City of the Dead

»5«

The bright new sun of early spring. Joggers plodding northward on the river walk; a pair of miscegenate lovers making tumultuous love on a nearby bench; an old derelict on yet another bench, asleep and mumbling epithets beneath yesterday’s Daily News.

Konig eats lunch from a paper bag brought from home and erratically packed. A hard-boiled egg. A raw tomato. A raw carrot. All seasoned from a cellophane envelope of low-sodium salt and washed down with a paper container of tepid black coffee.

Tugs and barges slip up and down the brown pasty water. Gulls wheel in wide arcs overhead as Konig sits fuming over his barely touched bag of lunch. He might have been with the others eating expensive and barely digestible Italian food at Adolpho’s, drinking bad wine and listening to Strang hold forth amid a court of jesters and sycophants. He had little stomach for that. Funny the way men quickly smell which way the wind is blowing. Junior and associate medical examiners already sensing which, way the power will fall and gravitating toward it like iron filings in a magnetic field. It was, of course, Konig’s choice. It was for him to name his successor. Strang was absolutely the worst man for the job. Though a capable enough pathologist, he was, however, a superb politician, an out-front man who loved to talk to the media and to press hands. He knew how to raise money and to smile when the Mayor was nearby. There were far better, more devoted, pathologists on Konig’s staff, but Strang was the departmental superstar, upstaging everyone, always knowing how to catch the Mayor’s eye, a prodigious generator of “earnestly concerned” memos, invariably and “regrettably” incriminating colleagues of whom he was either jealous or wary. Yes, it was Konig’s choice, but already there were powerful supporters eager to lend their weight to Strang’s succession.

Perhaps that is why Konig found himself more and more taking solitary lunch hours. Taking comfort in his solitude. Seeking quiet and respite from the turmoil of his days. Still, it seemed churlish now after almost forty years to complain about the course his life had taken. After all, it had been his own choice. He, the brilliant resident cardiologist, a boy in his twenties with the whole world before him, suddenly veering sharply from a safe and comfortable path into the uncharted wilderness of a rare and poorly remunerated specialty—forensic pathology. Two of Bahnhoff’s lectures audited casually with very little in mind other than a vague, desultory curiosity, then suddenly the whole world upside down. Bahnhoff, like Spillsbury with whom he’d studied, was a genius. An ascetic and a scholar, he lived only for his work, and like Spillsbury, he was driven by a ruthless passion for the truth. He did not care what means were necessary to get it. That was the man who taught Konig. People who boasted that they knew Bahnhoff (liars most of them—Bahnhoff, though world-renowned, permitted few people near him) claimed Konig was exactly like the master. Eerily so. Konig for a time even began affecting a slight German accent and started smoking the same kind of cigars. He had the same painstakingly methodical approach as the master, the same awesome memory coupled with the same uncanny intuition. Working with Bahnhoff, they all claimed, was for Konig a kind of Faustian contract. He gave up v his soul, became the head of the department, and a kind of legend in his own life. But now, it seemed, the devil was waiting in the wings.

Now, nearly forty years later, sitting on a bench, the odor of low tide and river sewerage in his nostrils, the taste of ashes in his mouth, Konig feels a curious bitterness. Why? he asks himself.

What was it for? Why had it ever been? He had such a promising career before him. “The million-dollar-a-year cardiologist,” they used to call him. To have taken such a course, the seedy, unheroic vocation of a civil-servant physician. His life spent in a series of shabby, barely respectable offices, served by surly, resentful clerks. All about him a scrap heap of old instruments that had fallen into desuetude; brand-new, utterly useless instruments that had arrived there mysteriously, that no one had ever ordered. And then, of course, the cheap, decrepit office furniture, the nameless litter and debris, the peeling walls and ceilings of his life.

Ida once said laughingly (but his decision had disappointed her) that it was his “natural morbidity, a fatal attraction for the grotesque. ‘… half in love with easeful Death,’” she had said, quoting the ode. And there was indeed something to that, some nagging little grain of truth. No matter how much he squirmed and wriggled, tried to avert his eyes from that disconcerting fact, it was nevertheless there. Always nagging.

