City of the Absent

by Robert W. Walker

  “How much all this gonna cost me?”

  “How much you got?” It was cash the doctor split between Maude and the oddly matched twins.

  Nightlinger had proved an easy mark indeed, and the doctor determined early on that Newly was as good as his name—like a newborn! Furthermore, Nightlinger had no ties beyond the boat he’d stepped from; at least, none here in the Midwest, much less the city. He’d come up the Mississippi and Ohio some years before, and somehow he found himself working the Great Lakes now. He could not say how he had gotten from the Ohio to here, but he’d called it an adventure.

  Most assuredly a confused adventure. The man struck the doctor as subhuman in his thought processes, as if sometime in his life he’d been dropped on his head, kicked there by a mule, or simply beaten about the cranium until his senses were loosened and distorted. The doctor’s opinion had nothing to do with his being black or poor or a deckhand, as he knew that instinct and cunning had nothing to do with race or wealth or a man’s chosen profession, but rather came at birth like the mark of Cain. You either had it or not, and Newly didn’t have an inchworm’s worth of guile or intuition or fear in him. Unfortunate for him, fortunate for the doctor. Even a fox in the forest knew when something in its nose or gut screamed danger, but Nightlinger never wavered from some deep-seated belief in his fellow man. It was the showman P.T. Barnum who was quoted in the papers as saying there was a fool born every day.

  After delivering this vagabond into the care of Miss Maude DuQuasi at the brothel and paying her well, the fellow was given the ride promised, and done so in the stupor of a drunken orgy. A kind of last supper for his senses, the doctor had thought with a salacious grin.

  The doctor stood in the shadows behind it all. Once he’d gotten Mr. Nightlinger ensconced for the duration of his rather useless life, he’d gone to locate the twins, telling them precisely where to find “money on the hoof,” as he termed it—ready money awaiting in the form of a black named Newly. He told them to speak to Miss M. DuQuasi, the big black madam with a face broader than a yardstick, so as to be certain they had the right man. Then he showed them a photograph he had made of the black man, another investment in the night’s work.

  Thusly armed, the twin ghouls were set on the path to locate, silence, and wrap the body the doctor sought for his surgery and the edification of his students. Sometimes…especially at times like these, he wished he’d instead become a horse doctor. Nobody gave a damn about dissecting a horse.

  What other choice have I, or any medical man? I’m no fiend, no more so than any man, but I must have cadavers for students if I’m to keep the surgical college afloat. Besides, how else to hone my own skills? It’s for science, for the advancement of mankind, in the name of learning and the future of medicine.

  Thirty-something Newly Nightlinger did more good on this spinning planet now than when he was sentient, reasoned the doctor. It helped assuage any feelings of conscience to add that the man’s life was one of uselessness and idleness; that in a sense, he was not really using his body and brain to full potential, certainly not to the potential they were now put.

  However, he knew that if his nefarious activities came to light, the names of people like Newly Nightlinger would be enshrined as model citizens long enough in the press to hang a certain surgeon and condemn the entire profession. He’d first undergo a public humiliation, a show that would not spare his wife and children; then he’d be imprisoned for some time, and most certainly excommunicated by Reverend Jabes, and finally hanged for the transgression that horrified the patriarchs, the matriarchs, the gentry, and the plebian alike—murder for the advancement of the surgical sciences—from cranial matter and sinus cavity to the three large gluteus maximus muscles that form each buttocks to the lower extremities. No one but another driven surgeon could understand the absolute need, the absolute instinctive drive toward understanding every inch of every organ, muscle, vein, and artery from carotid to the pinky and the toe.

  Still, the danger of his decisions made him long for a time when graveyards were a viable alternative to harvesting people like cabbages. At one time, cemetery caretakers, grave diggers, even cops, could be counted upon to help out a doctor in need. But the politicians had to make an issue of it in the legislature. Laws already on the books against grave robbing were given more teeth and were being strongly enforced, causing a paucity of cadaverous materials to work with. Nowadays anyone conspiring with a medical man to rob a corpse of its appointed eternal rest faced hanging. As a result, the doctor’s supply had entirely dried up.

