“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.
• • •
FINALLY, 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.
“Sir?”
She was back, his clerk, handing him the key and his license, leading him down a hallway to a set of double metal doors. She unlocked the doors, and he followed her down a narrow row of brass-fronted boxes running up to the low ceiling. They stopped, and she slid the bank key into the upper lock of DaSilva’s box. Simon slid his key into the lower lock; they turned the keys in unison. She removed the oblong box from its slot and handed it to him with a grave formality. He nodded, carrying the box to a small room at the back of the vault and closing the door behind him. He placed the box onto a plastic table, sat on a foldout chair. Inside the box were bundled stacks of cash, crisp and fresh, smelling of ink. He transferred the cash into his messenger bag, one bundle at a time. When the box was empty, he c
losed the lid and sat for a moment, trying to get his breathing under control. It still unnerved him, handling this much money; he didn’t know if he’d ever get used to it.
He didn’t know exactly how DaSilva manufactured the cash. The recipients made their checks out to Health Solutions, and Simon placed the checks into the office safe. DaSilva had never explained through what process of laundering alchemy those checks became the cash in this, and all the other, deposit boxes, and Simon thought it best if he didn’t know anyway.
His next stop was a Bank of America in the East Fifties, a bright, low-ceilinged space installed on the ground floor of a brutalist office tower, and he collected the rest of the payment from the deposit box there without incident. Outside again, his bag heavy with cash, he watched the light fade from the sky with a certain finality. People rushed along the street, collars pulled tight; the days of lingering, of strolling, were nearly done for the year. The thought hit him: What if he just left? Took the $145,000 and split. He could hole up in some remote, cheap corner of the country, whittle away at the cash while he figured out what sort of a life he could stand to live. God knows he wouldn’t be leaving very much behind, besides his father (and if anyone could understand such an abrupt withdrawal from a prior mode of existence, it was Michael Worth). He wondered how far DaSilva would go to find him, what sort of resources his employer had at his disposal. He wondered, not for the first time, whether DaSilva was an ambitious regular guy—an inveterate hustler, maybe, but no more—who’d stumbled upon a criminal opportunity too good to pass up, or a budding career criminal in deep cover. It was a long way from designing fake IDs to tampering with financial and medical records, violating medical law and ethics, and laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. The question was one of temperament or, to put it another way, of whether DaSilva was the kind of person who regarded intimidation and violence as the cost of doing business. Because that, to Simon, was a criminal: someone who considers anybody standing between them and what they want as an object to be eliminated in as expedient and permanent a manner as possible.
But who was Simon kidding? This line of inquiry was pointless. He wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t have the balls, and, besides, he wouldn’t be stealing from DaSilva—he’d be stealing from Maria, and he wasn’t going to screw her over like that.
• • •
He took the shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square and walked the few blocks to the Royal Crown. On the twenty-ninth floor, he found the door to Maria’s room and knocked. He heard a rustling, and the door opened partway, the lock chain pulling taut. Half of Maria’s face filled the crack, a single deep-black eye. She closed the door, and he heard the chain fall free, the door opening fully for him now. Maria retreated to the bed as he stepped into the room. The overhead light was off, the bedside lamp throwing an orange circle across the bed, the side chair, a swath of wall. The radiator gurgled and hissed in the corner. The heat was turned up too high, and there was an odd odor in the air, something sour and chemical. Maria gingerly lay back against the stacked pillows. On the bedside table stood a row of orange plastic pill bottles. The television played on mute, teenage girls screaming silently at each other outside a nightclub. Maria wore a baggy gray sweatshirt and flannel pants, her black hair falling lankly over the white pillows. She gave Simon a fatigued, drugged smile.
He sat down in the chair, the bag in his lap. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling,” she said, “just fucking peachy.”
“Did the Cabrera people treat you okay?”
“I wish I could tell you, but I don’t really remember.” Her voice was thick, syrupy. She pointed at the bag. “Did you bring me a present?”
“Your money.” He opened the bag, tilted it toward her to show the cash inside. “We’ve also arranged for you to see a doctor when you’re back in California.” He placed the sheet with the doctor’s information onto the bed beside her. “It’s important that you see him as soon as you get home. Okay?”
“All business,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“Want to see the sutures?” She clutched at the hem of her sweatshirt. “I’ll show them to you.”
“I don’t—”
She pulled up the sweatshirt. Her abdomen was flat, some faint stretch marks creeping above the waistband of her pants. He let his eye drift toward what she wanted to show him, the upside-down Y, its central branch beginning below her sternum and running through her belly button before splitting, the two prongs diving into the hollows of her hip bones. The cut was covered by medical tape, but he could see the shadow of the suture underneath, an eel slipping through murky water. The skin around the edges of the tape was red and puffy, an ointment of some kind glistening in the light of the lamp. She sat up straight, sucking in her stomach, the wound rippling with her breathing. He glanced up at her face, and she was looking down at her abdomen dazedly, the pink tip of her tongue probing the cracked corner of her lips, as though she couldn’t quite believe what had been done to her. Then she lay back against the pillows, letting the sweatshirt fall. She winced and grabbed at her stomach.
