City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  They stand there regarding each other for a moment. Then Konig speaks. “Go to my office now, Angelo, and wait there for me.”

  “Stop crying,” Konig shouts, red in the face, at the slumped, disheveled figure seated opposite him. “For Chris-sake—stop crying. That’s not going to help anything.” Angelo Perriconi slumps deeper into his seat, as if he were trying to osmose himself into the wood and vanish. His face is hidden behind trembling hands, and he sobs like a baby, pausing only from time to time to wipe his running nose across his sleeve. “Oh, my God, my God.”

  “Forget about God, Angelo. What the hell do you think you were doing down there?”

  Muffled wails issue from behind the old man’s hands. “Answer me. What the hell do you think—”

  “Dio mio, Dio mio. Now I gonna lose my job. Now I gonna lose everything—”

  “Will you stop that goddamned bawling and—”

  “What I gonna do?”

  “Listen to me. I’ll tell you what you’re—”

  “What I gonna do?”

  “Listen to me.” Konig’s thunder is so loud that the frenzied little man halts abruptly and gapes up at him.

  “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do, Angelo. First of all you’re going to give me the name of every mortician in this city to whom you’ve ever sold the names of unclaimed bodies.”

  “Unclaimed bodies?” The man half rises out of his seat. “I never—I never—”

  “Come on, Angelo. Cut the crap. I’ve known about your little sideline for years—”

  “Oh, no, Chief. I swear—I never—”

  “Angelo!” Konig bellows, his fist smashing into the center of the desk; papers fly, glasses rattle, pencils roll.

  “Oh, no, Chief. No. I never—I swear—I never—” The little man hiding behind his hands again, shaking like a leaf, is reduced to inconsolable sobbing.

  “Angelo”—Konig starts again, more reasonably, more restrained—“you’re going to give me those names or else I’m going to file a formal report of what I saw downstairs tonight.”

  “Oh, no. No—please, Chief. No, don’t do dat.”

  “If I file such a report,” Konig hammers on remorselessly, “it won’t be a private matter. Your wife, your family, everyone, will hear about it.”

  The old man whines behind his hands. “I givva those names, they gonna breaka my legs.”

  “Angelo, I want those names.”

  “They breaka my head—they gonna kill me.”

  “No one’s going to kill you.”

  “Dio mio, Dio mio.” The man wails like a mourning spirit.

  “Listen to me, Angelo.”

  “Ma che vergogna, ma che disgrazia.”

  “Listen to me.” Konig’s voice shatters once more through the office. Cringing from the sound, the man slumps deeper into a sour heap in his chair, and while he continues to whimper softly to himself, shaking his head incredulously back and forth, Konig stands above him like the wrath of God and speaks. “Now, this is what we’re going to do. Number one, you’re not going to be fired. You will resign for purposes of health. I’ll certify that. You’re only one year from retirement. I’m pretty certain I can get you your full pension.”

  The little Italian starts to protest but Konig waves him to silence.

  “Number two, you’re going to give me that list of names—”

  Angelo Perriconi resumes his loud wailing.

  “Shut up, Angelo. Let me finish. You’re going to give me that list and no one is ever going to know that you gave me the list. Your resignation has come about for reasons of health—right?” Konig peers down hard at him. “Right, Angelo?”

  The man snivels and shakes his head.

  Konig continues. “So no one will connect your resignation with this goddamned body-snatching racket. You understand?”

  Whimpering, sniveling, the man nods his head and Konig continues. “Actually, I blame myself as much as you for this whole thing. I’ve known for about three years that you’ve been selling names and taking kickbacks from shady people. I figured you needed the extra money. I know you’ve got kids, a big family. I know there’s a boy in college. I suppose I looked the other way, hoping you’d quit yourself. I was wrong. I should’ve stopped you the moment I learned about it. Oh, will you stop that goddamned sniveling.”

  The little Italian jumps, like a child recoiling from a blow, making Konig feel more angry with himself, more desolate. Averting his gaze from the little man’s shame, Konig’s eyes search desperately around the room, lighting finally on the coffeepot. “Want some coffee?”

