The Constant Heart (14 page)

“That depends,” I said, when Sara and I sat in the bar after the guy with the Hawaiian shirt had almost killed us both. “Maybe it's a knockoff, or bought at an outlet. Maybe it means just the opposite of what you think. The jacket shows the guy is a fraud rather than being genuine.”

“You mean like a disguise?” said Sara.

“I mean it's hard to tell what you're dealing with.”

“Oh,” said Sara. “I found that out. Oh, yeah.”

Somehow, as we had a drink, the scent of cordite lingered on my clothes. And, of course, it was the right thing to be reminded of, when you got into the difficulties, to put it in a polite way, of just what McDoza was up to.

He started by explaining tax policy. Sara thought he was nuts, and was about to take her bag and go home to one of those microwave noodle packages when, she said, the tax policy turned into tariff policy and how, if you lived in Mexico (“Me-he-co,” as McDoza said it, as though even though he was blond and blue-eyed he wanted to prove just how authentic he really is), you could end up paying a shitload of tax. That's another item, I think, I have learned to be wary around. The authentic. What's that? Breast implants? Genital surgery? Cheap mortgage rates with a balloon payment? Bernard Madoff? All advertised as the real thing. Items you can trust.

So, he said, he had a car that wasn't registered properly, since some dumb-ass in the Department of Motor Vehicles had got the wrong vehicle identification number on the forms.

Sara looked at him for a long time and said, “Yeah. I guess.”

MD figured that Sara could fix up a temporary registration and a sort of temporary plate, too, one of those cardboard things the dealers have, and maybe, you know, if she had a limited number, why she could make some copies with a high-end scanner and a good printer, see, and so who the hell would know? And then the idea was that a woman, a nice-looking, appealing, innocent sort of soccer mom like Sara (“I'm a little young for the soccer mom shtick,” said Sara),
why, she could get through customs like a warm, fragrant breeze. And so just like that they were already talking about how much Sara would make if she drove the car across the border, even though it was a long way away. Two days' drive to El Paso and then cross over to Juarez to meet the “client.” And that drug war stuff you see on TV? Well, that's just sensationalism, although if Sara saw guys walking around with a swagger and pushing people out of the way, she might be a little careful. It would be better if she did the drive as fast as she could and when she stayed the night on the way, make it a Days Inn. One of those anonymous places with a clerk from Mumbai who probably couldn't tell one customer from another anyway since he was working eighteen hours a day. Once she's gotten rid of the car, she takes a cab to the border, since she sure doesn't want to mess around with renting a car in Me-he-co (just as she doesn't want to spend any more time than possible with the “client,” that is, doesn't want to ask for a lift to the border), walks across with her ID, then takes a cab to the El Paso International Airport, where she gets a flight she's booked the day before, from her laptop, by way of Expedia, to Albany. $949. One stop in Chicago. Lands in Albany ten hours later, where she's left her car in long-term parking. And a lot richer than when she left it.

And then they started talking about the fact that MD's “customers” or “clients” weren't “gangsters or anything like that, but good, hardworking people, doctors, dentists, architects, you know, the salt of the earth,” and how they would pay her in cash and so all Sara had to do was to drop off the car with the temporary papers (“They can take it from there on the other side of the border, no problem”) and take the cash and
bring it back to this country, in used or at least dirty hundreds and twenties. Then, of course, MD and Sara would meet and she'd take her cut, which was going to be “like 20 percent” plus “expenses,” although he didn't want her staying, as he said, in anything more expensive than a Days Inn and not one night in Me-he-co. Food could be eaten at a Red Lobster. All the cars had great AC, some with all leather, nothing in the trunk, nothing underneath, nothing like that at all, just the car. Why, the DEA could look all day and use a vacuum cleaner and all the dogs in the world. Why, they could even use genetically enhanced dogs and machines to sniff, but that wasn't the deal, see, because every dumb-ass along the border is thinking about drugs but this isn't about drugs. It's just about some poor oral surgeon in Me-he-co who doesn't want to pay the tax on a new car from the U.S. of A. And of course, MD said, the beauty of it was that they were going to get a cut of the tariff, since they were going to sell the car at substantially below the price with tariff, but MD wasn't such a dumb-ass as to sell it without what it would be with some tariff, say about a quarter of what it really would be. So how could you beat that? You get 20 percent of a piece of a tariff the customs dickheads don't even know exists. And beyond that, you don't have to pay taxes, because you can either just spend it, cash, or if you want to be more legitimate you can launder it through the dealership. And be totally legitimate. Why, it would take an army of accountants to figure it out. And they're too busy trying to figure out reverse credit swaps and what a tranche is. Do you know what a tranche is?

