Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  'I know it's real. Can you help me with something? Do you know your way around the city?'

  'Pretty well. I used to drive a mortuary van.'

  'The first case was a homeless man, Ben. He was called Harmonica Man. They don't know where he lived, but he had a friend who was with him when he died, a man named Lem. The report says that Lem lives "under East Houston Street." Can you tell me what that means?'

  'Sure. He lives under East Houston Street. Like it says.' Kly smiled.

  'Can you take me there?' 'Now?'

  She nodded.

  He shrugged. 'I'll ask the chief.'

  'Please, don't, Ben. He may say no. If you would just take me there-'

  'We're going to get a transit cop to go with us, okay?' 'I've been all over this city picking up bodies,' Kly said. 'A lot of homeless dead. They call the homeless people skells. The skells die in every crack.'

  He and Austen were sitting at a table in Katz's Delicatessen on East Houston Street, on the edge of the Lower East Side. They were eating hot knishes and hot pastrami sandwiches with mild pickles, and drinking coffee. There were two flashlights on the table.

  Austen dug into her knish; a knish is a potato turnover. She burned her tongue on the potato. She had not eaten all day again, and she was practically fainting with hunger. The knish seemed to flow into her bones.

  Katz's Delicatessen was founded in 1888, when the Lower East Side was a slum populated by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Katz's is still owned by the Katz family. It has brown varnished walls and Formica tables, and the place is awash in fluorescent light. It is mostly self-service, but there are some waiter tables along one wall. The walls are decorated with photographs of celebrities, such as the police commis­sioner and Soupy Sales. Always the celebrities are shaking hands with a Mr Katz. There is a photo of Harry Houdini shaking hands with a Mr Katz - Houdini was a regular at Katz's.

  You get a ticket when you go inside, and the men behind the counters hold out little nibs of hot pastrami

  for a taste before you order, so you can judge whether the pastrami is good that day. On the outside the pastrami is as black as tar and covered with grit. On the inside it is delicate, red, juicy, though sometimes a little fatty, but that is the way Katz's customers like it. Occasionally the guys behind the counters give you more than you have ordered, such as two beers instead of one, but they mark only one beer on the ticket, and they say to you in a low voice, 'You wanted one? Speak up next time! Take it, will ya! Don't tell nobody.' There are racks of dry salamis hanging behind an elderly man who will sell you fifty of them if you want, and there are paper signs dangling from the ceiling that say

  Senda salami

  To your boy in the Army. It rhymes if you say it correctly.

  They finished their coffee and carried their tickets over to the cashier, and they went out onto Houston Street and walked westward. Houston Street is a wide, treeless traffic artery. The afternoon was getting along, and traffic was heavy. On the way, Kly used Austen's cell phone to call the Transit Police. He led Austen into a subway-station entrance at the corner of Second Ave­nue, a stop for the F train. Once in the station, they waited, and eventually a transit officer showed up.

  The station platform was a hundred and fifty yards long, and there were no more than three or four other people standing there. It was not a busy station.

  Ben Kly looked up at the ceiling. 'We're following Houston Street,' he remarked. 'We're going east.' At the end of the platform there was a metal curtain wall that went from floor to ceiling. There was a strong smell of urine in the air. Kly said that they were facing the East River. 'The tracks of the F line turn south from here,' he explained. 'We're not going that way. There's an

  abandoned tunnel that goes east.' Kly turned to the transit officer. 'How far's it go?'

  The officer was a chunky man with a mustache, and he had a flashlight. 'A ways,' he said.

  There was a small swinging gate at the end of the platform. They switched on their flashlights and went through the gate and down a set of steps to the tracks. Kly pointed his flashlight at a dark metal bar running parallel to the tracks. 'That's the third rail, Dr Austen. It's alive. Don't touch it.'

  The officer turned to her. 'If a train comes, stand against the wall, okay? In these little spaces. They're safety niches. But I'll stop the train with my light.'

  They walked a distance along the tracks. On their left was a wall made of sheet metal. Kly swung his light over it. He found what he was looking for - a hole in the metal - and they bent over and went through. On the other side was a set of abandoned tracks heading east. The rails were rusty, and the crossties were covered with scattered newspapers and trash. They walked along the track bed, casting their lights around. A train rumbled below them, filling the tunnels with a roar.

