by David Downie
Usually inured to blight and misery, as Daria approached the café, she wondered wearily why all of a sudden tonight she was noticing how cracked, pitted, and remarkably filthy the sidewalk of Corso Europa was. The condition of the area fronting what had to be the most hideous, badly built, and run-down set of apartment buildings in the city was worthy of a war-torn Third World country, she said to herself. Tilting her head up, she recognized the buildings as notorious tenements. Large billboards on the facades advertised cheap rooms for short-term rent. A foyer for immigrants kept two of the apartment houses full year-round, despite the appalling noise and suffocating air pollution from the expressway.
It was a cursed spot. Behind the apartment complex spread the grounds of Genoa’s main public hospital, San Martino. Among ruins left over from the Second World War rose the looming, dark silhouette of the crematorium’s chimney. From some of the apartments in the complex, you could reach out and almost touch it. She shivered despite the mildness of the night and trotted the last twenty yards to the café.
Ten
There were good reasons why Daria had agreed to meet Emilio Bozzo not in his clinical office at the morgue but nearby, outside the hospital grounds, on the corner of Corso Europa, at what regulars jokingly called the “Orange Nightmare.” The café had been given its nickname for the remarkably unsettling color scheme of the walls, last painted circa 1980, and the torturous orange plastic bucket seating. A student hangout, the Orange Nightmare overflowed morning, noon, and night when classes were in session. Anxious future health care professionals, fagged-out nurses and orderlies, and even full-fledged doctors desperate for a change of scenery from the clinical white of the hospital to the grimy orange of the café loitered outside, smoking and littering. Others crowded three deep to the bar. But today was a public holiday in Genoa, the start of the commemorations of the Insurrection of 1945. The long weekend or “bridge,” had begun. There were no students. The café was nearly empty.
The establishment’s only objective attraction Daria could discern was its strategic location flanking not only the crematorium, mortuary, autopsy, and anatomy facilities, but also Genoa’s municipal school of medicine. The threadbare premises of these state-run institutions clustered along the same dreary pot-holed street edging the vast, unkempt, unmade, premodern San Martino hospital grounds, the city’s largest and busiest.
Over the desultory scream of sirens raging like madmen in the night, Bozzo rose to limply shake Daria’s hand, then plopped back down into his chair, visibly exhausted. “It’s self-service,” he said, his voice raspy. He made a move to rise again to get her a drink, but Daria gestured him down, suddenly feeling spry compared to the coroner. She took a bottle of sparkling water from a nearby standing fridge, then sat across from him at his table, studying his haggard face. Silently, warily, glancing around the empty terrace room where they sat, Bozzo handed her a white A4 envelope. He watched her open it and flip through the contents. She stared with a pained expression at a series of disturbing photographs and suddenly wondered how she had wound up doing what she did and how much longer she could stand it.
“Taken in the morgue, two years ago,” Bozzo whispered. “We record everything that comes through.” Then he touched the screen of his phone lying on the table. An image appeared. He rotated the phone so she could see it. “Taken two hours ago, also in the morgue. Compare the two.”
Daria put the print next to the smartphone and glanced back and forth. The print was blurred and not a close-up. It showed a cadaver from the waist to the head. She looked at the digital image again. It showed a severed arm, a man’s arm, judging by the development of the muscles. That arm had once belonged to that body. The incisions made on the arm by intentional scarring were unmistakable.
“Scarification,” Bozzo whispered. Then he made a logical jump that Daria at first found hard to follow. “Imagine what this will do to medical science in Italy,” he said. “Once certain people in the government and the Church get ahold of this story, no more bodies will be given for science, no more dissections will take place in Italian universities, no more cremation will be possible. We are heading back to the 1930s. They are already banging the Bible the way the Americans do. What’s next?”
Daria did not know what was next. But she had an inkling and did not like it. She pursed her lips tighter and nodded her head.
What she did know with exactitude was what Emilio Bozzo meant without saying it. He was pleading with her to help him keep the details of the case quiet. To avoid scandal. The beleaguered hospital, medical school, and morgue do not need further knocks, his stale, panting breath and glistening brow told her. The budget had already been slashed by the latest incoming reactionary government. Everyone knew that. Privatization was the mantra. Politicians and the wealthy went to private clinics, not state-run facilities. Any excuse to run public services into the ground and outsource, take universal medical coverage away and break up the welfare state, that was what was next. But did he really expect her to assist in a cover-up?
“Let me tell you how it happened,” he began in what was evidently a goodwill gesture. “Because of the long weekend, everything is shut up tight except the emergency room and the main hospital. I got the super to let me into the medical school on the pretext that I needed to check the cold rooms and certain cadavers. They know me of course. I also teach here.”
“Of course.”
“Four things are worth noting, commissario. First, I was able to go in and out without a key. Anyone can. All you have to do is enter by the tunnel from the Institute of Anatomy, and probably any of the other adjoining, communicating buildings including the hospital—of that I am certain. You can also lift the barrier by hand and drive into and out of the parking lot behind the morgue. That barrier is supposed to be locked but never is. The lock broke two years ago or more.
