The Organ Broker

by Stu Strumwasser

  “Well, good days and bad, Jack,” she said cheerfully although a little less energetically.

  “Have a great Christmas with your family.”

  “You as well, Jack St. Peter. Merry Christmas to your family.”

  Why did she do that? Why did she invite me to have dinner with them, as if we were friends somehow? That was the very first follow-up call I made and it got me a Christmas dinner invitation. After that they rarely went all that well. They were usually short and awkward conversations with former clients who mostly seemed to resent me for having saved their lives. I didn’t care. They were saved. I had saved them despite their resentment. Sometimes there were brief, disjointed talks with relatives who explained that I was calling a dead man, but even the dead ones had at least been given a chance. Connie Laughlin had no chance without Jack St. Peter. She’d be a statistic. Did her husband get that? Did he think an aging Irish woman from Red Hook who was a secretary at a restaurant supply wholesaler was getting a kidney and a liver from the God Committee at a local hospital? I should have gone there and eaten all of his fucking fried chicken.

  If I hadn’t started that shit in 2004, maybe I wouldn’t have turned it into an annual tradition, maybe I never would have called Marlene Brown, never started on this path. It was that damned funeral. Why had the priest spoken about her operation? About the money? Why did it make me think about my own father? Why the hell did I ever drive to New Hope, Pennsylvania? If I’d just gone to Tucson maybe I wouldn’t have ended up on the phone that day and life would have just gone on uninterrupted.

  ◆

  In the early days of my business, when I traveled the world, before every trip I surveyed the books and maps and travel guides and located the few decent golf courses in those mostly destitute lands. I played at River Club, Glendower, and Durban in South Africa. For a brief time I was practically a member at Leopard Creek, far from the city and close to Kruger Park, but also one of the best courses in the world. I’ve enjoyed Bangpoo and Best Ocean in Bangkok, and Caxanga in Recife, Brazil, with its flat landscape and beautiful ponds, an oasis of security within the chaos that sometimes surrounds it in that economically splintered city. I’ve played all of those courses with doctors and businesspeople who ran hospitals. I played with local leeches and they all smiled eagerly at my explanations of the clients I could bring them.

  It was the winter of 2005. In New York we were still suffering through the midwinter gray and chill of February. I had been working for years with some people at the Royston Clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa and I had a meeting there with my main contact, Dr. Mel Wolff. Wolff had recently been named the head of the Royston Transplant Center, an important division of the hospital. Mel had always seemed particularly entrepreneurial and since he had taken over we had been talking about getting together. There were ways we could expand our business relationship, he explained.

  Despite the fact that I knew him for a few years, I vetted him all over again. I checked him up and down. He had been a doctor and in the hospital business all his life. He was twice divorced—also a good sign. That made a man more likely to be easily influenced by money. I waited nearly a year before taking him up on the invitation. By the time I went to see him, I was certain he was just trying to make money, not being secretly righteous.

  In Joburg it was summer and felt hot the minute I stepped off the plane. After about ninety minutes getting through baggage claim and customs, I entered the terminal and saw a young black man in a black suit holding up a sign that said, “Jack Campbell.”

  “I’m Jack,” I said as I approached him.

  He smiled broadly. “Okay, let’s go, Mr. Campbell. Royston Clinic sends me to get you and take you,” he explained, reaching out to relieve me of my bags.

  “I’ll hold on to this,” I said referring to my shoulder bag; in it were a couple of hollowed-out books holding neatly arranged stacks of American dollars, fifty grand or so. The X-ray on the baggage check read it as interior pages of the books. I was stockpiling a little American cash at a safe-deposit box in Joburg.

  We walked to the car without speaking much. He said, “Dr. Wolff said to take good care of you.”

  “Thank you.”

  He opened the door for me, let me in, closed the door behind me and got into the driver’s seat. It was a white Mercedes. I sat in the back, wishing I had just taken a cab.