  Angelo shakes his head and slumps deeper into his seat. “As it is now,” Konig goes on ruefully, “I’m pretty sure we’ve got a full-fledged scandal on our hands. The newspapers will pounce on this like vultures. They won’t let go. Leave that to me. I’ll handle that.”

  “My wife—my kids—Whadda hell they gonna say?”

  “They’re going to say nothing because they’ll never know.”

  The sobbing comes abruptly to a halt and the slumped, piteous figure turns a startled face toward Konig.

  “I certainly don’t propose to tell them,” Konig goes on. “Do you?”

  Still puzzled, not quite certain of the drift of thought here, the man shakes his head negatively.

  “Do you, Angelo?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. Then it’s our secret. Right?”

  Again the baffled man shakes his head, but a ray of hope has begun to creep into his features.

  “Our secret—right, Angelo?”

  “Right” The man sobs huskily, humiliation and defeat carried in the slump pf his shoulders.

  “Now go home, Angelo. You’re tired.”

  The man gazes up at Konig with red, teary eyes, mouth struggling to form words. But Konig, knowing all the arguments and all the old evasions, places his large index finger firmly against the little Italian’s lips. “Go home, I said.”

  Once again in the solitude of his office, Konig, rattled and exhausted, settles wearily down to the municipal ledger sheets, the innumerable lines and columns, interminable figures, debits and credits, the shaving here in order to pad there, the small duplicities, the shabby fudging in order to wangle a piece of new equipment. The whole silly mosaic of evasions and petty frauds to be completed by the end of next week, delivered to City Hall, and there somehow to make sense to the jaded eye of the City Comptroller.

  At approximately 11 p.m., eyes burning, the ache of his leg having spread up into the small of his back, Konig flings his pencils down and makes ready to go home. Stacking the ledgers neatly in the center of his desk, he reaches behind him and flicks off the Bunsen burner under the coffeepot. He is ready to go. But something still gnaws at him. Some bit of uncompleted business.

  In the next moment he falls back in his chair, reaches for the phone and is dialing information, long-distance operator, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  Shortly, there is a high-pitched ringing on the wires, a number of gongs and bells, voices of unseen people caught momentarily in the lines stretching across the darkened continent. Fathers, uncles, sisters, brothers, enemies, and friends. Then a phone picked up thirteen hundred miles away and suddenly the receiver flooded with a roar of voices and twanging guitars.

  “Will you turn that goddamn thing lower,” a woman’s voice shouts from the other end.

  Konig shouts back. “Hello—”

  “Wait a minute, f’Chrissake—will you?”

  Konig hangs there amid a pause of mutterings and movements coming to him from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then suddenly silence, as if a radio or TV has been rudely snapped off.

  “Hello—”

  “Hello—Mrs. Sully?”

  “Hello—”

  “Hello. Is this the Sully residence?”

  “That’s right.” The woman’s voice has grown strident, somewhat testy.

  “Sorry to bother you at this hour.”

  “What hour?”

  Konig glanc
es at his watch, laughs a little awkwardly. “Oh, it’s a few hours earlier there, isn’t it?”

  “Depends where you’re calling from. Who is this?”

  “This is Dr. Konig in New York City. I’m calling about your daughter.”

  “Who?”

  “Your daughter. Do you have a daughter—about sixteen or seventeen—name of Heather—er, Molly. Actually, it is Molly, isn’t it?”

  There’s a pause in which they listen to each other breathing.

  “Hello—hello—Mrs. Sully?”

  “Wait a minute, would ya, please? Tim—” Konig can hear the note of alarm in her voice as she cries out, “Tim.”

  Another pause as Konig waits, hearing something like agitated whispering on the other end. Then suddenly a gruff, beery masculine voice.

  “Hullo.”

  “Hello—Mr. Sully?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Dr. Konig in New York City. You have a daughter Molly?”

  “Thas right.”

  “Well, this may all sound strange to you. Incredible, really—” Konig laughs a little idiotically. “Has she been missing?”

  There’s another pause while he can actually hear the other man pondering the question. “Left here eighteen months ago. Ain’t heard from her since.”

  “I knew it.” Konig’s heart lightens and he rushes on eagerly. “I knew it. Listen—I saw her tonight.”

  “You saw her?”

