“What does that mean?” asked the man.
“It means that we can now operate on you,” said Ibrahim, emerging from behind his desk, “remove one of your healthy kidneys, settle what you owe to your landlord, and, inshallah, still leave you with a tidy pile of cash—fifty thousand rupees—for the future.”
Fifty thousand rupees. This to a poor man who toiled at a construction site. Work had dried up owing to bad weather and he could no longer pay rent for the mud-and-tin shack he occupied along with his wife and three children.
Fifty thousand rupees.
“Will I live?” he asked.
“Sure,” replied the doctor. “I’ll give you a shot to knock you out. When you wake up it’ll all be over. Just remember that if you tell anyone what happened to you, we’ll find you and we’ll kill you. Is that clear?”
The patient swallowed, eyes swiveling in fear.
“Stop worrying,” insisted the surgeon. “I’ve done this many times. If anyone does an MRI later, they will find that the surgery has been done professionally and that the kidney has been removed with precision.”
The surgeon didn’t bother to reveal that all his surgeries had been carried out without a medical license. He had flunked his final year at med school and was only qualified to perform autopsies. He worked part-time for Ibrahim and spent the rest of his time disposing of corpses at Delhi Memorial Hospital.
The patient nodded. He looked at the bodyguard who was standing at the door of the van. If he tried to get up and run, he knew he would be shot. He had never seen fifty thousand rupees in his entire life. One kidney was a small price to pay for a large sum.
Ibrahim could see the cogs turning inside the man’s head. He knew that the seven hundred and fifty dollars he paid the ma
n would be recovered twenty times over by the time he sold it off. This chap’s kidney was of a rare blood type, and there was a specific patient on the United Network for Organ Sharing database who had been told he would have to wait eight years for a matching kidney owing to his rare blood type. He would pay a handsome price to get it from Ibrahim.
“Will it hurt, sir?” asked the patient.
“Not during surgery,” replied the surgeon. “You’ll be knocked out. But when you regain consciousness, you will have pain in your lower abdomen. That will take some time to go but we will give you painkillers to manage it. We will also transfer you to a guesthouse on the outskirts of Delhi so that you can stay there for a few days in order to recover.”
Chapter 80
“I WANT TO see my daughter now, please,” said Nisha, steel in her voice. “You’ve had more than enough time to interview her.”
Two hours, to be precise. Sharma’s assistant, Nanda, had spent the time reviewing events with Nisha, increasingly frustrated at what he claimed was her lack of cooperation. The truth was, she was hiding nothing. But that didn’t stop the insinuations, the suspicions.
“Now,” she said, slamming a fist to the interview-room table. “I want to see her now.”
Nanda stared at her awhile, just to show her who was boss, that he wouldn’t be ordered around by her. Then with a nod to the duty officer he let himself out of the interview suite and Nisha settled down to wait.
After twenty minutes or so—a decent enough show-her-who’s-boss interval—the door opened once more, this time to admit Maya, followed by Sharma.
The interview-suite chair scraped as Nisha stood and rushed around the table, kneeling to take Maya in her arms. “Sweetie, I’m sorry. There was nothing I could do about that. Were they nice? Were they nice to you?”
“The lady looking after me was nice,” said Maya, then shot a baleful look at Sharma.
“I was doing my job, Mrs. Gandhe,” said Sharma. “Take a seat, would you? My colleague Nanda told me you’ve been about as much use as she has: ‘He wore a mask. He was disguising his voice.’”
“Then what else do you expect? What else can we tell you?”
They were all sitting now, Sharma huge on the opposite side of the table, filling the room with the stink of smoke, sweating with agitation and last night’s whisky. “What I want to know is why when Mommy was pointing her gun at the bad man she didn’t pull the trigger.”
“He wasn’t a bad man,” blurted Maya suddenly. “He was a good man.”
Sharma’s eyebrows shot up. “A good man, eh? Do you want to know what he did to Mr. Kumar, or Mr. Patel, or Mr. Roy? Shall I tell you?”
“Commissioner!” warned Nisha, beginning to rise from her seat.
“Sit down,” warned Sharma.
“He was about to hurt me,” said Maya. Her eyes shone with tears and her voice shook. “He was about to do really, really horrible things to me. I know the kind of things. Things you hear about on the news when children go missing and their bodies are found. Things like that. And the man in black stopped him, and I don’t care if he killed him because it serves the bad man right. It serves him right for what he was going to do to me and what he’s done to other children.”