City of the Dead

»14«

Silence. Only the ticking of the old Regulator wall clock, the gurgling of the coffeepot, the quiet hiss of the Bunsen burner sighing beneath it. Konig’s pen scratches across the large municipal ledger sheets of the office annual budget.

Goddamn Strang anyway. He and Blaylock. Both of them oughta be sacked—hang ’em both.

No goddamned tissue study—no mention of ecchymosis in the protocol.

Ought to send him up to Yonkers. Serve him right. They’d eat him alive. Carslin and those smart-ass ACLU boys. And me having to take all that goddamned guff from Benjamin. Flexing his muscles Threatening me with the grand jury. Chief Deputy Mayor and all that crap. Knew him when he was chasing ambulances. “The Mayor doesn’t want—repeat, does not want—any further embarrassment.” Well, screw the Mayor. And the Chief Deputy Mayor. Screw them all.

Calcification at the pubic symphysis. That pelvic section on the river today. No spring chicken. Course, it’d been submerged a while.

Need two new vans. Be lucky if I get one to replace these goddamned antiques. Goddamn Strang lecturing me about my duties, my responsibilities. Insufferable prig. Stuffed ass. Sucking around for my job. Asking about my health all the time. Watching me. Keeping score on me. As if I didn’t know about that silly goddamned racket. Stupid ass—No CO levels in the blood. No cinders in the larynx or the trachea. Fools. Fools. Hope they get that body back for me.

That smug bastard in court today. Suicide? Christ, O Mighty. Can you imagine the gall? Suicide—with a straight face, mind you. All solemn and pompous. Next time that young gorilla kills, it ought to be—Oh, Lolly, Lolly—Something about that hand with the fingernail polish. Odd. Was it left or right? Can’t remember. Funny. Postcards. Pictures. Pretty views.

Konig laughs out loud. Looks up startled to hear the sound of his own laughter rattling through the quiet night around him.

Silly goddamn kid. Postcards and dirty pictures. Coked to the gills on hash. Gonna be a big, famous model. Be dead in a year if she’s lucky—Oh, Christ, Lolly. Don’t study medicine for me. Do it for yourself. Only for yourself. If there’s something else you want to do, do it. But do it for yourself—

Suddenly he rises from his desk as if summoned, and not knowing exactly why, he starts from the office. Footsteps reverberating down the empty hall. The door of his office still open behind him, a plane of pale-yellow light spilling across the darkened corridor.

Something about that goddamned hand.

His feet, that slurred tread, the ache shooting down the thigh into the calf, a long, cold, thin blade of pain. Down he goes. Down Stairway D, spiraling ever downward into the green world of the mortuary below, turned gray and penumbrous now with only the scant illumination of a few dim night lights. No matter though for Konig. He knows the way by heart. Could find the place in his sleep. Peaceful there now with everyone gone. He almost prefers it. Just like old Bahnhoff. His own world. All to himself. Everyone but him an intruder. No noise now. No confusion. No questions and answers. Bumbling attendants and meddlesome colleagues. The place quiet, immaculate. Scrubbed clean of the day’s carnage. White tile and stainless steel. Gurney carts, minus their dismal, sacked cargoes, all lined up in neat, long rows. Shiny, efficient, expectant. Awaiting the morning flood of mayhem.

A single bare bulb illuminates the place, casting huge cavelike shadows across the walls. The only sound the soft, high whir of refrigerator motors cooling cadavers. Konig opens one of the body boxes and peers in. There in the dark chill, wisps of icy vapor rising from it, is the body of the young Spanish girl found in the Harlem stairwell that morning. Yesterday she was alive. Tomorrow she’ll be on the tables bright and early in the morning.

Konig moves on. The next, a badly decomposed cadaver found up in the Bronx Zoo that afternoon. Not much left—a separate skull and mandible. Torso and, extremities clad in a white short-sleeved shirt, a pair of dark-blue denim trousers, dark leather belt, heavy metal buckle. Numerous live and dead worms and extensive green and white mold cover the body surface, now largely mummified. Despite refrigeration, there is heavy cadaveric odor. This too will go on the tables tomorrow morning.

Next, the body of an adult Negro female. Well developed. Well nourished. Approximate age thirty. About 5′ 5″. Weight 122 pounds. Eyes open, staring into the icy darkness of her vault. The conjunctivae are pale; the corneas, clouded; the irides, brown with evidences of tache noire. Somewhere on her retinae is imprinted the image of her executioner—the last thing he ever saw. A long, gaping knife wound runs from just below the sternum to the pubic symphysis, virtually gutting her. A sizable amount of small intestine bulges outward from the wound, a strange flowerlike excrescence, like a red anemone blooming there between her breasts.

