City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  Several moments later he has regained a modicum of composure—the demeanor of the pure professional with which he has faced the world for nearly four decades. But he feels spent and weary. Somewhere deep within him is the ache of longtime grief.

  In the next moment he reaches down into the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk and withdraws from it a stethoscope. Unbuttoning his shirtfront, he screws the plugs firmly into his ears and listens. What he hears from the catacombs and tunnels just beneath his skin is the fatal ticking of his own life. For high up in the apex of his heart he can hear, quite distinctly, the steady, remorseless hissing of a badly damaged mitral valve, like the sound of air escaping from a slowly flattening tire.

  A short time later he has barged across the hall to Haggard’-s office. The Chief Detective, Bureau of Identification, like everyone else at that hour, is out to lunch. Konig fumes with indignation. What right has Haggard to be out? What right has the Deputy Mayor to talk to him that way? What right has Lolly—He’s seething with his sense of betrayal and hurt.

  Haggard’s desk is a mess. A mountain of clutterment. Sheaves of records of missing persons. Mug shots. Fingerprints. Death certificates. Notes to himself.

  “Ortega, Luisa—8 years old—ht. 4' 3"—wt. 72 lbs. Vanished Jan. 3, 1972. Last seen vicinity of—”

  “Barthelmy, Miguel—37 years—ht. 5' 8"—wt. 160 lbs. Vanished on or about—Wife claims—Presumed dead.

  “Jackson, LeRoy—”

  Above the desk on a cork pegboard, a gallery of faces. Mug shots, prints of thumbs and index fingers. A whole diaspora of the lost and wandering; a museum of the displaced and murdered. The faces all have a rather ghostly quality, like faded old daguerreotypes of people long since dead.

  Muttering, Konig rifles through the papers on the desktop. Then, finding a scratch pad, he hastily scrawls the words: “She’s called again.” He tears the sheet off, clips it to her birthday card, and props it up on the desk lamp where the detective will be sure to find it.

  In the next moment he is gone.

  »5«

  12:15 P.M. A BENCH ON THE EAST RIVER PROMENADE.

  The bright new sun of early spring. Joggers plodding northward on the river walk; a pair of miscegenate lovers making tumultuous love on a nearby bench; an old derelict on yet another bench, asleep and mumbling epithets beneath yesterday’s Daily News.

  Konig eats lunch from a paper bag brought from home and erratically packed. A hard-boiled egg. A raw tomato. A raw carrot. All seasoned from a cellophane envelope of low-sodium salt and washed down with a paper container of tepid black coffee.

  Tugs and barges slip up and down the brown pasty water. Gulls wheel in wide arcs overhead as Konig sits fuming over his barely touched bag of lunch. He might have been with the others eating expensive and barely digestible Italian food at Adolpho’s, drinking bad wine and listening to Strang hold forth amid a court of jesters and sycophants. He had little stomach for that. Funny the way men quickly smell which way the wind is blowing. Junior and associate medical examiners already sensing which, way the power will fall and gravitating toward it like iron filings in a magnetic field. It was, of course, Konig’s choice. It was for him to name his successor. Strang was absolutely the worst man for the job. Though a capable enough pathologist, he was, however, a superb politician, an out-front man who loved to talk to the media and to press hands. He knew how to raise money and to smile when the Mayor was nearby. There were far better, more devoted, pathologists on Konig’s staff, but Strang was the departmental superstar, upstaging everyone, always knowing how to catch the Mayor’s eye, a prodigious generator of “earnestly concerned” memos, invariably and “regrettably” incriminating colleagues of whom he was either jealous or wary. Yes, it was Konig’s choice, but already there were powerful supporters eager to lend their weight to Strang’s succession.

