City of the Dead

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At 6:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning the city has a soiled, spent look. The revelry and carnage of the night are over and soon the ragpickers and sweepers will come to clean up the mess. The big, buglike sanitation trucks will double-park in the side streets, grinding up the debris of today to make room for that of tomorrow.

Standing at a window now, Konig gazes over to the west. The sky is glowing neon pink and crimson above the Times Square area where some of the night lights have not yet gone out. It has the look of a city in flames.

Down below on the street the stray cats are picking among the overflowing trash cans. A few dirty pigeons wamble in the gutter and an old tart in a rumpled dress weaves precariously down 30th Street. Her hair is hennaed; she has a Kewpie-doll face heavily made up like a mask, a hideous maquillage. At a certain point she bumps into one of the trash cans, nearly knocking it over, but only dislodging the lid, sending it clattering to the pavement with a loud crash.

A few early risers are already out there too, walking the dogs, picking up the milk and The New York Times. Soon all the bells of the churches will be pealing. The great cathedral bells—St. Patrick’s, St. Bartholomew’s, St Clement’s, St. Mark’s—all the church bells of the great Empire City calling the faithful to worship. Great gorgeous bells tolling diapasons, their huge bronze throats sending great lead circles of sound skyward.

From somewhere far to the south Konig can hear the sound of a distant siren screaming northward up the FDR Drive. He gazes toward the river now. The water has a choppy, sullen look. A tugboat and a sand barge are out there plying upriver.

It had never occurred to him before how close the morgue was to the river. And then quite suddenly it dawns on him that its placement there was not merely fortuitous, that most of the morgues of the great cities of the world had been built either on the banks of or in close proximity to mighty rivers. Similarly, all the great necropolises of antiquity. All had been built on or near water. Some ancient superstition, no doubt, he thought, trying to recall some passage in Herodotus about that Something about facilitating the voyage of the soul back into the great ocean of time. Suddenly, as if in a flash, he has a vision of all the great rivers of the world-flowing at that moment into the East River: the mighty Nile and the Tiber, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Danube and the Ganges, the Rhine and the Volga, and the Father of Waters, the Mississippi, all flowing past his window, bearing their cargoes of dead souls out to sea. Then suddenly, in another flash, he sees all the great necropolises of the world rising below him on the banks of the river—Memphis, Thebes, Carthage, Tyre, Persepolis. There, King Djoser’s mighty tomb, Saqqara, with its huge pentagons of marble columns. And there, the great mortuary temples all along the Nile—Luxor, Karnak, Birket Habu. He sees the Roman catacombs—St Calixtus and St Sebastian—those intestinal tunnels winding along beneath the Via Appia, and then, the funerary pyres, the burning ghats, beside the muddy Ganges. And there, the great efficient incinerators of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Then, that even greater marvel of technological efficiency—Hiroshima, and its thousands incinerated in a flash. All those burial grounds, he sees. All those graves suddenly open and yawning. All those souls suddenly flowing past him on the river below his window.

Then, in another blink of an eye, the vision has boiled past, sinking slowly beneath the brown, sullen waters of the East River, leaving in its place only a view of the Queens skyline sprawling gray and squalid beyond it.

The sound of wailing sirens has grown louder and closer. Dozens of them appear to be converging on the spot where Konig stands, looking down into the street. Shortly several patrol cars turn into 30th Street, followed by a large black police van, swaying and tilting as it rounds the corner. Then come several more patrol cars and another van, causing a small crowd to collect outside the courtyard at the rear entrance.

Half a dozen night men from the morgue stream’ out into the courtyard, wheeling their steel gurney carts up to the vans. The doors of the patrol cars are opening and slamming, their dome lights still rotating slowly. Police pour out from them into the street, many of them sooty, unhatted, their eyes bleared, their uniforms strewn with ashes. The drivers of the big Black Marias are out now too, moving around in the courtyard, swinging open the big rear doors of the vans.

Then from both vans, simultaneously, a grisly cargo is unloaded. Nearly twenty cadavers, burned and charred beyond recognition, victims of a ghetto fire in Bed-Stuy. One sack after the next—women, children, the old, the young—all unloaded onto the shiny carts, then swiftly, efficiently wheeled through the big basement portal gates to the mortuary beyond.

There are more sirens and Konig watches a 41st Precinct patrol car turn the corner, leading another van. Yet another complement of the shot, the slashed, the bludgeoned and garroted. No more than a typical assortment of a no more than typical Saturday night.