  “Had dinner with her. Quite by accident. I mean, I looked up and there she was—selling postcards in a restaurant in Greenwich Village. I knew she was a runaway. I knew it. Just knew it. Had that feeling. But listen, don’t worry. She’s all right. She’s not in any immediate danger. But I’m afraid she’s going to get into a great deal of trouble. I’ll talk to you more about that when you get here. I know where she is—where you can find her. If you get the first plane out tomorrow—”

  “Who’d ya say this was again?”

  “Konig—Dr. Paul Konig. I’m the Medical Examiner for the City here. Listen, I have the address. If you want her picked up, I can—”

  “I don’t want the address.”

  “She’s not using her own name, but—” Konig’s voice trails off. “Beg pardon?”

  “I said I don’t want the address. I don’t ’give a good goddamn where she is.”

  Konig frowns into the black mouthpiece of the phone. “Oh?” He hovers there a moment, quite at a loss. “But your daughter—”

  “She ain’t no daughter of mine. Walked outta here eighteen months ago with a lotta fancy notions. Far as I’m concerned—”

  “Tim—Tim—” Once more the agitated, pleading whispers come hissing through the wires. “Tim—”

  “She don’t ever set foot in—”

  “Tim—”

  “Shut up, Alice. You hear that,, mister? You ever see that little bitch again, you tell her for me—”

  Konig hears the sound of muffled sobbing on the other end.

  “—I’ll bust her fuckin’ head she ever comes suckin’ around here again.”

  »15«

  SATURDAY, APRIL 13. 12:45 A.M. RIVERDALE, NEW YORK.

  A big old Tudor set high on a hill above the Hudson River. Inside, in the huge living room with its lofty, beamed ceilings and its musty, heavily curtained silences, “Paul Konig stands before tall French windows. From where he stands, he can look out over a stone patio and a moon-flooded garden that creeps up to its edge, and beyond that to a steep, grassy declivity tumbling downward to the river. Beyond the great black void of the river, he can see the cliffs of the Palisades rising squat and gibbous on the other side, and atop them, a dim, sluggish pulse of lights denoting early-morning traffic on the Palisades Parkway.

  “Paul—we need more champagne.”

  “Coming, Ida. It’s coming. For God’s sake, give me a minute. I only have two hands.”

  Beyond the stone patio, shadows drift and flicker back and forth in the moon-flooded garden.

  “Isn’t she lovely?”

  “Image of her mother.”

  “Fortunately for her.”

  Laughter rippling up through the branches of beech and poplar swaying above the garden. The air heavy with the scent of lilac and honeysuckle, hyacinths around a goldfish pond. Laughter echoing now through the great tomblike silence of a house long vacant.

  “Aren’t you proud of her today?”

  “Of course I am. Of course I’m proud of her.”

  “What’s she going to do now she’s finished school?”

  “God only knows. Watch out for that cork—bang—there it goes. Get a glass. Quick.”

  More ghostly laughter echoing through the immense silences of the house.

  “Got some funny notion she wants to go abroad for a few years and paint.”

  “Doesn’t sound funny to me.”

  “You finance her then. I won’t. I’ve footed bills for twenty years. I’m tired. Now’s her turn.”

  “But I imagine you’d feel a little different about financing her through, oh, let’s say for instance—medical school.”

  “Don’t be so goddamned smug, Chester. We all have ideas about what our kids should do.”

  “Just ideas, Paul. Seldom ever works out the clever way we plan it for them.”

  “Well, I don’t want her to go to medical school to please me. She can do what she goddamned pleases. I’ve washed my hands of it.”

  Standing now before a marble mantel, Konig stares at the craggy, pitted visage wavering in the smoke-glazed mirror opposite him. The eyes are Ted and bleary, as if they’d peered too long into a blast furnace.

  “Depressing, isn’t it, Paul? Being around so many young people?”

  “’Specially when you’ve just had a glimpse at your own EKG’s. Ida—who’s that fellow with Lolly?”

  “I don’t know. Some young man she met at school. I think he’s an instructor or something on the faculty.”

  “Oh?” Konig frowns deeply. “Well, I don’t like him.” Stillness hovers about the house with palpable weight, crouching in shadows and corners, inhabiting rooms and hallways long untenanted. Upstairs now, Konig drifts like a stranger down corridors he has known for a quarter of a century. Past doorways he has walked in and out of, and gloomy spaces still haunted by the aura of occupants long since gone.

