The Organ Broker Page 5

  There were some guys there from his Elks Lodge. Our neighbors were there. People checked the time on their watches and contemplated their own demises. I sat on a folding chair and listened to people talk about my father, for the last time, and I felt a great resentment toward him because I never got to tell him to go to hell again once I was big enough to look him squarely in the eye. I felt cheated. I have no memories of my paternal grandfather. He died when I was two or three. His name was John Trayner. They called him “Jack.” I sometimes wonder what kind of bastard he was in his day.

  ◆

  By the time school started again in September Carrie was gone. She was going to take the bar in Massachusetts, she told me. “No, it wouldn’t have mattered,” she said. “I would have left New York anyway,” she said. “It doesn’t matter, Jack. It doesn’t matter now,” she said, “because that is the past and things are different now. I’m sorry. It’s stupid to even talk about.” It was better when she was gone. I was cool and focused. One more year of this shit, I thought. I took the dealing down a notch. Demand was drying up anyway, and I got by. I paid the bills, and tuition, and I had some cash. A year or so later, the day I graduated, I dumped several grams ceremoniously down the toilet, and made a hard, clean break.

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  BILLY KIMBALL

  Not long after finishing law school I charmed my way in the door at Blake & Holcomb, a top-tier corporate law firm. And only a few months after I started I could no longer ignore the fact that I had no interest in being a lawyer. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose.

  The beautiful thing about an illegal enterprise like selling drugs is that you don’t have to pay any dues. The more illegal an activity, the more it becomes a meritocracy. The cream rises, and it takes little time, but only in a fully legal oligarchy like “the law” was one required to kiss the ass of one’s inferiors for years. Once I achieved my goals but then quickly realized I didn’t want them… . Well, I wasn’t a lot of fun to be around at obligatory office cocktail parties. All of those Hermes ties hanging down and swinging loose made me cringe the way that one does when accidentally catching an unwanted glimpse of an old man’s penis in a gym locker room.

  I had been there about a year, and that was the frame of mind I was sporting when a guy I knew from college called and made an appointment to come see me. The timing was perfect, or maybe it just seems that way now. I was not going back to selling drugs; I knew where that eventually landed everyone. Yet I could not resign myself to being a lawyer, to become a regular Joe.

  At Blake & Holcomb I had a very small office adjacent to the office of the partner I worked for. When Billy Kimball called and asked if he could come see me I joked, “You know, I’m not a criminal lawyer, Billy.” Kimball didn’t laugh. He just made an appointment and got off the phone rather abruptly. I agreed to meet him largely out of curiosity. I didn’t really have any friends left from college or law school, and Kimball had never really been more than an acquaintance.

  What is he doing here? I thought, when he showed up. We shook hands and said, “Yeah, a long while …” and, “I heard about Sue, yes. No. I mean, I didn’t really know her all that well. Probably not as well as you guys …” I walked him into my office. I settled in behind my desk, made a hole between stacks of files piled on my Bob Cratchet apprentice station so we could see each other, and lifted my eyebrows as if to say, “So?”

  “You’re not easy to find, Jack,” Kimball said quietly. He peeled his coat off, moving slowly, as if he was stiff or sore from working out, and laid it gently on the chair next to the one he eased into. His expression was severe. My guard was up, spider-sense tingling.

  “Oh yeah?” I replied with a casual smile.

  “Yeah. I asked around a little. Michael Baring, all those guys he hung around with in the summers, Hillary, Janie Swanson—she still talks to Carrie, but I guess you two aren’t in touch anymore …”

  “Well,” I said, more seriously, “you know how that is.”

  “I do, Jack. But still. You changed your name?” “Oh, yeah. Yes, I did,” I said, smiling again. Def-con 3 now. This is not a drill. “My, uh, stepdad, he died. I don’t know if you knew that, that my father died during law school.”

  “No. I’m sorry.” “Yeah. Thanks. But he was actually my stepfather and I had taken his name, Trayner, when I was a little kid and somehow, when he was gone, I don’t know, kind of making a new start … I went back to my name at birth. Tuckman.” Yes, it was all complete bullshit. My father had died, but he was my biological father, not my stepfather. I just twisted all of that into a convenient story.

  “Well, just that it was very hard to find you.”

  “Yeah, you said that.”

  “I was searching in that lawyer directory, Martindale-Hubbell, for “Jack Trayner.” I made a bunch of calls, no one from school seems to know what you’re up to and then you went and changed your name—”

  “Well, here I am.”

  “The Bar Association had a record of the name change—”

  “Billy, what is it you want to talk to me about?”

  I was nervous so I leaned back in my chair and yawned a little.

  “I’ve got a problem, Jack.”

  “Billy, I told you, I don’t do criminal law. Do you need me to refer you to someone?” “I don’t need a lawyer, Jack,” he said gravely. His eyes were sullen and the skin underneath them looked dark, as if from lack of sleep. He was wearing an obviously expensive suit, but it was crumpled, and didn’t fit him well. Something about his coloring was off too. He was pale and looked somehow bloated–not exactly as if he’d gained weight, more like he had maintained his weight but had somehow become a bit inflated. His face looked puffy. It’s a look that has become much more familiar to me in the years since then. He seemed exhausted but determined. Oh shit, I suddenly thought, he might be trying to cop drugs. Right in my freaking law office, the moron. He could definitely turn out to be a junkie, I thought.

