City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  “Kinetic Apocalypse Number Three.”

  “Oh, that.” The cork is liberated with a triumphant pop. “Don’t mean nothin’ really—just a nude of Cynthia.” Haggard glances back and forth from the lithe, willowy beauty of the black girl to the thorny, lethal-looking chrome and shrugs. “Okay—if you say so.”

  The young Greek extends a glass of wine toward him. “How about it?”

  “Thanks.” The detective smiles wistfully. “Another time. Haven’t had my dinner yet. Guess I’ll mosey over to the local coffeehouse.”

  »13«

  “This is as far as I go.”

  The pert, sullen face glances up at him in the dim orange glow of the streetlight. “But you said—”

  “Never mind what I said. This is where we part.”

  9:15 P.M. SOMEWHERE IN THE WEST VILLAGE.

  Konig and the girl stand in the dank, wavery shadows of a partially gutted tenement destined for imminent demolition. A tattered police order instructs all remaining occupants to vacate the premises by a certain date. Above them the sporadic lights of the last few remaining tenants—the obdurate and those with no place to go—flicker forlornly in the hazy April night.

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said.” Konig grows curt, gruff, a little nasty. “But this is it.”

  Surprise and hurt mingle in the girl’s eyes. A child denied a long-awaited present It is now fifteen minutes since Konig paid the bill at the little Italian restaurant on Minetta Lane, then started walking west toward the girl’s apartment over near the river. Now having reached there, he has what he’s come for. An address. In that time they’ve laughed and chatted. Been easy with each other. She’d been happy, secretly smug and congratulating herself on what an easy thing it had been to win him over. She’d been thinking of herself as shrewd and him as foolish. But not unkind. She doesn’t think he, will try to hurt her as some of the others have.

  Now, suddenly, the momentary laughter is all gone. He is stem, harsh, censorious. There is something even a little menacing about the way he looks at her. As if he were furious with her.

  “Ah, come on now.” She pushes up against him in the shadows, her child’s lips eagerly seeking his old man’s mouth. The obscenity of it offends him and he pushes her off.

  “Come on, Poppy. Don’t be scared.”

  “I’m not scared, and stop calling me that disgusting name. I’m not your poppy.” He looks up at the gutted, squalid thing, the tangle of brick and rusting iron crouching above them. “You live in this?”

  The girl seems suddenly grief-stricken, at a loss, unable to fathom all the sudden rejection.

  “Go upstairs now,” Konig says more softly, a bit of the edge off his voice.

  She stares at him helplessly, fright and puzzlement in her eyes. Then she turns.

  Watching her go, Konig calls after her. “How long have you been on drugs?”

  She turns back, mouth open, trying to form words.

  “How long you been on junk?” Konig’s manner grows more harsh and insistent. “Answer me.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “Answer me, I said.”

  “You’re a cop. I knew it.” She starts toward him imploringly. “Oh—hey, listen—I—”

  “No, you listen to me.” He hold her off at arm’s length. “I’m not a cop.”

  “Then how d’ya know?”

  “I don’t have to be a cop. All I have to do is look in your eyes.”

  Suddenly the girl starts to tremble. He shakes her violently.

  “Now listen to me. You keep on that stuff and you’re going to wind up in a garbage can.” He gazes upward at the crumbling brick and plaster, the punched-out windows, the graffiti scrawl of myrmidon street kids. “As a matter of fact, you’re more than halfway there right now.” He crams twenty dollars into her tiny cold fist. “Go upstairs.”

  The girl gapes down at the bill, her shoulders slumped wearily in defeat. He senses the struggle going on within her. She’d like to fling the bill back in his face, but he knows she won’t. He can see the need already too great upon her. The girl, he knows, won’t have her money long. Even now he can sense the avid burning eyes of the junk pusher crouching behind the brick wall with his precious little packets of forgetfulness, just waiting for him to go. “Take this, too.” Konig produces a small white professional card from his billfold. “When you’re ready to try and break out, come and see me. I’ll do what I can to help you.”