  'That's the uptown F train,' Kly remarked over the sound. 'It's going under us. We're on a bridge.'

  The tracks and the ground were covered with black dust.

  'Don't kick up that stuff,' Kly said. 'What is it?' Austen asked.

  'It's steel dust. It comes off the rails. It builds up in these unused tunnels.'

  They played their flashlights around. There were steel columns everywhere, and a vaulted ceiling. There were empty, open doors leading to black spaces. Their feet moved through the black dust, which was very soft, almost silky underfoot. It hushed the sound of their feet. The walls were decorated with graffiti. On the floor were

  scattered heaps of cardboard, and coils of dried feces. They stepped over a ski jacket, torn, blackened, lying between the tracks, and a furry mat or rug. Austen shone her light on the rug. It was a crushed, mummified dog. There was a bad edge to the air that seemed to come from the dog. Austen heard a snapping sound. She glanced over and saw that the policeman had unsnapped the leather flap on his gun holster.

  'Lem?' Kly shouted. 'Hey, Lem!' His voice echoed down the tunnel.

  No answer.

  'Anybody home?' Kly called. 'Lem!' Austen called.

  They moved slowly back and forth for a long while, shining their lights into grim-looking spaces. At one of the openings in the wall both Austen and Kly noticed the sound of many buzzing flies. This surprised Austen. She didn't expect to find flies underground.

  He was lying on an aluminum-and-plastic folding lawn chair. He could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty years old. He was a white man. His back was arched deeply, his body wrenched backward into the shape of a crescent moon. His abdomen had swollen to a tremendous size. It was distended, as if he were pregnant with something, and it had turned a molten shiny green in the lower quadrant over the intestinal area. Gases of decay had built up inside the body, swelling it. His mouth and beard were wet with green and black fluid. Cadaver liquids had poured from between his legs, staining his pants. Flies rose and skittered in the air. He seemed to have lost his eyes.

  The cop pulled his hand-held radio and switched it to the breaker channel. He stepped backward, then he turned away and coughed. He put his hands on his knees. He coughed again. There were splashing sounds

  and more coughing in the darkness. 'I hate these kind of ones,' he said at last, wiping his mouth.

  Drawing shallow breaths, Austen moved into the smell. She could feel it touching her skin - she could feel her skin receiving an oily coating from the gases, and a metallic taste appeared in her mouth. She was tasting the smell on her tongue.

  She knelt down beside the decedent. She opened her knapsack and put on a protective button mask. She handed another mask to Kly. He did not seem to be particularly bothered by the smell. She put on latex rubber gloves. Very carefully she lifted up the man's right hand.

  His fingers were intact, but the skin of the hand had sloughed off. It hung loosely about the fingers, a soft, semitransparent parchment. Delicately, she pulled open the fingers. His hand enclosed a collapsed eyeball.

  'He enucleated himself, Ben. He pulled out his eyes.' After making a brief examination of the dead man, Austen st
ood up and looked around the tunnel, shining her light into corners. Lem and Harmonica Man had been friends. Harmonica Man had sometimes hired Lem as a bodyguard, according to the report. Friends and neighbors?

  The transit officer was talking on his hand-held radio, reporting the body.

  Austen found a steel door a distance down the tunnel. It was a folding door. There was a padlock on it, and there were heaps of what looked like fresh garbage and food containers scattered around the door. 'Ben,' she said.

  He came over and looked, and shook the padlock. It opened. The steel loop had been cut with a hacksaw. 'That's a trick. The homeless do it,' he said, pulling open the door.

  Behind the door was a cramped space full of electrical cables. Most of the cables ran along a shelf above the ground. 'They sleep up on the shelf,' Kly remarked, playing his light around. 'It's warmer up there.'

  Austen stood on a cinder block and looked. There were several empty vodka bottles lined up on the ledge, and more bottles and plastic food containers. And there was a black garbage bag containing something soft.

  'Watch out for rats, okay, Dr Austen?'

  She felt the bag with her gloved hands, and pulled it down.