  “Well if you don’t need a lawyer, I mean … well then …”

  He cleared his throat a little, sat up a little straighter. “Look,” he said. “What I need … I need a kidney.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  He stared at me between those stacks of files for a long moment. I’m not easily rattled, but I hadn’t expected that.

  “Yeah. I’m serious,” he said despondently, answering the question I had not even asked. “Unfortunately.” His voice was breathy and quiet. I could barely hear him.

  “What’s that have to do with me?” I asked him. “Aren’t there hospitals … ?”

  “It takes too long, and I could die soon, Jack. I’m not playing around. You knew I was diabetic? In college?”

  “What does that mean Billy?” I truly didn’t understand the connection, but somehow I assumed it was all bad for young Jack. I didn’t like the odds of sitting across the table from a guy with little to lose who had made a major effort to find a guy he was never all that close to in the first place. “It means that everyone knows what you did back in college. No one cares, Jack. Hell, I appreciated it. But a guy who sold blow in college is the closest thing I could find.”

  “Closest to what? And keep your voice down!”

  “Like drug dealers. Or I don’t know what,” he said quietly. “Someone who might know where to get something like this.”

  “You mean … ?”

  He nodded affirmatively.

  “Put an ad in the paper. What makes you think I can help?”

  “It’s illegal.”

  “Keep your voice down please.”

  “I’m going through renal failure, Jack. Stage five now.”

  “Five?”

  “Out of five,” he said with a weak smirk. “It was brought on by the diabetes and there are some other complications …” His voice trailed off. “Look at this, Jack.” He moved his right hand across his chest, as if he was about to say the pledge of allegiance, and then pointed to two bumps pushing up under his shi
rt, on his arm just below his left shoulder. “It’s called a fistular.”

  “Fistular?”

  “It’s the connection where they hook me up to the dialysis machine.”

  “You go for that?

  He nodded and he then extended his palm toward the two bumps as if motioning to ask whether I needed confirmation, or might want him to otherwise reveal whatever was lying beneath his tailored blue shirt.

  “I trust you,” I said quietly.

  “Do you know what dialysis is, Trayner? Exactly, I mean?”

  I said nothing.

  “They hook me up to a machine three times a week and I sit there for hours while it filters my blood, doing the job my kidneys can’t do anymore. Thing about dialysis is that it will keep you alive, but the longer you’re on it, the more it tears up all sorts of other things in your other organs. The only thing that will really set me right is a real, live, functioning kidney. And the wait is over three years.”

  I wasn’t quick to speak. I was taking it in. I was measuring him and the situation. I was considering what he was asking of me… . “So, can you wait?”

  “Theoretically,” he said, quietly, looking down, “I can’t. And I’ve got a bad blood type. We tried everyone we know. We’ve made a lot of calls. I’m on lists but the lists are simply too long. My dad said to see if maybe there’s another way to find something,” he said with a little more volume, a bit more animated. “Maybe I know someone who has connections that are, you know—”

  “Yes. Softly, Billy.”

  “Well I really don’t know anyone like that—”

  “It’s illegal?” I cut in. I didn’t even know that.

  “I don’t want to end up being operated on in Thailand or India. You’re the only person I could think of. I just don’t know anyone else.”

  “Billy, what does one thing have to do with the other? This is like going to buy luggage at a car dealership. They’re both salesman, but c’mon. What do I know about this? What could I possibly know? And I don’t do those other things anymore anyway. I’m a lawyer now.”

  I could see what looked like some specks of dandruff in his hair. He occasionally scratched at the back of his head with his middle finger while the index finger next to it lingered in the air, curled. He did it then while saying, “You might know one guy who knows a person who could maybe make a difference.”

  He looked me in the eye then and I saw the look of a young man confronting his mortality. When we’re young we claim we know that we’re going to die, but we don’t really believe it. Billy was a believer. That guy had religion and he was wearing it on his face and on his sleeve. I could also see that he wasn’t pissed at me; he wasn’t blaming me or anyone else. He was simply trying to solve a problem. His logic required a bit of a leap but it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. I mean, he was even right. I knew some people who knew people who might be able to help arrange something like that, or like anything else for that matter, as long as there was enough cash to pay for it.

  Still, I replied, “Billy, I’m sorry, and I feel bad, but I just don’t think I could help. What I did in college to make a few extra dollars, that was casual and it was a while ago. I’m an officer of the court now.”

  “Jack, we could pay you a lot of money. My dad would. All we need is someone to make the introduction. Nothing else. Maybe you know someone. You might not even realize it. Couldn’t you just make some calls, check around?”

  “I’m sorry, Billy—”

  “We’ve tried everything. It takes too long. I’m really sick, Jack. My dad would pay a lot of money for this help.”

  “Hmm. Just out of curiosity, what would the fee be for something like that anyway?”

  “My dad would give you twenty-five K. Cash.” Cue the house lights and soundtrack. Looking back now I realize that was the watershed moment.