  Perhaps that is why Konig found himself more and more taking solitary lunch hours. Taking comfort in his solitude. Seeking quiet and respite from the turmoil of his days. Still, it seemed churlish now after almost forty years to complain about the course his life had taken. After all, it had been his own choice. He, the brilliant resident cardiologist, a boy in his twenties with the whole world before him, suddenly veering sharply from a safe and comfortable path into the uncharted wilderness of a rare and poorly remunerated specialty—forensic pathology. Two of Bahnhoff’s lectures audited casually with very little in mind other than a vague, desultory curiosity, then suddenly the whole world upside down. Bahnhoff, like Spillsbury with whom he’d studied, was a genius. An ascetic and a scholar, he lived only for his work, and like Spillsbury, he was driven by a ruthless passion for the truth. He did not care what means were necessary to get it. That was the man who taught Konig. People who boasted that they knew Bahnhoff (liars most of them—Bahnhoff, though world-renowned, permitted few people near him) claimed Konig was exactly like the master. Eerily so. Konig for a time even began affecting a slight German accent and started smoking the same kind of cigars. He had the same painstakingly methodical approach as the master, the same awesome memory coupled with the same uncanny intuition. Working with Bahnhoff, they all claimed, was for Konig a kind of Faustian contract. He gave up v his soul, became the head of the department, and a kind of legend in his own life. But now, it seemed, the devil was waiting in the wings.

  Now, nearly forty years later, sitting on a bench, the odor of low tide and river sewerage in his nostrils, the taste of ashes in his mouth, Konig feels a curious bitterness. Why? he asks himself.

  What was it for? Why had it ever been? He had such a promising career before him. “The million-dollar-a-year cardiologist,” they used to call him. To have taken such a course, the seedy, unheroic vocation of a civil-servant physician. His life spent in a series of shabby, barely respectable offices, served by surly, resentful clerks. All about him a scrap heap of old instruments that had fallen into desuetude; brand-new, utterly useless instruments that had arrived there mysteriously, that no one had ever ordered. And then, of course, the cheap, decrepit office furniture, the nameless litter and debris, the peeling walls and ceilings of his life.

  Ida once said laughingly (but his decision had disappointed her) that it was his “natural morbidity, a fatal attraction for the grotesque. ‘... half in love with easeful Death,’” she had said, quoting the ode. And there was indeed something to that, some nagging little grain of truth. No matter how much he squirmed and wriggled, tried to avert his eyes from that disconcerting fact, it was nevertheless there. Always nagging.

  It could have been so much easier, he thought, gumming dispiritedly the dry, tasteless egg yolk in his mouth. He could have been like his old classmate Nachtigal, the Park Avenue dermatologist with a clientele of movie stars and anxious politicians, spending his days curing dandruff and removing unsightly wens, transplanting hair from the back of the head to the front, dispensing cortisone for everything from acne to alopecia and hawking cheap shampoos on the side. The cunning little elixir bottles all marked with magical, arcane figures—xx34-2 (p)—(3xy). All the cheap, fraudulent claptrap of the high priest mumbling cryptic numerals over the man with the falling hair, the lady with the hirsute lip.

  He could have done that. He could have been, like Bernard Nachtigal, a millionaire three times over. What fatal flaw then, what idiotic perversity, led him on this fatal downward trajectory to the morgue?

  12:45. Too early for the court; too late to go back to the office. Konig crumples his soiled, half-eaten bag of lunch and tosses it into a reticulated trash can chained to the bench. The sleeping derelict mumbles, his head lolls on his shoulder, a sour, greenish chyme leaks onto his chin as Konig limps past.

  He has decided he will walk to court. Three miles at least to the Criminal Courts Building, 100 Centre Street. Sciatica be damned. Walking will, of course, only make it worse, but he knows he cannot sit still in a cab for any length of time. That under no circumstances will he face the assorted indignities of the mass-transit system. He
refuses to be carted about in the great black funeral hearse of a limousine the City has provided for him, with its impressive bronze shield that can make life easy even in the chaos of the city streets. So he will walk, the weather being fine, and besides, he has business en route.

  Consciously and with great deliberation he tells himself that he will walk all the way downtown on the river promenade. But he knows, even as he proclaims this weighty resolution to himself, that at a certain point, he will veer sharply west into the dense, teeming little neighborhoods of the East Village and the Lower East Side—Avenues B and A, Houston, Essex, Hester Streets—then cut south to Little Italy and Canal, and on through the narrow, winding little beehive streets of Chinatown, working south through a maze of lofts and warehouses, truck plazas, dingy storefronts, hardwares, plumbing contractors, electrical repair shops with dead geraniums wilting in the windows, neighborhood butcher shops with the flayed carcasses of pigs and rabbits hanging from steel hooks, blood oozing from their tiny pink nostrils.

