to the recipient that has been verified by the doctors who will do the transplant. The donor is always healthy and will recover; meanwhile his kidney will move along a well-traveled chain where everyone steps on the price until it gets to the hospital and goes into a rich American or Saudi, or someone who can afford it but cannot afford to wait.’
‘Come on, you’re not telling me it’s this well known and he’s out there today operating like this, and at the same time collecting aid money for his clinics.’
‘He absolutely is and I became part of his Indonesia operation for a few months during the nineties. That’s when he did my nails for me. I offered my services to get inside his operation. I had medical training and I told him I didn’t have many scruples. That’s the magic combination. I was in the operating room at the compound at least a dozen times as a surgical nurse, assisting as a young man’s healthy kidney was removed. I watched the liver removed from a very fit young man I’d been joking with an hour before, a young man who thought he was just selling one kidney so that his mother could get a needed operation. They sewed him up, helicoptered him to a remote area of the jungle and shoved him out.’
‘Were you in the helicopter when the kid got pushed out?’
‘I was. I watched him fall. Without a liver he was dead anyway.’
‘So it didn’t matter.’
‘Of course, it mattered.’
She stared hard at him.
‘Huarang is just one dealer in one country. There are many people who need organ transplants. There are Americans routinely getting transplants outside the United States for the simple reason that it’s more affordable elsewhere and, guess what, sometimes organs are more abundant and cheaper. Who knew?
‘Huarang was probably trying to sell my organs when I escaped. When he destroyed my fingernails he did it because one of his men had found a video camera among my things and I was on tape talking about what I’d witnessed. I’d shot the operating room and the helicopter taking off from the pad in the jungle clearing on its way to make a delivery.
‘Huarang said, “You beautiful woman, so I give you a choice.” He pointed at one of the two goons who’d brought me in and said, “Either he’ll dig your right eye out of its socket and fill the hole with gauze or we take your fingernails.” They tied me to a chair and he tore my nails off one by one with pliers, the first one fast, I think to shock my system, and then more slowly. He said he would stop after I told him the truth about why I was there, and when I did, he didn’t stop, and at some point I passed out. When I came to they were washing my hands with alcohol and he was washing his in a sink. They say you don’t remember severe pain, but they’re wrong.’
‘Did you go to the police?’
‘No, you go to the US embassy and try through them. Huarang pays off the local police and ultimately it was a local matter. The police chief went out and questioned Huarang. I heard he stayed for dinner and I was advised later by the State Department not to pursue it further.’
She told Raveneau other stories, and created the impression that she wanted to convey her bravery and foolish boldness and undaunted willingness to take risks for her fellow human beings.
‘I often dream of that boy falling from the helicopter. Sometimes I see myself jumping after him. Maybe it’s guilt that I didn’t save him. I remember looking down and he was just above the canopy of the trees, and then he vanished. I remember thinking that the animals would eat him, and as he went through that canopy of forest he just vanished from earth as though he’d never existed.’
She rested one of her hands on the tablecloth, turned the misshapen nails of her right hand so they couldn’t be ignored.
‘I could have plastic surgery, but I keep them this way so I don’t forget. I had a lot of anger, depression, sleeplessness, I couldn’t focus for a long time, and then I saw where I could make a difference.’
She had told this story many times before. That was obvious.
‘How did you know the identity you got from Alex wasn’t stolen?’
‘I knew her well enough.’
‘Everyone we talk to says she was a thief