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“I know.” He turned away with insulting indifference, and opened her armoire, searching for one of the fresh shirts she kept for him.
The next line in the script was predictable. “I’m free tonight and tomorrow,” she said. “Can I see you?”
“No,” he said lightly. “Tonight I have to go to a musical with Helen and the girls. And tomorrow I have that meeting. As you know.”
Her face tightened. She sat up. “I don’t understand why it’s necessary to meet this Zhoglo in order to conduct business with him—”
“Do not say the name,” he reproved her sharply.
She rolled her eyes. “This is my bedroom. Don’t get paranoid.”
“I wouldn’t want certain information to slip in the wrong context.”
Diana arched her chest, pressing taut nipples against the silk of her nightie. “When am I ever anything but discreet?” Her voice was a silky coo, but he heard the acid undertone. “Have I ever complained that you can never take me out to dinner? That you never touch me in public? Not even when we’re in Tokyo or Hong Kong or Johannesburg. It’s always room service. But do I complain?”
This part was so tedious. “No, Diana. You’ve been very good.”
“It’s insane, Richie. This idea to keep the stock supply here, instead of harvesting the parts overseas, or offshore.”
Parts. Stock supply. Diana needed to distance herself emotionally from the realities of the plan they were embarking upon. He didn’t.
“Those hours of travel time make all the difference,” he said patiently. “And I prefer to conduct the harvest myself. For the amount we charge, I have to control as many variables as possible. I have no choice, Diana.”
She looked down, twiddling with the silk nightie, her face sullen. He wondered briefly if she would be able to handle what lay ahead.
But he could handle Diana. The time honored technique known as “diamond and emerald earrings” always worked.
“Bullshit,” she said petulantly. “You have choices. Every day, when you choose to go home to that frigid bitch.”
They were out of the danger zone. He ran his hands over his own fit, lean body, checking for traces of the fluids of coitus. Not that Helen ever got close enough to him to smell another woman on his person, but even so. He was always meticulous about hygiene. Came from being a surgeon, no doubt. He ignored Diana’s complaining and went into the adjoining bathroom.
Strange, he thought, as he set the shower running, how an isolated incident could change a man’s life. One turn to the right or left affected one’s destiny forever. What was happening now had started at a medical convention in Paris, when he was an emerging thoracic surgeon with several brilliant successes to his name. He went out to sample Parisian nightlife, relieved to be away from Helen’s moods and headaches and the constant noise and chaos of his young daughters.
His adventures on that dreamy night had been lubricated by large quantities of alcohol and cocaine, and extravagant sums of money. He’d ended up in a luxurious apartment, entertained until dawn by two beautiful and uninhibited Parisian girls. He’d awakened in the rumpled bed, sticky with sex. Head throbbing.
A tidy, graying man with a pinstriped suit and an English accent was sitting by the bed, waiting for Richard’s eyes to open. He introduced himself as Nigel Dobbs.
It had taken a long, disoriented moment for the reason for the unusual stickiness to sink in.
Blood against the white sheets. He turned, looked. Gaped.
The girls’ wrists had been tied to the posts of the wooden bed. Their throats had been cut. They sprawled, naked, eyes wide and staring. Blood, everywhere. The room was doused with it.
It had felt like a dream. He blinked gummy eyelids, staring from Dobbs back to the girls, as a business proposal was made to him.
He had been very startled, but he had remained cool. His brain had always been that way, functioning superbly in situations that others would consider high stress. Compartmentalized. He would have been a good commander on the battlefield, he had often mused.
On the one hand, he was angry at being manipulated. On the other, he was fascinated to observe his own reactions to this shocking tableau. Amid the constant white noise of daily life, a man seldom got a chance to peer into the depths of his own soul. And what, after all, could possibly be more fascinating than the depths of his own soul?
Nigel Dobbs laid out the situation in a cool, clipped voice, as if they were in a boardroom, not an abattoir. A wealthy Ukrainian businessman who had to remain nameless was suffering from an acute heart condition. He wanted an immediate transplant. He wanted the surgery conducted by the celebrated young surgeon Dr. Mathes. Cost was immaterial.
Mathes told Dobbs that money was not the issue so much as the availability of a healthy and well matched organ, thinking that he knew exactly fuck-all about how organ donation was organized in the Ukraine—
“Not a problem, Doctor. The tissue typing has already been done.” The man’s tight mouth twisted in a thin, smug smile. “We have a number of potential donors. You need not trouble yourself about that.”
“But how…but that’s not…but you can’t just…”
A number of potential donors?Richard had floundered, until the truth sank in. And the bottom of the world fell away, to an abyss of nameless possibilities that made his soul quail.
