The Dismantling (10 page)

“So, what are you going to do?” Katherine asked, pulling him back into the room. “I'm sorry.” She waved a languorous hand as though to disperse her words. “We don't need to talk about this now.”

“It's okay,” he said. “I don't know yet. Lab tech maybe. Medical consultant.”

She nodded, as though she believed he was already considering these jobs, as though he had any sort of a plan yet. “You'll have weekends, vacations. Time for other people. I'll be jealous.”

“Of what?”

“You know. Your social life.”

But of course she wouldn't in any way be jealous. Why should she be? There wasn't any aspect of failure to be jealous of. And, anyway, he currently enjoyed no social life to speak of, his isolation first self-imposed then self-perpetuating. He didn't see that changing simply because he was going to drop out of medical school and have some free time on his hands.

He moved from the chair to the couch next to her, bent over the coffee table, and snorted another line. The drug hit him faster and stronger this time. He was pinned back against the cushions by the heel of a firm yet gentle hand. He reached out to touch Katherine's knee, feeling the denim grow warm and damp under his palm. She didn't move her leg or push his hand away. The air in the room grew thick, tropical. He looked over at her. Her face was tilted away from him, her eyes half-closed, her lips half-smiling. With an enormous amount of effort, he lifted his hand from her knee to her neck, to the smooth skin there, white as bleached bone. She turned to him; he leaned into her. Her lips were hot and dry, and she let them rest against his for a few moments. Then she gently took hold of his shoulders and pressed him back into the couch. “No,” she said, simply and not unkindly. She stood up and disappeared behind him, returning with a blanket. “Sleep here.” He allowed himself to be guided into a prone position, allowed the blanket to be spread over his body. It felt good to be taken care of like this. She turned out the lights, and he heard rustling and then a sigh as she climbed into her bed on the far side of the room. She'd left for class by the time he woke up the following morning. When she called him next, a week later, it was to say she thought she might have found him a job.

 • • • 

H
E
'
D
gone into his interview with Health Solutions knowing only what Katherine had told him, which wasn't much. Peter DaSilva was a childhood friend of hers from Riverdale, in the Bronx. She'd been close with his little sister; he'd been the obnoxious older brother, teasing and pranking his sister's friends. A big mouth, the neighborhood smart aleck. He was a natural hustler, she said, a schemer from birth, the kind of kid who sold loosies in the high school locker room and crafted fake IDs on his family's desktop. Early in his adult life, he'd discovered the health-care industry to be fertile ground for a wide variety of scams and side deals. He'd been, officially, a pharmaceutical sales rep, a health insurance consultant, a hospital administrative staffer, but he was now, in his midthirties, involved in “organ transplant consulting services” that “weren't totally legal,” and he was in need of someone “discreet” with a “decent knowledge of medicine.” Katherine had helped DaSilva out a bit during the company's first year—meeting with potential clients mostly—but his business was expanding, and he needed somebody more committed. Now that she was in med school, she didn't have the time to spare.

They'd met at an Irish bar in Bay Ridge. Simon still didn't know if this was near where DaSilva lived or if the location had been chosen randomly or even as an intentional misdirection. (Peter would prove remarkably adept at keeping the details of his life outside Health Solutions and Cabrera hidden from Simon, and he didn't probe for information about Simon's private life either. Simon recognized this as a smart business decision: the less they knew about each other, the harder it would be to link them in any investigation. It was possible, too, that DaSilva simply didn't
have
much of a life outside of his two jobs, that there simply weren't enough hours in the day.) It was early afternoon, and they sat at a table by the front window, milky January sunlight spilling across their laps, a slice of the Verrazano's underbelly hanging high in the window's upper corner. DaSilva—calm and terrifically fat, sipping daintily at the head of a pint of Guinness—seemed most concerned with establishing that Simon wasn't going to try to return to medical school. He needed “continuity.” It was not, he said, the kind of job you try out and then drop right away if it doesn't agree with you. Simon told him he couldn't go back to that school even if he wanted to, and this seemed to be good enough.

When DaSilva explained what Health Solutions did, he made the company sound like a charity or an NGO, like Planned Parenthood or Meals On Wheels: an organization that provided a morally necessary service neglected by traditional institutions.

