City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  Konig makes a grunting sound. “You say she’s been missing about three days?”

  “That’s right,” Mr. J. Phelps Skardon says. “Started out Tuesday afternoon right after classes.”

  Probing outward from beneath the craggy, beetled brow, Konig’s eyes continue their careful appraisal of the Skardons. Upper middle class. White Protestant. Undoubtedly wealthy. Family wealth, he imagines. Never lifted a goddamned finger for it. Skardon, Konig surmises, is a professional. A lawyer, undoubtedly, from the way the man questioned him at the start of the interview, his manner brusque, impatient, behaving as if being called down to identify what might be the remains of his daughter was an embarrassment, an inconvenience. His attitude toward Konig, the civil-servant doctor, is vaguely contemptuous.

  Mrs. Skardon is a small, pretty woman. Her eyes seem puzzled and terribly frightened. Neurasthenic, Konig imagines, the victim of innumerable psychogenic disorders—palpitations, cold sweats, insomnia, chronic constipation—all generated no doubt from twenty-five years of marriage to a bully. Konig can see the bully now, barely repressed inside the man, but already beginning to show in the beet-red flush in full bloom above the collar of his shirt and in the somewhat cyanotic lips. Mr. J. Phelps Skardon would die in roughly two years, Konig estimates, the victim of a stroke.

  “Any idea what she was wearing when she left school?” he asks.

  “Now how the hell would I know that?” Skardon lashes out, then sees something flicker in the cool, steady gaze of the pathologist that makes him sit back a bit, subdued, miffed, a little contrite. “We don’t know what she was wearing. What was this other girl wearing?”

  “Not very much,” Konig says. The woman moans and Konig rises. “Well, I s’pose we ought to go and have a look.”

  The Skardons rise too, he bounding up, she somewhat more tentatively.

  “You stay here,” the man bawls at her.

  “But I want—”

  “No need for it.” Skardon cuts off all further discussion. “This’ll just take a minute.”

  A small, feckless puff of air falls from Mrs. Skardon’s lips, a word unspoken, and she sinks back into her seat. Konig can still hear her whimpering as the door closes behind them.

  Silently they walk from Konig’s office across a reception area to a small room at the back of the building. There is nothing there but a long, rectangular plate-glass window beyond which lies a wide, gray dumbwaiter shaft. Konig presses a button beside the window. Instantly, a motor whines; the steel cables beyond the glass begin to move upward, and then from the floor somewhere below them, a dumbwaiter platform rises, bearing the waxen, yellow cadaver of a young girl. The motor turns off and the platform stops behind the glass before them.

  For a long while they don’t speak. Then Skardon, his eyes riveted on the figure behind the glass, suddenly says, “Was she raped?” His face has gone white, the color of parchment.

  “Several times.” Konig eyes him coolly. “We found three distinct semen types inside her.” He gazes for a moment at the badly battered features of a girl approximately seventeen years of age, face twisted in the rictus of violent and painful death. She had clearly once been a pretty, vital child, in her first year of college, with a privileged background and the world just beginning to open before her. She’d been beaten viciously.

  Gaping through the plate glass at the body, J. Phelps Skardon’s face twists with hate. “Were they niggers?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The animals who did this to my daughter. Were they niggers? This is their kind of thing.”

  Konig watches the man steadily. He appears to be on the verge of apoplexy. “I’m afraid I couldn’t say. I can tell you the type semen. Hence the blood type. But I’m afraid science has yet to find any physiological difference between black and white semen.”

  Skardon hangs there, leaning against the green wall, stupefied. His features wear an expression of betrayal.

  Konig sighs wearily. “From what I have to go on, there’s no way of saying who her assailants were. Anyway, it’s all now in the hands of the Bureau of Detectives.”

  Locked in awkward silence, Konig walks the Skardons back to the First Avenue exit At the door they stand about, shuffling their feet, avoiding one another’s eyes. No one speaks. At last, grunting, truculent to the very end, J. Phelps Skardon barges down the front steps, leaving the poor, tremulous, craven Mrs. Skardon to fumble along behind.

