The Organ Broker Read online

  A few weeks later, on a Friday evening, I was on my way back from JFK. I had just returned from Tucson. I had put off getting the $200K for the liver into the safe deposit boxes because I didn’t want to leave her, but after a week or so I felt compelled to go. I hated keeping too much cash in my closet under the luggage. I told her I had to go to London for some sort of corporate closing.

  When I called Michelle from the car she said that if I picked her up at her apartment, she’d let me buy her dinner.

  “I might still go to the Hamptons tomorrow,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to come … ?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, driving down Third toward her place in Soho.

  “I just want to get out of the city but I don’t have the energy to deal with going now,” she said when she came downstairs and got in the car. It was already about nine. She had peep-toe pumps on. Her legs were glistening as if they were covered with a thin sheet of condensation.

  “We could go somewhere,” I said.

  “You mean go to the beach? Now?” she asked, looking ahead and sounding tired.

  “Or somewhere else.”

  I turned my car east, onto the FDR, up toward the Thruway, and headed north. “To the woods,” I said to her. She pursed her lips, furrowed her eyebrows a bit.

  “Woods? Jack, I don’t even have a change of clothes.”

  “We’ll buy some.”

  More nodding. One eyebrow lifted perhaps. I didn’t know why she was going along. I didn’t know why she let me call her late and then show up at her apartment and sleep with her. I didn’t even know why she took my calls. I’m not that funny anymore. I’m not charming. I don’t know why she let me lie to her when surely she doubted most of it, or at least some. I don’t know why she didn’t ask me about my life, like the others always did. Instead, in my car that night under the star-filled country sky above the Thruway, I asked her, “Why don’t you ever talk about where you’re from?”

  “Funny, coming from you.”

  “I’m from Queens. I’ve told you that.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Flushing. You know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why don’t you talk about it?” I asked her.

  “Because it doesn’t matter. It’s not like I try not to talk about it.”

  “I’m interested.”

  “Then Harrisburg.”

  “Pennsylvania?”

  “Uh, huh. But I don’t go there or anything and I moved to New York right after college. It just doesn’t matter much.”

  “Do you have family there?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, tentatively, “you’re just very unusual, you know that?”

  She turned toward me in my Jag’s bucket seat and said, “I am? I’m unusual?”

  “Well, most women I’ve met, they like to talk about those kinds of things. Where people are from, their families. It’s just a little unusual.”

  “Unusual,” she mimicked quietly.

  “Yes. It is.”

  “Well, let’s talk about something else, then. Something more usual. Why don’t you tell me about London, Jack? Did you see Big Ben? Was it rainy?”

  “Where does your mother live now?” I asked.

  “She’s dead, like my father. But you probably know that, Jack.” “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you measure and gauge and evaluate every nuance of everything anyone says. Or do you not know that? Perhaps you aren’t quite so aware when it comes to yourself. Do you not know that you spin and misdirect every detail about yourself? You’re pretty unusual yourself, pal. And my parents died when I was a kid but I don’t need you to feel bad. It was a long time ago and I’m fine.”

  It was silent for an uncomfortable moment and then I just said, “Okay.”

  “And we’ve been in the car over an hour now and I want to have sex soon so start looking for a place to take me before I change my mind. Is that unusual?”

  It was silent for another long moment. Then I said, No, M’am,” sarcastically and quietly. She merely nodded a bit, smiling slightly. Point made.

  ◆

  About an hour or so after we had sex in a roadside motel, and before we fell asleep, Michelle said, “My mother killed herself when I was ten. I was an only child. So when my dad got cancer that made me his caretaker. I was still in high school.”

  “Oh hell,” I whispered.

  “I was shitty at it,” she said softly. “He died when I was nineteen.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s when I left Princeton for a year and just went to Europe.”

  “To get away?”

  “No,” she replied, seeming confused. Nothing more was said.