  “The Michelangelo, yes, Mr. Campbell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” he replied, still smiling in the rearview mirror.

  I had booked a room at the Michelangelo in Sandton because Wolff and I were to play River Club in the morning, right nearby. He had someone he wanted me to meet. It sounded like a local finder or some sort of go-between with the local population. My plan was to talk with Wolff, try not to play too exceedingly well, and then charter a plane to Leopard Creek and stay there for a few days and play by myself, leaving another day or two for game rides. Leopard Creek sits right at the foot of Kruger National Park, one of the better places in the world to see lions in the wild and not get eaten. On the third hole at Leopard Creek I have actually scored a hole-in-one.

  When I arrived at the bar at the clubhouse, Dr. Wolff was already seated next to a younger white man. Wolff was wearing beige slacks and socks and white shoes and a crisp and tailored-looking white dress shirt. More appropriate, I thought, for Capetown, or a rerun of “Miami Vice,” but I guessed that it was the guy’s day off.

  “Hier kom hy,” Wolff said to the man, then added, “New York Jack,” He motioned toward the other man. “Pierre Kleinhans.”

  “Hello,” Pierre said, standing slightly by placing his feet to the floor but never really lifting his ass from the barstool. He shook my hand firmly. That was the first time we met.

  “Afrikaans?” I asked, referring to the language.

  “I’m from Pretoria,” Pierre said. “Dr. Wolff explains that you are from New York?”

  “That’s right.”

  Pierre looked fine but not trustworthy. His hair seemed matted down a bit by sweat. I didn’t find him appealing on a personal level but that didn’t preclude him being a good finder. In fact, it might have been a positive characteristic as far as that specific job description might go.

  “Gee hom ‘’n dop,” Wolff said to Pierre. I didn’t understand him, but it sounded like an instruction, and when Pierre left to fetch my drink, the dynamic of their relationship was rather clear.

  “I don’t speak any Afrikaans,” I said to Wolff bluntly, but politely.

  “I apologize, Jack. Just habit. I ordered you a Scotch.”

  “Thank you.”

  Pierre returned with my drink and pulled a barstool around so the three of us could sit in a triangle, facing each other. The clubhouse was nearly empty, not that it mattered much.

  “Jack, I have explained to Pierre how you help people in the States. How you and I have worked together over the years. Now that I am running the transplant center at Royston I would like to help a lot more people in need of that type of care, and I think you know that we run a world-class facility.”

  “I do, Mel. I have always thought that of Royston.”

  He smiled sincerely. “Thank you, Jack. I appreciate that.”

  He extended his glass to mine and we clinked them. Pierre pushed his own glass forward and we both clinked his as well. I had a rocks glass nearly full of Scotch, one solitary cube floating in the amber pool. I took a big swallow. It was a very fine single malt. All the South African white guys shared my affinity for good Scotch.

  “So Pierre works with the hospital. He coordinates with the local population of donors, as a liaison, and helps to facilitate matching and proper tissue typing,” Wolff said, spewing euphamisms. A finder—I was right. He turned to Pierre and said, “Jy het dinge vir kliënte van Jack se reeds.”

  “Please, Doctor,” I said politely to Wolff, “English.”

  “I apologize again, my friend. I only told Pierre that he has already fou
nd things for clients of yours. I will try to maintain my speech in English. Bad form. Please forgive my rudeness.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “And now, gentlemen, with me running the entire transplant facility, couldn’t we work together and help a far greater number of patients coming to us from the States and Europe looking for the very best care?”

  “Jack,” Pierre began, his thick Germanic accent obtrusive against the South African version of English I was more used to. “Dr. Wolff says that you represent sick people who need organs. People who need lifesaving help and can afford to travel to a facility like Royston to get the best care, without fighting the bureaucracy in the States for years.”

  I didn’t reply. I watched his facial muscles. I listened to the tone of his voice.