  This meant that perfectly fine corpses went rotting in their perfectly useless pine boxes, intact and preserved and unmolested in their eternal slumber, left to liquefy.

  CHAPTER 17

  The doctor had secured, cleaned, and prepared the black (and getting blacker) corpse, having removed all blood and fluids. He next filled its every vein and cavity with formaldehyde, its every cavity with cotton batting. With the stench of his work still clinging to his hair and clothes, he turned out the lights, and leaving, locked up his laboratory and teaching theater. He expected the wooden platforms encircling the body to be full with students tomorrow morning just after dawn, and to dismiss some of the idiots among them, when he would instruct young minds in the method of proper dissection and autopsy procedures.

  “There is no teacher as effective and efficient as the human hand,” he’d remind the young would-be doctors again and again. “And no tool yet devised by God or man that is so useful as this marvel of creation, this tentacle of the brain.” He’d hold his surgeon’s hands up to his students’ stunned eyes, having removed the gloves he habitually wore, displaying his burn scars. “Yes, even as scarred as I am from a fire, my hands remain my best, last tool.”

  Mr. Nightlinger’s organs would be repacked inside the thorax and his body stitched together again to be used yet another and another time, until his condition of preservation could no longer support another invasion and demonstration. Like a refrigerated cucumber, at some point the very cohesion of tissue broke down to a jellylike consistency impossible to cut even with a scalpel. The best to hope for was one excellent demonstration followed by two, possibly three fair shows. Knowing this, the doctor was already wondering where the next cadaver might come from.

  The students had to get their money’s worth at Glenhaven Medical School if the school were to survive in the shadow of such giants as Rush College and Northwestern University. Two institutions with a standing contractual agreement with the city to take off their unknowns. Bodies of deceased that remained unnamed and unclaimed. Bodies dissected before going to Chicago’s Potters Field to be forever forgotten. Other facilities had ready-made human material to work with; he didn’t unless he manufactured his own.

  With this agreement among authorities and the major medical schools, even if he raided the cemetery of numbered headstones, he had no way of knowing which bodies below which sites were intact and which were not.

  The doctor now called in his most promising students to give them first go at opening up Mr. Nightlinger and turning his fresh insides out. The eager young men in his classes could always count on having a fresh cadaver, and these chosen, his first wave, did not balk at working over the remains of a black man, nor a yellow, red, or green-with-moss-and-mold fellow freshly fished from the polluted waters of the Chicago River. They performed a service, keeping the river clear of floaters and the streets from the rotting corpses of winos.

  “Doctor, you’ve done it again!” said Rucker, one of the brightest of the lads.

  “Wherever do you get them?” asked Hollingsworth, not really wanting to know.

  “So long as we’ve another opportunity to use our scalpels, what’s it matter?” asked Webster.

  “Indeed,” added Pomeroy.

  “Then have at it, you men,” said the doctor. “Your results will be your quarter final grade!”

  Newly Nightlinger’s inert, unnamed body was jostled by the activity about it,
but the supple ripples had more to do with the lighting here than with the skin tone. His body formed a final exam, and its movement mere reaction to the four frenzied scalpels going after various organs: Rucker, Hollingsworth, Webster, and Pomeroy.

  From overhead now, in the viewing theater, the doctor in charge watched with avid interest at how the young interns chose to proceed. They’d obviously worked out their differences, each being assigned a separate task, and soon the organs were being removed as one single rack, attached as yet to the thoracic vertebra and rib cage they’d cut away, using heavy bone saws. On a separate table, Nightlinger’s insides were then separated from one another and each organ and the lungs weighed, each number noted.

  The interns only slowed to argue what might have caused the yellowing of the liver and its shriveled look, and then a handful of off-color jokes and remarks about the size of Nightlinger’s penis, but for the most part the doctor’s young students worked soberly and efficiently.