Next, the young man found that morning soaking in a bathtub with an ice pick in his chest. The pick is gone now, off to the police laboratory. And the youth lies there, handsome and curiously vital-looking even in death. A young black king dreaming. On the verge of waking to go forth.

The next locker is the one he’s been looking for. Contained within it as well as in the next three lockers are the neatly packaged remains that were exhumed from the muddy shoreline near Coenties Slip that afternoon. There are the legs and arms, the pelvic and thoracic sections, the packages of feet and genitals, jawbones and ears, gobbets of flesh. All neatly packaged in plastic and meticulously labeled, ready for the exhausting and largely fruitless business of identification.

And there among all the other packages, in a separate receptacle of its own, what he has been looking for, what has been on his mind for several hours without his actually even knowing it, the hand with the luridly enameled fuchsia fingernails. It lies on its side in the plastic bag, waxen and rigored—frozen by refrigeration into an exquisitely sculptured gesture. Rather like the plaster hand of a supplicant broken from a piece of religious statuary.

Konig lifts the package from the freezer and gazes down once more at the garishly painted thing. He takes it out of its container, holding it in his hand, turning it in the light. There has been, he now sees, an attempt to mutilate the fingerprints on the hand by abrading them on a file or against a hard surface, thus making the job of identification more difficult. Not unusual. He’s seen that one before. But there is something, else about the hand. Something far more interesting suddenly occurs to him, what he’s been mulling about all evening, ever since he first saw the hand dredged up, still dripping mud and slime from the river. And that is the fact that what he, and what everyone else down there at the time, had blithely assumed was the hand of a woman, he now feels might very well be the hand of a man.

Suddenly he turns, glancing upward as he does so at some vague, indeterminate point above him. A footstep rings softly on the metal steps of Stairway D. He listens a moment more, then turns back to the hand, dismissing as implausible the notion of anyone coming down there at that time of night.

Then suddenly another step. A pause. Then a series of two or three more steps, tentative and stealthy.’

In the next moment he has returned the wrapped hand to its place in the locker and slipped noiselessly through the swinging doors of the autopsy room.

Several moments pass while he waits there in the great, gloomy, formalin-sodden shadows. From where he stands just behind one of the doors, he has an excellent vantage of the wall lockers through a small glass window cut into the center of the door. Listening to the uneasy, slightly wheezing sound of his own breathing, Konig waits. He waits for what seems an extraordinary length of time. Until it seems to him that he’s imagined everything, that he will wait there forever, listening to the vague creaks and groans of metal stairs contracting and expanding, settling into their fastenings.

Several times he peers through the glass window, seeing nothing but the long, impassive wall of gray lockers. He’s quite ready to forsake the whole thing, but something tells him to wait. For besides the revelation of the dismembered hand, there’s yet another piece of business down here remaining to be settled.

In the next moment, within that small pane of window glass is framed the face of a man. It is an old, tired face, deeply lined, full of apprehension, a little appalled, yet a little excited at finding itself in such an unlikely place so late at night. It’s not an unpleasant face either, but rather kindly and avuncular. The face of an elderly Italian man whom Konig himself hired more than twenty years ago.

Moving with the stealthy tread of a small mouse venturing out of its hole, the man creeps toward the wall lockers, pausing several times, glancing nervously around before he reaches his destination. Once there his eyes scan wildly up and down the numerical labels, on each drawer. Then he goes about systematically correlating locker numbers with names and entering them on a clipboard.

Shortly, he pauses before a locker. With a simple motion he reaches up, pulls out a drawer, and the body of Barbara Rosales rolls out once more into the dim light.

Konig watches the man hovering there above the sheeted cadaver. The man appears to be studying the face of the dead girl, a mixture of pity and awe in his eyes. Then, with a slow, tremulous gesture, he draws the sheet downward, revealing the badly battered, unclad body.

It is at that point that Konig steps out of the darkened autopsy room. “All right, Angelo.”

The head whirls, and the man freezes there, crouching, winded, his face gone the sickigh color of raw mushrooms.

They stand there regarding each other for a moment. Then Konig speaks. “Go to my office now, Angelo, and wait there for me.”

“Stop crying,” Konig shouts, red in the face, at the slumped, disheveled figure seated opposite him. “For Chris-sake—stop crying. That’s not going to help anything.” Angelo Perriconi slumps deeper into his seat, as if he were trying to osmose himself into the wood and vanish. His face is hidden behind trembling hands, and he sobs like a baby, pausing only from time to time to wipe his running nose across his sleeve. “Oh, my God, my God.”

