Wendell Black, MD

by Gerald Imber, M. D.

  If the mule was part of a drug-smuggling ring, which had to be the case, considering the value of the heroin and the sophistication of the device, there was a surgeon at both ends, maybe even a plastic surgeon. I thought about that for a while. There were hundreds of plastic surgeons in New York, and a thousand general surgeons capable of removing the implants and closing the incision. And how many general doctors or operating-room nurses could possibly do it? But I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t my problem.

  The phone rang in the bullpen. Across from me a sleepy young guy with a silly-looking haircut answered it. “Save it, Dr. Sheppard is right here.” He pressed hold and nodded toward Alice without saying a word. She picked up the receiver and he looked to me and stage-whispered, “Fucking car wreck on the interstate.”

  And so it goes. The next four hours were hell. Well, not so much for me as for the surgical people. Technically, Alice and I were equals. Outsiders, working as ER receiving doctors. Mercenaries. We saw everything that crossed the threshold, treated what we were capable of treating, and palmed the rest off on the specialists. In a teaching hospital like this, that meant action for the residents. Great for me, but Alice was their fairy godmother. She was the idol of the surgery residents, a grown-up vision of themselves. She had been there, she knew, she helped, and she was the de-facto team leader.

  By the time the last of the drop-ins were treated and gone—runny noses, infected pimples, and other great challenges—it was nearly one a.m. I dragged myself to the on-call room and flopped facedown onto the itchy wool blanket stretched military-style on the rock-hard single bed. I might have slept for ten or fifteen minutes before I dragged myself up and undressed. I used the head, found my toothbrush and a tiny airline-size tube of Colgate in the Dopp kit at the bottom of my father’s leather carry-on, brushed, showered, and might already have been snoring when I crawled under the covers. I left the door unlocked so Alice could slip in beside me when she finished. Or at least I meant to.

  On-call rooms are the heart of hospital social life. Before residents successfully agitated for a forty-, or fifty-, or sixty-hour week, it was routine to spend every other night, or every third night, on call at the hospital. You didn’t work all night, but you had to be there. You can imagine the rest. Even now, working per diem in the ER, we had on-call rooms provided for catnaps. They weren’t luxurious, but we made do. I was hoping for a pleasant few hours. Dream on.

  Turns out that even though I remembered not to throw the dead bolt, the door locked automatically, and I had the key. Worse still, I didn’t hear Alice rapping on the door at three. We didn’t discuss it in the morning because we didn’t see each other, but her e-mail was not warm. The path to the doghouse is paved with good intentions.

  8

  The New York Times ran a small piece about the smuggling episode in the morning crime blotter.

  . . . A spokesman for the medical examiner’s office said the deceased, identified as Azul Capinpin, succumbed to an overdose of heroin when a drug-filled breast implant ruptured during a flight from London’s Heathrow Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

  They neglected to mention that the victim was male. They also didn’t mention me. I was happy for the second and didn’t understand the first. Mostly, I couldn’t understand how, or why, the breast implant information was released.

  By the time Alice returned my call, it was early afternoon. We had taken to mostly e-mailing or texting during the day, but I felt like talking. Knowing she would not pick up messages until the morning’s surgery was completed, I left a long and fairly awkward voice message. Any distance I might have imagined evaporated when I heard her voice. She was all ease and congeniality and was eager to talk about dinner plans for that evening. I had forgotten that she was joining a visiting colleague for drinks and I was window-dressing.

  Farzan Byarshan had trained with Alice in England and had now, by all accounts, become a runaway success as a plastic surgeon in London, while Alice opted for fellowships and travel before signing her life away to three decades of practice. By Alice’s telling, Farzan had married up within the Persian community. His wife, Alaleh, was distantly related to the late shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It seemed that every ex-pat Iranian claimed some tie to the shah, so I didn’t take that very seriously. Besides, the shah was an inept fraud whose only saving grace was his willingness to be influenced by the CIA. Alaleh’s father was well connected and rich as Croesus. Anyway, the Persians overthrew Croesus, and the Islamic Revolution ran Alaleh’s father out of Tehran.