  The policeman was asking them what they were doing. 'Just a minute,' Austen said.

  She opened the bag. It contained a black hooded sweatshirt, balled up in a lump, and a roll of silver duct tape. There was also a clear plastic bag. It contained two Hohner harmonicas.

  'Harmonica Man lived here,' she said.

  The Transit Police brought the body out in a bag, working with city mortuary drivers. Austen left instruc­tions for them to be especially careful about taking universal biohazard precautions with the body, and she asked that it be placed in a double pouch. She then called Nathanson at his office.

  'You can do the' autopsy tomorrow,' Nathanson said. 'The guy's so putrefied, you could wait until Monday, I think.'

  'I'd like to do it right now.'

  'It's Friday. It's rush hour,' Nathanson said, sighing, but he asked Glenn Dudley to stay while Austen did the autopsy. She couldn't sign the death certificate.

  Annoyed, Dudley hurried the body into the X-ray room and took dental X-rays. They were alone in the Pit, except for Kly, who had stayed to help them. All the other tables were empty.

  They cut Lem's clothing away, and found that rats had eaten his genitalia.

  'They go for that first,' Dudley remarked.

  There was what looked like a maggot infestation in his left eye socket. Austen took light breaths, barely able to draw air into her lungs. The smell was so thick it had a greasy quality. She had to force her hands to make the Y incision to open the body.

  Dudley stood to one side with his arms folded.

  She was cutting now, and as her scalpel crossed the belly, there was a hiss of escaping gas. The abdominal fat had liquefied. It wept oil and stank.

  'Oh,' Austen said. She backed away.

  'You work around it, Austen,' Dudley said.

  Dudley removed the skin hanging from Lem's right hand. It came off easily. He put his rubber-gloved hand inside the skin glove, his fingers sliding up inside Lem's finger-skins. The finger-skins still had fingerprints. Dud­ley inked the fingertips and rolled a set on a fingerprint pad. She noticed that Dudley's hands were trembling inside Lem's skin. She wondered if Dudley had a drinking problem.

  The internal organs were a foul stew. Austen took samples and dropped them into the stock jar. She inspected the mouth carefully. It seemed to be marked with dark spots, possibly blisters, but it was hard to tell.

  Dudley said, 'When you look at that meat in a microscope you won't see anything.' The cells had been dead a long time, and they would have ruptured and would appear, at best, like ghosts.

  The smell filled the Pit and got out under the doors into the morgue area, where two attendants on the night shift noticed. 'They're doing a mean one in there,' one of them remarked.

  Island SATURDAY MORNING

  The Staten Island ferry left South Ferry Terminal at the tip of lower Manhattan and rumbled across Upper New York Bay, churning through water the color of pave­ment. It was a gray, misty Saturday morning. Alice Austen stood outside on the forward deck, behind a folding rail, watching Governors Island pass on the left, a low expanse of trees and brick buildings. The trees on Governors Island were breaking bud, bursting into an indistinct bloom, a haze of russet and pale green flowers. Yellow splashes of color suggested to her that the forsythia was in flower. The wind threw her hair around. She looked the other way, at the Statue of Liberty passing in the mist. There weren't many people on the ferry. The deck trembled and bounced under her feet. Delicate small terns with black heads flipped and pirou­etted over the water, and a bell buoy passed the boat, clanging.

  The boat docked at the ferry terminal at St George, on the northern tip of Staten Island. It was a shorefront of abandoned piers that stretched into the bay. Austen walked through the terminal building, lugging her knapsack, with its weight of computer and notebook, consulting a map. She found the platform of the Staten Island Rapid Transit train, and took a train to Stapleton, then walked inland until she came to Bay Street. She

  looked left and right, and found a Victorian house with yellow aluminum siding. A sign on the ground floor said 'Island Antiques.' The house was next to a dog-grooming salon. A smell of salt air filled the neighborhood.

  Austen found an entryway with a buzzer button, and she pushed it.

  Long pause. 'Who is it?'

  'It's Dr Alice Austen. We spoke on the phone.'

  The buzzer sounded and the lock was released. Austen climbed up a flight of stairs to another door on a landing. 'Walk in,' a voice croaked.

