it, too.”
“You got a name for this character?”
“I got one, but I don’t know whether it’s his or not. He introduced himself as Roberto Ribeiro.”
Roberto Ribeiro watched Arnaldo stuff the cell phone back into his sock. Then he fished his own phone out of his pocket and called Claudia.
“Filho da puta has a cell phone with him,” he said, “one of those ultrathin numbers. He’s carrying it in his sock.”
“Has he used it?”
“Just now.”
“Where the hell did he get a phone?” she said, sounding particularly bitchy, like it was his fault that the guy had a phone.
“How the fuck should I know?” he said, irritated. “I just picked him up.”
“Who did he call?”
“What am I, psychic? I couldn’t hear a word he said. There’s no microphone back there, just the TV camera.”
“Why didn’t you take it away from him?”
“No place to stop. I can only get in there through the rear doors.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. God knows who he was talking to. As soon as you get back here, give that Argentinian at the travel agency a call and tell him to lie low for a while.”
“Hey, I think you’re overreacting. This guy-”
“I don’t give a damn what you think. Just do what you’re told. What’s he doing now?”
Ribeiro looked down at the little black-and-white moni-tor suspended under the dashboard.
“Eating the sandwiches. And, yup, there he goes, pouring himself a drink of the lemonade. He’s a big one. Gonna be a lot of dead weight. I’m gonna need help to unload him.”
Chapter Thirty-one
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
“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.”
