9
I
t was my turn to pick Eden up the next morning. I hadn’t slept. My night had been filled with steel toolboxes, with scalpels and needles. The junkie had yelled at me all night.
I just reached down and broke it. I just reached down and broke it.
The kind of desperation that would cause a man to break his own bones. I knew that as I slept. More than once I woke sweating and listened to a storm rolling overhead. It had been a while since a case had touched me like this.
I pulled up in front of Eden’s apartment block. It was a nondescript redbrick place that might have been one of those ultra-trendy reclaimed and fitted-out factories. I could see through round windows on the wide street that all the top floors had lofts, and all the beams inside looked exposed. The old loading dock on the ground floor had been turned into a tiny café with only stools to sit on and everything written in chalk. Eden peered out at me briefly from a set of balcony doors on the third floor. I raised a hand in hello but she didn’t answer. It was while I was searching the emptiness behind her that I noticed the painting on her wall. I lifted my eyes to the circular window above her and spied a couple more paintings and something covered in a paint-stained sheet. A grin spread over my face.
Finally, one of her secrets.
She opened the apartment door and jolted as she saw me standing there. She had a short black military-style jacket on over a black blouse, tailored jeans that hugged everything. She swept her long hair off her shoulders briskly.
“You didn’t have to come up, Frank.”
“Show me your studio.” I smiled.
Eden froze, giving me one of those brief obligatory looks in the eye.
“I don’t . . .”
“Come on, Eden. I can see it from the street. Share this secret with me and I promise you one in return.”
“Frank.” She lifted her shoulders as she breathed, let them drop. “Don’t.”
“I’m not backing down.” I folded my arms. “I’ll stand here all morning.”
Something flitted across her face. Rage. Shame. I’d caught her naked fantasies laid bare and I wasn’t letting it go. She covered her emotion with one of her crooked smiles and a roll of her eyes. I didn’t care. If this was what it was going to take to know something, anything, about her, then I was willing to force her a little.
Despite the run-down exterior, the apartment was large and modern. Polished hardwood floors met vast white walls where she had hung a great number of paintings, giving each the appropriate light and space to allow it a world of its own. Some of the factory’s original structures—strips of iron and bolts up the walls—had been left and painted over. A black leather lounge set hugged a huge plasma television set against one corner. Bloodred curtains hung against the balcony doors.
“Wow.”
She sighed and tried to figure out what to do with her hands as she stood impatiently by the door. I hesitated before heading for the twisting iron stairwell to the loft floor. There was too much to see. The paintings on the walls were like little universes, cut off and independent from each other. All of them in dark thick oils and pigments, hollow faces obscured by dream. A burning farmhouse. A man standing on a seaward-facing cliff. A small girl playing with a black stuffed toy dog in a room with bloody walls.
“How could you not tell me about this?” I scoffed.
“You’re not into art, are you? Art is a very personal thing.”
I tentatively touched the base of a polished wooden statue, two naked warriors caught in battle. One was strangling the other, trying to drive a blade into his ribs. I climbed the stairs to the studio. Gold Spanish horses rearing, their necks twisting, teeth bared. One wall was black and covered in brush marks and smears where Eden scuffed her brushes clean as she worked. The effect was a colorful vortex swirling in on itself. I examined the paintings silently, feeling I wouldn’t have enough time to appreciate them all. A stocky, thickly built man welding a piece of iron, live sparks hitting his shoulders and neck, spraying into the air. A thin black-haired teenage boy staring at a mirror, reaching out. Some of the paintings were of seemingly ordinary things but they each had a menacing quality to them, like a snapshot of a moment about to go horribly wrong. I wandered over to the sculpture I had seen from the window. It dwarfed me by at least half a meter on its steel frame. Eden stood by the stairs, folding and unfolding her arms. She strode forward, grabbing the speckled sheet and tearing it down from around the piece of work.
