“Your concerns are utterly without foundation,” Bittler said.
Claudia sat back in her chair and glared at him across the expanse of his desk. The man had always been arrogant, often insufferably so, but this newfound conviction in his own infallibility was a dangerous development.
“I’m only suggesting that we proceed-”
He didn’t let her get any further than that.
“You’re not suggesting that we proceed at all. You’re sug-gesting that we do exactly the opposite. And that, my dear Claudia, is an excess of caution.”
“With respect,” she said, her tone belying her words, “until the whole business with Tanaka blows over, I strongly advise that we-”
“If Tanaka had told anyone about our arrangement, his colleagues would have been at our throats by now.”
“I give you that. But what if someone else delves into Tanaka’’s recent investigations and comes to the same con-clusions as he did?”
“Impossible. He destroyed all the records.”
“He told you he destroyed all the records. The man was a blackmailer, for God’s sake. Do you think you can take the word of a man like that at face value? How about that swine, Ribeiro? Didn’t he tell you he’d destroyed that family’s furni-ture? Let’s kill him. Kill him now.”
“In good time, Claudia. Not now. Now, we need him.”
“We only need him if you persist in implementing this scheme of yours. He’s dangerous. Your plan is dangerous. That anthropologist is dangerous.”
“No no no, you have it all wrong. Can’t you see that using Oliveira will lead to less risk, not more?”
She crossed her arms, raised an eyebrow, and stared at him.
“You have no need to worry about Oliveira,” he said irri-tably. “He’s firmly within our camp.”
“That may be true at the moment. But what about after we’ve saved his brat? What then?”
“After we’ve saved his brat, Oliviera will have become our accomplice. If he opens his mouth to the authorities, he’ll have as much to lose as we do. Then, we’ll start offering him financial incentives. Soon, we’ll have him in a position where he’ll be supplying us with untraceable organs forever.
Some people aren’t moved by money.”
“In all my life, Claudia, I’ve only known one man who wasn’t.”
“And who was that?”
“The man whose picture is on the mantelpiece over there.
You’ve promised to tell me about him someday.”
“And someday I will. Not now. Do you want to hear the details of my plan or not?”
“Of course I do. It’s my career, my future that you’re play-ing with.”
“I’m not playing. Stop being petulant.”
“Petulant? Me?”
“And spare me your sarcasm.”
Bittler took out a handkerchief and started polishing his glasses.
“Tell me,” she said.
Bittler smiled and sat up straighter in his chair. He loved to talk, loved to impress people with his brilliance.
Claudia, on the other hand, wasn’t much for talk, never had been, not even as a little girl, not even before the accident.
The funeral seven-year-old Claudia Andrade’s parents had planned to attend was that of her maternal grand-mother.
En route, their car was broadsided by a truck. Both were killed. It drew newspaper headlines at the time, the irony of their being on the way to a funeral and winding up at their own.
Claudia’s brother, Omar, two years younger, was a mama’s boy, deemed too young to attend the double burial, so Claudia, the one who’d always avoided her mother’s embraces, was the one who got lifted up over the coffin.
“Kiss your mother good-bye,” her uncle Ugo told her.
Claudia did as she was told, dutifully pressing her lips against the dead woman’s cheek. Her mother’s flesh was cold. Claudia reacted by making spitting noises and rubbing her mouth. Everybody knew that Claudia was a strange little girl. They didn’t blame her. They blamed Ugo. He was the one responsible for causing a scene, and the Andrade family hated scenes.
Claudia’s next brush with death occurred two weeks before her thirteenth birthday. She’d been living, then, with her great-aunt Tamara and had been walking home from school.
Omar was running half a block ahead, his pencil case in one hand, constricting his penis with the other. He was des-perate to get to a bathroom before he peed in his pants. He crossed the street in front of the house, flung open the gate, and ran up the steps, ignoring the family dog, a little dachs-hund named Gretel.
The dog dashed out of the open gate and ran to greet Claudia.
Happy barks were cut off by a loud thump and a wail of pain. The car that struck her, a black Ford LTD with tinted windows, never slowed down. Whether the driver was a man or a woman would remain a mystery. The cops weren’t about to waste their time trying to hunt down someone who’d done a hit-and-run on a dog.
Gretel’s battered body came to rest in the gutter at Claudia’s feet. The dachshund was still alive-barely-bleeding from the mouth and panting for breath.
Claudia put a hand on the soft, reddish-brown fur. She could feel Gretel’s heart, fluttering, fluttering, and then, sud-denly, it stopped. Claudia shuddered. Her head began to spin. She sensed a shortness of breath, an increase in her heartbeat, a sharpening of her senses.
It was. . wonderful.
They buried Gretel in a corner of the backyard. Omar cried at the funeral and planted a cross of two sticks bound together with kite string. Claudia squeezed out a tear or two, more to make Omar feel guilty than from any sense of loss. Head down, hands over her eyes, she found herself thinking. . thinking.
Would they catch me if I killed the neighbor’s dog? How about our cat?
It was then and there, standing over that little mound of earth, that Claudia Andrade decided what she was going to do with her life: she was going to become a doctor. No one got closer to death than a doctor did. No one had a more continuous and intimate look into last moments.
And last moments, for thirteen-year-old Claudia Andrade, were profoundly exciting, more than boys, more than parties, more than clothes, more than jewelry, more than anything. She bought a box of razor blades and started experimenting with small creatures, seeing just how much she could lop off without causing immediate death. Sometimes she’d bind up the stump of a leg, or sew an incision after removing some-thing from inside one of the little bodies. She’d stuff cotton into their mouths and bind it in place with adhesive tape to stifle their screams. One time she cut into a pregnant guinea pig and the babies came pouring out, six in all, almost at term.