“Forget about God, Angelo. What the hell do you think you were doing down there?”

Muffled wails issue from behind the old man’s hands. “Answer me. What the hell do you think—”

“Dio mio, Dio mio. Now I gonna lose my job. Now I gonna lose everything—”

“Will you stop that goddamned bawling and—”

“What I gonna do?”

“Listen to me. I’ll tell you what you’re—”

“What I gonna do?”

“Listen to me.” Konig’s thunder is so loud that the frenzied little man halts abruptly and gapes up at him.

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do, Angelo. First of all you’re going to give me the name of every mortician in this city to whom you’ve ever sold the names of unclaimed bodies.”

“Unclaimed bodies?” The man half rises out of his seat. “I never—I never—”

“Come on, Angelo. Cut the crap. I’ve known about your little sideline for years—”

“Oh, no, Chief. I swear—I never—”

“Angelo!” Konig bellows, his fist smashing into the center of the desk; papers fly, glasses rattle, pencils roll.

“Oh, no, Chief. No. I never—I swear—I never—” The little man hiding behind his hands again, shaking like a leaf, is reduced to inconsolable sobbing.

“Angelo”—Konig starts again, more reasonably, more restrained—“you’re going to give me those names or else I’m going to file a formal report of what I saw downstairs tonight.”

“Oh, no. No—please, Chief. No, don’t do dat.”

“If I file such a report,” Konig hammers on remorselessly, “it won’t be a private matter. Your wife, your family, everyone, will hear about it.”

The old man whines behind his hands. “I givva those names, they gonna breaka my legs.”

“Angelo, I want those names.”

“They breaka my head—they gonna kill me.”

“No one’s going to kill you.”

“Dio mio, Dio mio.” The man wails like a mourning spirit.

“Listen to me, Angelo.”

“Ma che vergogna, ma che disgrazia.”

“Listen to me.” Konig’s voice shatters once more through the office. Cringing from the sound, the man slumps deeper into a sour heap in his chair, and while he continues to whimper softly to himself, shaking his head incredulously back and forth, Konig stands above him like the wrath of God and speaks. “Now, this is what we’re going to do. Number one, you’re not going to be fired. You will resign for purposes of health. I’ll certify that. You’re only one year from retirement. I’m pretty certain I can get you your full pension.”

The little Italian starts to protest but Konig waves him to silence.

“Number two, you’re going to give me that list of names—”

Angelo Perriconi resumes his loud wailing.

“Shut up, Angelo. Let me finish. You’re going to give me that list and no one is ever going to know that you gave me the list. Your resignation has come about for reasons of health—right?” Konig peers down hard at him. “Right, Angelo?”

The man snivels and shakes his head.

Konig continues. “So no one will connect your resignation with this goddamned body-snatching racket. You understand?”

Whimpering, sniveling, the man nods his head and Konig continues. “Actually, I blame myself as much as you for this whole thing. I’ve known for about three years that you’ve been selling names and taking kickbacks from shady people. I figured you needed the extra money. I know you’ve got kids, a big family. I know there’s a boy in college. I suppose I looked the other way, hoping you’d quit yourself. I was wrong. I should’ve stopped you the moment I learned about it. Oh, will you stop that goddamned sniveling.”

The little Italian jumps, like a child recoiling from a blow, making Konig feel more angry with himself, more desolate. Averting his gaze from the little man’s shame, Konig’s eyes search desperately around the room, lighting finally on the coffeepot. “Want some coffee?”

Angelo shakes his head and slumps deeper into his seat. “As it is now,” Konig goes on ruefully, “I’m pretty sure we’ve got a full-fledged scandal on our hands. The newspapers will pounce on this like vultures. They won’t let go. Leave that to me. I’ll handle that.”

“My wife—my kids—Whadda hell they gonna say?”

“They’re going to say nothing because they’ll never know.”

The sobbing comes abruptly to a halt and the slumped, piteous figure turns a startled face toward Konig.

“I certainly don’t propose to tell them,” Konig goes on. “Do you?”

Still puzzled, not quite certain of the drift of thought here, the man shakes his head negatively.

“Do you, Angelo?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. Then it’s our secret. Right?”

Again the baffled man shakes his head, but a ray of hope has begun to creep into his features.

“Our secret—right, Angelo?”

“Right” The man sobs huskily, humiliation and defeat carried in the slump pf his shoulders.

“Now go home, Angelo. You’re tired.”