  Suddenly, not knowing why, and stunned at his own anger, Konig cries out after the two figures just stooping to enter a cab. “Why in God’s name did you permit her to hitchhike?”

  Skardon turns and stares back at him. It is at that moment that the man begins to cry.

  Almost 10 a.m. now, and along with April sunshine pouring through the front door comes a torrent of troubled, querulous humanity—pathologists, policemen, lab technicians, reporters, and, of course, mourners. The mourners are always easiest to spot They wear their apprehension and their grief like carnations in their lapels.

  Ambulances and police vans are pulled up at the sides and the back of the building. Patrol cars are everywhere around the place. Gurney carts roll out; canvas sacks roll in. “The meat delivery,” the police call it.

  Inside, the noise all along the green corridors is deafening. Clatter and gonging of metal doors. The incomprehensible garble of a PA system with the susurrant static and crackle of loose wires summoning people from one place to another.

  Konig weaves through this torrent, limping a little from the ache in his leg. Sciatica. APC’s and Valium. Nothing else for it but to wait it out. He greets several of his colleagues on their way down to the autopsy rooms—the deputy medical examiners—Pearsall the amiable, Bonertz the melancholy, Delaney the bigot-prig (will work only on white corpses), and then, of course, shifty-eyed Carl Strang, pompous and grandiloquent, who watches the Chief closely and covets his job.

  There are a number of other men—Indians, Orientals, Slavs—good men who have come halfway around the world to study with the Chief. There are also newly appointed associates, officious and bumbling, anxious to please, and medical students sporting rumpled gowns with stethoscopes conspicuously placed for highest visibility—badge of rank sort of thing. The Chief smiles inwardly to think of the usefulness of a stethoscope at a morgue.

  Konig descends now to the autopsy rooms, going down a steel spiral stairway into green glowing light. Down out of long green corridors he drops. Aquarium green. Municipal green. Bureaucratic green. Green moist tiles—freezing in winter, sweating in summer. Down into a soft green diffusion—the netherworld of First Avenue. Past the Acheron of a dozy guard, across the Styx of the iron anteroom gate, moaning open, clanging shut behind him. The gong of heavy steel doors reverberating through cavernous green-tiled tunnels.

  Down he goes, still descending, yet another short flight of stairs, the slow, slurred click of his slightly limping tread pinging oft’ the ceilings and walls. Another gate squeals open, gongs shut behind him, and he is now in the deeper green of the subbasement level. The air is heavy with the thick, fumy vapors of formaldehyde.

  There is a curious smell to an autopsy room. Death and asafetida. Formalin and fright. Once you’ve smelled it, you never forget it. The odor—almost forty years’ worth—so much a part of Konig’s being that he is no longer aware of it. It imbues his clothing, his skin, his hair. His car smells of it and his closets at home. When his wife was alive, she wouldn’t permit him to come near her until he’d showered.

  Konig now enters a gray cool area filled with the high-pitched electrical whir of refrigerator motors. Already lined up on his left, a number of stainless-steel trolleys, each bearing a lumpen, belted canvas sack—a grim succession of the night’s harvest of victims. There is a whole wall of refrigerator compartments running from floor to ceiling, temporary repositories for the unclaimed, the anonymous, the unwanted. Known often just by numbers, the stiff, formal impersonality of two and three digits, here the dead lie, all left to
the cold impartiality of separate drawers. All awaiting the pathologist’s blade.

  Konig drops down a final three steps, pushes open swinging doors and enters a bright white glow. Here, green-robed attendants shuttle back and forth on padded feet—hooded acolytes in some ancient druidical rite. Konig moves past steel pans of cirrhotic livers, a diseased lung gurgling in a tub of formalin. Each time Konig makes this descent, each time he enters this abattoir, this charnel house fuming with the ever-thickening waves of stench, his whole being is suffused with the curious, yet somehow entirely befitting notion that he has once again come home.

  Already the place is a hive of activity—twelve tables going all at once. Cadavers naked, flayed open, sectioned. Unreal-looking things. The organs opened, exposed, give the appearance of wax fruits.