  9:20. Konig limping back crosstown, some huge, vague, unspecified rage smoldering within him. No destination. Uncertain where his faltering tread impels him. Bone-weary, yet determined not to go home. No reason to. Dreading the empty house and its haunted shadows. Unaware of the pain shrieking down his leg, he hobbles through the green-red gridlike maze of traffic patterns blinking up and down Sixth Avenue, then starts up West 4th, unaware that at that very moment behind the yellow plate-glass storefront window he is passing, beyond which flicker the tawdry lights of cheap reproduction Tiffany lamps, Francis Xavier Haggard sits hunched and miserable over a cup of bitter-as-rue espresso, trying to assemble, make some sense of the odds and ends, the bits of trivia hailing down upon him in badly fragmented English from the lips of an excitable young Armenian waiter gesticulating above him.

  Konig drifts across the moist, hazy April night, moving beneath bright white street lamps ringed with gauzy, spectral halations, past a flowing tide of young, laughing, animated faces. All the world is young here, making him feel suddenly ancient Some obscene, discarded, castoff thing. Full of curious envy and contempt and sick at heart. Their vitality taunts him. He searches those faces, all restless, eager, seeking life on the littered pavements. Searching, yet unaware that he is searching, seeking out one face. Suddenly, the small, frightened features of Heather Harwell, nee Molly Sully, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, waver momentarily before his eyes. He wonders, now that he’s dispatched her, why the need to have been so cruel about it. The final, heartless brutality of his rejection of her, he realizes now, afforded him some odd, unsavory pleasure. Then the need to humiliate her further with the twenty-dollar bill, proffered for nothing—no services rendered—with almost regal contempt. The faintly oily odor of her hair, mingled with that of cheap spray, still clings to him, and the memory of small, frail, pathetically childlike bones crushing up against him in the dark—not for lust, it suddenly occurs to him, but rather the small child’s need for protective warmth against the night—suddenly saddens him.

  Up Broadway and over to St. Marks Place, he shambles through the gaudy night, pausing from time to time outside the yellow-orange windows of saloons and coffeehouses, small bistros and bookstalls, little Japanese gift shops reeking with incense, hung with paper lanterns, stuffed with fake jade, cheap brummagem, past endless pizza parlors, tiny hole-in-the-wall Greek restaurants, the smell of singed lamb, oily pilaf, sausages frying on vendors’ griddles, a hundred different smells licking outward from open doorways like a moist, sour tongue. And everywhere the young. A flood tide of the young—students, lovers, painters, poets manque, bearded teenagers plotting a better world in cheap all-night cafeterias, drug-crazed junkies hovering like lean, hungry jackals in shadowy doorways, pondering desperate solutions to desperate problems. Konig’s eyes sweep and scan these youthful faces. Oh, Lolly, Come home, dear. Please come home now. “Evening, Chief.”

  Konig looks up into the smiling rubicund visage of the night guard.

  “Working late tonight, are you, Doc?”

  Konig gazes around like a stranger. A little startled to find himself there. “Oh, no—nothing, Scanlon. Just some paper work. Won’t be long.”

  “Take your time. I’ll be here if you need me.”

  The pleasant lilt of a Gaelic chuckle fades behind him; the echo of his own footsteps clatters through the long, empty green corridors, and once more Paul Konig has entered the green, comforting gloom of the world he knows best.

  »14«

  Full-time Deputy Chief Medic
al Examiner $40,500

  5 full-time Associate Medical Examiners $33,000/$165,000

  10:00 P.M. KONIG’S OFFICE.

  Silence. Only the ticking of the old Regulator wall clock, the gurgling of the coffeepot, the quiet hiss of the Bunsen burner sighing beneath it. Konig’s pen scratches across the large municipal ledger sheets of the office annual budget.

  8 full-time Assistant Medical Examiners $10,500/$84,000

  Goddamn Strang anyway. He and Blaylock. Both of them oughta be sacked—hang ’em both.

  Chief Toxicologist, full time $19,500

  No goddamned tissue study—no mention of ecchymosis in the protocol.

  Hematologist, full time, 4 Assistants and—

  Ought to send him up to Yonkers. Serve him right. They’d eat him alive. Carslin and those smart-ass ACLU boys. And me having to take all that goddamned guff from Benjamin. Flexing his muscles Threatening me with the grand jury. Chief Deputy Mayor and all that crap. Knew him when he was chasing ambulances. “The Mayor doesn’t want—repeat, does not want—any further embarrassment.” Well, screw the Mayor. And the Chief Deputy Mayor. Screw them all.

