The Family Hightower (11 page)

“We're looking for . . .” the American says in pretty bad Romanian. Then stutters, trying to find a phrase he practiced before but can't remember now. He gives up, resorts to pantomime. Holds up a book, pretends to play an instrument while staring at it.

“Sheet music?” Madalina says. Pronouncing the Romanian so he can learn the phrase.

“Yes, sheet music.”

“You should try up the street.
Anticariat D. Grumăzescu.” She points to an antique store maybe ten doors up, on the other side of the street. The American peers up there and nods. Behind him, a university student running to class puts a deep footprint in the cement and hops away, cursing. A bicycle follows thirty seconds later, leaving long snaky trails.

“Thank you,” the American says, or at least Constantin and Madalina think he does. Constantin waits until the Americans are halfway up the block.

“Imagine that,” he says. “An American speaking Romanian.”

“Mm-hmm,” Madalina says.

“You ever think about going to America?”

“No.”

“How about Germany? When are you going there?”

They've talked about this before. She holds up the book she's had in her lap for the past few weeks, a German-language textbook.

“As soon as I've mastered the language,” she says.

Constantin laughs. He knows she's half joking. “You don't need to master the language to go to Germany,” he says. “You just need to be able to stumble around it like a drunk at a wedding reception.”

“I think I should be a little better than that.”

“Why? It's not stopping the Americans.”

“Nothing stops the Americans,” Madalina says.

Constantin smiles. “Give it time.”

By the time the Americans weave out of Anticariat D. Grumăzescu, drunk, full, and caffeinated, the cement in the middle of Pietonalul Lapusneanu is full of footprints, bicycle tracks, the deep trench left by a wheelbarrow tire. A record of every unlucky person who crossed the road that beautiful spring day.

“You know,” Constantin says to Madalina, “you really should get out of here.”

“But Iasi is such a nice town,” she says.

“Sure. But people don't teach themselves German just for the hell of it. Please tell me you have bigger plans for yourself.”

She decides to be honest. “Journalism,” she says.

Constantin nods. “Be seeing you,” he says. But after she leaves Iasi, a few months later, he never sees her again.

You may be wondering why all this matters. Hang in there, reader. We're getting there.

Madalina's in Berlin from
1992
to
1995
. Her facility with languages applies to German, and she finds work as a translator, both writing and speaking. She gets involved with some serious journalism, too. Because she can speak both Romanian and Ukrainian—and because she's a woman—she helps a few investigative reporters interview women who have escaped the sex trade. It's hard to hear, hard to make them talk about it. They all thought they were coming for legitimate jobs. Someone told them they could work as maids in hotels, as housecleaners to wealthy clients in Berlin. Someone got them passports and working papers, covered the travel expenses. The women took the offers without asking a lot of questions; they couldn't afford to. They came to Berlin by car, by plane, never realizing anything was wrong until they were led to an apartment somewhere that didn't seem legitimate at all. Then the stories all turn horrible. The constant raping. The beatings. Some of them watched while women who tried to get out were caught and killed, by stabbing, by strangulation. Half of the survivors are sick now, so sick that they don't want to get tested. They know what the results will be. For the first few days of this, Madalina goes home and cries. She has nightmares, a collage of the things she's been told. It's too easy to imagine, to picture herself or her friends from Negostina where those women are now. In the morning, she talks to the reporters. The ones who are men are ashamed of their sex. They know that if there weren't men willing to pay for it, nothing they're investigating—that brutal chain of illicit commerce stretching across Europe, the world—would exist. And it's hard not to notice that it doesn't work the other way around. There's no male sex trade. It's just men brutalizing women, raping and killing in the service of their pleasure, and that horror seems to reveal something: that the long conversation about how there's no real difference between men and women is only half right. When we're at our best, boys, maybe there's no real difference. But at our worst?