  I had no interest in this reunion, but Alice and Farzan had been an item. She downplayed the romance in the telling, though I remained dubious, since she still needed a man by her side when she planned to see him. I was the beard, and I was a little curious about Alice’s taste in men.

  The King Cole bar is the centerpiece of the posh St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Farzan and Alaleh were staying there in what must have been an insanely expensive suite. I had once naively recommended the place to a friend who bit my head off when he got his bill. We arrived a little after six and settled in among the tourists. The lounge itself was a funny place. There was a long, comfortable bar beneath Maxfield Parrish’s King Cole mural, and lots of little tables were scattered around the room, always “reserved” until one parted with a twenty—in which case they were “reserved for you, sir.” I hate that, but it fuels New York. I played the game. Alice and I sat alone for a quarter of an hour, and she chattered away about Farzan and the old days, which couldn’t have been more than six or seven years ago. I listened. I liked to watch her while she spoke. I watch people’s lips—not just beautiful people like Alice, everybody. It’s a bad habit and I have to remind myself to make eye contact, but you get pretty good at eavesdropping, and if family history plays any role, I’ll be deaf as a stone by seventy and have a leg up on the other old guys.

  The room was cold, probably in anticipation of a hundred or so warm bodies arriving within the next hour. It was not yet dark outside, and the low lights had to struggle with banners of sunlight through the curtains on the Fifty-fifth Street windows in order to set a sophisticated scene. Patrons were well dressed. Men wore suits and neckties, some straight from business, some dressed for an evening out. The ladies looked elegant in dresses or fashionable trouser suits, and appropriately upscale for a place where a martini and a glass of champagne ate up a fifty. Alice had her blond hair swept back, diamond stud earrings and very little makeup. She wore a basic black dress with a scooped neck that was filled with her breasts beneath an inverted V inscribed by a black cardigan buttoned only at the neck and flowing out. I wondered on whose behalf she had planned the landscape.

  Farzan and his wife arrived from the lobby, and we didn’t see them approach until they stood over us.

  “Alice, darling.”

  I was immediately uncomfortable. Alice and I stood up reflexively, and she and Farzan embraced. Mrs. Byarshan and I stood by, watching. She couldn’t have been any happier than I.

  “I’m Wendell Black, nice to meet you,” I said to the other outsider. She was an attractive woman with refined features and thick black hair, and was seriously made up and decked out. I had never seen so many jewels on so young a woman. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, and she dressed like an upper-class matron. She and Alice embraced warmly, though I don’t believe they had met before. Farzan offered me his hand and a lackluster grip, but he looked directly into my eyes, held my right arm with his left hand, and said enthusiastically, “So good to meet you.”

  Maybe so, but he could not have known enough about me to make that judgment. We sat, and after a few minutes of reminiscences we were all four included in the conversation, which was pleasant enough. Farzan was a good-looking man and spoke with a British accent that was too polished to be native. He was slim and graceful, with longish, thick black hair, heavy eyebrows, and clean-shaven cheeks. Steel-rimmed eyeglasses made his appearance more severe than his
attitude. He laughed freely and was nothing of the formal Middle Easterner I had expected. He put me at ease. It is my nature to be standoffish with strangers. My own insecurity, I’ve been told, too many times.

  The first round of drinks was consumed quickly and helped break the ice. Farzan and the two women quickly killed a bottle of criminally expensive champagne. I had two nice single malts. Whatever had gone on between Alice and Farzan was not obvious to me. The cocktail hour was painless, and we were off to dinner. Apparently I had passed the test, or maybe it was all about Alice, but something had made her more relaxed, warm, and affectionate. We walked arm in arm for three blocks to a fancy Italian restaurant set in the atrium of a nondescript Park Avenue office building. My plan was to feed our hunger and get her out of that little black dress as quickly as possible. I leaned toward Alice and began to nuzzle her hair and touch her ear with my tongue. When my hand slipped under her dress, she smiled and pushed it away.

  “Later.”

  But not too much later. It was a needy and passionate night. Less lovemaking than clawing urgency. Which neither of us seemed to mind at all.

