Li was startled. ‘What!’
She remembered reading something a couple of years ago. Some report on international traffic in organs. A task force who had found no proof of anything. And then there was David. That night in the
sushi
restaurant in Chicago. What was it he’d said?
They got this weird religion in Japan
.
Shinto
.
They have a pretty strange view of the sanctity of the dead body
. And something else … She fought to remember, and then suddenly it came to her. Because, of course, he was a cardiac consultant.
Last time a doctor over there performed a heart transplant was in nineteen sixty-eight, and he got charged with murder
. Then the name she’d been searching for came to her. ‘The Bellagio Task Force,’ she said. ‘That’s what they were called.’
‘Margaret, what are you talking about?’ The frustration in Li’s voice was clear.
‘Bear with me,’ she said, and she turned back to the computer and called up an Internet search engine to try to find what it was she was looking for. It only took a couple of minutes before she had the report up on the screen. T
HE
B
ELLAGIO
T
ASK
F
ORCE
R
EPORT
ON
T
RANSPLANTATION
, B
ODILY
I
NTEGRITY
,
AND
THE
I
NTERNATIONAL
T
RAFFIC
IN
O
RGANS
. She scrolled quickly through the pages, and then stopped suddenly. There it was. ‘Listen to this.’ And she read, ‘
Asian concepts of bodily integrity, the respect due elders, and objections to a standard of brain death, practically eliminate cadaveric organ donation in such countries as Japan. Despite an embrace of most medical technologies and deeply ingrained habits of gift-giving, transplantation from cadaveric sources is rare. Heart transplantation is not performed at all and the limited number of kidneys donated come from living related persons
.’ She turned to Li and Mei-Ling, wide-eyed, almost exultant. ‘You see? If you’re Japanese and you need a heart transplant or a new liver, or a kidney, the chances are you’re not going to get it in Japan. Even if you have all the money in the world. And you’re not going to get it in the States either, because there’s more than sixty thousand people in the queue ahead of you.’ She paused, considering for herself the implications of what she was saying. ‘So you’re going to die.’
Li was still toiling to take all this on board. ‘But why can they not get organs in Japan?’ he said. ‘Are they not one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world?’
‘And one of the most religious and superstitious,’ Margaret said. David’s words came back to her again. ‘Shinto,’ she said, and she turned and entered the words
Shinto
plus
Transplants
into the search engine. Within twenty seconds she was spoiled for choice. Dozens of documents came up. She picked one at random.
In Shinto, the dead body is considered to be impure and dangerous, and thus quite powerful
. She clicked on another.
In folk belief context, injuring a dead body is a serious crime
. And another.
It is difficult to obtain consent from bereaved families for organ donation, or dissection for medical education
,
or pathological anatomy … the Japanese regard them all in the sense of injuring a dead body
.
And in a moment of absolute clarity, she knew exactly what had happened, and why these women had become unwitting donors.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘The man is a monster.’ She turned to Li. ‘These women weren’t picked at random to have their organs stolen. They were exact matches for specific Japanese recipients with the money to pay for them.’
‘How would he know these women were exact matches?’ Li asked, puzzled by this sudden leap.
‘Because they’d all had abortions at his clinics,’ Margaret said. ‘Three hundred thousand women a year pass through his clinics. That’s one-and-a-half million since he started. And nothing would be easier than to tissue-type them when they came in for the procedure. He must have the most comprehensive list of organ donor matches in the world. Only, these women were never donors, they had their organs taken without consent. As soon as Cui had a client, some wealthy Japanese facing certain death, he could consult his files and find an exact match. They’d snatch the girl and take the organ.’ She stopped, as another revelation struck her. ‘That’s why they went after the girl in Beijing. Jack’s sister. Because her HLA DQ-alpha gene was almost unique in China. She must have been a rare, but perfect match for some Japanese. Only, she turned out to be a junkie and they killed her for nothing.’
She stood up and walked towards the window, hands clutching her head. Every nerve-end was tingling, every fibre of her straining to come to terms with her revelation. She saw her reflection in the window and thought she was staring at a mad woman. She spun round to face the others.