  It was at this moment the dean of the school stepped into the theater to watch. He complimented the doctor on his obvious progress with this crop of surgeons. “And good news.”

  “Oh, what’s that?”

  “That deal I’ve been working on with the state penitentiary in Joliet?”

  “Really? It’s come through?”

  “It’s almost set.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Should see results in the coming weeks.”

  “Takes so much off my mind. No more scrounging for cadavers. But will the inmates willingly sign over their bodies for science?”

  “That’s a foregone conclusion, Doctor. Ha! Most can neither read nor write. They’ll affix their marks. The warden assures me.”

  “I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”

  “We in administration share your excitement, I can tell you. This will legitimize our having cadavers on hand, and no more use of those ghouls you’ve been paying.”

  “Yes, yes…all to the good.”

  “And Kenneth…”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “To be on the safe side, Kenneth, get rid of anything that could come back to haunt us.”

  Kenneth Mason, M.D. and surgeon of Glenhaven Medical School, glanced down at the black corpse his students worked over, and he gave thought to a handful of jars that held the remains of one Nell Hartigan. “Yes, absolutely right,” he muttered.

  The dean slapped him on the back. “Why so glum, Kenneth? You’re getting a raise! We’re onto a new day at the college, the members of the board are happy, all thanks to our ‘friends’ out at the prison. Lotta inmates out there die annually.”

  The twins had settled in for a night of surveillance, each taking turns to watch the dapper old gent that Philander’d had his eye on for weeks. Philander believed the old fellow a perfect candidate—if not for Dr. Kenneth Mason at Glenhaven Medical, then old Doc Hogarth out at Evanston. In point of fact, Philander had simply decided he was no longer just doing it for the money. Something in him became jubilant at the notion of the hunt and elated at the kill. To feel a life draining out of another person and through his blade and by extension through him had been its own reward. The moment of the kill, as when he’d ripped open that Hartigan woman; God, but it made him feel more alive than he’d ever felt or imagined possible.

  The old fellow that Philander now stalked lived alone, and he appeared to have no visitors and no friends beyond a hound. A small terrier that Philander promised to Vander. “He’ll be quite easily managed,” Philander assured his brother. This promise of a pet had calmed Vander.

  The odd old man with warty face lived in a plush house on Gannett Street that faced the Chicago River, and it would be no difficult trick getting his body from the house and onto their little wagon, the same as had carried Newly Nightlinger from the brothel earlier in the day.

  The old man seemed in fair health, save for a limp and those growths on his neck and face—which no doubt the surgeons would find intriguing. In fact, such growths upped the ante the man’s body would fetch. The man’s neck swung with a turkey-red goiter, and the warty-looking growths, some sort of ugly cancer, made the fellow as sure an outcast as anyone penniless and homeless. And no one seemed capable of having a conversation with the man, as they could not stand in his sight long. Most treated his malady as catching as leprosy or small pox.

  An outcast in his own city.

  Vander, as ugly as he was, had actually professed a sadness for old Dodge, alone in his bed, but Philander told him this man’s loneliness was yet another reason to set the poor man free of this wretched life. When Vander asked what Philander meant, he shouted, “He’s better off dead! Like you, maybe!”

  With a bit of digging, Philander had learned from the local grocer and butcher and others bits and pieces of the man everyone called Dodge. Calvin Dodge was in some distant way related to the famous General Grenville Mullen Dodge, who’d become famous not for being shot off his horse four times and losing an arm in the Civil War, but for getting back on his horse four times in battle. The man then, after the war, became a railway builder whose Kansas railhead became a town named in his honor: Dodge City. Calvin, a so-called cousin several times removed, had created a name for himself as a banker, playing on his famous relative’s name in such slogans as Don’t Dodge Before You C Dodge, As Safe as a Dodge, and Bank on a Dodge. But Dodge’s lending place had always been the back-door of a saloon.

  After making more inquiries in the neighborhood about the old gentleman, the twins had learned that he called himself Colonel Calvin Jamison Dodge, and that he’d led men into battle at Shiloh, or so the story went. Furthermore, he too had been unseated from his horse by cannon fire, shrapnel shattering his leg—in the tradition of his famous relative.