Then there's the glimpses the reporters get of the organization that does the trafficking—the same shadows of movement that Kosookyy sees, that the FBI's taking notes on. The chain of sex trafficking is one of many; there's a web, a network, a cloud of connections. Money laundering, pirated goods, fraud, grift. Parting people from their money. Trafficking in drugs, in arms: All those guns the Soviet Union made have been sold off, and now they're spilling across the world, to Africa, to Latin America, ending up in the hands of drug cartels, private militias, revolutionaries, child soldiers. Making the world a more dangerous place. And somewhere underneath all that, organ harvesting, the shadow of a shadow. The reporters know about the documented cases. The organ bazaars in India, local brokers paying people in shantytowns a few thousand dollars to give their kidneys to patients traveling from Oman, the United Arab Emirates, other places in the Middle East; by the early
1990
s, it's up to two thousand transplants a year. A law India passes in
1994
makes the organ bazaars illegal, but that just means that it's taken over by organized crime syndicates. They say the trade is as thriving as ever. In
1995
, it comes out that China's government has been harvesting body parts from prisoners: kidneys, corneas, liver tissue, heart valves. Sometimes just after they execute the prisoner. Sometimes just before. The organs go to people in China with good political connections, or they're sold somewhere in Asia, for as much as thirty grand. Chinese officials, of course, deny the whole thing, but that gets harder to do in
1998
when two Chinese citizens are caught on videotape offering to sell body parts to doctors in the United States. It's all over the papers, but that doesn't mean it stops.

The stories will continue for years, multiply all over the world. In Brazil, a São Paulo police investigation reveals that the local morgue has taken several thousand pituitary glands from the bodies of poor people and sold them to American medical companies. An anatomy professor in Recife has sold inner ear parts to NASA. A couple German and Austrian medical centers get heart valves taken from the corpses of paupers in South Africa. A clot-dissolving drug has been developed from kidneys taken from dead newborns in a hospital in Colombia; it's unclear whether the parents know, let alone consent. A South African doctor tells a researcher that there's a broker in Southern California who delivers fresh organs, as he calls them, to anywhere in the world in thirty days; clients place their orders by email. In
2002
, it's discovered that local kidney hunters recruited three hundred men from poor rural villages in Moldova to sell their kidneys. They're trafficked to Turkey and the United States to do the operation. The men are destitute, don't have what you'd call proper shoes, don't have enough to eat. Nothing left of value but themselves. And then there are the rumors, of people—children—kidnapped and murdered for their eyes, their hearts, across the southern hemisphere and into Eastern Europe. The stories are wild and terrible, hard to prove, but so persistent. There's a market out there for bodies, parts of bodies. Parts of us. It's capitalism taken to its logical end, our complete rendering into a commodity. A dollar amount on just how much we're worth. The market is an animal, and when you let it run free, it eats us. And Madalina, in time, reports on it herself. First she shares bylines with other reporters, but when they, and their editors, realize she can get the story herself, they hire her to do it.

She's written twelve pieces already, under her own name and no one else's, for newspapers, magazines, and advocacy organizations, by the time she goes to Ukraine. She's there because she's been translating for a German telecommunications company that's interested in moving into the Eastern European market. A junior executive there sees that Madalina's more than a word machine. She's smart, and knows things about Romania and Ukraine that he doesn't. So when he gets the account to start business in Kiev, he says he won't go without her. That's how she meets Petey Hightower.

She's in Kureni, a restaurant overlooking the Dneiper. On the table are plates of duck leg and rabbit liver, pike and salmon. She and the junior executive are entertaining a client, a large Ukrainian man with an interest in being a conduit for German investment into Ukraine. He already has a cell phone himself—one of the sleek, new-generation ones that, for
19
95
, is pretty sophisticated—and he makes a show of having it, leaves it next to his plate while they're talking, has a habit of picking it up and tapping it on the table every time he says the German word for it—
Handy—
which he insists on using.
He's still smarting from not being in on the Mobile TeleSystems deal that went down in
1993
. He should have been there, he says. He should be raking in the cash now; and Madalina looks again at the cut of his Western European suit, his custom Italian shoes. A man who doesn't want for much. But he wants, she thinks. He wants everything. Then she sees Petey, over the businessman's shoulder, a young man sitting among older men in expensive suits in the VIP section. Everyone at that table's having what even for Ukraine is a little too much vodka, and they're all yelling at each other as drunk men do, in a mixture of Ukrainian, Russian, and English. She's repulsed by them, but not by Petey, his lightning-blue eyes, dark hair combed back like the two photographs from the
1920
s of Madalina's relatives that her parents have on the walls of their house in Negostina. Then he sees her and stares back, stops paying attention to everything else around him. She breaks eye contact, returns to her meeting, but when it's done and they're leaving the place, she notices the young man excusing himself from his table, following her out the door from a distance. She pretends that she forgot something in the restaurant she has to go back for. She shakes hands with the Ukrainian businessman, who tells her it was wonderful to meet her and then says something awful to her—
when we close the deal, tell the Germans to send a man.
She doesn't flinch.
Why? Have I misrepresented you? Because one more remark like that and I can start.
The junior executive smiles through the whole thing; he doesn't understand a word. She nods, turns, walks back into the restaurant, and stands in the vestibule. In three seconds Petey is there, a little hazy around the edges, but still looking at her with the same intensity, as strong as it is opaque.

