She was looking at me, waiting for my reaction. “Well?”
“How would I rate it? I would say a perfect client. Rich, desperate, no qualms.”
A shrug. “Sure, but he doesn’t tell us what is wrong with him. We only do organ transplants. If he’s been in pain since childhood, it’s likely something incurable, in the bones, perhaps, or the immune system itself. More likely it’s psychological. Someone else’s body parts won’t help.” She tapped the e-mail. “You get lots like this, lots and lots. Whoever thinks life is wonderful doesn’t practice medicine. How about this one?” She clicked onto yet another Yahoo account: Dear Doctor White, Sorry I don’t speak Inglish so good. I am mother of Chad. My husband bring us to America but he dye. My little girl need diyalisi for kidneys. We don’t have insurance. I heard you help poor people, you very good woman. Doctor White, my little girl she need kidneys. We love you Doctore White. Abena Abeni
We remained silent for a moment. Finally she clicked back to the first e-mail and smiled her Vogue smile. “So, do you think you and Vikorn can find a liver for poor Abe?”
A liver for poor Abe? “I’d have to ask Vikorn,” I heard myself say.
She nodded. A grin, then she cocked her head. “But however rich Abe is, he won’t expect to pay more than a few thousand dollars for half a liver. You want to hang on to clients like that. After a few years the second liver starts to fail-that’s when you get into the serious money. Second transplants are a serious business and generally you need a whole liver, a perfectly healthy whole liver.”
“From a cadaver? Or someone brain-dead?”
“Then you’re talking about waiting lists, priority allocation, just-in-time contacts with traffic police or some other authority. That’s hard for us in the parallel trade to set up. Perhaps impossible.” I gasped. She noticed how I recoiled and scrolled back to the e-mail from Michael James Conran. “You read what the man says. He doesn’t care who has to die.” She stood up. “If you really want to be a player, this is what you have to realize. All human beings are cannibals when it comes to brute survival. That is really what the trade is all about, no matter how they care to dress it up for the folks at home. Think about it, Detective. But don’t take too long. I can get over three hundred thousand dollars for a good-quality whole liver from a recently deceased donor, whether brain-dead, volunteer-or otherwise.”
I walked out of the business suite into the silk rugs and damascene chaise longues of the sitting area. The door to the master bedroom had been left ajar; I saw a brilliant white pillowcase, a Turkish bedspread turned back, a pair of naked white feet. Polly caught my gaze and stopped moving for a telling moment. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up; somewhere under my skull prohibited synapses were making a thrilling connection between sex and death. Then I seemed to hear Chanya’s voice: One move, one hint that you’re ready for sex, and you’re done for. They don’t care who dies.
I coughed. “Cyclosporine,” I said. “You were going to tell me about it, then we got distracted.”
She nodded, as if conceding that the moment had passed. “Modern solid-organ transplant is decades old. You could date it from the first-ever kidney transplant in 1950 in Illinois, or from the first heart transplant by Christiaan Barnard in South Africa in 1967, but there are plenty of other landmarks. What’s new, though, and what has transformed an exotic sideline into a global business that is about to explode, is the discovery and commercial production of cyclosporine. Before, there was the laborious task of matching organs to try to avoid rejection by the recipient’s immune system. The new drug changed all that-it suppresses the immune system. It’s not quite a case of throwing any working kidney into any body that needs it, but almost. In fact, at the seedier end of the trade, that’s pretty much what happens. Of course, the recipient dies in a few years. Even if the new organ functions properly, the immune system is paralyzed by the cyclosporine and the patient starts to grow every kind of tumor imaginable, but without the transplant they would have died sooner. That’s an important factor that can’t be disputed. Actually, they’re kept temporarily alive by the cyclosporine as much as by the new kidney, but who’s splitting hairs?”
10
Next morning we shared a limo to the airport. Lilly dressed down in jeans, designer T-shirt, and sandals while Polly, in a navy dress suit, decked herself in gold, especially in the form of bracelets on her wrists. On the plane Lilly took the window seat, Polly took the aisle, and I was the meat in the sandwich. Not that it really mattered: in first there was so much space between pods, we could have been flying solo. There were buttons that, when pressed, sent screens up from the armrests to shut out the neighbors on either side. Being friends, none of us used the facility, which enabled me to make what may have been a key observation. Lilly said something to Polly in one of their Chinese dialects-I fancy it was Fukienese-which attracted her twin’s attention. A stowaway fly had infiltrated First and was free-riding on Lilly’s window. I assumed a HiSo fastidiousness had been invoked, and I looked forward to an indignant word from one or both of them to the purser.
Wrong. Polly said something back to Lilly in an excited voice. Lilly responded with still greater excitement. All six of our eyes were now fixated on the fly. I had no idea of the odds or the sums agreed on, but something told me neither was minimal. The fly made a dash toward the top of the window-a move in Lilly’s favor for sure, to judge from the glee in her eyes and the glum in her sister’s. True to its nature, though, the fly would not be so easily predicted and made a series of jerks in a W pattern, which left it pretty much where it had started in terms of suspension between earth and sky.
More hurried punting. I had a feeling the stakes were getting serious. A middle-aged woman in the seat behind me looked up from her video and understood; now eight eyeballs awaited the fly’s next move. The fly jerked a couple of inches skyward. To my right Polly fidgeted unhappily with one of her solid gold bracelets. Lilly pressed her palms together and wrung her hands. But the fly was nothing if not a tease. He decided to give himself a body wipe with his legs, all over from head to feet, about a dozen times with extra attention to face and eyes. Who said flies are dirty?
Unable to resist, I leaned toward Polly. “What’s the betting so far?”
She glared. “Don’t ask.”
“I ask.”
She slipped off her gold bracelet to invite me to heft it. More than two ounces, that’s for sure. Maybe five. I remembered the figures from the Gold Souk. Well over a thousand dollars an ounce, close to twelve hundred if I remembered correctly. We were talking about a six-thousand-dollar fly. Now Polly lost it and said something fast-desperate, I would say.
Lilly turned to stone but nodded her head.
“How much now?” I asked.
Polly refused to answer. The woman behind me got up to lean over my pod. She had an American accent. “Please tell me how much they are betting on the fly?”
“About six thousand dollars, I think.”
“If it gets to the top of the window before flying away?”
“I think so.”
“If it gets to the bottom of the window before flying away, she pays double,” Polly hissed.
Lilly remained stone-faced, silently urging her fly heavenward.
Now the fly was clean as a whistle and good to go. In a sudden burst he shifted four inches up. Only about an inch and a half more, and Polly’s gold bracelet changed owners.
I stared at the bracelet for a moment. Polly understood my thought. “It’s gone up a lot more than that.”
“Oh, please tell me how much you’re betting,” the American woman said.
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Polly said.
Lilly broke into a grin. “Tell them.”