The Sin Collector

ANDREY

Andrey sat holding the beeping receiver of his office phone in one hand and staring into space. The prisoner known as the Doctor, one Oleg Zitman, had apparently moved to Israel after being released early for good behavior. How had he managed to pull that off? Andrey had always thought jail time was supposed to make it difficult to get residency somewhere else.

The other tidbit he’d picked up was even more curious. The good doctor had made his fortune traveling around Russia, and sometimes Moldova, Ukraine, and other former Soviet backwaters too, buying human organs on the black market. Poverty and desperation drove people to sell whatever parts they had that came in pairs. Kidneys were most in demand. Here, former collective-farm workers, abandoned by the system, found hope again in fifteen- or twenty-thousand-dollar payouts. They fixed their homes or bought a cow, and while all around the world physicians and lawyers carefully debated whether or not to legalize the sale of donated human organs, Dr. Zitman grew very rich. But the world community finally rejected the idea, and the good doctor was caught and convicted, much to the dismay of many Moldovan peasants—who now had both their kidneys, but no prospects for making money.

Then Zitman did time with Yelnik, and naturally he would have told him how he ended up in jail. What would Yelnik have thought? Perhaps what Andrey was thinking now: selling organs was nice work if you could get it. But Yelnik was no doctor. The only reason he’d ever held a knife was to murder somebody. Had Zitman and Yelnik joined forces? One could have done the killing, and the other could have collected the organs.

Andrey needed to find out the last time Zitman had visited Russia, and also, if possible, when he’d last contacted Yelnik.

He called around to every big security agency in and around Moscow. Printouts began coming through the fax machine thirty minutes later.

First Andrey skimmed a list of phone calls, looking for Israel’s country code. Nothing. That would have been too easy. Besides, the numbers didn’t mean anything by themselves. Yelnik could have used any number of phones and names. But just then, the Israeli embassy returned Andrey’s call. No, they told him, Mr. Zitman had not crossed the Russian border since receiving his Israeli citizenship.

The tantalizing door that had opened in Andrey’s mind slammed shut. Organs need to be transported quickly and carefully. Yelnik never could have handled them without the doctor. Still, Yelnik’s own gutted belly was too strong a connection to ignore. Andrey nudged the door open again with one foot. Could Yelnik have worked with a different corrupt doctor, if not Zitman?

He squinted again at the densely printed faxes. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, just try to spot anything unusual. Another country, a distant province, calls that lasted too long or came too frequently.

Andrey searched and searched, and finally he found something. Several calls, a month apart, lasting ten seconds each. Andrey underlined them in red. He turned back to the computer. Bingo! The number belonged to a government office, one at the Ministry of Defense. Andrey sat back in his chair. So there was Yelnik, an unidentified doctor, and the mysterious military men. Andrey grimaced. It was all starting to come into terrible focus.

Night had fallen over Moscow. He was exhausted and starving, and he still had to stop and pick up some food for that shameless dog. Maybe some of those nasty brown pellets the commercials said were a guaranteed hit with hungry canine pests.

As he closed the office door behind him, Andrey looked one more time at Karavay’s desk, and the thought crossed his mind—without the bile he’d previously associated with her—that his intern had probably been asleep for hours already.