  In his own bedroom, where he has not slept since the death of his wife, the fine old French furniture—the tall canopy bed, the Louis XVI escritoire, the graceful silken Recamier—is shrouded now in sheets. On a night table on the side of the bed where Ida Konig slept is a yellow, faded photograph—a bridal picture, formal and stiff, depicting a tall, stern-visaged young man awkwardly attired in top hat and tails; beside him, a dark, diminutive woman in long peau de soie lace, more handsome than pretty, with a strikingly arresting gaze.

  Farther on, a music conservatory. A grand piano sits before a huge bay window with leaded panes and insets of stained glass depicting shepherds and lambs, swains and milkmaids, saltimbanques and saints, funereal crows in laurel branches, all limned in scarlets and cobalts, regal, ecclesiastical purples.

  On the music stand on the grand piano, a book stands open to a Chopin nocturne; an air of expectancy about it all, as if the whole setting were simply awaiting animation by the appearance of players soon to come.

  Farther on, the lace and tapestried bedroom where his mother died eight years before in ghastly pain. The closets still hung with her clothes, redolent of old persons—camphor and mothballs, the vapory medicants of the sickroom.

  Other rooms—guest rooms, sitting rooms. Gracious old baths, generous in size and opulently appointed—sunken tubs, fine old Italian brass fixtures. Certainly not the baths of a civil-servant physician with no visible private means of his own, but very definitely the baths of a young professional man who happened to marry quite well. Even now, the bitter rue of the have-not in a world of haves still rankles in him.

  Then, at the far end of a corridor, a sewing room, la
rge and cozy beneath steep-pitched gables, with a stone hearth and a loom. Ida’s hideaway. Balls of colored yarn still lie there in wicker baskets, a vase stocked like a quiver full of knitting needles, a beautiful old antique Singer; and on the loom itself, just as she left it, half completed, a white Bargello needlepoint rug studded with immense blood-red hydrangeas.

  Then, finally, another room, smaller than all the others; a silken nook of a room—a small canopied bed, an elegant little vanity flounced with ruffles. Paintings of ballerinas line the flower-papered walls. An exquisitely feminine room, that of a child who had entered womanhood in that room. Once a nursery with a crib where an infant slept, an infant who’d arrived completely unexpected by her parents, long after they’d given up all hope of ever having a child of their own. Ida Konig had for many years appeared to be one of those stubborn and curiously begrudging cases of infertility. Responding to neither drug nor treatment, a mystery to a half-dozen specialists, all of whom were unable to determine the root of her problem. Then one morning, a few days past her fortieth birthday, she woke up and found strange stirrings inside herself. Nausea, flushes, menses long overdue. Even the gynecologist was unwilling to attribute the symptoms to pregnancy, preferring instead to call it some vague hormonal disorder. Then he saw the results of the rabbit test and the urine analysis, and a little later, during the course of an internal examination, felt a tiny fetus clinging to the wall of the uterus. And that night, Paul and Ida Konig lay in each other’s arms and laughed themselves to sleep.

  Lolly Konig’s room was a clutter of pieces and oddments from every stage of her life from infancy to young womanhood. An old moth-eaten hobbyhorse, shelves lined and crowded with every imaginable kind of doll—Dutch dolls, china dolls, Raggedy Anns, cinnamon teddy bears with button eyes, Pinocchios and harlequins, a grenadier with pink cheeks and a shako, ballerinas and toreadors, little Hummel figurines out of Grimm and Andersen. And beneath the shelves of dolls, the shelves of books—Madeline, Babar, Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Guki the Moon Boy. Then the somewhat older books—Heidi, Lorna Doone, Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and on through Dickens and Twain. Then books about the planets, the life of fish and insects. Later, books on plant histology and art history. Then huge, opulent books crammed with paintings, cave paintings from Lascaux, medieval and Byzantine icon painting, Italian Quattrocento and Flemish painting, great French and Spanish masters, Impressionists and Russian moderns, and endless books of American painters—Eakins, Ryder, Sargent, Homer, Burchfield, Hopper, Remington, and Russell.