  He had taken that route many times in the past five months. Always choosing to walk, no matter how weary, rather than ride. Drawn there irresistibly, as if on some invisible leash. Prowling streets. Eyes searching out shadowy alleys, doorways reeking of urine, trying to pierce the dirty brown brick of turn-of-the-century tenement buildings fallen on hard times. Wanting to see past the people on the stoops to the dark, noisome halls beyond, where malicious strangers often lurked, and on into the tiny, inhuman cubicles with the trapped, hapless occupants huddled in the dark, fetid corners. Somewhere in that squalid maze, he is certain, his lost child cowers.

  He is moving now as if through a dream on a tide of churning humanity—stray dogs, squalling urchins, the immense and suffocating stench of outdoor fish stalls, bodegas, and costermongers. A grayish, greasy curtain billows outward from an open ground-floor window, carrying with it the smell of fried fish and moldy upholstery. Konig glances up, seeing a fat, antiquated lady with a wen on her nose drowsing at the sill on great beefy arms, head nodding on her chest. A sleeping sibyl. Perhaps he might take himself to her, present votive offerings, seek oracular guidance. “Where should I go? What must I do? How can I get back to where I was?”

  He often thought that if he could give himself up to magic and the local wizards, to beads and talismans, all would go well. He would go to an astrologer, chew macro biotic foods, contemplate Zens koans—anything. If only he could get past this corrosive cynicism, shrive himself of the hubris of forty years of weights and measurements to reach some blessed little green oasis of hope, he might yet save himself.

  In Chinatown he pauses to look in a window full of pressed ducks hung on wire nooses, heads lolling grotesquely sidewards; then another window crammed with jars and canisters of dried herbs behind which a wizened septuagenarian mandarin in a black skullcap smiles quietly back at him.

  He turns, dispirited, and lurches quickly on.

  »6«

  1:45 P.M. MANHATTAN CRIMINAL COURTS BUILDING.

  Seedy, decrepit halls, reeking of refuse and bureaucratic neglect; a causeway of vagabonds and mendicants, victims and offenders, rubbish and court magistrates.

  Konig is fifteen minutes early. He limps into one of the judges’ lounges which he, as a lofty municipal officer, is entitled to use. The place is empty, the only trace of magistrates being the lingering fog of expensive cigars, the smell of cracked and ancient leather in a room where the soiled, bird-spattered, windows have not been opened for decades.

  Wincing, Konig hoists his aching leg onto a camel hassock and pops a Valium. Court makes him nervous; interrogation causes queasiness in him. Question and answer, innuendo, recrimination and threat, the beady eye of the prosecutor, the muffled sob of grieving litigants. After years of civil courts and grand juries, Konig still arrives at court like a novitiate, struck with awe and wonder at all the casuistry and outright lying, the wheedling, oily words of clever men, the near certainty that justice won’t be served.

  Just enough time now for him to study his notes, review his protocol in preparation for the inquisition. Printed in medical and forensic journals, translated into a dozen languages, Konig’s protocols are world-renowned. He has filled three volumes with them and they have been the subject of lengthy transoceanic correspondences carried on with an international community of scholars and specialists—people who come to him for the final word—for he is, in his chosen field, the court of last resort.

  Written in the style of Professor Virchow, Prosector of the Dead House of the Berlin Charite Hospital during the last half of the nineteenth century, Konig’s protocols are marvels of precision and lucidity. They are without literary pretensions, neither eloquent nor graceful; merely a recitation of naked, unembellished facts, dreary when taken individually, but staggering in their remorseless cumulative drive toward final truth.

  Konig’s eyes now begin to scan his protocol.

  CASE BENJAMIN WILTON

  This is the body of a generally well-developed white male. Appears to be that of man twenty years of age, height 1.65 meters. Gunshot wound of head. Death in eighteen hours from edema of lungs. On autopsy, entrance of bullet is found to be above left eyebrow. The track of it runs from left frontal lobe to right occipital lobe of brain. Extensive edema of the lungs. Numerous unrelated manifestations: dilations of aortic arch; endocarditis mitralis; herpes zoster; chylification of intestines.

