What is a kidney worth?

Six thousand dollars. It's somewhere near the average going rate for kidneys in today's global organ trade. Palestinian men who sold their kidneys in Saddam Hussein's Iraq after the first Gulf War got just $500 to $1,000. They helped make Iraq the organ-trading hub of the Arab world until the latest war broke out. In the slums of Manila, where corneas, livers, and lungs are also offered for sale, kidneys fetch about $2,000, according to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, cofounder of Organs Watch, a group at the University of California, Berkeley, that tracks the trade. Some Israeli organ donors have gotten $20,000, she says. And a few American sellers have gotten $30,000 to $50,000 for their kidneys.

But $500 is more than Hernani has ever held in his hands. Captain Ivan tells him to make sure Daisy, Hernani's wife, has enough for when he's gone, and to buy some new clothes.

Hernani hardly has to be told twice. Within an hour, he's walking through the sliding doors of the Shopping Recife mall and into a new life. The lights are bright and the giant windows are filled with personal beer kegs, colorful shirts, and tiny cameras that seem to seduce him, whispering: You've got money now, you can afford it, come in, buy me.

Hernani quickly succumbs to the mall's sirens. He buys five or six polo shirts. He buys a new pair of lace-up shoes. He buys two pairs of jeans, tripling the number of long pants in his wardrobe. He goes to the food court and fulfills a lifelong dream of buying a cappuccino. At the supermarket he fills his cart with rice, beans, bread, milk, eggs, and the ultimate luxury food - meat. For about $2 he buys enough beef to feed his family for a month.

This is just the beginning, he thinks, as he sits down later that night at a fancy restaurant. Things are different now. I am somebody. I'm a consumer.

* * *

But when he opens the metal door to his house just after midnight, he realizes money can't change everything. Daisy is lying on the carpet they call their bed. She's angry. She knows he's been to see his mistress, Antonia. And she knows he has spent most of the money on himself, even though it was supposed to be the down payment on their new life. Yet no matter how much she has come to detest him over the past few years, she can't stop herself from worrying.

"Don't go," she tells him as he lies down beside her. "You don't know what might happen. They could do anything, take anything. You don't know who they are or what they want."

"Shut up," Hernani barks. "Let me go to sleep."

"It could be a trap, Hernani," she persists. "You might not get out alive."

Actually, in this brave new world of kidney selling, donors rarely die. But Daisy's fears aren't totally unfounded. In India, about 2,000 people sell a kidney each year. One study there in 2002 found 86 percent of organ sellers saying they had significant declines in their health in the three years after surgery. In the eastern European nation of Moldova, some 300 peasants sold their kidneys between 1999 and 2002. A study by Organs Watch found 79 percent of Moldovan donors with health problems in the months and years after the procedure.

But in the darkness of their house that night, with the promise of a payday to beat all paydays, Hernani ignores his wife's anxious pleading. "Daisy, I'm doing this," he says, cursing her. More harsh words are exchanged, and she flees to the next room to sleep with her son.

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