“Then why did he go through with it? If he already knew how it was going to end, what was the point of the surgery?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he actually believed it himself for a moment, if he convinced himself that things were going to be different, or if he agreed to it just to shut us all up.”
Simon was afraid he knew the answer to Crewes’s question, and it wasn’t the one the man wanted to hear. Yet Simon also knew he was complicit in all of this too; he hadn’t cared what Leonard Pellegrini really wanted. None of them had, not DaSilva, not Crewes, not even Cheryl, who’d understandably preferred that her children grow up with a father. The question for Simon wasn’t whether Lenny wanted to live; the question was whether a man with a wife and two young children had the right to choose to die.
“The press is calling Don MacLeod already,” Crewes said. “The Times. The Post. ESPN. They’ve covered those meetings at his house before. And now here’s another retired football player killing himself. It’s something more for them to write about.” He paused, staring somewhere above Simon’s head. “You heard about DeMarcus Rogers?”
“The name sounds familiar.”
“He played linebacker for the Bears in the eighties. Won a Super Bowl, voted into some Pro Bowls. He used to do work for the Players Association. I met him a few times, and I liked him. Most people did. But the word was he’d been having difficulties these last few years. He’d get so frustrated when he couldn’t remember things that he’d fly into these crazy rages, smash things up at work. He got divorced, and his kids didn’t hear from him much. He sold his stake in this chain of hardware stores he had up in Illinois, and then he stopped doing work for the association. Basically dropped off the map. Turned out he’d rented a condo in Miami without telling anybody. About six months ago, he shot himself in the chest with a handgun. He left a note saying he’d chosen the chest because he wanted to leave his brain intact for testing. They can take a slice of it now, put that slice under a microscope, and discover how badly your brain got fucked up when you were playing. What they’re finding out is that all these guys who’re dying young, in their forties and fifties—guys who are killing themselves, OD’ing, crashing their cars drunk—all these guys, their brains are ancient. They’re finding these markings, the same things a seventy-five-year-old with dementia or Alzheimer’s would have. DeMarcus was the kind of guy who paid attention to this stuff.” He shifted carefully in his chair, as though his bones were fragile cargo within the bag of his body. “Don MacLeod is going to ask Cheryl if she’s willing to donate Lenny’s brain to the same people.”
“What do you think she’ll say?”
“I don’t know. I think it might be good if she could give a name to what she saw happen to him. You know? To have somebody tell her there wasn’t anything she could’ve done differently. That something had happened to his brain, something he wasn’t coming back from. Then again, she might be sick of people cutting his body apart.”
Simon looked at Crewes’s hands grasping the edge of the desk, the knuckles swollen to the size of quail eggs, the left pinky skewed at a crazy angle. “What are you going to tell them when they ask you about Lenny’s transplant?”
“Who’s ‘them’?”
“The press, the same people who are interviewing Don and Cheryl. If they make that link.”
“Isn’t that what you’re here to tell me?”
Simon took a deep breath. “I think the best we can do is keep the donor’s identity a secret for as long as we can. Until the story is dead and nobody cares enough to look for her anymore.”
“‘The best we can do’? Jesus.” Crewes seemed more weary now than pissed off. “Well, I don’t know who she is, so that shouldn’t be so hard for me. What about my money?”
“The money that went to the donor? Untraceable.”
“It’s in cash now?”
“Yes.”
“You laundered it?”
Simon hesitated. “It went through a process, a conversion to cash.”
Crewes held up his hands. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that not exactly what laundering is?”
“I think it’s actually more like the opposite of laundering.” Simon paused. “Anyway, I’m not sure how it was done.”
“Come on, Simon, I’m not fucking taping this conversation. Be real with me here.”
Simon cleared his throat. “I am. The money, that’s not my area.”
Crewes stared at him, a single vertical furrow cut between his eyebrows. “But somebody converted it?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the cash?”
“In a deposit box at a bank.”
“And where is the girl?”
“In a safe place.”
“I hope she stays there.”
Crewes paused, and with Howard’s tough-guy patter quieted for a moment, Simon’s attention was drawn to the despair edging around the man’s eyes, despair and also fury—fury that he’d been unfairly cheated out of his best opportunity for atonement, as indirect as it might have been. It was a particular strain of anger and frustration, that of a man who has tried to do the right thing and been punished thoroughly for it, and Simon recognized it with the sympathy and respect of a fellow sufferer.
“I can’t be tied to paying that girl anything.” Crewes rapped his knuckles against the desk. “I’m not going to jail just because Lenny was a depressive fuckup.”
• • •
SIMON drove his rental car—a ridiculous candy-red Dodge, high and short like an SUV lopped in half—directly from Crewes’s cul-de-sac to Maria’s apartment on South Tenth. He parked across the street and looked up at her window, stalling. He didn’t want to have this conversation, but he understood that DaSilva was right: too many people at Abraham, and probably Cabrera too, knew where she was. If somebody in one of the hospitals decided to talk to a reporter, she’d be quickly found, and then they’d be fucked, all of them—Simon, DaSilva, Crewes, Maria herself. Still, he hated doing this to her, dragging her out of her apartment, adding yet another absurd and difficult complication to her run of epically miserable luck. He got out of the car and crossed the street; he couldn’t put it off any longer. She buzzed him in and met him in the hallway outside her front door, wearing a baggy T-shirt and flannel pants, her face still bleary with sleep.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s happened?”
