City of the Dead

»23«

Sometime around 2 a.m. Konig is back home in Riverdale, padding about upstairs in his bathrobe after a hot shower. He cannot sleep. Even with the heightened dosage of Demerol, the sciatic pain in his leg is once again gnawing remorselessly at his bone.

He tries to read a magazine but his attention wanders, his mind too agitated and full of the day; the budget still due, the list of chiseling morticians from Angelo, the exhumation of the Robinson boy in Yonkers on Wednesday, the Doblicki business in Jersey, Strang’s treachery, and the matter of the missing heads. Without heads they will never be able to ascertain precisely the age of the two dismembered corpses. Without the dentition inside the jaws and without the terminal segments of fingers with which to make readable prints, they can never hope to make any real identifications. And despite the strange hand with the lacquered nails that seem to suggest a woman’s but feels more like a man’s, in the absence of a pelvis and lower trunk, any hope of accurately sexing that skeleton appears remote at best. And then, of course, Lolly. The thought of her comes creeping back into his head. Voices whisper through the room, all the old oaths, recriminations, guilts, and sorrows.

He rises and goes downstairs, padding through the empty house like a somnambulist. These nocturnal perambulations of his have grown more frequent. Over the past months since wife and daughter have gone, he has grown more restive and irritable. Less able to sleep. What a curse a bed is when you cannot sleep in it.

He goes to the kitchen—spotless, immaculate—where nothing has been cooked in nearly half a year, and nothing eaten, except small snacks nibbled late at night from the nearly empty refrigerator. He pours a glass of milk, hoping it will soothe his stomach, sour now from frayed nerves, too much gin and cheap Chianti. He wanders from there to the library looking for a book, something to get him through the night.

For a physician, Paul Konig is unusually well read. In his youth, fresh out of medical school, with textbook reading comfortably behind him, he developed a voracious appetite for books. Nowadays, his life being the hectic thing it is, he has scarcely time for that. But his library is stacked from floor to ceiling with the passion of those years—history, poetry, biography, novels. His favorite character in all literature is Prince Myshkin, probably because he is nothing like Myshkin. If anything, he’s like Coriolanus, proud, angry, incautious, scolding the mob, always confronting them with their stupidity. As a character, Konig loathes Coriolanus.

Now his fingers wander up the shelves and search through the titles, pausing finally at an old, frayed copy of Lear. The story of the old, derelict king, bereft of throne, fortune, his daughters, careening over the stormy plain, blind and dotty, wondering what it was he’d lost, or ever thought he wanted, is an old favorite of his. As a senior in medical school he played the part of the mad old king in a laughably inept university production. Lurching and ranting around the stage in an ill-fitting costume—“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks” and so on—he elicited from his audience a number of embarrassed titters. And the young man who reviewed it in the school paper was able to remark that “Konig’s Lear was awesomely voluble if not entirely convincing.”

He takes the book down now and pads out into the sun parlor. It is a large, glassed-in hothouse-cum-terrace, moist and verdant, crowded with a tangle of assorted indoor flora, unpruned, unattended, growing wild since Ida’s death—the coleus, the schefflera, the huge luxuriant ficus with their great green paddle leaves, the myriad pots of blooming lilies, variegated and of every color, Ida’s passion.

He lies back in the sultry, near-tropical greenhouse air, recumbent on a chaise of rattan, aching leg propped high on a cushion, and sips his milk. He starts to read, but after a moment his eyes flutter and close, the glass balanced on his chest, and he nearly drowses. Then suddenly the harsh jangle of the phone, the ring, like a long, cruel needle, drills through the silence of the house. The milk nearly topples and, sitting upright, he waits for a second ring, already believing that, just as the other night, the second ring will never come.

But it does, and suddenly his heart is thumping. He’s up, spilling milk, lurching, staggering, hobbling to the phone on a leg with shooting stars in it Another ring and yet another. His bowels grind with fright. A premonition of danger. Who can it be at such an hour? Possibly the office. Or Flynn. No—they’d never call like this, unless—“Lolly—Lolly,” he murmurs even before the phone is in his hand.

“Hello.”

Only silence roaring back at him. Ominous. Anticipatory.

“Hello—hello. Who is this?”

“Dr. Konig?” A voice comes at him.

“Yes—speaking.”

“Dr. Konig,” the voice proclaims once more, as if he were being officially summoned.

“Yes, this is Paul Konig. Who is this?”

“Listen to this, Dr. Konig.”

There’s a moment of silence in which Konig can hear the other man breathing. Then suddenly a piercing, wrenching scream, followed by a lewd giggle in the background.

“Dr. Konig,” the voice comes again, “did you hear that?”

A cold sweat breaks out on Konig’s forehead. His heart is beating wildly in his chest. The voice continues now more softly. It is a refined, eerily gentle voice.

“Dr. Konig,” it resumes, “that was your daughter.” Another loud, wrenching scream. More ghastly. More anguished. Then the phone is slammed down.