  A great din and hum of human enterprise animates this autopsy room. It could be the production loft of a prosperous dress manufacturer, the tailors all bent and busy over their tables.

  Here are the pathologists, cutting, weighing, evaluating; and the police stenographers, scribbling dictation from them onto their pads. The young medical students hovering around the various tables’, asking questions. The scrubbers—dieners they call them—sewing up the cadavers with large needles and black thread after the pathologists have finished. A strange breed of men, these. One there in particular, a small, dark, recently naturalized Albanian with furtive eyes and scarcely any English, Konig watches uneasily, knowing him to be one who liked to handle young female cadavers, liked to undress them, prepare them for cutting. Then would linger over the flayed carcass, long after the autopsy was completed and everyone else had gone, ostensibly sewing it up.

  And then, of course, the cadavers, twelve of them lined up on steel tables—the objects of the quest. Here, a black man, throat slashed from ear to ear, laryngeal cartilage glinting from the gaping wound, flashes a death grin. On the table beside him, an ancient, wizened little lady, with dainty hands and feet, somewhat beyond eighty. Body shrunken, oddly childlike, face blue with cyanosis, the sparse, frizzled pubic hair of a child, she seems to be gazing upward at heaven. She’d been hammered to death and robbed of sixty cents in a welfare hotel room the night before.

  A little farther down, a bedraggled itinerant with a huge halo of gray hair encircling the face of a saint. He’d been martyred in a doorway on Canal Street Then two homicides—undoubtedly two of Flynn’s half dozen of the night before—three gunshot wounds, a stabbing through the throat and a fatal garroting. Then a beautiful young girl, with the features and lineaments of a fashion model, dead of barbiturates at twenty-two. After her, a drowned black prostitute who’d been in the water several days, her hair separated from the scalp so that it could be lifted off like a cap. White froth bubbles from her nose and the body is swollen from distention of the tissues with gas.

  There are few things that can be hidden from the pathologist. But at that point there’s no longer any need to hide. The reasons for hiding have all been eliminated. The only questions that remain are academic. The pathologist stands before the flayed and naked corpse like an old shaman reading auguries in the viscera of sacrificial sheep.

  “Emboli in left coronary artery.”

  “Aortic incompetence. Ascending aorta dilated with longitudinal rugae on the intima.”

  “Liver enlarged with gross fatty change.”

  “Testes, 30 grams.”

  “Rectal lesions—rectum markedly dilated, containing fresh semen.”

  No further need for shame or disguise. Shame seems such an empty gesture at this point. It is all written there clearly for the pathologist to read, as if the organs were a kind of papyrus upon which the foolish hieroglyphics of our lives are scrawled.

  Beneath the cool white glare of overhead fluorescents, Konig pauses to watch Arthur Grimsby, a young assistant, remove the calvaria of what was once a male Caucasian, approximate age forty to forty-five, blood type O+. A jeweler shot to death in his shop on Delancey Street.

  The saw buzzes and particles of hair and bone whir off its blade in a pretty lariat.

  “Neat,” Konig murmurs as young Grimsby’s hand severs the medulla and cranial nerves preparatory to removal of the brain.

  Already the Chiefs gray, avid eyes have spied the point of entrance of the bullet. It is at the forehead and just beneath the hairline. Long before Grimsby, he has spied the point of exit at the back of the head, as well as the route the bullet has taken in between. He has a fairly good idea from the powder burns on the skin at what distance the pistol was fired, and from the angle at which the bullet entered the skull, something of the position in which the jeweler met his end.

  Grimsby extracts several fragments of the bullet with a prong, plucking them out and holding them up to the light like rare gems, for all to see.

  “Neat,” Konig murmurs again. “Careful you don’t mess those bullet tracks.”

  The Chief always pauses for the children. He doesn’t want to, he simply has to. It is a compulsion of his, a rather sick one he has concluded, since he knows that there is literally nothing more he can learn from contemplating such pathetic spectacles. He has seen so many in his day. They all tell the same dismal story. But, still, in nearly forty years of practice, of seeing the most grisly testimony to man’s inexhaustible genius for cruelty, he has never quite been able to steel himself to the sight of a battered child. When the job is done well, as so frequently it is, it is truly an awesome sight to contemplate.