He guided her inside the apartment and told her about Lenny’s suicide, leaving out the fact that it was Lenny’s own three-year-old daughter who’d found him facedown on the bed in a puddle of vomit.
“Oh, fuck,” Maria said, sinking onto the couch. “His wife. I saw her in the hospital, I remember . . . What was her name?”
“Cheryl.”
“And he had kids too, didn’t he? You told me he had kids.”
“Two of them.”
“How could he do this to them? How could he just . . . just . . . give up? After everything that everybody did for him?”
“I know,” Simon said, “I know.” It was awful what Lenny had done, an act of sadism toward his family almost breathtaking in its spitefulness, a resounding fuck-you to the world, but what could they do about that now? They had to try to salvage what could be salvaged. “People are going to try to find out about you now, okay? This is an alcoholic ex-NFL player who killed himself a month after getting a liver transplant. People are going to want to find out who he got the liver from, and somebody in the hospital might tell them.”
He knew by her expression that she saw it then—how Lenny was the first domino, how his falling could lead to her, then to Crewes, to Simon, to DaSilva and Cabrera itself. She stood up from the couch.
“That money is mine,” she said fiercely. “I fucking earned it. I fucking need it.”
“Nobody’s going to take it from you,” he said. “But you can’t stay here
.”
She started to shake her head.
“Yes,” he said. “We’ve got to leave. Too many people know you live here. We need to hide you, just for a short time.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“My apartment.”
She looked over at him, her face suddenly wary.
“Now you don’t trust me?” he said. “It’s safe. I promise you.”
She screwed up her eyes and balled her fists, as though she could reverse Lenny’s suicide through sheer force of will. A low, furious humming escaped her pursed lips.
“Maria?”
She opened her eyes. “I’ll go to a hotel.”
He shook his head. “For how long? And, anyway, hotels are too public, too many variables you can’t control. Listen, we’ll find you a new apartment soon, once everything’s calmed down. But my place is the safest thing for now.” He paused. “You’ve got to trust me.”
She went into the bedroom, and he stood in the doorway and watched as she angrily swept her clothes into a duffel bag, throwing her laptop in with the sweaters and jeans and skirts. She squatted down, punched a code into the safe. Inside was a small mound of banded bills, and she dumped them into the bag as well, plucking out a single wad of hundreds and waving it at Simon. “The point of this was not needing to trust anybody anymore. Do you understand that?”
“I know,” he said, although he didn’t, not really.
She threw the wad into the bag and yanked at the zipper. “I hate this, Simon.”
“I know,” he said again. “How much cash is that?”
“Somewhere close to two thousand, I think.”
“The rest’s in the bank?”
“Yeah.” She tried to hoist the bag, but she buckled under its weight, grimacing and clutching at her abdomen.
“I’ve got it.” Simon took the duffel from her and slung it over his shoulder. “Ready?”
“My meds,” she said.
He found the pill bottles in the bathroom cabinet and tossed them into the bag, then he hustled out the door, Maria following close behind. Out in the hallway, he reached back for her hand. There was a pause, and then he felt her palm, hot and slick, press against his own. He moved quickly across the hall to the stairwell, and she let go of his hand and grasped his shoulder, keeping her other hand on the banister. He’d almost gone running down the stairs, forgetting for a moment how careful she still needed to be with her body, only five days out of Abraham. He threw the duffel into the trunk of the rental car, helped Maria into the passenger seat, and jerked the Dodge out onto South Tenth, accelerating around the corner onto Bedford, driving far too fast, as though the difference of a few minutes were going to mean anything now.
• • •
They didn’t speak during the ride to Roosevelt Island, Maria staring blankly off into space. Her mind seemed far away, preoccupied with some other crisis of the distant past or future. Inside his apartment, she collapsed onto the couch, her face pale, damp with sweat. Simon fetched a glass of water as she dug the bottle of Percocet out of her bag. She swallowed a pill and wiped her face with her sleeve.
“So I’m just supposed to hide out here?” she said. “For how long?”
“Until we don’t think anybody’s trying to figure out who Lenny’s donor was.”
“Fuck that, Simon!” Maria smacked the couch, anger erupting suddenly, shattering her opiated calm. “I’m not just going to sit around and wait and hope nobody finds me. I was supposed to be anonymous, okay? That was part of the deal.”
“I know. We’re trying to keep it that way.”
“You’re not trying—you’re hoping. And who’s ‘we’? You and that coordinator, DaSilva? How can we trust that guy?”
“We don’t have to trust him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he can’t screw me. I know too much about what he does, about how he operates inside that hospital. If I ever told people what I know, he’d have far more to lose than me. Forget his job. Forget all the money he’s making from Health Solutions—”
“Which is how much?”