Again, two men. Smooth, impossibly black marble. One was pinned on his back, his legs and arms curled in defense, muscular feet and ankles anatomically perfect, grinding at the body of the other man. The warrior with the upper hand had the man on the ground by his throat, the other arm raised, a long sword hovering ominously in the air above the victim’s face. I looked at the victim’s chiselled cheekbones and howling lips. I bent and peered into his mouth, noting teeth shaped expertly from the marble.
“Where did you get this?”
“Italy. It comes in a series of large blocks.” Eden’s face seemed to flush a little with pride as she illustrated with her hands. “It weighed about half a ton originally. I had to get an engineer to tell me if the floor would hold it.”
The warrior’s lips were drawn back over his teeth in a snarl. Both men were naked. My fingers, with a will of their own, ran down the sculpted abdomen, wanting to know the ripple of the marble.
“What’s it called?”
Eden paused, studying the sculpture. I waited.
“
Vengeance
,” she admitted.
Without knowing why, I felt a little afraid in her presence at that moment. I got this strange feeling that every painting in the house, every sculpture, every bar of color and stroke of darkness were connected. They all meant something and Eden was nervous that I was wandering around in one giant temple dedicated to that thing. She was worried that I would
get it
. I didn’t get it, not then. But I wanted to. There was fear and yet there was a longing. I wanted to understand her and I knew I’d have a fight on my hands.
“You’re incredibly talented.”
“Can we go now?”
“Yes, we can go now.” I turned and headed down the stairs ahead of her. Color flashed in her cheeks. Tangible relief.
“I won’t forget the secret I owe you,” I told her as she closed and locked the front door.
“Yeah? Well, it better be a fucking big one,” she said.
Dr. Claude Rassi’s office was on the sixteenth floor of a building on Darlinghurst Road, a few blocks down from St. Vincent’s Hospital. It was a short stroll up the road to the convict barracks, then on to Hyde Park, laden with bug-eyed ibises and the homeless, coffee vans and lawyers on lunch breaks. I liked the idea of coming to work here every day. It seemed like a hive of activity, crisscrossed by angry motorists and cops on horseback.
From the look of his office interior, it was clear that Dr. Rassi hadn’t done much slicing and dicing in the past few years, aside from what he prepared for his dinner. There were four identical filing cabinets taking up one wall of the office and two other walls dominated by shelves of medical texts and journals. There were two stacks of papers on his large glass desk, one going in and one going out. Both were at least twenty centimeters high.
A floor-to-ceiling window gave the feeling of being able to walk right through the office and off the side of the building. I stood at the glass and looked down at the people on the street, enjoying the weightlessness.
“I haven’t got long, I’m sorry,” Rassi began, taking the huge wingback chair behind the desk. “I’m actually leaving the country this afternoon to consult at a seminar in India.”
“We shouldn’t take up much of your time,” Eden said. “We just want a brief rundown of the whole system.”
A stunning young woman clopped in on stilettos, all glossy hair and straining muscle, and set a mug of black coffee in front of the doctor. Eden ordered a white tea and I waved my refusal. The woman smirked at me with wet red lips and left. I felt like I’d just been slapped.
“My understanding from our phone conversation is that you’ve got a vigilante surgeon doing organ transplants?” Rassi said, raising his eyebrows. Put like that, even I found it hard to believe. I nodded anyway. He shook his head.
“From what I saw on the news so far, it’s a fairly large-scale operation.”
“We’ve recovered twenty bodies.”
“The first thing I have to tell you is that you’re probably going to find more,” Rassi sighed, rubbing his eyes. “Something this . . .
primitive
would take a few goes to get perfect. Even with extensive training, adapting the transplant process into a one-man, garden-shed job is a significant medical feat. It’s not something I would try, even with my background.”
He waved at a series of framed certificates hanging on the wall. I looked them over and tried to make a suitably impressed face, something like a slow nod with my bottom lip poked out.