  My own mother is still alive. I have an older sister who lives in California now. They are Mark’s grandmother and aunt. We don’t speak anymore. I lied about some of those things too. I couldn’t forgive either one of them for not even trying to stop him. I wasn’t the first kid to get abused by an alcoholic father, and I didn’t have to blame them too. Unusual. I made my own aloneness.

  ◆

  The next day Michelle and I parked at Minnewaska and walked along a trail that led around a mountain lake. There was a gray moistness permeating the woods but the scent was fresh and alive, with the smell of ozone in the air. Gravel and wood chips and branches crunched under the sneakers we had bought at a sporting goods store in New Paltz.

  Michelle said, “I could buy some land here. Maybe near a lake like this.” Everything was quiet. There were very few people on the trail. When we passed them we just nodded and half-smiled and respected each other’s private moments with nature. “Build a house,” she said. “That would be really nice.” I didn’t say anything. “Maybe not. I couldn’t do it alone.”

  “Why would you have to do it alone?” I asked her.

  “You’re a piece of work, Jack,” she said, feigning a little laughter.

  Philip was dying at Cornell and I was casually hiking around a lake with my new semi-girlfriend, who already found me to be inaccessible. Yes, I am. I am Jack Piece-Of-Work.

  ◆

  In the short time Michelle and I have been together I’ve had several cell phone numbers and some of those numbers have already changed. She’s asked me about it once or twice, teasing, but she’s never pressed me. I think that Michelle just hoped for the best. But I have sometimes wondered why she does not wonder why I have three different cell phones and why the numbers keep changing. This has been the ongoing and unspoken discourse between us now for months. We didn’t talk much about my work. “International law …” “Oh,” she’d say. “Um hmm.” Multi-national deals. Contracts. There must be currency issues sometimes … She knew there was something unseemly about me but it was not a problem because for some reason she seemed to like it. And what about Mark?

  ◆

  A day or two after we got back to the city I heard from Wallace again.

  “Jack, this guy, this guy has late-stage cardiomyopathy. AIDS complications. What’s going on?”

  “I want to do it,” I said.

  “Of course,” Wallace said. “But if he has to travel we need to get going. If this guy starts to tank and it’s too late we’re going to lose a lot of money, New York.”

  “Something like this isn’t done the usual way. Frankly, I have no idea how it’s done and don’t want to know anyway. But I’m going to have to go there and talk to them again. I am going to have to go there and set it up personally. It’s too big.”

  “Then may I suggest,” he said, “that you book a flight?”

  “I’ll handle it. Just sit tight. He’s stable for now.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “What?”

  “That he’s stable?” There was tense silence.

  Then, I said, “You’d be screaming bloody murder if he wasn’t, Wallace. Relax. I am on it and Jack is getting this guy the part.”

  “You mentioned L-VADs b
efore. Do you know much about them?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want us to lose five million fucking dollars. I’m thinking that if he starts to tank that maybe we could keep him afloat with an L-VAD long enough to get him on a plane and get him there. Maybe if we could get enough money up front we could walk away with the deposit when he finally dies overseas. They might advance half of it. That’s still a lot of money, Jack. Someone has to be thinking about contingencies.”

  “That’s not good business.”

  “It’s circumstantial. Sometimes things don’t work out.”

  “It’s not a good plan, Wallace.”

  “Well, a lot is at stake here. We need a Plan B.”

  “Plan A is fine. I am going to get this guy the part and you don’t need to worry about contingencies.”

  “Well, it’s getting into the late innings. This is too big a bet not to hedge,” Wallace said quietly.

  It was all shit. I was talking to a guy who would have gladly sold Philip to a black-market cadaver dealer as long as he got his fee—that’s how much he cared. I knew that Wolff could do this at Royston. Pierre could set up the seller. They clipped that poor bastard’s liver. True, it will grow back—but only if he survived the post-op trauma after losing a kidney and a third of his liver and getting minimal medication and no proper aftercare … Okay, one can’t re-grow a heart. Sometimes you can’t even mend a broken one. Pierre Kleinhans would greedily accept the assignment, and Mel Wolff would rationalize the whole situation so poetically that by the time he was done, and four or five double Scotches were in my gut, I might even believe that he was right and we were noble.