Almost wasn’t good enough. They were dead within a matter of minutes. All of her other subjects died, too, but few of them so quickly. One brown hamster with a white belly suffered the loss of all four legs, but kept eating and drinking, and lingered for eleven days.
Finding subjects to experiment upon wasn’t difficult. After the owner of the local pet shop started getting suspi-cious, and refused to sell her any more hamsters or guinea pigs, she’d hang around outside of supermarkets, looking for families who were giving away kittens, or she’d pick up small dogs on the street, luring them into the toolshed when her great-aunt was out shopping.
After sustaining a number of bites and scratches, she took to wearing heavy workman’s gloves to protect her from the animals’ teeth and claws. She kept them, and the instru-ments she called her “surgical tools,” under a pile of firewood stacked up against the back wall of the shed.
When it came to somewhat larger animals, and the cotton and adhesive tape didn’t keep the victims quiet enough, she started cutting out their tongues. And when that proved insufficient, she went to the library, got out a book on vet-erinary science and learned how to cut vocal cords. Fortunately, Tamara was more than a little hard of hearing. She only once happened upon her great-niece while she was at work, and that was when she came into the shed to look for a pair of gardening shears. Claudia was busy with a six-week-old kitten at the time.
She blocked what she was doing with her body, folded the razor she was using as a scalpel, slipped it into her pocket, and claimed she’d found the mutilated animal on the street. She was successful in convincing the old lady that she was attempting to save its life, mostly because Tamara didn’t want to believe otherwise.
Six years later, Claudia was cutting into her first corpse at medical school. Shortly after becoming a surgeon, she met Dr. Bittler. Their relationship had been going on for almost five years, and in that time Claudia had been content.
Her employer didn’t care how she harvested organs, and as long as she did it cleanly and efficiently, he left things like the choice (or even the use) of an anesthetic to her. They’d seldom had occasion for conflict.
Until now.
Bittler put his glasses back on his nose and began out-lining the details of his plan.
“Are you familiar with the FARC?” he asked.
“They’re a gang of Colombian rebels and drug lords trying to overthrow the legitimate government in Bogota. What have they got to do with anything?”
“Roberto has found us a pilot. This pilot has his own air-craft and makes his living by supplying the rebels with arms. They pay him in cocaine. He brings it back here and sells it to the major drug dealers. According to Roberto, the man sells himself extremely cheaply and has no morals at all.”
“Two peas from the same pod, eh?”
“Exactly. Now, this pilot, whose name is Manolo Something, and Roberto, will fly into the airstrip at Posto Leonardo, the administrative center for the Xingu reservation. The pilot will be posing as a reporter and Roberto as his photographer. The two of them will ostensibly be preparing an article for the Estado de Sao Paulo on the tribes of the Xingu.”
“No one will believe that idiot Roberto is a photog-”
“I agree. No one will. But no one except Oliveira is going to have any contact with him. All flights into or out of the Xingu reservation have to be authorized by an official of the FUNAI. Oliveira has that power. He’ll meet the aircraft and immediately guide Ribeiro into the forest.”
“And then?”
“Oliveira claims there’s a river where the Indian women from various tribes come to bathe in the cool of the night. No warriors accompany them, but they bring their infants. Ribeiro waits for the right moment and-”
“When is all of this supposed to happen? The Oliveira boy’s heart-”
“-could give out at any time, I know. There is need for haste.”
“And how about the other Indians? The relatives of the children you’re planning to snatch? Doesn’t Oliveira expect them to kick up a fuss?”
“He believes they’ll blame another tribe. Apparently, it’s not uncommon to steal women and children. The Indians do it all the time when they feel their numbers are getting too small. More children and more women lead to more warriors, and more warriors lead to greater success in their little con-flicts. Anyway, that’s how Oliveira explained it.”
“And suppose they don’t blame another tribe? Suppose they play by white men’s rules and file a complaint with the authorities? What then?”
“I asked the same question. Oliveira says he’ll promise them an investigation and then destroy the paperwork. He’ll also say, if anyone asks, that the journalist and the photogra-pher couldn’t have had anything to do with it. He’ll swear he was with them all the time.”
“What happens if they’re seen boarding the aircraft with the infants?”
“Oliveira will accompany them back to Sao Paulo. If they happen to be spotted, he’ll claim the children have been exposed to a contagious disease, one that Roberto was suf-fering from, but failed to inform him about. He’ll say he has to take the children for urgent medical treatment. Then he’ll hold them for a week, return them, and try again.”
“By which time it might be too late for his son.”
“True. But it’s unlikely that anyone will see them. They’re bringing lights to illuminate the runway, and they’ll take off in the dead of night.”
“And no one will find that suspicious?”
Bittler smiled a smile so superior that Claudia wanted to lash out and slap him across the face. “Newspapers have deadlines. They wait for no man. Such is the life of journal-ists and photographers.”
“What happens if we don’t have compatibility between Oliveira’s son and one of the infants?”
“Bad luck for the Oliveira family, but not a problem for us. As a matter of fact, I rather hope we don’t get a suitable heart on the first try. Then we’ll have to go back again and maybe again. The more Indians we take in the first round, the bet-ter, the more committed Oliveira becomes. You see? I’ve thought of everything.”