  When Austen opened the door a smell of cats hit her. Sitting in a recliner, facing a plate-glass window with a view of warehouses and the bay beyond, was a heavy, wrinkled woman about eighty years old. She was wearing a nightgown with a bathrobe, and slippers. Her ankles were thick, puffy, blue with edema. 'I can't walk good. You have to come over here.'

  It was Mrs Helen Zecker, the mother of the decedent. 'I'm working with the City of New York,' Austen said. 'We are trying to find out what happened to your daughter, Penny. We are concerned it might be an infectious disease. We're trying to trace it.'

  There was a long pause. Mrs Zecker shifted her bulk and looked at Austen with terrified eyes. 'It got my Penny.'

  'What did?'

  'The monster thing I kept tellin' the doctors about! They wouldn't listen to me.' She began to cry. Austen sat down on a chair next to her.

  'It got my Penny. It'll get me, next.' She waved her hand in a gesture that seemed to say, I'm finished with you.

  'May I ask you some questions?'

  Helen Zecker rolled around in the chair and looked at

  Austen with a tear-streaked face. 'You'd be a darling and feed the cats.'

  The kitchen was filthy and disordered. 'The moment Austen opened a can of food, four cats came hurrying in. She filled two teacup saucers with chopped chicken liver, and the cats crowded around them. She rinsed out the cats' water dish and refilled it.

  Back in the living room, she said, 'I'm interested in Penny's activities in the time before she died. Can you help me?'

  'It got her. That's all I know. It got her.' 'Let's try to figure out what it is that got her.' 'There's all these things happening and they never tell us anything!'

  Mrs Zecker's memory of recent days was not good. Her memory of her earlier years was very good. 'I grew up in this house,' she said. 'It was nice before the city went to hell. On New Year's Eve, Papa and Mama, they'd take us up to the attic.' She pointed to the ceiling. 'Papa would open the window up there. It was so cold. We'd have blankets around us.'

  'About your daughter, Penny-'

  'You could smell the smoke from the freighters coming in the window. On New Year's Eve you'd hear the sailors singing on the ships. Right at midnight, Papa would hold up his hand and he'd say, "Quiet! Listenl" And we'd be quie
t. And we'd listen. And it would start. Over there....'

  Austen followed her gaze, to where the silver-gray towers of Manhattan seemed to float in the distance. 'It was a roar like the wind,' she said. 'It went on and on.' It was the sound of Manhattan on New Year's Eve. 'I don't hear it anymore.'

  Austen sat down on a chair next to her. She touched Mrs Zecker's hand. 'Can you remember? Did Penny go anywhere, do anything unusual? Anything you can remember?'

  'I don't know. I don't know...'

  'Where did she buy the things for the shop?' Austen asked.

  'All over. I don't know. She always paid the taxes. Once she went to Atlantic City. That was a bus tour. ... My Penny is gone.'

  'Do you mind if I look at the shop?' 'I can't go with you.'

  'That's all right.'

  Mrs Zecker pulled a handle on the side of her lounge chair. The back came forward, raising her up. She put her feet on the floor and grunted. Austen took her by the hands and helped her up, and she shuffled across the room, her slippers dragging. She picked up a coffee cup from a bookshelf, and tipped it over. A key fell out.

  Austen went down the stairs, out to the sidewalk, and let herself in through the front door of Island Antiques. She switched on a fluorescent light. It was chilly in the room; the heat was off. The walls were painted lemon yellow, and there was dingy lace trimming around a plate-glass window. A number of glass cases and cabinets displayed cheap-looking 'antiques.' It was really

  a thrift shop. There was a rack of musty women's . dresses, and a metal desk with the dried remains of a sandwich sitting on a piece of waxed paper. Next to it was a glass ashtray full of cigarette butts. Penny Zecker had been a heavy smoker. There were bookshelves holding forgotten paperback best-sellers. There was an oak display case with items of costume jewelry in it. On the display case was a sign: 'Case not for sale. Don't even ask.' There was a caned rocking chair selling for seventy­five dollars, which seemed a high price, and a scuffed chest made of stained pine selling for forty-five dollars. She opened the chest. Inside was a stack of National Geographics.