“Who are we,” he wondered, speaking as one reasonable person to another, “to tell people what they can and can't do with their bodies? If we're honest with people, and they're willing to pay for a surgery and accept all its risks, who are we to tell them they can't spend their money like that?” He waited for an answer.

“I don't know,” Simon said. And he didn't.

“I work in a transplant unit, okay? That's my ‘legitimate' job, I guess you'd say. I'm a coordinator. I try to put the pieces together for donations. I try to get very sick people the organs they need to live. I see, firsthand, my patients dying because they can't get access to a kidney or a liver fast enough. Not enough young, healthy people crashed their motorcycles or shot themselves in the head this month, so, sorry, no liver for you. If nobody in your family's a match or healthy enough to donate, you're likely shit out of luck. It's a waste, and I'm sick of it. So those are the recipients. As for the donors, who are we to tell people they can't sell something that's already theirs?” He leaned in with the fervor of a true believer, or at least a very convincing facsimile of one. “Isn't it condescending to talk about exploitation, as though these donors—rational, adult human beings—can't make decisions for themselves? Why should we restrict their ability to better their lives? They know the risks. We don't mislead anybody. For Christ's sake,
they
come looking for
us
.”

Simon wanted to tell him that the further prosecution of a moral argument wasn't necessary. He didn't know precisely where he stood on the issue of legalizing organ sales—he'd never had a reason to consider it before—but he did know that he harbored no opposition strong enough to prevent him from taking the job. He needed money, and he needed it quickly; if he could make that money while helping seriously ill people, then all the better. Yet DaSilva seemed to enjoy playing the provocative ethical philosopher, so Simon let him talk, nodding and frowning at the appropriate points. The whole time, he wondered how DaSilva could trust him with all of this information.

“You'll work on commission,” DaSilva said. “You'll get 2.5 percent of the recipient fee for each successfully brokered pair. That might not sound like a lot, but if—when—you start making deals at $200,000 or $225,000 a pop, it'll add up. Let me ask you something: you have a way to pay off your med school loans anytime soon?”

Simon shook his head.

“Katherine put them at about $50,000. That right?”

“Nearly that.”

“Debt's a motherfucker, huh? Tell you what: I'll clear your loan with the school the day you start working for me. I'll pay it all off at once, in your name, obviously. You'll owe me instead, with no interest, and guess what? Credit agencies aren't going to be calling
my
number anytime soon. And that means a clean slate for you.”

“It doesn't sound like a bad idea.”

“That's because it's not a bad idea. You like where you're living right now?”

Of course Simon liked it, but he couldn't afford it anymore without his stipend and loans. He shook his head.

“I own a place on Roosevelt Island, near the hospital,” DaSilva said. “I'll rent it to you for a few hundred bucks a month. First two months free, until you start pushing through some deals. What do you think?”

There wasn't much to think about. How else could he clear his loans so quickly? He'd put in a year with DaSilva, maybe two, and then he'd be debt-free, able to start his life again unencumbered, on level ground. Besides, even if he didn't want to admit it to himself, he was intrigued. Maybe this was a way in which he could help people; maybe he'd found a task for which his particular combination of experience and temperament was well suited. And if it all seemed too good to be true, there was an obvious reason: it was illegal. This explained DaSilva's aggressive pitching—after all, how many people with Simon's medical knowledge and clean background would be willing to participate in a criminal enterprise, to assume all of its attendant risk? Sure, Simon was desperate but so too, he guessed, was DaSilva.

Anyway, Simon didn't harbor any strong objection to breaking the law per se—he did it all the time, didn't he, just like everybody else, every time he exceeded the speed limit or took drugs or even jaywalked? And, besides, he thought this might be one of those instances, like marijuana or stem cells, in which the law had fallen behind ethics or, at the very least, common sense. A crime was when you deliberately hurt somebody else, not when you broke an arbitrary rule. As for the risk, building any kind of case against Health Solutions would, the way DaSilva explained it, be both unlikely and difficult. The only illegal act was the exchange of money between recipient and donor. The recipient wrote a check to Health Solutions for “consultation fees”; the donor was paid, weeks later, in untraceable cash. And who was going to bring a charge anyway? If they did their job right, it was in everybody's interests—the donor's, the recipient's, the hospital's—to keep quiet, to protect the status quo. What good would a messy legal case do for anybody?