‘And do you know what’s really sick? The thing that I could never understand? They were keeping them alive to meet the needs of some Japanese religious or superstitious fear of violating the integrity of a dead body. It didn’t matter that they were killing a living person in the process.’ She threw back her head and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Jesus, life’s always so much cheaper, isn’t it?’ She lowered her head again and stared wild-eyed at Li and Mei-Ling. ‘Cui Feng was offering a unique service. Life-saving organs from a living body. Maybe one could be charitable and suggest that perhaps the recipients didn’t know that the donors were ultimately paying with their lives. But, then, you don’t take someone’s heart and expect that they’ll still be alive. Do you? Jesus …’ She leaned forward on the desk and shook her head, blinking back tears of shock.
There was a long silence. Li glanced towards the officers standing in the doorway. He was not sure how much they had understood, but they knew for sure that something dramatic was unfolding here. Mei-Ling sat down in the seat vacated by Margaret. She was a dreadful colour, and Li saw that her hands were trembling. He looked at Margaret again. ‘So why did Cui need to sell organs through the Internet if he had ready-made customers in Japan?’
Margaret looked up from the desk. She had been focusing very hard on the grain of the wood, trying not to think about what it was she knew. If she had been unhappy to know about her father’s predilection for pornography, she would never have wished to know this, could never have imagined it. She said, ‘Waste not, want not. Once Cui had fulfilled his contract to his Japanese customer, there was still a lot of money to be made by selling on the other organs.’ And having said it out loud, she realised just what a cold-blooded and mercenary operation Cui had been running here. If it was possible to conjure up an image of hell, this would be it. They might never know just how many poor women had been butchered in operating theatre number one, while some wealthy Japanese recipient lay anaesthetised on the table in the operating theatre through the wall waiting for one of their organs. A life for a life.
There was a loud beep from the computer and Margaret looked at the screen to see a message informing them that the connection had been terminated due to lack of network activity.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘There is no proof of any of this. Unless you can find the back-up copies of whatever files they kept on the computer.’
‘Or retrieve them from the hard disk,’ Li said.
Margaret nodded distractedly. She was thinking of Chai Rui and how she had died so completely in vain, and how that had led, ultimately, to Jack Geller’s murder. And she let her mind drift to the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who were dying needlessly because organs for transplant were so difficult to obtain, and how the fears and superstitions of potential donors had led to the appalling trade that had been conducted from this clinic. It all seemed like such a waste. She looked sadly at Li. ‘And it doesn’t bring us any closer to finding Xinxin,’ she said, and the pain in the pit of her stomach intensified with the thought.
Mei-Ling spoke for the first time in a long while. She still looked unwell, and stood up shakily as she spoke. ‘You said you thought the surgeon might be an American,’ she said to Margaret.
‘It’s a guess,’ Margaret said. ‘He might be Chinese, trained in America.’
Mei-Ling said to Li, ‘We should put checks on all points of departure. As soon as we get a list of employees we should know who we are looking for.’ Li nodded, and she said, ‘I’ll go back now and put things in motion.’
She hurried out, past the bemused officers standing in the corridor who had only the vaguest idea of what had gone on inside. In the silence of the administration office, all that could be heard were the hum of the fluorescent lights and the computer, and the rain on the window. Margaret looked into Li’s eyes and saw in them his fear for Xinxin, bleak and full of hopelessness.
III
Painted on three of the white panels of the high blue wall were toucans in flight, each one balancing two pint glasses of Guinness on its yellow beak. A haphazard jumble of bicycles was parked along the wall under the dripping trees. By the gate, a painted ship in a bottle stood over a sign for
O’Malley’s
. Margaret and Li huddled together under their umbrella, splashing through the gutters. They had left the investigating team to de-construct the clinic piece by piece. Dai had offered to drive them back to 803, but Li had said they would get a taxi. In Shanghai it was not possible to walk ten paces along any street without a taxi cruising by. But they were well off the beaten track, and on this wet Sunday night they had walked the length of two streets and seen only one sodden cyclist shrouded in a glistening cape. Li cursed himself for not having telephoned a taxi from the clinic.