  12 Scrubbers/Mortuary $7,500/$90,000

  Calcification at the pubic symphysis. That pelvic section on the river today. No spring chicken. Course, it’d been submerged a while.

  3 full-time Van Drivers

  Need two new vans. Be lucky if I get one to replace these goddamned antiques. Goddamn Strang lecturing me about my duties, my responsibilities. Insufferable prig. Stuffed ass. Sucking around for my job. Asking about my health all the time. Watching me. Keeping score on me. As if I didn’t know about that silly goddamned racket. Stupid ass—No CO levels in the blood. No cinders in the larynx or the trachea. Fools. Fools. Hope they get that body back for me.

  1 new Prince-Hauser Autoclave. $16,500

  1 new Barschach Gas Chromatograph $12,500

  That smug bastard in court today. Suicide? Christ, O Mighty. Can you imagine the gall? Suicide—with a straight face, mind you. All solemn and pompous. Next time that young gorilla kills, it ought to be—Oh, Lolly, Lolly—Something about that hand with the fingernail polish. Odd. Was it left or right? Can’t remember. Funny. Postcards. Pictures. Pretty views.

  Konig laughs out loud. Looks up startled to hear the sound of his own laughter rattling through the quiet night around him.

  Silly goddamn kid. Postcards and dirty pictures. Coked to the gills on hash. Gonna be a big, famous model. Be dead in a year if she’s lucky—Oh, Christ, Lolly. Don’t study medicine for me. Do it for yourself. Only for yourself. If there’s something else you want to do, do it. But do it for yourself—

  Suddenly he rises from his desk as if summoned, and not knowing exactly why, he starts from the office. Footsteps reverberating down the empty hall. The door of his office still open behind him, a plane of pale-yellow light spilling across the darkened corridor.

  Something about that goddamned hand.

  His feet, that slurred tread, the ache shooting down the thigh into the calf, a long, cold, thin blade of pain. Down he goes. Down Stairway D, spiraling ever downward into the green world of the mortuary below, turned gray and penumbrous now with only the scant illumination of a few dim night lights. No matter though for Konig. He knows the way by heart. Could find the place in his sleep. Peaceful there now with everyone gone. He almost prefers it. Just like old Bahnhoff. His own world. All to himself. Everyone but him an intruder. No noise now. No confusion. No questions and answers. Bumbling attendants and meddlesome colleagues. The place quiet, immaculate. Scrubbed clean of the day’s carnage. White tile and stainless steel. Gurney carts, minus their dismal, sacked cargoes, all lined up in neat, long rows. Shiny, efficient, expectant. Awaiting the morning flood of mayhem.

  A single bare bulb illuminates the place, casting huge cavelike shadows across the walls. The only sound the soft, high whir of refrigerator motors cooling cadavers. Konig opens one of the body boxes and peers in. There in the dark chill, wisps of icy vapor rising from it, is the body of the young Spanish girl found in the Harlem stairwell that morning. Yesterday she was alive. Tomorrow she’ll be on the tables bright and early in the morning.

  Konig moves on. The next, a badly decomposed cadaver found up in the Bronx Zoo that afternoon. Not much left—a separate skull and mandible. Torso and, extremities clad in a white short-sleeved shirt, a pair of dark-blue denim trousers, dark leather belt, heavy metal buckle. Numerous live and dead worms and extensive green and white mold cover the body surface, now largely mummified. Despite refrigeration, there is heavy cadaveric odor. This too will go on the tables tomorrow morning.

  Next, the body of an adult Negro female. Well developed. Well nourished. Approximate age thirty. About 5' 5". Weight 122 pounds. Eyes open, staring into the icy darkness of her vault. The conjunctivae are pale; the corneas, clouded; the irides, brown with evidences of tache noire. Somewhere on her retinae is imprinted the image of her executioner—the last thing he ever saw. A long, gaping knife wound runs from just below the sternum to the pubic symphysis, virtually gutting her. A sizable amount of small intestine bulges outward from the wound, a strange flowerlike excrescence, like a red anemone blooming there between her breasts.