Yes, maybe his father had sworn off risk, but Simon wasn't required to follow his depressing example. In any event, it sure beat the hell out of registering with a temp agency. He moved into DaSilva's Roosevelt Island apartment by the end of the week and started searching for clients the following Monday.

And how had DaSilva known Simon wouldn't screw him? Maybe it was something Katherine had said, or maybe DaSilva just took one look at the crumpled figure sitting across the table and understood, with his hustler's intuition, that here was a broken young man, no more capable of fucking him over than of sprouting wings and flying.

 • • • 

F
INALLY
,
just before three on Tuesday morning, Simon received DaSilva's text—“All fine. Hang tight.”—and was flooded with relief.

Maria was a recovering inpatient at Cabrera now, out of his reach, and he heard nothing more until five days later, when he received a second text directing him to the Sixty-Second Street office.

On the desk he found a clear plastic folder. Inside were two sheets of paper. On each was printed the location of a bank and a safe-deposit box number. Written next to one address was “45K,” and next to the other, “100K.” A small key was paper-clipped to each sheet. A third sheet of paper listed the name, address, and phone number of a doctor in Glendale. Simon bent down behind the desk, where a heavy metal safe was pushed against the wall. He spun the combination and reached inside, removing a tightly packed black plastic bag. Within the bag were banded stacks of bills, mostly hundreds, some fifties and twenties. This was his commission. He counted it out on the desk: $4,750. Half of the 2.5 percent of the deal fee he was technically owed, but they'd agreed that DaSilva would deduct fifty percent of the payouts until Simon's loan was cleared. Still, the figure was almost double what he'd earned on any of his previous pairings. He had to guess he was seeing here, in the inflated fee, the argument for shifting their focus to livers.

His cell phone buzzed as he stuffed the cash into his messenger bag. Another text from DaSilva: “Discharged AM. Drop off PM.” Simon wrote back: “Confirmed.” Five days was the earliest end of the donor's postsurgery inpatient window; Maria must be recovering quickly.

Simon cracked the window, lit a cigarette, and did a quick calculation: he still owed DaSilva about $10,000 on the loan. Two more deals like this one, though, and he'd be free and clear. As he tapped the cigarette against the ashtray perched on the windowsill, a gust of wind pushed into the office. The cherry of his cigarette came loose and was blown to the carpeted floor, still glowing, hot and orange, behind a stand supporting the fax machine. “Fuck!” He stubbed out the butt and dropped to his hands and knees, peering underneath the stand. The ember was burrowing into the carpet just beyond his reach. He grabbed a curled sheet of paper from the floor behind the stand and stretched to stamp out the ember with its folded edge.

He stood up and looked at the paper, which appeared to be some kind of wire transfer form filled out in DaSilva's bulbous, oddly childlike hand. Strings of account numbers and routing codes; a bank address in the Bronx and another, it seemed, in Cyprus; at the bottom, DaSilva's signature. A small burn hole marred the document now, an inch above the top account number. Simon folded the paper and slipped it into his inner jacket pocket. He'd return it and explain the burn hole to DaSilva when he next saw him; he assumed Peter didn't want something like that just floating around the office anyway.

Simon walked to the subway, messenger bag slung over his shoulder. His first stop was his own bank, a Chase on Delancey Street. He stacked the new cash into his deposit box, where it joined about $3,000 left over from his earlier deals, and peeled off a few hundreds, folding them inside his wallet. Next he took the 7 train to an HSBC in Flushing. He handed over his driver's license and the deposit key to the clerk, a Chinese girl no older than eighteen, her hair pulled back into a high ponytail, diamond stud in her nose. She scanned his license, glanced up at him. Then she disappeared into a back office, and he waited by the teller windows, fiddling with the strap of his bag. At the window nearest to him, he watched an old woman with a face like a dried date shove a stack of wrinkled bills under the divider.