The waiter arrived with two little glasses of sambuca, the surface burning with a blue flame, coffee beans floating on the top.
“Courtesy of the house,” he said.
When he was gone, Hector picked up Gilda’s glass by the stem and blew out the flame, and then did the same to his. He’d chosen the Due Cuochi Cucina, debatably the best Italian restaurant in Sao Paulo; he’d splurged on a ten-year-old bottle of Barolo; and here they were, talking about mur-der rather than whispering sweet nothings to each other. The evening was definitely going down as one of his most unusual dates.
“Of course, I could be wrong,” Gilda said, as she finished explaining her organ theft theory. “I wasn’t always a suspi-cious person, but I seem to be getting that way as I get older. Sylvie says I spend too much of my time with cops.”
“And she’s an expert?”
“She claims she doesn’t know any cops. But I know Sylvie. She’s looking.”
“I meant on transplants. Is she an expert on transplants?
Yes, she is.”
“I’ve seen experts proven wrong before. Tell me more about this whole transplant business. I recall reading about the guy who performed the first one-but he died awhile back.”
“Christiaan Barnard? The South African?”
“Yeah, him.”
“Barnard didn’t perform the first transplant. He performed the first heart transplant. And his patient died within a month. The first successful transplant was years before that, in Boston. The surgeon was Joseph Murray. Barnard didn’t come along until the late sixties.”
“So how come Barnard is famous and Murray isn’t?”
“Because Murray’s work didn’t capture the public’s imagi-nation the way Barnard’s did. Murray was working with iden-tical twins. What he transplanted was a kidney. Both brothers lived on for years, but what Murray did was only applicable to twins, so the procedure didn’t have much personal or emo-tional significance for the great majority of the population. Barnard, now, he did something entirely different. He took a heart, matched it for compatibility-blood type and so on- and got it to work in another human being totally unrelated to the donor. And it wasn’t heart failure that ultimately killed the recipient. It was something else, a lung infection as I recall. Am I talking too much?”
“Not at all. I’m fascinated. Go on.”
Gilda took a sip of her sambuca.
“Delicious,” she said. “Okay, it’s like this: the body’s im-mune system normally attacks foreign organisms, which is mostly good, as in the case of a virus or a bacterial infection. But in the case of an organ transplant, it’s a problem. The body wants to reject a new organ, tries to kill it.”
Hector picked up his own glass of sambuca and cautiously touched his lips to the rim. It was cool enough to sip, and he did, the liqueur sweet on his tongue.
“So to make a transplant work,” he said, “they had to find a way to get around the body’s natural response.”
“Uh-huh. And they did. They invented drugs that sup-press the immune system. The first was cyclosporine. It was a breakthrough.”
“But if you suppress the immune system-”
“You leave the body open to infection. Yes, that’s true. It’s a tricky thing, has to be carefully controlled. But when you consider the alternative. .”
“I take your point. Alright, so now we’ve got. . what did you call it?”
“Cyclosporine.”
“Cyclosporine-and transplants are possible. But does it always have to be a human organ? What about other sources, other animals?”
“That’s called xenotransplantation. Xeno from the Greek, meaning foreign.”
“Got it. Like xenophobia.”
“Exactly. Well, the name exists, but the procedure isn’t feasible yet and probably won’t be for decades, if ever. The same is true for genetically manufactured organs.”
Gilda took another sip and ran her tongue around her lips licking off the sticky sugar. Hector watched the tip of her tongue and felt a tingling in his groin.
“So what you’re saying,” he went on hurriedly, “is that the only source of human organs is other humans.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
Hector put down his glass and drummed his fingers on the linen tablecloth.
“Alright, let’s suppose for a moment that you’re right. Suppose somebody is killing people to steal their organs. It seems to me that people who’d be doing what you suggest would have two principal problems.”
“Yes,” she said, and counted them off on her index and mid-dle fingers. “Sourcing victims and disposing of their bodies.”
Hector raised an eyebrow. “You’ve thought this through, haven’t you?”
“If I was looking for people who I could make disappear without causing a stir,” she said, “I’d probably look in the favelas.”
Hector immediately thought of the Lisboas and their friends, the Portellas.
“Why the favelas?” he asked.
“No offense, but most of the cops I know, and I know a lot of them, don’t even want to stick their noses into such places, much less investigate complaints.”
“With good reason. The city administration doesn’t run the favelas, the drug gangs run the favelas. And drug gangs kill cops.”
