City of the Dead

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“Been here all night?” Haggard asks.

“Guess I have,” Konig replies, a little astonished. He’s had no sense of the fleeting of fifteen hours. “What time is it?”

“Five a.m.,” says the detective. “It’s five a.m.” Once again his gaze drifts past the Chief to the reconstructed corpses, the gobbets of flesh and bone still in trays all about him. “Why do you do it?” he asks, staring at the bleared, red-rimmed eyes, then at the ashtrays full of burned-out cigars, the beaker full of cold, rancid coffee gulped through the long reaches of the night. “Twelve, fifteen hours a day in this rotting, stinking place. You don’t need the money.” Haggard’s face is full of loathing. “Why the hell do you do it?”

But Konig is no longer looking at the detective. Instead he’s staring down at Ferde and Rolfe, the two creatures he gave birth to during the night. Already, almost in the moment of having named them, they’ve become old friends. He feels a curious camaraderie with them. They’ve exchanged intimacies. Konig knows their little secret. He has the gist of their story. He holds a picture of their faces in his head, and like the inveterate physician that he is, he even knows something of their daily aches and pains. Ferde’s foot problem—bunions probably. And Rolfe’s osteosacral miseries. What backaches that fellow must have had.

“Why do I do it?” Konig murmurs aloud, more to himself than in response to the detective. “I do it for them,” he says, gazing down at his new friends. “For them I do it. Because I hate the goddamn creeps. The zip-gun freaks and the boys in the back alleys with the razors and machetes. If it’d been your wife and kid on those tables”—he flings a thumb backward at Ferde and Rolfe—“wouldn’t you want to know that someone was going to get the creepy bastard that put them there? And believe me, I’m going to get the bastard. Why do I do it?” Konig laughs scornfully, working himself up to a tirade. “I do it because no one else will do it. No one else cares. All these here, working with me now—you think they’ll do it? They won’t. They play at doing it. But they don’t really do it. They’re all trimmers and fakes. Come here three, four years, put in their time with me, then go scurrying off to some cushy job in the suburbs—a hospital or a university seat. I do it because it has to be done, and no one else will do it. I do what all your fancy-pants Park Avenue sons of bitches with their fancy office hours won’t do. I do the shit work. I clean up after the goddamn party.”

Konig is red in the face, while the detective stands there impassively, taking the lash of his tongue. “Does that sound arrogant?” Konig rants on. “Very well, it’s arrogant. I am arrogant. That’s me. And if they don’t like it—”

“If who doesn’t like it?”

“All of them. The Mayor. The Police Commissioner. The New York Times. You. The whole goddamned kit and caboodle of you. If you don’t like it, you all know where you can goddamned well shove it. I do this work because I love it. I do it the best way I know how, and I’m going to continue doing it till they carry me out of here kicking and screaming—Where the hell have you been, goddamnit?” Konig snarls, but something like a sob, full of outrage and hurt, issues from his throat. “I’ve been looking for you high and low. I can’t find you. I can’t find anyone. All I hear is excuses. Where the hell is everyone when you need them?”

Haggard stares at him quietly. For the first time in the more than twenty-five years he has known the man, Konig appears close to tears. Racked with exhaustion and worry, his body trembles. His voice, full of anger and recrimination, is modified by a deep sense of helplessness—something he is personally unfamiliar with. The effect results in something like whining. “They’ve got her. They’ve got my kid. Some kind of freaks have got her. They’re hurting her. And they’re going to kill her. Where the hell have you been?”

The detective is seething from the lash of that voice. He too has not yet been to bed. He’s been out all night crisscrossing the boroughs, chasing down false leads, running up blind alleys. The two of them gasping at each other now in the clammy gray of early morning, disheveled, sleepless, burned-out, have the look of two old derelicts, both off on an all-night rip, whose paths suddenly cross.

Finally Haggard stirs from some private musing. “I’ve been out looking for Wally Meacham.”

Konig gapes uncomprehendingly. “Wally who?”

“Wallace Meacham. Alias Walter Eames. Alias Wendell Barker. Alias Warren Eggleston. Three years Dannemora, armed robbery. Eighteen months Leavenworth, aggravated assault with intent to kill. Busted out of Danbury about a year ago. He was doing six-to-twelve for blowing up a bank. The Bureau knows him as 86438 912. Their file describes him as ‘Educated. Logical. Shrewd. With a tendency to brag, and possibly vicious.’ He’s a dilly. One of the beautiful people. Going to make the world a better place for us all to live in.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Konig booms. “They’ve got my kid. They’re gonna kill her and you talk riddles. What the hell has—”

“Paul,” snaps the detective, his voice so full of authority that it brings Konig up sharply. He peers, suddenly mute and petrified, into the detective’s face.

“Come upstairs, Paul. I’ve got some things to tell you, and you’re not going to like them.”