  The one he is looking at now, mauled and beaten beyond recognition, is a toddler. No more than two or so, and the facial features have literally been erased by the use of some heavy, blunt instrument.

  Seeing the ragged, broken little shape on the table, Konig suddenly has a vision of his own daughter, Lolly—Lolly as a child at the seashore, toddling toward him with a shovel and a sand pail upon which enamel dolphins gambol; Lolly in the mountains, a brash little girl astride a dun mare; Lolly on her first trip abroad, a sere and yellowed photograph, frayed with age, showing a smiling ten-year-old perched on the taffrail of a French passenger liner.

  McCloskey, the youngest man on the staff, is now working up the little cadaver. The Chief hovers there behind him, a little self-consciously, and watches. Several times the young pathologist pauses from the painstakingly meticulous work, a lapidarist laboring in miniature, and gazes up at the frosted ceiling windows.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Konig murmurs over the shoulder of the young man.

  “Lousy,” McCloskey replies. His back still to the Chief, he bends once more to his task. “Nearly a hundred separate contusions. Liver ruptured. Face a pulp. Nearly every bone broken—even the fingers.”

  “By all means the fingers,” Konig says, a touch of spiteful levity in his voice. “They never forget the fingers. That’s often the most painful. Particularly in young children. Parents claim the kid fell out of his crib.” Konig chuckles.

  “Spare me any reference to the parents, please.” McCloskey’s powerful frame swells. “If I ever set eyes on them—get my hands on them—”

  “Mama’s probably preggers right now with the next.” Konig laughs again and wonders why it makes him feel better. “I’ll finish up for you.”

  McCloskey flushes. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll finish this one myself.”

  Konig passes up an embolism, talks a young assistant through a very delicate arterial survey, then pauses for a moment to watch Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Carl Strang work up the remains of what was once a dignified Lebanese gentleman. Strang is inserting a syringe into the corner of the cadaver’s eye, then very deftly draws off a few cc’s of vitreous humor.

  “Get me a spec report on this,” he snaps at a young assistant. “Tell them I need it quick—Oh, hello, Paul.”

  The smile, the lethal smile, flashes, then the pointedly assessing glance. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look a little peaked.”

  “Been up and running since five.�
�� He studies Strang’s sharply chiseled face. “I have a feeling I’m going to be called up before the grand jury.”

  “Oh?”

  “The Robinson business.”

  “They’re not going to prosecute, Paul.”

  “They’re not?”

  “Too sticky—too political.”

  Konig tastes the bitterness rising in his gorge. “Carl, tell me something—Blaylock didn’t talk with you at any time before you did the Robinson job?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “And you still feel your conclusion of asphyxiation by hanging will stand up?”

  “I have no doubt of it.” The Strang smile is more radiant than ever.

  It’s just one smile too many for the Chief. Suddenly he lashes out. “But why in God’s name couldn’t you at least have done a tissue study?”

  “No need to. The abrasions were superficial.”

  “Superficial? Around the head—superficial?” Konig’s voice grows harsher. Several Indian doctors in the area turn. “Oh, forget it.” His voice drops and he gazes down now at the dignified-looking Lebanese gentleman on the table. “What’s the story on this?”

  “Diabetic—pancreatic lesions—insulin tracks—”

  “Look at the chancre scar on his belly.”

  “It’s old—at least ten years.”

  “Exactly why I’d do a lumbar—he’s a syphilitic.”

  The impertinent smile wavers on Strang’s features as the Chief turns abruptly and strides from the room.

  Now 10:30 a.m. and a procession of assorted mankind all with vested interests marches in and out of Konig’s door. First, an insurance adjuster clamoring for a verdict of suicide on a death certificate. Konig is no friend to the insurance companies, with their actuarial tables and their wheedling, obsequious adjusters. Always quick to extract their annual tithe at premium time, but squirming desperately, dragging their feet, trying to weasel out when their day comes to pay off. He is determined to make it hard for the man.