“One of the sections of the payment for a security,” said Sara.

More authentic items, and some of these left a lot of men,
particularly those who had been in construction, standing around with signs that said WILL WORK FOR FOOD.

“I can see you're going to go for this,” said MD. “Someone as smart as you.”

So that's the way it started. MD didn't say the cars were stolen, but then sometimes she met him in the parking lot of a McDonald's where two kids, probably not seventeen, brought in a car, a new Camry, all leather, CD, extra speakers, and they passed the car over fast and got out of there, and then Sara put the temporary tags on and she already had the papers filled out, since these days MD was dealing directly, by coded email, with the doctors and dentists on the other side of the border and was providing, to order, just what they wanted, although sometimes the color was hard to get. A black Infiniti was usually pretty easy, but a new yellow Boxster was a harder item, and MD didn't want to start playing around with painting cars, although he asked if Sara's dealership could do it and she told him no.

And it was fine. The money came in and Sara was thinking about buying a vending machine business to get the money in the bank that way, to keep it totally separate from the dealership, but for a while she kept it on the top shelf of her apartment, wrapped in baggies, which, it seemed to me, was one of the great American contributions to crime. And of course, she had the money in baggies in case she had to bury it quickly. MD was happy. The kids who brought him cars were happy. And Sara was, if not happy, glad to see the money lined up there like new shoes in her closet, just as she made it clear to MD that she wasn't going to meet any kids behind a McDonald's and have them see her.

Then came the Mercedes SUV. Silver. TV in the back. Great suspension. All leather. Compass, GPS, air bags, even in the back. The car was for a surgeon across the border, but it wasn't a car that he was going to use and it wasn't for his wife, either, but his mistress, and the mistress knew that the chances of being kidnapped were pretty good these days, especially in the border towns, and so that's why she wanted the Mercedes. So Sara fixed up the papers and put on the temporary plates, drove to the border crossing in El Paso, a place of some tension, and after the dogs went over the car and after they looked under it with a mirror on wheels and found absolutely nothing, she met the surgeon in the parking lot of a McDonald's in Juarez, on Calle Antonio Ortiz Mena, but the surgeon said he had something to explain and that she just had to be patient, although, of course, Sara was in no mood to be patient, and, I can say if there is any human being on earth who is not likely to be patient in a McDonald's with a hot car on Calle Antonio Ortiz Mena, it was Sara in her premature soccer mom outfit.

But the surgeon was apologetic, of course, in a sort of south-of-the-border Catholic kind of way, which made Sara even more uneasy, since that Catholic whiff, which could have been incense, reminded her of death and disease, which of course is exactly the right association, since the surgeon didn't have the money, but he did have a kidney, for transplant, all packed in ice, and people on a waiting list were paying as much as thirty thousand dollars for a good kidney, and so while he didn't have the money she could take the kidney and sell it for plenty. Maybe more than thirty thousand. Maybe forty. People's lives depended on it.