At last another patrol car wheels slowly into the street. No van follows this. It rolls slowly down the street with a kind of bleak majesty, weaving through the gathering congestion, and turns into the courtyard just below the window. In the next moment, Konig sees Haggard’s fleecy white hair through the car window, then his tall, stooping figure climbing out from the front seat. His hat is off, his rumpled raincoat open, his tie loose at the collar. Two uniformed patrolmen get out of the car and come around the back.

Standing there in the sour dawn, in the slight, mizzling rain, Haggard glances upward and sees Konig standing two stories above him at the open window looking down. They stand there for a moment merely staring at each other.

Shortly, Konig himself is down in the courtyard, limping through the noise and confusion, past the chatter of police and porters, canvas sacks and rolling carts, past the gaping crowds gathered just outside a makeshift police cordon. He is moving directly toward the place where Haggard and the two patrolmen are struggling to remove a large canvas sack from the rear seat of the car.

Haggard glances up as Konig joins them, and without a word they gently lift the sack out of the back of the car. One of the porters, without knowing what is contained in the sack, rushes over with a cart and starts to take the sack from them. Instantly Konig’s face flushes, his eyes bulge. He flings the man roughly aside. It is the diener—the little Albanian with the furtive eyes.

“Don’t touch her,” Konig booms. “You keep your goddamned hands off her.”

Cringing, the little man gapes at him, then turns and slithers off into the milling confusion around the vans.

Haggard and the two patrolmen start to lift the sack onto the cart.

“Leave her alone,” Konig shouts, pushing them aside, prizing their hands from the canvas. “I’ll take her. I’ll take her now. Don’t touch her.”

They watch silently as he eases the sack onto the cart, then proceeds to push it, all by himself, down the ramp and through the large open gates leading to the mortuary.

Inside, the place is jumping. A blur of motion. Carts rolling in and out. People shouting. Phones ringing. The doors of the cold lockers banging open and closed.

Konig is scarcely noticed as he rolls his cart into one of the empty autopsy rooms. He looks like anyone else there, hard at work, going about his business. No one knows anything of his grief.

Unloading his burden onto one of the examination tables, the top of the sack comes undone and a coil of soft honey-brown hair spills up over the top of it.

Now he stands there over the half-opened sack, his legs wobbling beneath him, thinking that he’s about to throw up. But nothing happens. The worst of it is that nothing really happens. He feels nothing. Forty years in the business have made a zombie of him, and after the wobbly legs and the slight nausea, he is once again the dispassionate professional, that highly skilled, carefully calibrated instrument, measuring, recording, deducing.

Finally Lolly Konig is out of the canvas and lying there on the table. He can see where they’d beaten her, the blackened eyes, the large contusions about the face and head, the ugly weals on her shoulders and ribs, the black-and-blue marks circling like dark planets about her temples. He can see nail marks and the dull yellow-violet abrasions across her throat where she’d been strangled. Palpating the area gently, he can feel the fracture of the thyroid cartilage, and quickly suspects the cause of death to be an avulsion of the hyoid membrane with fractures to the great horn of the hyoid bone.

Her tongue protrudes slightly and is bruised where she’d bitten deeply during the process of being throttled. He tucks the tongue gently back in, reducing somewhat the harsh effect of rictus on her features. Her eyes are still half open and with a thumb he carefully rolls the lids up, revealing the widespread petechial hemorrhage beneath the conjunctivae and the unmistakable signs of tache noire just beginning to radiate out from the pupils.

There is little sign of rigor and, as of yet, no lividity. She is still warm, her body temperature, he estimates, only a few degrees below the norm. Very soon it will start to take its dip.

With his thumb he gently presses the lids closed. She seems now almost to be sleeping, an oddly peaceful expression about her features. Just as she used to look as a child when he’d come in late from work and poke his head through her door to have a look at her. She looks just like that now, an innocent little girl sleeping, her face wreathed in tousled honey hair, dreaming of toys and dresses and birthday parties. He has a sudden image of her pedaling toward him on a tricycle. Poor bird. Poor pretty bird. This little torn, crumpled sleeping thing was his child. He might just nudge her now and she would stir in the sweet warmth of her bed. Then turn and yawn, glance up at him through drowsy eyes and smile.

For a moment he’s the old mad king again, lurching across the stage in an ill-fitting costume in a laughably inept college production. “Howl, howl, bowl.”