  How much was true and how much nonsense, it was hard to tell. As for his being a colonel, not two nights ago the twins, like many in Chicago, had heard the oratory of Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, who’d proclaimed on the Lyceum stage, “Why…it’s come to my typically wayward attention that nowadays the title of ‘colonel’ hasn’t the slightest ‘kernel’ of truth to it. Why, the title’s become as commonplace as goose shit in Canada.”

  Feeling that he had learned enough about Calvin Dodge to know that the old fool had no bank any longer and no one who could stand his company any more than his warts, Philander also learned that the limp was due an old injury in falling down a stairwell, and not won in battle.

  The night of Twain’s show, Philander had said to his brother, “That man Twain pulls no punches.”

  “Yahhh…”

  “Quite the funny man.”

  “Yahhh…uh-huh!”

  “Sagacious, like you!”

  “Yeah, sug-ga-gay-cious. Funny.” Vander laughed and spewed spittle. His color seemed a pale green like pea soup, yellow under splotches of gaslight. His exaggerated facial features caricatured his twin, his bulging, too wide eyes looking like Cyclops. He never blinked. Uncanny and unnerving as it was, the blasted eyelids were held open by invisible pinchers. The hunchback looked as always as if he carried their third dead twin in a gunnysack over his shoulder.

  The smarter of the two twins watched as Colonel Calvin J. Dodge’s lights began to flicker off in his residence; the man was readying for bed. Still one light lingered for all of an hour. Finally, the old fellow set aside his copy of The Helmut of the Sabbath as sleep claimed him and whatever will and righteousness and faithfulness may’ve moments before held his attention.

  “Studying for his finals,” Philander had joked, but Vander didn’t laugh. Philander at first assumed that Vander was too lame in the head to get the joke, but to his chagrin, Vander had fallen asleep in the bushes outside the intended target’s brownstone home.

  “Wake up! Wake the devil up!” he cursed, and yanked at Vander. At once the younger twin came awake, startled.

  “Shhh! It’s me!”

  “Oh…oh, brother, I thought it was her.”

  “Her who?”

&n
bsp; “That Nell Hartigan you killed…come to get us back.”

  They had learned of Nell Hartigan’s identity through the beer and ale grapevine that fed information throughout the city like lifeblood. “Don’t be stupid! The dead can’t touch us. You start thinking trash-thoughts like that, next you know, you’ll be in Cook County Asylum. You want that? Huh, dummy, huh?”

  “Can we go home now, Philander? I’m cold.”

  “No, damn you, look!” Philander pointed to the darkened house. “Time we pay Mr. C. J. Dodge a visit. Maybe tomorrow night.”

  At once, he stopped Philander cold by saying, “We maybe ought not to do to Colonel Dodge what we done to the others, Philander.” Vander scratched behind his dirty ear. “Him bein’ a war hero and all.”

  “First off, he’s no colonel, not a real one, I’m told, and there’re questions as to his being related to General Dodge.”

  “What’s it mean, Philander?”

  “He’s an old liar!”

  “But a banker can’t be no liar.”

  “You daft fool! I’m telling you the old man’s made up all that Civil War colonel bull!”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.”

  “Is he…you know, goin’ ta-be asleep when we do it?” asked Vander.

  “Why? What’s the difference, Van?”

  “It’s better when we don’t gotta hear no pleading. I keep hearing ’em in my ears, Philander, pleading.”

  “Hearing who? Who you hearing?” Philander took a deep breath. Could Alexander be speaking to Vander, too?

  “The other ones we kilt.”

  “Ohhh…but look, nobody’s gonna make a sound if we do it right.”

  “How’s-sat?”

  “Suffocate him.”

  “Pillow to the face?”

  “Easier and cheaper’n poison. Choke ’im with his own nightcap if need be.”

  “Why’re you yellin’, brother?”

  “’Cause you’re so stupid at times that—”