  9

  As I mentioned before, the simple act of owning a dog in New York runs your life. I wanted nothing more than to spend the night in Alice’s bed. Sometime during the night, in what was clearly going to evolve into round two, I remembered Tonto sitting at home with his legs crossed.

  “Honey, I have to go,” I said. We were already pawing each other and she had quickly brought me back to life.

  “Don’t go yet—I need more.”

  Being weak of will, I stayed, and Alice expressed her approval loudly enough to awaken the neighbors. A thirty-second shower barely brought me back to earth; a quick kiss, and I was on my way.

  It took twenty minutes to get back uptown, and by the time I reached my door, it was after two. Tonto, bless his heart, was not the least bit disapproving. No guilt trips, just the usual “nice to see you” slurps, and out we went. I was undressed again and in bed by half past two, and I managed to log nearly five hours’ sleep, which would have to do.

  Morning broke with a headache and I performed my routine in a fog. I skipped the gym. Mrs. Black recognized my condition with no more than a raised eyebrow and silence. Before I could sip the tea, my cell phone sounded Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and I fished through pockets looking for it.

  “Wendell, good morning.” It was Alice, in her professional voice. I knew she was surrounded by people and couldn’t speak freely, and the English accent made her sound very serious. I contemplated teasing her about being a sexual predator but couldn’t get myself in gear. Good thing, because it became clear she was in no mood for my sense of humor. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Go ahead.” Just the tone of her voice made my headache worse.

  “No, not now. I have to get someplace private. Can I call back in five minutes?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll be here. Want to call on the landline?” Cell reception in the office was lousy.

  “No. The cell. Wait for me.” I wondered why she hadn’t gone someplace private before making the call to begin with, but it wasn’t the time to bring it up.

  “Got it.”

  I closed my door, picked up my teacup, and paced. Alice called back fifteen minutes later. “Sorry, I had to wait for transport to get the patient to recovery. Wendell . . .” I kept silent. “Farzan called me. He has to speak to you.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “I’m not exactly sure, but he knows you are with the police and that has something to do with it.”

  “Start from the beginning. Farzan only found out about my job last night, and it seemed to roll right past him. Why the sudden change?” I waited several seconds for an answer.

  “Actually, I told him about you before, but you’re right, he didn’t seem particularly interested. Can you speak to him . . . please, for me?”

  I hesitated. “Sure, but I’m just a doctor like you guys. I have no influence on police procedure.” I didn’t like where the conversation was going. It was an unnatural progression of events, and my bullshit meter was topping out. I had the sense that everyone knew what was going on but me, but I agreed to take Farzan’s call. Actually, I would have taken it without Alice’s intervention. There was no reason not to.

  The day passed slowly. It usually does when I don’t get enough sleep. My headache disappeared before lunch and I was feeling almost human. Farzan called at one forty-five, which is when I am scheduled to return to the office from lunch to clear my desk for traveling duties. Very convenient.

  “Dr. Black, this is Farzan Byarshan speaking.” Of course it is.

  “Wendell . . . please call me Wendell. I’ve been expecting your call. What can I do for you?” I was just the least bit annoyed. Farzan had called me Wendell throughout cocktails and definitely in his enthusiastic farewell. Why the sudden formality?

  “Wendell, I would like to meet with you.” Two calls and I still didn’t know what the hell was going on. I was almost willing to write it off to cultural differences, but I couldn’t let it go.

  “Why don’t you tell me what this is about, then we can meet if we need to.”

  Farzan hesitated. “It’s about the man who died on the plane, and I would prefer . . .”

  “The person on the plane . . . what could that have to do with you?” One of the things cops and doctors have in common is that neither believe in coincidences, and I’m both. This was starting to smell like three-day-old fish.

  10

  Farzan Byarshan was sitting in a booth toward the back of the coffee shop when I entered. He was wearing an elegant, dark brown sport coat, blue shirt, and tan tie, and stood out like a neon sign among the cops and cadets chewing, gesturing, and laughing loudly. His expression barely qualified as a smile, and he stood to shake hands with me.