Gazing down at her now he pushes the tumbled hair from off her face and smoothes it. Suddenly, looking down at her, he sees the lineaments of his own face staring up at him. To him she’d always looked like Ida. Now in death he could see his own face in her reposeful features.

“Looks exactly like you, Ida.” He laughs and it’s more than twenty years ago in a maternity ward on Long Island. “The spitting image.”

“No—I’ve seen her too. That’s your daughter, Paul Konig. Your chin. All your—”

“Don’t push the child so, Paul.”

“Who’s pushing her? Hell, she’s got to learn.”

“Hurry, Lolly, hurry. The bus is coming. If you miss that damn thing, don’t expect me to drive you way the hell up to camp—”

Suddenly the door of the autopsy room bursts open. “Chief?” It’s the night doorman from upstairs. “Phone call for vou.”

“Who is it?”

“Sergeant Flynn.”

“Tell him I’m not here.”

The attendant gawks at him helplessly.

“I don’t want to talk to him,” Konig says quietly. “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

The man shrugs. The door closes and once more Konig is alone. For a while he merely sits there, holding the cold, stiffening hand of his child, waiting for her to awaken, calling up in his mind old, lost memories—holidays, picnics, long vacations at the shore. Ida is there and so is Lolly. Always Lolly—a bright, funny little girl, animated, irrepressible, so invulnerable to harm. They’re all there. All together again.

Again the door opens, and once more the attendant is standing there, shamefaced and stammering. “Sorry, Chief. It’s Flynn again. Says he’s gotta talk to you Says it’s an emergency.”

“Tell him I don’t care.” Konig stares listlessly at his child. “Tell him to go away.”

“I did, but he says he’s just gotta talk to you.”

“Tell him—” Konig sighs, still gazing at Lolly. Then, knowing he can do nothing more there, he covers her gently and turns to follow the night man upstairs, up the green spiral steps of Stairway D and out of the underworld of 30th Street.

“You were right. Goddamn it, you were right.”

“Right? Right about what?”

“That newspaper with the serial number—”

“Oh,” Konig murmurs disconsolately.

“What a brainstorm,” Flynn roars into the phone. “What a goddamn brainstorm.”

“You get the guy?”

“Get him? Did I get him? You bet your sweet ass I did. Don’t ask me all the details. I’ll show you the blisters on my feet when I see you. But I got him. Walked right in on the son of a bitch. No sooner than I laid it on him than the poor bastard broke down, started to bawl. Confessed the whole thing. Said he was glad I found him ’cause he was gettin’ all set to do it again. Had the guys all picked out too. Another pair of queens. Live down the block from him. Got a thing about fags, this guy, and if you ask me, he walks a little tippytoes himself.” Flynn howls gleefully. “I tell you—”

Konig sits at his desk, his hand covering his eyes to block out the glare of sunrise streaming through his window. “Was it the Salvation Army guy?”

“Sure it was. Knew it all along. Had a hunch,” Flynn roars, full of the exhilaration of victory. “When I come in, the son of a bitch was still in his collars. Colonel Divine he calls himself. Divine. Can you beat that? Guy was a missionary in Africa.”

“A doctor?”

“No, but he had medical training. Worked in a hospital out in the bush somewhere. Knew a lot about medicine. Used to assist the doctors in the surgery. Pull teeth. Sew up holes. Stuff like that. Place was full of old medical journals. Had a whole drawer full of medical instruments. Forceps, sutures, the works.”

“That figures,” Konig murmurs listlessly. “How come he left the church?”

“Did I say he left the church?”

“You said he was a medical missionary.”

“Oh—right. So I did.” Flynn laughs.” You’re some smart guy for a sawbones. He didn’t actually leave the church. The way he tells it he had a crisis of faith. But what actually happened was that he got busted.”

“Defrocked?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“Sure,” Flynn says, momentarily puzzled, the wind out of his sails. “Anyway, I contacted the church organization that sent him out there, and they refused to discuss the case. Just said he was asked to leave. Turn in his collar, so to speak.” Flynn giggles meanly. “So he came back to the States and joined the Salvation Army. They canned him too. Around seven years ago. I just got off the phone with the commander of the New York Division. Chap by the name of Pierce. He wasn’t too anxious to talk about it either. Just said Divine was asked to leave for conduct unbecomin’ and so forth and so on. A lot of fancy argle-bargle, but you get the picture.”

“Yeah, I get it. And he’s been running around loose in that uniform all this time?”