Simon hesitated. Naming precise figures seemed like yet another clear and definite step in what he’d come to think of now as his betrayal of DaSilva.
“Jesus, Simon,” she said. “Don’t you think you owe me some fucking honesty here?”
“He’s taking nearly $75,000 off the top of each deal.” Simon spoke in a rush, before he could stop himself. “Double on yours, since it was a liver instead of a kidney. Before you and Lenny, we’d put together a dozen pairs in the last eight months.”
“That’s almost $900,000.”
“Right. He’s taking payments for brokering transplants. He’s doctoring medical records, doctoring financial records. He’s laundering cash. I have no idea how much time all that could get him. Fifteen years? Twenty?”
“But don’t you think he knows that?” She shook a second Percocet into her palm and studied it, as though its shape concealed some divinable solution to their problems. “Don’t you think he has some kind of plan in place?”
“His plan is to not get caught. Look, you see how this all works, right? Everyone is holding something over someone else’s head. Me and DaSilva. You and Howard Crewes. DaSilva and Cabrera. That’s the glue that makes this whole thing stick together.”
“Fear?”
“Self-interest.” Saying it out loud for the first time, he saw the situation’s elegance, which he’d always understood, but also its fragility, which until now he had mostly chosen to ignore. “Everybody’s got what they want, and it can only be taken away if they go after someone else.”
“You mean deterrence.” She tossed back the Percocet. “Which is another word for fear.”
“You can call it that if you want.”
“That never works for very long, Simon. Somebody always upsets the balance trying to protect themselves.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve seen it. Somebody gets greedy or panics. They try to catch everybody else by surprise.”
“Seen it where?”
“It doesn’t matter where. The scam changes, but people’s behavior doesn’t.” Maria gave him a hard look, and he thought he’d just glimpsed another facet of her composite self: the scrapper, the fighter. The survivor. “Don’t be the guy waiting around, trusting that the system’s going to work,” she said. “You need to take control. You need to do something.”
“DaSilva’s not going to panic, okay? It’s not his style.”
She shook her head in annoyance, as though he were completely missing the point. “How long are you going to do this job, Simon?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be a long-term solution.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’m only two, maybe three, deals short of paying DaSilva back my loan.” As soon as he said it, he knew this was an irrelevant statement, borderline ridiculous.
“Wait, you owe him money?” Maria looked genuinely surprised for the first time during the conversation.
“I . . .” He was suddenly embarrassed. How could he have put himself into such a position? It had seemed so simple at the time, so logical. His shoulders slumped. “Yeah. I owe him money.”
“And you’d start work on another deal?” She stared at him. “After everything? Are you fucking kidding?”
“No, you’re right. Of course, you’re right.” Simon rubbed his eyes. “I’ll quit when this is over. When you’re safe. When nobody’s looking for you anymore.”
“Will he let you go?”
“I don’t know.” He looked away. “I guess we’ll find out.”
THAT night, Simon took Maria on a walk around the island, circling past the lighthouse and then south along the eastern river promenade. Maria, stir-crazy and still fuming, wore a hooded sweatshirt
pulled tight over her head to hide her face, a gesture that Simon thought shaded into the paranoid. They passed under the bridge, the cavernous sound of traffic rumbling overhead, and when they came out on the other side, there was Cabrera, the sooty main building genuflecting to the blue-green glass of the transplant wing. On the far side of the hospital’s parking lot, a single fisherman cast over the railing into the glossy black river, a bucket of bait at his feet. Beyond Cabrera, they cut across a large hillocky field, an expanse of dirt and grass littered with colossal pieces of construction equipment. They took a gravel path hemmed in by low trees and emerged onto a narrow spit of dirt strewn with weeds, plastic trash, blocks of broken concrete. The spit rested low, only a few feet above the waterline, a rusted metal ladder descending into the murky water. They sat at the top of the ladder, their feet hanging out over the edge. The river flowed by, the incoming tide pushing up from New York Harbor to part around the island. Simon looked out over the water to his right, at the blank-faced towers of Tudor City. South, down the barrel of the river, the three bridges to Brooklyn hung like Christmas lights strung across the expanse. They sat together in the half dark, the glow of Manhattan on one side, Queens on the other.
Earlier in the evening, Simon had paged DaSilva to his cell phone. When the call came, he stepped into the stairwell and told Peter that Maria had returned with him to the Roosevelt Island apartment. DaSilva ordered Simon to keep her there, under his watch. He’d been even more curt with Simon than usual, as though every word were costing him money, as though he’d reached some rarified level of tension beyond the expression of speech. “How are things at Cabrera?” Simon had asked. “Difficult,” DaSilva had said, and then he’d hung up.
“It’s beautiful,” Maria said quietly now.
“It’ll be different soon though.” Simon gestured behind them. “That field? With all the equipment on it? They’re going to turn this whole end of the island into a manicured park. Level it off, plant some grass, a few clusters of trees. This spit here”—he kicked the rusted ladder—“it’ll be long gone.”
The Dismantling Page 19