  “Not me,” I finally replied. “Just someone. Someone else. And we’re just talking hypothetically.”

  “Right. Fine. Twenty-five. Cash. Hypothetical cash. A lot of it.”

  That’s how things start sometimes. By accident. That was about eighteen years ago and I was only one year removed from law school. It was a lot of money to me. “Really,” I replied, more to myself than to him. I was considering what I could ultimately extract from a rich man whose first offer was twenty-five grand. I could probably get a lot more than that from a guy whose son would otherwise die. I was thinking about a golf trip to Scotland… .

  “There are about twenty or thirty thousand people on the waiting list for a kidney right now in this country, and a few thousand die every year while waiting.” He said this while looking down at the carpet. He had probably said it a thousand times by then. It sounded like his mantra, and also like his epitaph. “I’m sicker than most.”

  I didn’t speak for a moment. Then I said, “That seems like a pretty big market.” That was 1993. The list has tripled since then.

  “I don’t know about that. But I’m not doing well, Jack. And my family has money. What do you think? Could you help? Do you think you might know anyone?”

  “Well I don’t really want to discuss it any further right now, but you should give me a phone number where I can reach you.”

  “Okay, Jack,” Billy said softly. I slid him a pad and pen.

  “I’ll come back to you,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  When he said “Okay,” he sounded utterly hopeless and I guess it was contagious because I felt infected by his mood. I think it was empathy—thinking how I might feel to be young but dying. I cared about the guy. I wish I could say that it was my primary motivation, but it was not, and I want to tell the truth now. The money is what really captured my attention, and my imagination, but of course I also wanted to help him. Kimball was the same age as me—twenty-seven at the time—but he looked like he was pushing forty. He was always more successful with women, a bigger personality. Now, he looked helpless.

  “I will,” I said, and stood up. “I will come back to you on this. For sure, Billy.” His dull and yellowed eyes lifted slightly to meet mine. “Oh,” he said, with a slight smile. “Then I’m O positive. You’ll need to know that. Here, I’ll write it down.”

  “Your blood type?”

  “O positive. Yeah.”

  “Weird. Me too.”

  “Really? A lot of people don’t even know.” We locked eyes for a moment and in a split second, without saying a word, he asked the question we both knew with certainty that I would say “no” to and I did, with my eyes, and he didn’t seem surprised.

  He cleared his throat a little. “You’ll need this other information, too. It’s antigens. HLAs. But they don’t have to be a perfect match. Three or four out of six would be great, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be any at all as long as the blood type is O positive. These days, as long as you have money you can take this new drug, Cyclosporine. We can get that without help. It’s legal.”

  “Cyclo..?”

  “Stops organ rejection. It doesn’t matter. Just remember O positive.”

  “O positive. Same as me. How could I forget?”

  “Right. From a healthy, living donor under fifty years old. I’m writing it all down for you. Call me, Jack,” he said, smiling again as he got up to leave. “Twenty-five grand,” he added in a whisper.

  CHAPTER NINE:

  JACK TUCKMAN

  After I passed the bar exam and before I got my position at Blake & Holcomb, I changed my name for the first time and laid to rest the coke dealer that was Jack Trayner. It was liberating. I did it legally—driver’s license, social security—and put a bow around my past and stuck it in the attic. Morphing from one Jack into another paved the way for several more Jacks to come. I read something once about an actor who always tried to have his characters renamed so they shared his actual first name. He said it was easier to remember his cues if the other actors referred to him by his real name. It’s true. It’s a lot easier to respond quickly and naturally to “Hey, Jack. Yo
u see the Mets last night?” or “Jack, hand me that file please” when you happen to be Jack. And Jack doesn’t stand out. Jack keeps a low profile.

  ◆

  It wasn’t long after I started at Blake & Holcomb that the disappointment set in. And the boredom. “Jack, clean up this draft for me,” my boss would say, and drop a stack of papers on my desk so thick that it sounded like a baseball bat cracking into a hardball when it landed. “Here’s a list of case law to research, Tuckman. Need it in the morning,” he’d say, dropping it on my desk without ever making eye contact. “Gotta pay your dues, Buddy,” he would sometimes say as he walked past my station on his way out at six or seven, knowing full well that I’d be there until midnight. I already paid my dues, I would think. This is what I spent five years hanging out in the bathroom at the Palladium for? This Formica cubicle is the life I am rewarded with for years of hard work, neverending caution, and the actual “sacrifice” of Jack Trayner?

  The stage had been set, and then that meeting with Kimball changed everything. From the moment he left my office I too had one foot out the door. Once I found that first kidney it was all I could think about. I decided to let a few days go by before calling Kimball. I needed to consider whether I really wanted to do this, but I also wanted to make him jones for it for a while—get him nice and anxious before letting him know that I might have something. Many of the skills developed in my previous profession translated to this new endeavor—the sales skills, the caution, the precision, the patience, the egocentricity. Yet, now, when I look back, it’s funny to realize how sloppy and clueless I was. The way I worked that deal for Kimball, I should have been picked up by the FBI and transformed back into a half-assed coke dealer by virtue of losing my law license. But I wasn’t.