  B.W. aged 21. Occupation at time of death: car salesman, but known trafficker in addictive drugs. No signs of drug use or addiction present on body. Shot through the head with small handmade pistol, caliber .38, above middle of left eyebrow. Unconscious on arrival at hospital—6 p.m.—Jan. 3, 1974. Breathing stertorous; pulse scarcely perceptible; blood pressure 60 systolic over 30 diastolic; urine passed involuntarily; loud tracheal rales; heart sounds barely audible; no albumin or sugar in urine; left pupil larger than right. Periodic exudation of grayish-white matter from the wound. At midnight, pulse had risen somewhat; respiration still stertorous though a little easier. Early the following morning the man’s condition showed marked deterioration. He died at noon.

  Postmortem examination (occupying two hours and three-quarters) Jan. 4, 1974.

  EXTERNAL EXAMINATION

  Body generally pale in color. Flanks, scrotum, and glans of a uniform reddish-purple.

  On turning the body over, a large quantity of yellowish-brown fluid containing dark-brown particles escapes from the mouth.

  Rigor mortis marked in extremities and muscles of the neck. Slight cadaveric odor perceptible.

  Hair of head abundant, curly, dark brown. Beard full; hair on right side of head stained red; much matted together and roots covered with dry, clotted blood.

  On the forehead, directly above middle of left eyebrow, a small, blackish bullet hole, 9 millimeters in diameter, with a narrow rim of reddish-brown abraded skin surrounded by a halo of powder tattoos to a radius of 10 centimeters.

  Eyelashes dark brown; pupils round; irises pale grayish-blue. Front teeth perfect, of brownish cast. Molar teeth defective and carious. Teeth tightly clamped.

  Eyelids partially closed; corneas firm and transparent. Nostrils filled with large quantities of dried blood.

  Hands large; nails long and bluish, edges compacted with thick black dirt. Neck not easily movable. Abdomen somewhat scaphoid.

  Penis small, much contracted; very little prepuce; no cicatrix of any kind perceptible. What remains of the prepuce dark red and rather dried. Scrotum small and wrinkled. Some appearance of blood externally on both sides.

  The parts about the anus much soiled with brown excrement. The anus closed.

  A fly buzzes somewhere in the room. Konig’s head snaps up as if he’d been abruptly summoned. Something like the sensation of a long needle passing up the length of his spine transfixes him to his seat. He feels a cold tingling at his scalp and suddenly he is filled with a creeping sense of prescience.

  “Come on, Lolly. Come on, honey. Walk to Daddy.”
<
br />   “Paul, how can you expect the child to walk? She’s barely ready to crawl.”

  “She’ll walk—she’ll walk for me. Just watch her.”

  The fly buzzes through the finger loop of the shade and proceeds to dance up the frayed length of the attached string. Konig’s eyes fasten on the fly’s progress as if hypnotized, but it’s not the fly he sees; he’s string at something quite far beyond it.

  INTERNAL EXAMINATION

  Scalp opened by intermastoid incision from one ear across to the other. Skullcap removed. The bones difficult to saw through. Six to 8 millimeters thick.

  Left frontal sinus filled with pulpy matter... dark-red clots, right frontal sinus. Vessels much distended with blood...

  “Come on, Lolly. It’s this way.”

  “No, it isn’t, Daddy. I’m sure we came the other way. Through that little copse behind the church...”

  ... debris in aperture of skull. Much destruction and hemorrhage along the track of the bullet wound.

  “It’s four strokes then raise your head. Four strokes, raise your head. Four strokes—”

  “I know, but I keep getting water in my mouth.”

  “That’s too damned bad. We’re going to keep right on doing this until...”

  ... the head being raised and drawn forward, a .38-caliber deformed lead bullet is recovered from area just below right ear. Brain being removed, its base seen to be infiltrated with blood.

  “Compravao, compravi, comprava, compravamo, compravate, compravano.”

  “Good... Now the past absolute.”

  “But, Daddy, we’re not up to the past absolute.”