“Second, two of the five cold chambers at the medical school used for storing bodies and body parts are broken and therefore are sealed shut. They call it ‘deferred maintenance.’ Except one of them wasn’t sealed shut. It was being used in violation of all health norms and statutes. I found it unlocked, the door ajar. It was filled with the year-old body parts from the dissection labs scheduled for incineration. These were body parts that weren’t incinerated because of scheduling problems, problems with the incinerator last week, a chronic backlog, plus the long weekend.
“Third, I discovered that, because of budgetary restrictions, the security team in the hospital now also guards the adjoining medical school and morgue. It does not have a videotape or whatever it’s called nowadays covering the period last night when the events in question happened. Why? Because they only have enough digital storage space in the system to keep data for twelve hours. Twelve hours. Can you believe it?
“One of them remembers seeing a disposal crew come in at around three in the morning, but he isn’t sure of the exact time. He had actually been asleep and only woke up because he had to use the men’s room. So on the way back from the toilets, he glanced up, and on the cameras in the cold room area, he saw two men in hospital whites with the usual white head coverings and white cloth masks. They were removing body parts from the broken cold room, dropping them in plastic bags. He didn’t think it was unusual and did not alert anyone. The disposal people come at all hours of the day or night, and, as I say, there was a backlog and a terrible stench, because the cold rooms were full and two are broken.
“The security guard toggled to the outside cameras and saw an unmarked van, its doors open. He assumed it was a substitute removals service working during the holiday break. Who would steal rotten, chopped-up monkeys, and pieces of John and Jane Doe?”
Daria realized she had been nodding her head the whole time, like one of those spring-loaded toy dogs placed on the package tray of a car. Her neck ached. She spoke to Bozzo in an undertone, telling him to avoid the press. Use one of the tunnels into the basement of the hospital
when coming and going and leave from the emergency room, she suggested. It’s always crowded. There is safety in numbers. Wear a hat and sunglasses. Don’t let anyone catch your eye. If you are known to follow the same route habitually, change your habits and change your route. Don’t answer the phone without screening calls. Don’t talk to anyone else in the police department or the Carabinieri—call me first.
“So,” she said slowly, whispering now like Bozzo, “just to be clear, the human body parts we found in those bags were mixed with parts of monkeys used for studying dissection, and everything in the three bags originated here and was scheduled for incineration?”
Bozzo rubbed his eyes and blinked. “Yes. Can you stand to see it again?”
Daria hesitated, then dipped her head, nodding slowly. She knew her nod concealed a lie and that in all likelihood she would lose the focaccia and sparkling water that were keeping her on her feet. But she also knew she had to see the evidence.
What had clinched his suspicions, Bozzo said, as they kicked their way through mounds of cigarette butts and piles of trash, walking down the dog’s-leg street past the medical school to the morgue, was what everyone else called “the tattoo” on the severed right arm. It wasn’t actually a tattoo, he explained, but rather a specific form of scarification practiced by certain Sub-Saharan tribes. He had rarely seen it at the morgue and only once in that area of the upper arm. In life, it had been a very strong and inky, almost purple-black arm.
Later, Bozzo had been able to confirm that the body of the African was that of an illegal immigrant who had died of natural causes, from extreme privation and exposure. The body had passed through the morgue two years ago. Like many other unclaimed corpses, after autopsy and a lengthy process of investigation to try to find its identity, it was sent to the medical school. Under normal circumstances, it should have been incinerated a year ago—one year was the statutory time limit for scientific uses of cadavers. But because it was such an unusual specimen, at Bozzo’s request a meeting of the medical committee had been called. It decided the scarified arm should be preserved in embalming fluid and used for teaching purposes for an additional year, until the state of disaggregation of the tissues became too extreme.
“It was at the bottom on the third bag,” Bozzo explained. “I didn’t see it until I was back here. Most of the other parts in the bags I had never encountered before,” he said. “They probably came from other regions of Italy and wound up here at the request of the medical school. Unclaimed corpses do a lot of traveling in this crazy country.”
It was not the first time Daria had been inside the morgue. In some sections, the walls were tiled in white floor to ceiling. In others, they were clad in stainless steel. The air was cold. A sour smell like the smell of a butcher shop, no matter how scrupulous the butcher, clung to everything. One side of the long, narrow room where the cadavers were kept was lined by a double row of refrigerated steel cells. They looked like the giant sliding drawers in a high-tech industrial kitchen.
Emilio Bozzo tugged at a handle, and one of the drawers, measuring about a yard square, slid open. Arrayed on layers of thick, disposable, absorbent cotton fiber paper were some of the body parts from the bags. Even though Bozzo had lowered the conservation temperature to half a degree above freezing, the stench was still strong.
“Starving, desperate, homeless Africans all look alike to most people around here,” Bozzo sighed. “But this time, that couple from the farmhouse up near the turnout were right. It was the man who slept under the viaduct, except they got the timing wrong. This man died two years ago. Who knows how many others have come and gone since then?”
“So, he was not North African, he was black African? What about that head I saw? Was that his?”