  “There’s something else.” Wallace suddenly said. “I talked to The Siren.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking,” I nearly whispered in response.

  “It’s getting done, Jack. I am tired of this shit, and need a break, and I am not passing up this fee.”

  “Wallace, there is no Siren. Those stories about kidney thieves from Vegas are impossible. You know that.”

  “Tell that to the man I spoke with.”

  “If you spoke to someone who called himself The Siren … just think for a minute about who that man might really be, what he might really want from someone like you. Please stop it. I am on it. Just let me handle it.”

  “I know that guy’s a risk, but I am not passing. So tell me now, Jack. Swear it. Tell me you’re New York Jack and we’re good and it gets done and I’ll forget him. But think, if you were me, and you needed someone who had the guts to cut out part of a man against his will, would it be so crazy to call someone with experience?”

  “Maybe not if he was real. But whoever this guy is, Wallace, I am telling you this for me but I am also telling you this for you, whoever this guy is, you ever meet that guy and you’re going to prison, or you’re dead.”

  “Then tell me what I want to hear and make it good.”

  I sighed. I was the protagonist at the end of “1984” when he finally admits that two plus two is five. I would have said anything. “I’m New York Jack, Wallace. We’re good and it is getting fucking done.”

  ◆

  Murder is a black and heavy word. We’ve become desensitized to it, but still it sits like a brick on the brain. Can one even say “murder” in a sentence that isn’t a reference to a news report or television crime show? To my surprise, I could, and that carried weighty implications. In China it would still have been murder, but it would have been crudely rationalized by a crooked legal system because it would have been a death-row prisoner who was due to die soon anyway.

  Who’s to say that the parts contained within your body remain somehow your property, or the property of your descendents, after your death? If we had “presumed consent” in this country, even with the option to opt out, a large part of the organ shortage would be solved with one swipe of a pen and parasites like me would be out of business. But here in Jesus-land-America some people seem to think He demands that you never give anyone a kidney. I haven’t read the Bible in thirty years, and I didn’t listen much in Church as a kid, but isn’t that completely ass-backwards?

  ◆

  The plan was this: I tell Kleinhans that we need a heart and he goes into his vast database of potential sellers who had been tissue-typed in advance. He finds an O positive male between 160 and 190 pounds, between fifteen and fifty years old, with various other matching criteria that matter for a heart (and which would also dictate how much cyclosporine Philip would need to take—when his system could handle very little). Pierre would sign up that guy to sell a kidney, advance him a few thousand rand, bring him to Royston where Philip would already be prepped, and then Mel Wolff would cut his heart out. Pierre’s people would tell the guy’s family that there were complications and he died on the operating table while selling a kidney. “He’s lucky he didn’t end up in jail,” they’d tell his family. “Do you want to end up in jail?” they’d say to the one family member who asked questions. That’s what they would say to the indignant one. And that would be it. There are certainly no investigations or autopsies done in South Africa on blacks who die in well-regarded hospitals.

  Wolff had asked for two hundred and fifty grand. Wallace suggested that “on this first one” we voluntarily pay double what he asked. “It’s a good investment, Jack,” he had said. It was notable that Wallace was suddenly looking out for Wolff and our relationship with him. It was also notable that he had a long-term view.

  I thought about it constantly. Could I do this? The money was no longer my focus. I could do it for Philip, but mostly for Mark, and for the right reasons. Philip was a good man. He had integrity, even if he was a little obnoxious about it. It was about Mark. I have never wanted something the way I wanted to save Philip for Mark. It was a deep and powerful feeling, tugging at my gut. I desperately wanted to do one good and important thing that I could chalk up on the right side of my karma ledger.