  Next, the young man found that morning soaking in a bathtub with an ice pick in his chest. The pick is gone now, off to the police laboratory. And the youth lies there, handsome and curiously vital-looking even in death. A young black king dreaming. On the verge of waking to go forth.

  The next locker is the one he’s been looking for. Contained within it as well as in the next three lockers are the neatly packaged remains that were exhumed from the muddy shoreline near Coenties Slip that afternoon. There are the legs and arms, the pelvic and thoracic sections, the packages of feet and genitals, jawbones and ears, gobbets of flesh. All neatly packaged in plastic and meticulously labeled, ready for the exhausting and largely fruitless business of identification.

  And there among all the other packages, in a separate receptacle of its own, what he has been looking for, what has been on his mind for several hours without his actually even knowing it, the hand with the luridly enameled fuchsia fingernails. It lies on its side in the plastic bag, waxen and rigored—frozen by refrigeration into an exquisitely sculptured gesture. Rather like the plaster hand of a supplicant broken from a piece of religious statuary.

  Konig lifts the package from the freezer and gazes down once more at the garishly painted thing. He takes it out of its container, holding it in his hand, turning it in the light. There has been, he now sees, an attempt to mutilate the fingerprints on the hand by abrading them on a file or against a hard surface, thus making the job of identification more difficult. Not unusual. He’s seen that one before. But there is something, else about the hand. Something far more interesting suddenly occurs to him, what he’s been mulling about all evening, ever since he first saw the hand dredged up, still dripping mud and slime from the river. And that is the fact that what he, and what everyone else down there at the time, had blithely assumed was the hand of a woman, he now feels might very well be the hand of a man.

  Suddenly he turns, glancing upward as he does so at some vague, indeterminate point above him. A footstep rings softly on the metal steps of Stairway D. He listens a moment more, then turns back to the hand, dismissing as implausible the notion of anyone coming down there at that time of night.

  Then suddenly another step. A pause. Then a series of two or three more steps, tentative and stealthy.’

  In the next moment he has returned the wrapped hand to its place in the locker and slipped noiselessly through the swinging doors of the autopsy room.

  Several moments pass while he waits there in the great, gloomy, formalin-sodden shadows. From where he stands just behind one of the doors, he has an excellent vantage of the wall lockers through a small glass window cut into the center of the door. Listening to the uneasy, slightly wheezing sound of his own breathing, Konig waits. He waits for what seems an extraordi
nary length of time. Until it seems to him that he’s imagined everything, that he will wait there forever, listening to the vague creaks and groans of metal stairs contracting and expanding, settling into their fastenings.

  Several times he peers through the glass window, seeing nothing but the long, impassive wall of gray lockers. He’s quite ready to forsake the whole thing, but something tells him to wait. For besides the revelation of the dismembered hand, there’s yet another piece of business down here remaining to be settled.

  In the next moment, within that small pane of window glass is framed the face of a man. It is an old, tired face, deeply lined, full of apprehension, a little appalled, yet a little excited at finding itself in such an unlikely place so late at night. It’s not an unpleasant face either, but rather kindly and avuncular. The face of an elderly Italian man whom Konig himself hired more than twenty years ago.

  Moving with the stealthy tread of a small mouse venturing out of its hole, the man creeps toward the wall lockers, pausing several times, glancing nervously around before he reaches his destination. Once there his eyes scan wildly up and down the numerical labels, on each drawer. Then he goes about systematically correlating locker numbers with names and entering them on a clipboard.

  Shortly, he pauses before a locker. With a simple motion he reaches up, pulls out a drawer, and the body of Barbara Rosales rolls out once more into the dim light.

  Konig watches the man hovering there above the sheeted cadaver. The man appears to be studying the face of the dead girl, a mixture of pity and awe in his eyes. Then, with a slow, tremulous gesture, he draws the sheet downward, revealing the badly battered, unclad body.

  It is at that point that Konig steps out of the darkened autopsy room. “All right, Angelo.”

  The head whirls, and the man freezes there, crouching, winded, his face gone the sickigh color of raw mushrooms.