“And drug gangs kill cops,” she agreed. “I know. Who do you think gets their bodies for autopsy? But that’s exactly my point, you see. Life in the favelas is cheap. Drug gangs kill cops, cops kill dealers, and lots of perfectly innocent people get caught in the crossfire. People die and disappear all the time. Favelas would be perfect hunting grounds for organ thieves.”
“Okay, suppose you’re right, suppose that’s what those graves were about. That brings up another question.”
“Which is?”
“You’ve established that none of the corpses were recently deceased. So why are the people who were killing them then not killing them now? Why should they kill thirty-seven men, women, and children and then simply stop?”
“Maybe they didn’t.”
“Stop you mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think we should be combing the Serra da Cantareira for more burial grounds?”
“Maybe. But even if there aren’t any, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the killer or killers suspended activities. They could simply be destroying the evidence.”
“Burning the corpses?”
“Dissolving them in acid might work, but it would be a long and messy process.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
“I know. Bizarre, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Burning the corpses. You know what? I’m warming to the idea.”
“Oh, please. Was that meant to be a joke?”
“Not funny, huh?”
She shook her head.
“If they’re medical people,” he said, “and they’re burning the corpses, would they use a crematory oven?”
“I doubt it. Have you ever seen one of those things?”
“No.”
“They’re called retorts and they burn at a little over eleven hundred degrees Celsius, which means they have to be heavily insulated and need a substantial chimney. They’re huge, costly to buy and install.”
“How do you happen to know all of that?”
“I had a namorado who used to install those things.”
“I don’t think I want to hear about it.”
“About what? The retorts or the boyfriend?”
“The boyfriend.”
“Good. I don’t like talking about him. He was a creep. They also have to be licensed, retorts that is, not boyfriends, although come to think of it, that might have been a good idea in his case.”
“A namorado’s license?”
“Uh-huh. To get the license you’d have to pass a test. There’d be sections on sensitivity, reliability, honesty, and all that kind of stuff. You’d have to show a girl your license before you asked her out. My ex would have failed on all counts, particularly the fidelity part, the canalha.”
“These retort things,” he said, as if the conversation hadn’t taken a detour, “if they didn’t have one, how would they go about cremating a body?”
“There are other devices, ovens designed for the disposal of medical waste. They don’t burn as hot as retorts, so the process would take a lot longer, but they’d do the job. The advantages would be that they’re much smaller, cheaper, and more common. They wouldn’t attract attention if they were installed in a clinic, and although they require licenses, the licensing procedure is much simpler. The downside is that adult bodies wouldn’t fit inside. They’d have to be dismem-bered before cremation, and once the burning is complete, the bones would still have to be reduced to powder. That’s not a problem. There’s a machine that crematories use for grinding bone. It’s commercially available and quite small.”
Hector sat back in his chair and looked at her.
“What a mind,” he said. “We could make a good team. Professionally, I mean.”
“Sure,” she said, “professionally.”
“And, professionally, would you suggest I start checking out all the clinics that have ovens for the disposal of medical waste?”
“No, I wouldn’t. You might get lucky, but I doubt it. Unless you catch them in the act, all you’re going to do is to put them on their guard.”
“Hmm. You have another suggestion about where we go from here?”
“Let’s just get together and see how it plays out.”
“It’s a deal. Tomorrow night?”
“Eight o’clock. My place. Do you cook?”
“Not well.”
“Okay. It will be spaghetti with a meat sauce and salad. You buy the wine.”
“Chilean? A Carmeniere?”
“Too heavy.”
“A Cabernet Sauvignon?”
“Fine.”
“Getting back to the case. .”
“How about this: transplants, legal or illegal, are the last stop, the end of the line. They’re what you do when the diagnosis is certain, when there’s no other way to save a patient’s life.”
“So?”
“So you go back to the beginning. The path leading to a transplant begins with someone getting sick, going to a doc-tor, and having tests or treatment done. When it’s a heart problem, there’s going to be a cardiocath, or a radioactive stress test, probably both.The gear to do that kind of stuff is expensive. Only major hospitals have it.”
“So we find people whose tests-”
“And/or treatments.”
“-and/or treatments indicate they wouldn’t survive with-out a heart transplant.”
“Yes. And you cross-reference to the waiting lists for heart recipients. Anybody who didn’t put themselves on the list must have had access to an alternative source. Anybody who did, and is no longer there, has gotten a legal organ, or died or-”
“Has gotten one illegally?”
“You catch on fast,” she said.