  “Hello, Farzan. I assume this must be important.”

  If he was shocked by my lack of social grace or at all uneasy with the cop-stop coffee shop, he didn’t show it. He wasn’t here to make small talk, and I was betting he wanted to get whatever it was off his chest as soon as possible.

  “That person who died on the airplane? I think I know something about it.” I kept quiet. There was really nothing to say, and I couldn’t imagine where he was going from here. “I didn’t know him, not personally, but I know about people like him.” He got the sex right, and he sure as hell didn’t get that from the papers. They didn’t know. In fact, the newspapers and television stations had already lost interest. The captivating idea of heroin-filled breast implants was worthy of a single news cycle. No one really cared about swallowed, sewn, or inserted drugs. It was old news. Images of breast implants bought the story a few salacious minutes.

  Farzan held his chin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and rubbed it, seemingly lost in thought. “One doesn’t know where to begin.” As if to emphasize his confusion, he paused for several seconds. The moment tingled with expectation, and the din of the coffee shop vanished as I waited for him to continue. I felt like I was in a movie. He was definitely working me, and I was ready not to like him. Still, there weren’t many upper-crust British Persians in my life, and maybe his way about things was just different, so I waited. He drew his lips back a bit as if to smile, and for some reason I focused on his large, very white teeth. There seemed to be too many for his mouth. His style of handsome was the sort that comes with centuries of good breeding.

  “These people, the Asians . . . like your person from the plane . . . they are mostly Filipinos and Indonesians working in Saudi Arabia. We see some of them in the clinic. They come to the Saudis and Kuwaitis from advertisements and agencies, by the thousands. They come to earn money for families at home. They hire out as domestics, but there are construction and driving jobs as well. They take any work that the spoiled, oil-rich Bedouins don’t want to do themselves. In Saudi Arabia these people earn perhaps seven–eight hundred riyals per month . . . less than a hundred and forty
euros. There is nothing to save or send home, and to add insult to injury they are treated like cattle. Kuwaiti labor laws do not apply to foreign workers, and they are routinely abused. It is every bit as bad, perhaps worse, among the pious Saudis. Human rights groups have begun advertising campaigns quoting the words of the Prophet Mohammed, ‘He who has no mercy will not receive any.’ It is a very bad situation for these unfortunate people.”

  I didn’t want to interrupt Farzan. He was on a roll, but I didn’t know where he was heading. I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture on human-rights infringement in the Middle East.

  “How does the person from the plane fit into this?” I asked, trying not to show my impatience.

  “He may have been one of them.”

  “Why in the world would you jump to that conclusion? These are poor people. They can’t afford plastic surgery. They can barely afford to eat, and they . . .”

  Farzan held up a hand. “A moment, Wendell, if you please, I am getting to the point.” I stopped talking and slouched against the plastic back of the booth, feeling a bit like a chastened child. “Some of these unfortunate people are homosexual, a few are transsexual or wish for surgical gender change, just as in Western society. In fact, Muslim societies have always been tolerant of homosexuality.” I started to interrupt, but Farzan headed me off at the pass. “Sodomy . . . homosexuality, these are capital offenses, but not if you look the other way. In my country, my old country, there is a thriving gay community. Our Daneshju Park is the Tehran version of the Brambles in Central Park. Gay men meet for sex and no one interferes. Even our wonderful Basij, the morality police of the Islamic revolution, look the other way. In Tehran and Riyadh it is easier for a gay couple to meet for sex than for unmarried heterosexuals. That is the way it is, whatever the law. Like any other group, a small percentage of the Asian servants are homosexual and a smaller subset have gender issues. It is not very difficult to identify them. They will do almost anything to find their surgical release from the bonds of gender misidentification. Do you see where I’m going now?” I nodded. “A lot of this surgery is performed in Thailand, but with menial work and no way to pay for the multiple procedures, they become desperate. Enter the drug traffickers. To gain control of these workers, they are known to use both threat of exposure . . . punishment by death is a heavy threat among the unsophisticated, and then dangling the carrot of gender-altering surgery. Your man fits into the pattern.”