Bozzo grunted. “No, that was someone else. I found a photo of that body with the head attached. But to return to the arm…” Vinci followed the tip of the pen Bozzo unclipped from his shirt. “Like I said,” he observed, “the scarification is unmistakable.” He slid the drawer back in. “I don’t think we have photos of the monkeys, so you’ll have to trust me on that. If either one of us starts phoning around trying to identify the other human body parts,” he added, pausing to swallow hard, “everyone in the country will learn what happened. I can guarantee you that all of the unfortunate human beings in those bags died at least one year ago and passed through the dissection labs here. This is not a case of murder, commissario. It’s a case of someone—some group, perhaps—for some reason, trying to use these poor unclaimed people for political purposes, unless it’s a sick hoax, a hazing rite of some kind.”
Bozzo slid another door open, let Daria glance at the arms, legs, and heads, then shoved the drawer back in. “I would like to send what’s left of these people to the crematorium right now. That would be the ethical thing to do. But I can’t and I won’t because I realize your investigation might need them as evidence. What I will do is keep things under wraps on my end for as long as I can, in hopes you can figure out what is going on and bring the body-snatchers to justice. If you do that swiftly, the impact of the theft and the sacrilegious treatment of the remains will be dampened. If the case drags on, and the press gets ahold of the details, it will be catastrophic to the state of medical science in Italy.”
Tired and depressed, the pathologist accompanied her down another tunnel and out of the morgue to a parking lot at the side of the building. They shook hands. Feeling ill at ease, she turned to him and asked a final question. It was ridiculous but it had been nagging at her ever since she’d seen Willem Bremach. “Do you know precisely how many human and monkey body parts were in the bags?” she asked. The coroner seemed perplexed. He thought for a minute or two before answering. “I inventoried and labeled each one, just in case,” he said, glancing wearily at his smartphone. “Unless I’m misremembering, there were nearly thirty. Why do you ask?”
“Nearly thirty? How many, precisely?”
Bozzo hesitated, glanced at the screen, then said, “Twenty-seven, unless you count certain jointed parts separately, in which case there are thirty-three.”
Blanching despite herself, Daria mumbled something inaudible about the Brindisi Bronzes, nodded, thanked him again, and walked swiftly away across the parking lot, her heart thumping and the hair prickling on her arms.
Eleven
It was a neighborhood suffused with pain and suffering. As Daria strode through the parking lot, she recognized the somber surroundings from having been to the morgue countless times in the past six years, since her transfer to Genoa from Rome, a change about which she still had mixed feelings. She had escaped her mother and a dead-end relationship but had left her favorite city and her childhood friends behind, possibly forever.
Leaving the parking lot, she tested the barrier, lifting it easily with her bare hands and confirming it was unlocked, as Bozzo had reported. Anyone in the know could drive in and out at any time of day or night.
Glancing across the narrow, tree-lined street beyond the rusty fences encircling the morgue, Daria noticed for the first time a small florist’s shop. Its front was almost entirely masked by parked cars and the spreading branches of old trees. That explained why she had not seen it on previous visits. The shop looked as if it had been in business for a century. A light was on inside, the only light in the street. Feeling like a powerless moth, Daria floated toward it. She peered through the window, then found herself knocking on the door. It swung open under the pressure of her rapping knuckles. She stepped in, light-headed, stretching out an arm to steady herself. The scent of lilies rose up. An elderly woman sat hidden in the closet-sized room, bent double over a pile of papers, writing in an accounting ledger.
“Good evening,” the woman said without looking up, her voice solemn, “may I help you?”
Daria hesitated. She had not meant to come in. Did she want to question the woman? About what? She suddenly realized she did not want to know whether the wo
man had seen the van of the body-snatchers. She wished the van did not exist, that the case would go away, that she could wake up in her old bed in her mother’s old apartment in Rome. “Please forgive me,” Daria said softly, “I should not have disturbed you.”
“You haven’t disturbed me,” the woman answered quietly. “It’s life that disturbs us. Then it’s over. Then we rest.” She stood, shuffled over, stared for a disconcertingly long time through milky gray cataracts into Daria’s hazel-green eyes, then plucked a lily from a vase. She handed it to Daria in a strange, mystical silence.
Startled, Daria snapped out of what felt like a trance. Taking the flower, she whispered her baffled thanks and quietly shut the rickety door behind her.
As she stood under the thick cover of branches, Daria felt tears filling her tired, burning eyes. She wiped them away, then sniffed at the intoxicating sweetness of the lily.
The night air was cool and clean and tonic. Taking a deep breath, Daria considered whether to pick up a taxi at the hospital’s emergency room or walk home. It might take an hour or more on foot, she knew. But she could continue researching along the way and also clear her head. Her legs made the decision for her.
Pausing to nose the lily again, Daria puzzled over how to delay reporting the details of the theft of the body parts. She could sleep on it. That would buy her six to eight hours. At the very least, she could think things through as she strode across town toward her apartment. Part of her wished she could click her heels and be safe at home, her new home, her impregnable citadel.