Sara had come this far and she wasn't likely to turn back now, since, as time had gone by, she had noticed a certain unpleasantness in MD's attitude about things, not thug-like, not yet, but she imagined it wouldn't take much to push him over the edge or maybe just show what he was really like. No, what bothered her were two things. Was it a human kidney? And how the hell was she going to get it across the border? The first item she decided she'd have to take on faith, but the second required a little work. She said she'd do it if the doctor went to his office and got his medical license and then drove her and the kidney, packed in ice, in a special Styrofoam box, back across the border, so that if the customs agents looked in the box and found the kidney, the doctor, who had his license, could talk his way around it and say that the kidney was for an emergency transplant, etc. Did it require papers, too? Like a Mercedes?

So they went to the doctor's office and he got his passport and his ID and they went right across the border, waved right through, since she looked so much like a premature soccer mom in her blue shirt and khaki skirt and beautifully tanned legs (from watching all those games). But now she couldn't go to El Paso International Airport, not with that Styrofoam box to take through security, and even then (she said in the bar, she could feel the forces of fate or whatever it was, sort of what you see in those pictures of the Horsehead Nebula: mysterious power) she knew that this was going no place good, but the entire sensation was like being at the top of a roller coaster that had just reached the top of its run and was about to fall.

So she knew that she wasn't going to be able to have the kidney X-rayed when she tried to get on an airplane (and, in
fact, she knew of a recent case in which someone who was taking his mother's ashes to be buried had them confiscated at the airport). Instead, she had the doctor, who was getting increasingly uneasy, drive her to a Hertz in El Paso, just as, before they crossed the border, she had had him fill a prescription for Provigil, which she took, and, after renting a Subaru with good AC, she started driving north, and on the way, she stopped every five or six hours at gas stations to put more ice in the Styrofoam box, to keep the kidney fresh.

The real problem, though, was that she began to think things over and while she had made a lot of money, and while it had gone a long ways to make her feel better about a lot of mistakes she had made, but not all of them (such as me and that I had loved her), she still felt lousy, as though the screenplay, the dead dog, the stolen underwear, the series of dingbats she had slept with all added up to something she just couldn't shake. So, nonstop, eighteen hours later, after dosing herself with baby powder in the bathroom of the dealership, she went to work.

The first buyer was a man who sat in her cubicle and stared into the parking lot. When she tried to talk options, air, leather, mileage, rebates, her foot kept touching that cool Styrofoam box under her desk. She hadn't called MD and she was trying, at the same time she sold a car, to explain to herself why she had gone for the kidney (she could have said, “This is a cash deal, Jack”), but then, MD had never told her what she was supposed to do if someone offered her something like an organ instead of money.

The man who sat at her desk, in a sort of cubicle, stared into the parking lot where the cars were lined up with numbers
painted on their windshields in starch (Total Steal! Factory Reduction! A Give Away!) and didn't say a word about the rebate, which was a pretty good deal, since the manufacturers were getting desperate with so much inventory (since those guys who were holding signs that said WILL WORK FOR FOOD sure weren't buying cars, not to mention just about everyone else), but, instead, he took out his wallet where he kept a check and wrote out the entire amount, tax, license, everything, and pushed it over, and while she was on the phone with the bank to make sure that the check was good and that it was all right for the guy to take the car, Jack Michaels came in and started kicking the brand-new tires on a car with four-wheel drive and tinted glass.

Two-tone. Compass. GPS. TV in the backseat for the kids when you go on vacation. Sara pushed her toe against the Styrofoam box that was under the desk in her cubicle. She had packed it with ice from the service station across the street, taking the box into the bathroom with Barry Hammelman giving her a look that was somewhere between terror and suspicion, but she had said, “Female trouble. Ice helps.”

“Oh,” said Barry. “I'll have to tell my wife.”

So the check cleared and she had the mechanic get the car ready and when the guy who bought the car drove it down the street she went back to her cubicle and made a notation on the clipboard she had to keep track of the cars she sold. Jack sat on the other side of the desk, the cubicle making them seem somehow more secluded than ever.

He had a new picture of Nadia. She looked even thinner, but she had lost a front tooth, and looked younger, as though somehow the disease was taking years from her, rather than
adding them. Sara held the picture. She took her tuna sandwich out of her top drawer and passed it over.