Margaret said, ‘Let’s go in here.’
Li looked at the bizarre sight of the Guinness-balancing toucans and asked, ‘What is it?’
‘It says it’s an Irish pub,’ Margaret said. ‘Improbable though that might be. But they’re bound to have a phone.’
As Li pushed open the high blue gate, Margaret felt like Alice stepping through the looking glass into Wonderland. What greeted them on the other side of the wall could not have been imagined from the street. Here lay a beautifully kept garden, with manicured lawns and a crazy-paved path lined by trees. White-painted wrought-iron garden furniture stood dripping in the rain. Concealed lighting led them down the path past an old-fashioned road sign mounted on a black and white striped pole. In Gaelic and English, signs pointed in three different directions to Cork, Galway and Dublin. Apparently they were only nine miles from Dublin. Under a pitched roof raised on pale blue pillars there were more tables and chairs sheltering beneath redundant sun umbrellas splashed with the Irish harp of the Guinness logo. Above the entrance to a large, whitewashed house, a painted blue and gold sign incongruously announced O’MALLEY’S IRISH PUB. The covered courtyard was lit by coach lamps.
Margaret almost whispered, ‘What the hell is this place? Are we still in China?’
Li shook his head in amazement. He had never seen anything like it. ‘You would not think so,’ he said. After the revelations of the last hour, neither of them was prepared for dealing with this.
They walked inside to a gloomy interior hung with fishing nets and glass buoys. There was an open stone fireplace, old sea trunks, ancient glassed bookshelves lined with antiquarian books leaning at crazy angles. Above the bar a musket and a pair of ancient pistols flanked a sign that read: IRISH GOODS SOLD HERE. Around the central bar area, a railed gallery looked down upon them. Margaret felt as though she had either strayed through some kind of time warp, or walked on to a film set. The place was empty. It was still early. Not yet six o’clock. ‘Hello,’ Margaret called out.
A tall girl with long red hair and green eyes stepped out from a back room to greet them from behind the bar. To Margaret, after a week of blue-black hair and Asian faces, the girl seemed absurdly out of place. She smiled at them. ‘Hello there, folks, yer early tonight,’ she said in a lilting Southern Irish brogue.
‘Is there a telephone I can use?’ Li asked.
‘Sure. Just through the back there,’ she said, pointing. Li went off to phone, and the girl turned back to Margaret. ‘I’m Siobhan,’ she said. ‘You look like you might have a bit of Celtic blood in you.’
‘On my father’s side,’ Margaret said, and she thought how bizarre it was that the part of her father that she carried in her genes should somehow connect with an Irish girl in Shanghai.
‘American,’ the girl said. ‘You been here long?’ Margaret shook her head. She didn’t feel like indulging in idle conversation. The girl said, ‘I been here a month. It’s great. This is where all the ex-pats hang out, you know? Three hours from now the place’ll be jumpin’. It’s great crack.’ She paused, perhaps realising that Margaret was not interested in small talk. ‘You want a drink? Sure, yer man there looks like he could do with one.’
It wasn’t the girl’s fault. She was just trying to be friendly. She had no idea that just a couple of streets away dozens of women had been slaughtered for their organs, hacked to pieces and stuffed in a freezer. She was just here for a good time, a six-month adventure in exotic Shanghai, serving drinks to wealthy ex-pats in a quasi-Irish bar. Home from home. Just don’t ever get an abortion, Margaret wanted to tell her. Instead, she said, ‘No, thanks. He’s just calling a taxi.’
The girl shrugged. ‘Oh, well, if you need me for anything, just holler.’ And she disappeared into the back room again.
Li came back from the phone. ‘There’ll be one here in a few minutes.’
They stood in silence in this strange place, uncertain what to say, how to pass the time as they waited. Margaret perched on the edge of a bench seat, and Li stood with his hands thrust in his pockets staring into space.
After a very long minute he said, ‘I should never have brought her here.’