City of the Dead

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“This is as far as I go.”

The pert, sullen face glances up at him in the dim orange glow of the streetlight. “But you said—”

“Never mind what I said. This is where we part.”

Konig and the girl stand in the dank, wavery shadows of a partially gutted tenement destined for imminent demolition. A tattered police order instructs all remaining occupants to vacate the premises by a certain date. Above them the sporadic lights of the last few remaining tenants—the obdurate and those with no place to go—flicker forlornly in the hazy April night.

“But you said—”

“I know what I said.” Konig grows curt, gruff, a little nasty. “But this is it.”

Surprise and hurt mingle in the girl’s eyes. A child denied a long-awaited present It is now fifteen minutes since Konig paid the bill at the little Italian restaurant on Minetta Lane, then started walking west toward the girl’s apartment over near the river. Now having reached there, he has what he’s come for. An address. In that time they’ve laughed and chatted. Been easy with each other. She’d been happy, secretly smug and congratulating herself on what an easy thing it had been to win him over. She’d been thinking of herself as shrewd and him as foolish. But not unkind. She doesn’t think he, will try to hurt her as some of the others have.

Now, suddenly, the momentary laughter is all gone. He is stem, harsh, censorious. There is something even a little menacing about the way he looks at her. As if he were furious with her.

“Ah, come on now.” She pushes up against him in the shadows, her child’s lips eagerly seeking his old man’s mouth. The obscenity of it offends him and he pushes her off.

“Come on, Poppy. Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared, and stop calling me that disgusting name. I’m not your poppy.” He looks up at the gutted, squalid thing, the tangle of brick and rusting iron crouching above them. “You live in this?”

The girl seems suddenly grief-stricken, at a loss, unable to fathom all the sudden rejection.

“Go upstairs now,” Konig says more softly, a bit of the edge off his voice.

She stares at him helplessly, fright and puzzlement in her eyes. Then she turns.

Watching her go, Konig calls after her. “How long have you been on drugs?”

She turns back, mouth open, trying to form words.

“How long you been on junk?” Konig’s manner grows more harsh and insistent. “Answer me.”

“Are you a cop?”

“Answer me, I said.”

“You’re a cop. I knew it.” She starts toward him imploringly. “Oh—hey, listen—I—”

“No, you listen to me.” He hold her off at arm’s length. “I’m not a cop.”

“Then how d’ya know?”

“I don’t have to be a cop. All I have to do is look in your eyes.”

Suddenly the girl starts to tremble. He shakes her violently.

“Now listen to me. You keep on that stuff and you’re going to wind up in a garbage can.” He gazes upward at the crumbling brick and plaster, the punched-out windows, the graffiti scrawl of myrmidon street kids. “As a matter of fact, you’re more than halfway there right now.” He crams twenty dollars into her tiny cold fist. “Go upstairs.”

The girl gapes down at the bill, her shoulders slumped wearily in defeat. He senses the struggle going on within her. She’d like to fling the bill back in his face, but he knows she won’t. He can see the need already too great upon her. The girl, he knows, won’t have her money long. Even now he can sense the avid burning eyes of the junk pusher crouching behind the brick wall with his precious little packets of forgetfulness, just waiting for him to go. “Take this, too.” Konig produces a small white professional card from his billfold. “When you’re ready to try and break out, come and see me. I’ll do what I can to help you.”

9:20. Konig limping back crosstown, some huge, vague, unspecified rage smoldering within him. No destination. Uncertain where his faltering tread impels him. Bone-weary, yet determined not to go home. No reason to. Dreading the empty house and its haunted shadows. Unaware of the pain shrieking down his leg, he hobbles through the green-red gridlike maze of traffic patterns blinking up and down Sixth Avenue, then starts up West 4th, unaware that at that very moment behind the yellow plate-glass storefront window he is passing, beyond which flicker the tawdry lights of cheap reproduction Tiffany lamps, Francis Xavier Haggard sits hunched and miserable over a cup of bitter-as-rue espresso, trying to assemble, make some sense of the odds and ends, the bits of trivia hailing down upon him in badly fragmented English from the lips of an excitable young Armenian waiter gesticulating above him.

Konig drifts across the moist, hazy April night, moving beneath bright white street lamps ringed with gauzy, spectral halations, past a flowing tide of young, laughing, animated faces. All the world is young here, making him feel suddenly ancient Some obscene, discarded, castoff thing. Full of curious envy and contempt and sick at heart. Their vitality taunts him. He searches those faces, all restless, eager, seeking life on the littered pavements. Searching, yet unaware that he is searching, seeking out one face. Suddenly, the small, frightened features of Heather Harwell, nee Molly Sully, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, waver momentarily before his eyes. He wonders, now that he’s dispatched her, why the need to have been so cruel about it. The final, heartless brutality of his rejection of her, he realizes now, afforded him some odd, unsavory pleasure. Then the need to humiliate her further with the twenty-dollar bill, proffered for nothing—no services rendered—with almost regal contempt. The faintly oily odor of her hair, mingled with that of cheap spray, still clings to him, and the memory of small, frail, pathetically childlike bones crushing up against him in the dark—not for lust, it suddenly occurs to him, but rather the small child’s need for protective warmth against the night—suddenly saddens him.

Up Broadway and over to St. Marks Place, he shambles through the gaudy night, pausing from time to time outside the yellow-orange windows of saloons and coffeehouses, small bistros and bookstalls, little Japanese gift shops reeking with incense, hung with paper lanterns, stuffed with fake jade, cheap brummagem, past endless pizza parlors, tiny hole-in-the-wall Greek restaurants, the smell of singed lamb, oily pilaf, sausages frying on vendors’ griddles, a hundred different smells licking outward from open doorways like a moist, sour tongue. And everywhere the young. A flood tide of the young—students, lovers, painters, poets manque, bearded teenagers plotting a better world in cheap all-night cafeterias, drug-crazed junkies hovering like lean, hungry jackals in shadowy doorways, pondering desperate solutions to desperate problems. Konig’s eyes sweep and scan these youthful faces. Oh, Lolly, Come home, dear. Please come home now. “Evening, Chief.”

Konig looks up into the smiling rubicund visage of the night guard.

“Working late tonight, are you, Doc?”

Konig gazes around like a stranger. A little startled to find himself there. “Oh, no—nothing, Scanlon. Just some paper work. Won’t be long.”

“Take your time. I’ll be here if you need me.”

The pleasant lilt of a Gaelic chuckle fades behind him; the echo of his own footsteps clatters through the long, empty green corridors, and once more Paul Konig has entered the green, comforting gloom of the world he knows best.