“Do we know each other?” she says in Ukrainian. She's wondering if his interest is romantic or criminal. He doesn't say anything at first, which puts her on guard. She goes through the small conversations she's had with strangers in the past few days, maybe the wrong things she might have said to the wrong people without knowing it. The things she might have been an accidental witness to.

“No,” he says at last, and in that single word, she can already hear his American accent, tell how much he doesn't know the language. It's endearing. “I wanted to see you,” he says. Extends a tentative hand. “I'm Peter.”

“Madalina.”

“Can I see you again?”

She smiles, wants to tell him something nice, but is afraid he won't understand what she's trying to say, because his Ukrainian is so bad. So she just digs into her pocketbook for a business card and a pen. Writes her phone number on the back of it and hands it to him.

“Call me,” she says. “I like coffee.”

He smiles back at her, and she leaves then. Later that night, falling asleep, she can't say quite why she decided to give him a chance.
Look at the kinds of friends he has. Look at the people he's with,
her father would say.
Too ambitious.
But she sees a thing in him that, so far in Petey's life, only his mother and his aunt Sylvie have seen. She looks right through the swaggering, angular young buck, sees the good boy Muriel tried to raise. Just prone to mischief, that's all. She's sure enough of herself to think that she can handle it. He calls the next day.

You know how the story goes. It's first love, for both of them, and it happens fast. Within weeks, they feel like they've discovered a new continent, a new ocean. They've been let in on a giant secret; something about the world has been revealed to them that no one else seems to know, or maybe they've all just forgotten. They look at their friends with pity, because nobody they know can be as happy as they are. By the end of the second month, for each of them, the other seems to give off light, and they transform the city wherever they go. The colors heighten, run together, like it's all a carnival and they're spinning around in it, screaming, laughing, their hands in the air. They're impregnable, they have superpowers. They could jump from the roof of her apartment building and land on their feet, right on the sidewalk, walk to the curb, and hail a bus. They could turn knives into paper, bullets into steam, but they don't have to. No one would dare touch them.

It's only when Petey's Ukrainian gets a little better that Madalina realizes how deep in he might be. Like I said, reader, Madalina's not stupid; it's just that she doesn't imagine that whatever Petey's involved in could be so terrible. She's thinking it's just about money. A little graft, a little corruption. Getting government contracts to do construction, putting up money for a bunch of guys to do half-assed work building fancy new apartment complexes on the highway out of Kiev. The returns come in when the units are sold to foreign corporations for a price that's too high. Or maybe there's a favor called in to someone in the finance ministry in return for a business arrangement in Lviv so exclusive that it amounts to a monopoly. The kind of thing that, as a friend of her father's was fond of saying, is illegal but not a crime. Just the way of the world, the way things get done, among those who understand that the size of your bank account and who you know just might be all that matters. This is what legitimate market economics looks like, right? Government and business working so close together that it looks criminal. The market looked like that when it
was
criminal, she reminds herself, under Ceausescu, under Brezhnev, even under Gorbachev. That was the big lesson of the planned economy, that you can't stop people from buying and selling things how they want to buy and sell them. Telling people how much a loaf of bread is worth from on high is just asking people to walk down the street to buy their bread from a guy selling it out of a van—the guy who bought it all up quick, maybe before it hit the store, because he knew it was worth more than the government was saying. He knew it and he was right. The farce went on for so long that the black marketeers got really good at their jobs. It shouldn't have surprised anyone that they grew so fast when the collapse of communism set them free. It doesn't surprise Madalina. But she isn't prepared to accept that it's gotten so bloody, or that her sweet Petey has it all over him.