Prologue
The room smelled of nothing, and that was the most expensive thing in it. A man in a clean shirt sat at a folding table under a tube light and turned the pages of a file. There were no names anywhere in it. Codes only. A letter for the state a body had come from. Two digits for the week it had arrived. A third for the blood group. After that came the small abbreviations that told him what a person could be asked to give up before they stopped being of any use to anyone. He did not think of himself as a cruel man. The word would have offended him. He thought of himself as a logistics manager, which on his better days he believed he was, a man who cut down on waste, who kept to timelines, who did not let feeling spoil a sound margin. He had a daughter in a good school in another city. He paid the fees on time. He had never raised his hand to anyone in his life, and he found the men who did the actual lifting and cutting a little distasteful, the way a clean accountant finds the men who collect the debts a little distasteful, and necessary. His phone lit up. A number from a city far to the north. “Yes,” he said, and listened. “Tomorrow is possible. Not the day after. After that the cold time becomes a problem, and what I send you, your surgeon will curse me for.” The voice on the other end said something about money. These people always did. They spoke about money the way villagers speak about rain, as if it were weather they could call down by complaining loudly enough. “Money I have heard about,” he said, without heat. “What I am telling you is biology. Biology does not take advance payment.” He ended the call and opened a second file, the thin one, the order from the north. A name he was not allowed to write down, attached to a sum he was. A blood group that had to match. A clock that started the moment the matching unit came in off the road or the rails, and ran, after that, whether anyone watched it or not. He wrote one figure in the margin. A time. Daybreak. Then he made the other call, the short one, to a man who rode trains for him and had a good eye for the ones nobody would come looking for. He did not say much. He never said much on the phone. He said the route, and the window, and the blood group they were short of this week, and he said it the way you tell a man what vegetables to bring back from the market. “O negative is the difficult one,” he said. “If you see it, you take it. Don’t be greedy with the rest. One clean piece is better than three with questions on them.” Somewhere under the floor a refrigeration unit changed its note, a long mechanical sigh, the sound a building makes when its only job is to keep things from going bad. He had stopped hearing it years ago, the way a man stops hearing his own heart. He capped his pen. He squared the file against the edge of the table until its corners lined up. Then he switched off the light, and in the dark the machines kept breathing, patient as anything, and eight hundred kilometres to the south a young man he would never meet, and never need to, was sitting in a security cabin under a buzzing tube light, deciding when to tell his mother he was leaving.
