tell me because I am asking, because I’m Jack and you know me and I need you to tell me this. What does this guy do for a living?”

  “He’s a lawyer.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE:

  MICHELLE

  July twenty-third was my second visit with Mark to go see Philip at the hospital. We wound our way through the hallways and into the cardiac unit and found a beautiful, thin woman with long, dark hair trailing behind her bent over Philip’s bed. It only took a fraction of a second before something in my brain rushed a signal down to my heart saying, “Keep the pace! Don’t send in the adrenaline.” I knew it before she turned around. She wore a smart, white, button-down blouse and I knew that somewhere beneath it the Chinese symbol for Justice was emblazoned across her lower back. I stood still in the doorway, with Mark a half a step in front of me.

  She hugged Mark and looked over his shoulder at me. “Jack,” Carrie said softly and crossed the small room and took my face in her hands and kissed me on the cheekbone and then embraced me. A mantra kicked in somewhere in my mind saying, “Stay calm” over and over and over and I couldn’t really hear what Mark or she might have been saying. My eyes were closed too. It went on for what felt like a long time. Then she stepped back, creating a small space between us that allowed us to face each other and she whispered, “I’m glad you know him,” and no one else could hear her but me. No one else in the world.

  ◆

  “He’s a really good kid, Jack,” Carrie said to me, still speaking very quietly so Mark and Philip couldn’t hear us.

  “I know.”

  “Philip too. He doesn’t deserve this,” she said, and it sounded just a little bit as if Carrie understood what I did for a living and was asking me to take a job.

  I nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “I’m in town for another day or two but I’m going back to Boston for a while after that. Do you want to get together for dinner? Maybe we could talk?”

  My gaze was locked on her eyes and in them I was peering into a different time. Does she have any idea? Could she even imagine the degree to which I was still safe in her apartment near NYU with her, some time twenty years ago? I didn’t respond at first. Mark knew about Billy Kimball. She knows me. Carrie knows everything, perhaps. Her question hurt me. Of course I want to have dinner with you, Carrie Franco, but what could I do about it?

  “Jack?” she asked again gently.

  “All right,” I said. I wanted to decline, but it was ridiculous to pretend that I might.

  ◆

  When I left the hospital, it was looking like it might rain. The clouds were blending, throwing what looked like a dull gray dust-blanket over New York, and I just started walking down York Avenue. I didn’t really have a particular destination other than downtown, simply because that’s where one goes. I walked down Second, with the flow of traffic, past the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. The only way to save Philip was to have Mel Wolff do it at Royston. Wallace would make three million dollars. I would earn two million. Somewhere in a shanty-town near Jozi a family would learn that their brother or their son had died on the operating table while selling a kidney. It was his own fault anyway. Pierre would laugh about it over drinks at the Michelangelo. Wolff would sleep fine. In the forties I turned south on Third Avenue. Could I do this? I want to help him but I can’t do this. I can’t. I needed Scotch to think more clearly.

  The news was flooded with nonsense about the debt-ceiling crisis. The US Congress couldn’t agree on a plan to raise the amount of borrowing our government is allowed. The US was about to default on its debts for the first time. Our triple-A credit rating was in jeopardy and we all knew that the reign of this empire, at least to some degree, was beginning to come to a close. Maybe it didn’t matter at all anyway—that priest in California had miscalculated the End of Days. On May twenty-second, with the sun still shining and the birds still chirping, he must have taken out his abacus and a few lizard toes and figured out that he’d done the math wrong. The world was going to end on October twenty-first, not May twenty-first. It would have made things much simpler if he had just been right the first time.

  I passed construction site scaffoldings and waded across crowded avenues, sidestepping double-length buses. I kept heading south, occasionally turning west and inward toward the middle of Manhattan
, and then south again … and I eventually got to 38th and Lexington when I finally decided to stop walking and get a drink.

  ◆

  It was late afternoon but the bar was almost empty. There was no music on when I first arrived and only a handful of people were scattered at a few tables and at the bar. I got a bar stool and ordered a Macallan’s neat with an ice-water back. Eighteen years, I thought. After two or three scotches I asked the bartender for a piece of paper and a pen. It was my intention to begin making notes about my plan, start outlining some of the details. The paper remained unmarked. By the time it passed six o’clock and the bar started to fill up with some local happy-hour patrons I had a good five or six drinks in me. I’d killed off what was left of one bottle of Macallan’s and the bartender had to retrieve another from the basement.

  I got up to go to the bathroom and took the Scotch with me. I placed it on the glass shelf underneath the mirror in the bathroom while I peed. I swigged from it before I placed it down again to wash my hands. I leaned on the sink and stared into my own eyes in the mirror—the eyes that are so much like Mark’s—and I knew then that I would do it. All those years, I could have done much better. I felt like crying. My eyes got blurry and moist. I spit into the sink. I could have built a law practice. I could have tried. I turned on the cold water and splashed it on my face and ran my fingers through my hair and did it a few more times, cupping the water in my hands. Then I grabbed a paper towel and wiped off my face but my neck and shirt were still wet, and by the time I reached the door, it was dripping down again from my hair.

  I opened the door to leave the small, candle-lit bathroom, and took two steps into the tight hallway. It was early, but dark inside the bar, and there was electronica playing softly. People were swirling by and the absence of smoke was somehow oddly off-putting. I was glad when they outlawed smoking in bars in New York, but it also diminished the allure of quietly getting drunk in public. I miss it now. They should make smoking legal in bars again—if not mandatory. Bars and smoking and driving without seatbelts …