The man gazes up at Konig with red, teary eyes, mouth struggling to form words. But Konig, knowing all the arguments and all the old evasions, places his large index finger firmly against the little Italian’s lips. “Go home, I said.”

Once again in the solitude of his office, Konig, rattled and exhausted, settles wearily down to the municipal ledger sheets, the innumerable lines and columns, interminable figures, debits and credits, the shaving here in order to pad there, the small duplicities, the shabby fudging in order to wangle a piece of new equipment. The whole silly mosaic of evasions and petty frauds to be completed by the end of next week, delivered to City Hall, and there somehow to make sense to the jaded eye of the City Comptroller.

At approximately 11 p.m., eyes burning, the ache of his leg having spread up into the small of his back, Konig flings his pencils down and makes ready to go home. Stacking the ledgers neatly in the center of his desk, he reaches behind him and flicks off the Bunsen burner under the coffeepot. He is ready to go. But something still gnaws at him. Some bit of uncompleted business.

In the next moment he falls back in his chair, reaches for the phone and is dialing information, long-distance operator, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Shortly, there is a high-pitched ringing on the wires, a number of gongs and bells, voices of unseen people caught momentarily in the lines stretching across the darkened continent. Fathers, uncles, sisters, brothers, enemies, and friends. Then a phone picked up thirteen hundred miles away and suddenly the receiver flooded with a roar of voices and twanging guitars.

“Will you turn that goddamn thing lower,” a woman’s voice shouts from the other end.

Konig shouts back. “Hello—”

“Wait a minute, f’Chrissake—will you?”

Konig hangs there amid a pause of mutterings and movements coming to him from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then suddenly silence, as if a radio or TV has been rudely snapped off.

“Hello—”

“Hello—Mrs. Sully?”

“Hello—”

“Hello. Is this the Sully residence?”

“That’s right.” The woman’s voice has grown strident, somewhat testy.

“Sorry to bother you at this hour.”

“What hour?”

Konig glances at his watch, laughs a little awkwardly. “Oh, it’s a few hours earlier there, isn’t it?”

“Depends where you’re calling from. Who is this?”

“This is Dr. Konig in New York City. I’m calling about your daughter.”

“Who?”

“Your daughter. Do you have a daughter—about sixteen or seventeen—name of Heather—er, Molly. Actually, it is Molly, isn’t it?”

There’s a pause in which they listen to each other breathing.

“Hello—hello—Mrs. Sully?”

“Wait a minute, would ya, please? Tim—” Konig can hear the note of alarm in her voice as she cries out, “Tim.”

Another pause as Konig waits, hearing something like agitated whispering on the other end. Then suddenly a gruff, beery masculine voice.

“Hullo.”

“Hello—Mr. Sully?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Dr. Konig in New York City. You have a daughter Molly?”

“Thas right.”

“Well, this may all sound strange to you. Incredible, really—” Konig laughs a little idiotically. “Has she been missing?”

There’s another pause while he can actually hear the other man pondering the question. “Left here eighteen months ago. Ain’t heard from her since.”

“I knew it.” Konig’s heart lightens and he rushes on eagerly. “I knew it. Listen—I saw her tonight.”

“You saw her?”

“Had dinner with her. Quite by accident. I mean, I looked up and there she was—selling postcards in a restaurant in Greenwich Village. I knew she was a runaway. I knew it. Just knew it. Had that feeling. But listen, don’t worry. She’s all right. She’s not in any immediate danger. But I’m afraid she’s going to get into a great deal of trouble. I’ll talk to you more about that when you get here. I know where she is—where you can find her. If you get the first plane out tomorrow—”

“Who’d ya say this was again?”

“Konig—Dr. Paul Konig. I’m the Medical Examiner for the City here. Listen, I have the address. If you want her picked up, I can—”

“I don’t want the address.”

“She’s not using her own name, but—” Konig’s voice trails off. “Beg pardon?”

“I said I don’t want the address. I don’t ’give a good goddamn where she is.”

Konig frowns into the black mouthpiece of the phone. “Oh?” He hovers there a moment, quite at a loss. “But your daughter—”

“She ain’t no daughter of mine. Walked outta here eighteen months ago with a lotta fancy notions. Far as I’m concerned—”

“Tim—Tim—” Once more the agitated, pleading whispers come hissing through the wires. “Tim—”

“She don’t ever set foot in—”

“Tim—”

“Shut up, Alice. You hear that,, mister? You ever see that little bitch again, you tell her for me—”

Konig hears the sound of muffled sobbing on the other end.

“—I’ll bust her fuckin’ head she ever comes suckin’ around here again.”