  “With Dr. Wolff in charge now, it greatly expands the nature of what I can provide to those patients.”

  “Pierre,” I said quietly, trying to suggest with my own volume that he should lower his even more, “that’s already been the case, effectively, at Royston for years.”

  Wolff let go of a small chuckle, and then said, “But not like this. If we did a couple of transactions a month, that was good business. Now, I could do ten times that amount. And all the other things people need beyond kidneys. Pierre can get anything, almost any match, full MHC with multiple HLAs, all sorts of matching criteria for various other organs, not just kidneys, on a few days notice. Don’t underestimate the value of that, Jack.”

  His statement was weighty. Most people, if confronted with an opportunity to triple their business, would get very excited. Jack usually excuses himself to the bathroom and leaves town. But this was the business I knew. I knew this facility. I would be warm and safe and halfway around the globe when the transactions took place.

  “What about things that are hard to find?” I asked, looking directly at Pierre.

  “Nothing will be hard to find now,” he said offering up a smarmy smile that made me think of my old coke dealer friends. “There are so, so many of them here.”

  “Sellers?” I asked.

  “The poor,” he replied and laughed.

  That’s how things start sometimes.

  ◆

  Before I even got back to the States, I placed one call from Leopard Creek. I called Wallace.

  “Hello?”

  “Wallace, Jack.”

  “New York,” he said brightly. “I see you’re out of the country. Visiting friends?”

  “I am.”

  “Is that good for our team?” he asked jovially.

  “As a matter of fact, it is. Wallace, I just cut a deal that can make us a lot of money.”

  “What kind of deal, New York?” he said more quietly.

  “To source anything we need, on just a few days notice, for anyone able to travel and pay. Hard to find goods. I have no idea how long this might last, but my guy here was just put in charge of the transplant center and seems anxious to make money. We should leverage the opportunity while we can.”

  “I like the way that sounds, Jack,” Wallace replied. “Let me know when you get home. Safe travels.”

  ◆

  That was early in 2005, over six years ago. The wait on the legit lists for kidneys was about four or five years by then. How about that for a growing industry? It is so many kidneys ago, so many trips to Jozi and Tucson ago, and more than one Jack ago. It always is. Back in 2005, when Pierre said they could get anything, he meant “any kidney from a living donor and any harder match from a cadaver donor.” Now, in 2011, when Pierre smiles and quietly says that he can get us anything, he means it literally.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  CHRISTMASES

  After talking with Connie Laughlin in 2004 I made follow-up calls every December. Those calls became my holiday ritual; those former clients became my cousins and aunts and uncles. In December of 2009 Maria Thomsallei was my girlfriend and one Saturday afternoon she said, “You have to come to my parents’ house for Christmas dinner, Jack.”

  “Not a chance,” from subtle Jack.

  “My father personally said to invite you. He’d be offended if you didn’t come.”

  “What’s your father’s first name?”

  “Tony.”

  “No fucking way.”

  “It’s Anthony.”

  “No.”

  I eventually felt guilty and agreed to go to Long Island with her. As I had done several times in years past, I prepared myself to tell stories full of lies before tables of glassy-eyed younger brothers and cousins and parents who all desperately wanted to believe that I was something I am not. You sit at a man’s dinner table, holding his adult daughter’s hand, in front of a huge roasted turkey on a china serving platter, and you know that the poor guy can’t focus on anything other than, “Please dear Lord, thank you for this bounty we’re about to eat, but much more importantly, please don’t let this Jack guy turn out to be an abusive, lying prick. You know, like me, Lord. Please don’t let him turn out to be like me.” God apparently never did right by those guys. Every year I drove up to some family’s house in a new Jag or Lexus and told them tales about cases won, about courtroom drama and huge settlements wrestled from unethical insurance companies. They sat there and ate it up with their rice pudding while they daydreamed about their precious daughter ending up as my sidekick on a TV legal drama created about our lives. I rarely thought twice about it back then.