  Mark. Carrie’s son. And mine. I never knew him, because she was right to keep him from me. I have hurt so many people. I’ve turned down so many beautiful things that this life has to offer. Every single day, on every street corner in New York there were invitations that I side-stepped. One God-forsaken organ was all I needed. Frankly, Philip needing a heart was a great gift to me.

  I needed to organize the transaction and also plan for contingencies. I didn’t know if he’d ever be able to travel, or from where I could source the part. But one thing is certain, I remember thinking, I need to get this guy over to Columbia Presbyterian right now. Just in case. That’s the first thing. We’ve got to move him to Columbia.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN:

  LOST TIME

  Over Labor Day, Michelle and I rented a suite in Montauk and drove out Thursday night in the rain. My telescope was in the trunk and I was disappointed because I had wanted to show her some stars. I felt the pressure of time growing short. The tip of Long Island is different from the Hamptons, only a half hour away. It’s become more “hip” (and therefore more crowded) in recent years, but there’s still an element that remains dark and calm and natural. There’s a lot less light pollution. I wanted us to look together into the light from the past in the skies above the beach, but it rained. I’d like to show Mark that as well. Instead Michelle and I ate lobsters at Gossman’s among families and strange couples and some elderly and weathered folks who looked better suited for Boca. We drank Scotch at a local bar with fish mounted on the walls and a pool table in the back and a few old men sitting alone on bar stools listening to loud rock songs from the eighties. That was good too.

  I was always proud to be seen with Michelle. She’s one of the few people I know who is capable of making fun of you in a way that makes you feel cared for, leaves you feeling better about yourself. She genuinely meant no harm. Behind her sharp-witted barbs she was simply kind. From the beginning, I thought, She should run for office. It seemed like everyone around her wanted her attention, yet more and more it was reser
ved for me.

  That night we left the tacky curtains open, their paisley pattern bunched up at the sides of the large window. We let the blackness of the beach sky into our room and the raindrops blew into the glass with the sound of a soft and far-away drum roll. The water glistened with the light of the one lamp shining above the beach, beyond our hotel, but mostly it was dark and the sky looked like syrup.

  Michelle whispered, “It’s like we’re alone out here.”

  I was drunk. We did not have sex. “Maybe we should just stay here,” I said.

  “Stay here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Forever?” she whispered and I could see her smiling in the dim light, teasing me.

  “We should. We should move to the beach. Just live here,” I said.

  “Could you do that? Could you stay with me?” she asked, and the delicate balance of that moment was splintered.

  I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head as if to say, “I don’t know.”

  Then she said, “You could, Jack.”

  “Yeah?” I think I was hopeful. Please convince me, Michelle.

  “Maybe people like us… .” It was silent for a while, except for the rain.

  “What?”

  “Maybe we could, is all …”

  That’s when I would usually make a joke, or sometimes leave. With most women, that would prompt me to put my pants back on and drive back to the hotel bars in downtown Manhattan looking for new friends before last call.

  I did neither of those things that night with her in Montauk. I pulled her in close to me and I could taste the salt that had settled on her lips. The sweat that had dried on her neck behind her small ears. I didn’t say anything. To have that time together, and now, to have these memories—it’s important.

  ◆

  I lay in bed that night and thought about Tucson. It’s rarely crowded at the pool during the week. Maybe it wasn’t impossible, I thought. Maybe it wasn’t too late. What if I just stopped—did this one last thing and saved Philip and then stopped and settled in at my place in Tucson? What if I got a job at a local golf course as a pro teaching retirees how to let go of all of the habits that were screwing up their swings? I could convince Michelle to come and maybe we could even move to LA and she could keep working. I’d have enough money. I could go to confession. I could say, “I used to practice law in New York … back in the nineties … International mostly … Oh, currency issues, yeah, all that …” What the hell have I done for all of these years? What have I done?