“Sure. Like I told you—found his name on the ten-year-old Salvation Army duty roster. He had a key to the old shelter down on South Street. Been lettin’ himself in and out of the place for years, operatin’ on his own. Ministerin’ to the flock. Savin’ all the lost souls. God help us,” Flynn howls merrily. “Department’s got at least half a dozen unsolved homicides on the books involvin’ derelicts in that South Street area. And they’re pretty sure now this is the guy that did ’em. Actually, I kinda like the guy. He was very nice. A real gent.”

“Sounds like a sweetheart,” says Konig, desolation heavy in his voice. “glad you got him. Listen, I can’t—”

“Hey. Wait a minute. Don’t hang up. I got a job.”

“What?”

“I got a mess down here.”

“What?”

“Town house. Gramercy Park. It’s a slaughterhouse.”

“Oh, come on, Flynn.”

“What d’ya mean ‘come on’?”

“I can’t come now.”

“What d’ya mean you can’t come now? You gotta come. I can’t handle this alone.”

“Well, you’re going to have to. I’m finished. I’m all done here.”

“Done? What d’ya mean ‘done’? Day’s just started. Sunday’s the best day for work.”

“No—I mean I’m finished here for good.”

“For good?”

There’s a pause in which Konig can hear the detective’s puzzlement “Forever,” he goes on. “No more for me. Never again.”

“What d’ya mean ‘never again’? What the hell is all this about?”

“Just that. Never again. Goodbye,” Konig murmurs quietly and hangs up.

For a time he sits there slumped over his desk, numb and scarcely hearing the shouting and hurrying footsteps, the banging doors, the noise and excitement outside his window as more canvas sacks are brought in from the fire in Bed-Stuy. The building has collapsed now and dozens of charred and broken bodies have been dug out of the rubble and rushed here for identification.

Once again the phone rings. Konig reaches for it Lifts it to his ear.

“I get it. I get it now,” Flynn jeers at him through the wires. “It’s the goddamned morning papers. Right?”

“What morning papers?”

“The Times. The News.” Flynn laughs harshly, tauntingly. “Listen. I read them too. I know all about it. The Robinson case. The body-snatching thing. The grand jury investigation. They really put it to you.” Flynn howls gleefully. “They really shafted you this time.”

“Shut up, Flynn.”

The detective’s glee grows even more shrill. “They scared you, didn’t they? First time I ever seen you scared. You gonna go run and hide someplace now just ’cause they gave you the business? Screw them holier-than-thou bastards. Sittin’ on their asses all day with a typewriter, readin’ everyone the riot act. What the hell do they know? Come on down here. I need you. I’m up to my ass in blood.”

“I can’t, I said.”

“You gotta.”

“I can’t,” Konig shouts and flings down the phone. Several seconds later it is ringing again. He snatches it up. “I can’t. Will you please, for God’s sake,” he pleads, “leave me alone?” Something like a sob catches in his throat. He grinds a fist into his eye where a cinder has caught there and suddenly hot, tired tears are streaming down his cheeks. “I can’t,” he says brokenly.

“What’sa matter with you? Your voice sounds funny. What’s—”

“Nothing’s the matter. I can’t come now. Just leave me alone.”

“I would if I could, but I can’t handle this thing myself. It’s too big.”

“I’ll send someone else.”

“I don’t want no novice. I want you.”

“What the hell is it anyway?” Konig pushes a hand hectically through his tousled hair.

“Whole goddamned family. Mother. Father. Three kids. Looks like a machine gun. Place all busted up. Brains all over the goddamned walls.”

“Robbery?” Konig asks, something like interest springing feebly in him.

“No sign of it. Just for kicks, looks like to me. Come on down.”

“All right, all right,” Konig sighs. “Don’t touch anything. I’ll be right there.”

“Atta boy.” Flynn giggles. “Listen—Wanna laugh? I’m gettin’ married again.”

“Who to?”

“My ex-wife. Buried the hatchet. We’re gettin’ together again. How’d ya like them apples? Come on. Come on. Konig, you mean old son of a bitch.” Flynn roars affectionately through the phone.

“Watch your tongue, Flynn.”

“Fire me. Go on, fire me. I could care less. I got a job as a store dick in Bloomingdale’s whenever I want it. Just gotta say the word. Come on, Konig. Come out and play with me.”

“I’m coming. I’m coming, for Chrissake. Just let me get my car.”

“Don’t bother,” the detective shouts hilariously. “I already sent one up there for you. Should be sittin’ right out there in front now. Come on. Come on. Get the lead out Let’s get the bastards.”