  Maria’s parents lived in Levittown—a middle-class enclave in Nassau County built one small, cookie-cutter structure after the other, right after World War II, to house returning soldiers. I was dreading dealing with her family and my back-story more than I normally did. That was still a full year before I went to Marlene Brown’s funeral but the sense of ennui, of being sick of it all, had already started to creep in on me.

  ◆

  I made more follow-up calls than usual that year and one of them was to a guy named Tom Walsh. Walsh was a kidney, and a pretty typical case. However, despite a strong profile and proper post-surgical treatment, he had some complications afterward. At one point it looked like sepsis; it briefly appeared that he might not even make it. That’s unusual for a buyer who’s in renal failure but otherwise reasonably healthy. I had worried about Walsh, but I was also always reluctant to follow up too soon for fear of giving the impression that I wanted to maintain an ongoing relationship.

  A woman’s voice answered the phone: “Hello?”

  “Hey, is Tom around?” I asked, trying to be as casual as possible, as familiar as possible, so as to suggest a sense of existing friendship.

  “Can I ask who’s calling?”

  “It’s Jack. Thanks.”

  “Okay.” Then it was quiet. In older households there is more silence settled in around things—not as much background noise or people talking, music, activity … Holding on the telephone was sometimes like a little vigil when I called the older ones. I would stand with my feet planted firmly and hold the receiver firmly, bracing myself. I occasionally reminded myself not to submit to the temptation to pace. You see, I had taken their money, but I also wanted them to be okay. And I didn’t want to feel responsible.

  A man cleared his throat. “Y’ello?”

  “Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tom Walsh?”

  “Can I help you?”

  “Hey there. Jack. Jack Campbell. Do you remember me?”

  Silence.

  “Tom?”

  “Yes. What? What, Jack?”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “It’s been a couple of years. Merry Christmas. I just—”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s been over three years now. I wanted to just say hi and see how you’re doing.”

  “During the holidays,” he said. “I’m fine. But you shouldn’t call me, Jack. I got a house full of people here. My grandkids are here.”

  “Yeah. Sorry. So everything’s okay?”

>   “I’m a lucky man,” he said very quietly.

  “Well, that’s what we like to hear, Tom.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, just wanted to check in—”

  “You said that,” he interjected flatly. “Jack, please don’t call here.”

  “Okay. Well, thanks.” The line clicked and went dead. “Have a great year,” I added.

  ◆

  Maria had four brothers. The oldest was named Anthony Jr. There was also a Peter and two much younger guys, one of whom was named Louie and one whose name I never got. She also had a sister named Rose. She had grandparents and nieces and nephews and a few cousins. It would be chaos, I imagined. Eventually the spotlight would fall on Jack and then the crowd would fall silent and I would be forced to recount some of the spectacular details of my imaginary law career. That year I just didn’t have the stomach for it. With each comment or question directed toward me by members of her family, Maria squeezed my hand tighter under the table and snuggled up closer to me until she was finally halfway off her chair and onto mine.

  At one point Tony Sr. said, “Shut up for a minute, shut up everyone, because we got a lawyer here and I want to ask his opinion.” They all more or less complied and shut up and he then directed his attention at me and asked, “Jack, what do you think? You think Giuliani could be President? Could he ever win?”

  “Oh, I really don’t know,” I said.

  “But couldn’t he do for the rest of the country what he did for New York? I mean, didn’t he clean up Times Square and straighten out the moulignons and kick Osama’s ass a little?”

  “The moulignons?” I responded.

  That cracked up a couple of Maria’s brothers, one of whom said, “The eggplants. The troublemaker blacks.” Maria threw a fake slap at him as if to suggest that he was being inappropriate and embarrassing her in front of me, but she did it for comedic effect.

  ◆

  In the car on the way back to the city Maria said, “I’m sorry, Jack. My brothers are a bunch of morons.”