“Jesus Christ.” Her face screwed up in pain, and then she relaxed again, opening her eyes and staring at the ceiling. “He almost fucked it up. Him and his bitch of a wife.”
“Who? Lenny?”
“Before I left, the doctors wanted me to go see him and say good-bye. Because we’re so close and everything. I limp in, and that woman says, ‘So this is her.’ Like she’s surprised.”
“That’s . . . Who was in the room?”
“The coordinator. And two nurses.”
“The coordinator? You mean Peter DaSilva?”
“Yeah. She’s sitting in her chair staring at me. Lenny—tubes running into his nose and mouth and stomach—he mumbled something to her. I couldn’t hear what, but he sounded pissed. If you were in the room, you’d know she never saw me before in her life. You haven’t heard anything about it, have you?”
“No.”
She looked at him, her eyes suddenly lucid. “It’s DaSilva, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Your contact at the hospital.”
“I don’t have a con—”
“Simon. Please. The whole thing, it was too smooth. Somebody’s greasing the wheels in there.”
Simon shook his head.
“He didn’t blink,” she said. “He just stuck to the script, talking about what a fast recovery I’d made. What a blessing it all was. He knew what was going on. I could tell.”
“That’s just not the case.” It seemed somehow obscene to lie to her as she lay there wounded and diminished on the bed, but he didn’t see any other choice. “Sorry.”
She sighed. “Whatever. Fine.” She looked at the TV, turned it off with an irritated flick of the remote. “Just tell me I don’t have to worry about it.”
“About what?”
“The hospital coming after me. Or Lenny. Asking questions. Looking for this.” She pointed her toes toward the bag on the floor.
“You don’t have to worry about it.”
“Okay. I want to get on the train on Monday and leave it all behind.”
“That’s what’s going to happen.” He looked around at the chaos of the room, socks and underwear hanging off the radiator, lotions and nail files and toiletries spilled across the bathroom counter. “I can take you to Penn Station if you want.”
“I’ll be fine.” She pointed at the bag with her foot again. “I think I have enough cash for a taxi.”
“Tell me you’ll go see the doctor when you get home.”
“I’ll see him.”
Simon stood, sweat pooling in the small of his back. Maria closed her eyes, and he thought for a moment she might have fallen asleep. He felt an impulse to sit next to her on the bed, to stroke her forehead, hold her clammy hand. A strand of ha
ir stuck to her cheek, curled underneath her bottom lip. He stepped toward the door, and then she opened her eyes and said, “I forgot something when I was showing you the suture.” She propped herself up onto her elbows, wincing again. “Look.” She pulled the sweatshirt up and peeled off the top portion of tape. The incision was black and yellowish purple, puckered at its quilted junction like a pair of bruised lips, but that wasn’t what she was trying to show him. She pointed to a chocolate-colored birthmark a few inches below her sternum that had been bisected by the cut. It was irregular, vaguely oval: a coffee stain, a dirty cloud. Simon leaned in closer as Maria tilted her torso toward the lamp. He could see that the birthmark’s two halves had not been aligned properly during the sewing-up of her abdomen; one had been set a half inch or so higher than the other. The marred birthmark seemed in its asymmetry more grotesque than the scar itself, more unnatural, and abruptly, in one vertiginous moment, Maria’s wound swallowed up the rest of the room, the rest of the world: the halved birthmark, the bruised tissue, the sheen of ointment.
He stepped back, bumping into the chair.
“Yeah, well. Like I said, I don’t wear a lot of bikinis.” She shrugged, let the sweatshirt fall again. “This”—she nodded at the money—“it’s going to save my life. You don’t even understand. Anyway. Take care of yourself, Simon.”
• • •
HE couldn’t sleep that night. After an hour, he rose from his bed and pulled open the shades, leaving the lights off. He watched a black rope of water uncoil as it slid past the river’s near bank, and then he turned away, closing the shades and switching on the bedside lamp. He opened the bottom drawer of his dresser and removed a metal lockbox. He sat on the edge of his bed, in the lamp’s pool of light, with the box in his lap. It was Amelia’s. Simon had taken the lockbox and its contents during the two weeks between her death and his father’s stripping of her room. He remembered pushing the door open gently, gingerly. He’d felt as though he were moving within a dream or a hallucination, an interval outside the normal flow of time, in which Amelia was absent, and upon his return to the real world, he would find her here, in her bedroom again, still angry at him and still alive. He discovered the lockbox under her bed, pushed into the far corner against the wall. He took it back into his room and solved the four-digit combination on his first guess. The code was her birthday; locking the box seemed to be a ritual, not an actual protection against anyone who knew her well opening it. Inside was a small red notebook held shut with a black elastic strap. His nerves sang: her diary. He opened the book to its first page to begin reading, but he found he couldn’t do it. His eyes filled with sudden tears; the letters on the page blurred and swam. The dream ruptured. The notion that she was gone and that he could have saved her took on the heavy gravity of truth. He felt in his gut the first spasms of overwhelming guilt, like the probing tendrils of fever in the hours before it fully seizes the body. He closed the diary and slipped the elastic strap back into place, and he let himself cry.
The Dismantling Page 9