“So how can I begin to help you?” Rassi shrugged. “Organ donation rates are always a heartbreaker. There are around seventeen hundred people on the list at any one time and last year less than half the demand for organs was met. Things are getting better but they’re never satisfactory. A lot of factors influence such an unmet need. People have misconceptions about organ donation. People think it’s against their religion, that they’re somehow cheating what their god intended. But that’s just a load of codswallop. Few scriptures mention it simply because it just wasn’t conceivable.”
“What else stops people from donating?” Eden asked, her pen hovering over her notebook.
Rassi smirked bitterly, as though recalling a personal insult.
“There are plenty of myths and legends. A common story, which always happens to friends of friends, is the doctor failing to resuscitate car crash victims because their driver’s license shows they’re a donor. Harvesting without familial consent is another one. In optimum cases you can use a donor body to save up to ten lives and people are scared by the idea of a doctor sacrificing them to up his survival rates. The general impression that
someone else will do it
or
I’ll never need one
dominates people’s perception. There’s also a sort of ickiness that people don’t like about the concept of one person’s organ living and thriving in the body of another. It’s seen as unnatural. Particularly when you get into animal-to-human transplanting.”
Eden nodded as she wrote. I was beginning to feel the ickiness that the doctor spoke about looking around at the artistic diagrams on the walls, the ancient oil paintings of primitive organ surgery. In one, a tall man stood astride the body of a young man held down by several nurses, a long saw in his fist. In another, a corpse lay beside the body of a living patient, grey in the face, while black-cloaked figures discussed their plan of attack.
“How long would a patient expect to be on the organ recipient waiting list?” I asked.
“Anywhere between six months and four years. Most of our organs are recovered from cerebral vascular accidents—blocked blood vessels in the brain, strokes and the like.”
“What’s the actual process of organ transplant?” Eden asked. “You mentioned that it would be difficult, near-impossible, as a one-man job.”
The doctor drew a breath and puffed out his cheeks.
“It’s possible but it would be difficult, yes. Heart transplants, for example, are a five-hour procedure with a team of six. A person doing this alone in a chop shop, as they’re commonly called, could get by with a heart and lung machine, a monitoring system, a defibrillator and a hell of a lot of drugs. It would be risky. Things would be made easier for the survivable transplants by the fact that only one of the patients has to survive. Like I said, I think the man you’re looking for probably tried and failed a number of times before he got the technique right.”
“So it’s possible we’ve got recipients as well as donors in our body pile,” I told Eden. She looked downtrodden.
“What kind of drugs are we searching for here?”
“Anticoagulants, antiseptics, sedatives, anesthetics. Adrenaline. The real money shots would be the anti-rejection drugs. Various immunosuppressants. They’re not easy to get, even on the black market. A patient’s critical stage is just after the transplant operation, when the body fights the foreign organ because of the unfamiliar DNA. The anti-rejection drugs stop this process. Organ transplant recipients need to be on a program of anti-rejection medication for the rest of their lives.”
“We’ll need a list of the most common anti-rejection drugs and their manufacturers.”
“I’ll have my secretary print you one out.”
“Can you speculate about the sort of prices a recipient would be looking at?”
Again, Rassi shrugged.
“He could charge whatever he liked. Transplant tourism is rampant in China, encouraged by their lax medical consent laws and Mao’s barefoot doctor program. There are places in provincial China where you can get a kidney for ten grand Australian, but you run the risk of unskilled surgeons, money scams and disease. A well-organized, confident and discreet surgeon, operating out of your home country, with a record of success—forged or legitimate—could charge upwards of eighty grand.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“How do you put a price on life, Detective?” Rassi eyed me curiously. “If you had the money, would you play your hand on the waiting list?”
I didn’t answer.
We spoke for an hour or so, going back over the process of transplantation, the necessary materials and skills. It seemed to me, as I sat quietly calculating in my leather armchair, that the killer had outlaid a million or more on his setup costs alone. The profits of the business were mild in comparison, but unlimited. Rassi provided documented cases of transplant tourism operating in China, the Philippines and Pakistan. There was no reason, he concluded, that our killer could not be going global with his business. There was no reason why he wasn’t conducting a transplant operation every couple of weeks.