It could have been so much easier, he thought, gumming dispiritedly the dry, tasteless egg yolk in his mouth. He could have been like his old classmate Nachtigal, the Park Avenue dermatologist with a clientele of movie stars and anxious politicians, spending his days curing dandruff and removing unsightly wens, transplanting hair from the back of the head to the front, dispensing cortisone for everything from acne to alopecia and hawking cheap shampoos on the side. The cunning little elixir bottles all marked with magical, arcane figures—xx34-2 (p)—(3xy). All the cheap, fraudulent claptrap of the high priest mumbling cryptic numerals over the man with the falling hair, the lady with the hirsute lip.

He could have done that. He could have been, like Bernard Nachtigal, a millionaire three times over. What fatal flaw then, what idiotic perversity, led him on this fatal downward trajectory to the morgue?

12:45. Too early for the court; too late to go back to the office. Konig crumples his soiled, half-eaten bag of lunch and tosses it into a reticulated trash can chained to the bench. The sleeping derelict mumbles, his head lolls on his shoulder, a sour, greenish chyme leaks onto his chin as Konig limps past.

He has decided he will walk to court. Three miles at least to the Criminal Courts Building, 100 Centre Street. Sciatica be damned. Walking will, of course, only make it worse, but he knows he cannot sit still in a cab for any length of time. That under no circumstances will he face the assorted indignities of the mass-transit system. He refuses to be carted about in the great black funeral hearse of a limousine the City has provided for him, with its impressive bronze shield that can make life easy even in the chaos of the city streets. So he will walk, the weather being fine, and besides, he has business en route.

Consciously and with great deliberation he tells himself that he will walk all the way downtown on the river promenade. But he knows, even as he proclaims this weighty resolution to himself, that at a certain point, he will veer sharply west into the dense, teeming little neighborhoods of the East Village and the Lower East Side—Avenues B and A, Houston, Essex, Hester Streets—then cut south to Little Italy and Canal, and on through the narrow, winding little beehive streets of Chinatown, working south through a maze of lofts and warehouses, truck plazas, dingy storefronts, hardwares, plumbing contractors, electrical repair shops with dead geraniums wilting in the windows, neighborhood butcher shops with the flayed carcasses of pigs and rabbits hanging from steel hooks, blood oozing from their tiny pink nostrils.

He had taken that route many times in the past five months. Always choosing to walk, no matter how weary, rather than ride. Drawn there irresistibly, as if on some invisible leash. Prowling streets. Eyes searching out shadowy alleys, doorways reeking of urine, trying to pierce the dirty brown brick of turn-of-the-century tenement buildings fallen on hard times. Wanting to see past the people on the stoops to the dark, noisome halls beyond, where malicious strangers often lurked, and on into the tiny, inhuman cubicles with the trapped, hapless occupants huddled in the dark, fetid corners. Somewhere in that squalid maze, he is certain, his lost child cowers.

He is moving now as if through a dream on a tide of churning humanity—stray dogs, squalling urchins, the immense and suffocating stench of outdoor fish stalls, bodegas, and costermongers. A grayish, greasy curtain billows outward from an open ground-floor window, carrying with it the smell of fried fish and moldy upholstery. Konig glances up, seeing a fat, antiquated lady with a wen on her nose drowsing at the sill on great beefy arms, head nodding on her chest. A sleeping sibyl. Perhaps he might take himself to her, present votive offerings, seek oracular guidance. “Where should I go? What must I do? How can I get back to where I was?”

He often thought that if he could give himself up to magic and the local wizards, to beads and talismans, all would go well. He would go to an astrologer, chew macro biotic foods, contemplate Zens koans—anything. If only he could get past this corrosive cynicism, shrive himself of the hubris of forty years of weights and measurements to reach some blessed little green oasis of hope, he might yet save himself.

In Chinatown he pauses to look in a window full of pressed ducks hung on wire nooses, heads lolling grotesquely sidewards; then another window crammed with jars and canisters of dried herbs behind which a wizened septuagenarian mandarin in a black skullcap smiles quietly back at him.

He turns, dispirited, and lurches quickly on.