McCabe wondered if Spencer ever had a beard. If there was a picture of him anywhere with a beard.
‘Always he sat alone. Like me. Though not so tired as me, I think. Sometimes he’d be drinking wine. Sometimes whiskey. It was easy for me to tell he was not French. I thought English or possibly American. I thought perhaps he was visiting a relative who was in the hospital for a long stay. I’m divorced, and he seemed interested, so we struck up a conversation that lasted several hours. After that we saw each other two or three more times in the café. Once we went elsewhere to dinner.’
‘Did you become lovers?’
‘Yes, but I don’t think his heart was in it. I think he may be homosexual. Or maybe not. As a woman who attracts quite a few men, I could tell he was more interested in what I did at the hospital than in me as a woman.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Mostly my job. How much experience I had. What kind of equipment we used.’
‘Did that surprise you?’
‘At first, yes, but when I asked him about it, he said what he did for a living was sell medical equipment. Including heart-lung machines. That’s what he said he was doing at the hospital, a business deal.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘Yes. I had no reason not to. He knew a lot about the machines.’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘He told me his name was Phillipe Spencer.’
‘Philip Spencer?’ McCabe felt a surge of adrenaline. Here it was. Falling right into his lap. The corroborating evidence Burt Lund was pushing for.
Sophie sensed his excitement. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Let’s just say I know the name.’ He was sitting with a witness who could directly link the sonofabitch to an illegal transplant. Not perfect, but a hell of a lot better than a pair of Bruno Magli shoes. Why would Spencer use his real name, though? Why not Harry Lime or some other alias? It didn’t make sense. Yes, it did. Simple. The passport. He was traveling in a foreign country. He didn’t have the time, or maybe the means, to get himself a phony. Still, why give her the name? No. It didn’t make sense. Then again, lots of things that don’t make sense turn out to be true.
McCabe watched her light another Gauloises. With her Jeanne Moreau face, her accent, and the strong smell of the cigarettes, McCabe was beginning to feel like he had somehow landed in the middle of a Truffaut film himself. Tirez sur le Détective?
‘What happened next?’ he asked.
‘Phillipe somehow found out, or maybe he already knew, that I had money problems. I’m sure that’s why he approached me. I make a good income as a perfusionist in France – not as much as one would make here in the States, but still quite a lot. But I have expensive tastes, and I indulge them. I was carrying a lot of debt at high interest. So when he said he could offer me an assignment that would pay very well, I was interested in hearing more about it. I asked what it was, and he said there was an opportunity for me to take part in a transplant operation in America. I asked him why he’d want me to travel all the way from France when there were already many perfusionists in America. It quickly became clear that this was to be an illegal operation. He wanted me because of my financial problems and, I suppose, because I have no contacts with the medical or legal authorities in America.’
‘Did he tell you who the patient was?’
‘No, not by name. He just told me that a very rich man in his eighties was dying of end-stage congestive heart failure. He wanted a new heart but couldn’t qualify for an approved program because of his age. Phillipe said he’d located a resource that could obtain hearts outside of normal channels. I told him I had no interest in breaking the law and even less in going to jail. He said there was no danger of that. He said he and his friends had performed a number of these operations in the past and no one was any the wiser.’
‘Is that the word he used, friends? Not colleagues? Or associates?’
‘I think so. Yes. I’m quite sure it is. Is that important?’
‘I don’t know. It might be. What happened next?’
‘This conversation didn’t occur all at once. It took place during the course of two or three meetings.’
‘I understand.’
‘Even though he said there was very little risk, I told him I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to be involved in anything illegal, and given the shortage of healthy hearts for transplant, I didn’t believe it was ethically right to deprive someone younger of the chance for a normal life to help an old man who’d soon die anyway.’
‘Did he accept that?’
‘He seemed to.’