During the course of that afternoon, while one by one the others had slowly drifted off, McCloskey and Konig have drawn closer to each other, some mutual obsession holding them there long past the hour when common sense has told them to quit and go home, seek warmth and light, respite from the day, a comfortable room, a few genial friends.
But no, they’re still there, shuffling bones, both having fallen unconsciously into the attitudes of student and teacher—yet, perhaps, not quite so formal. There’s also a touch of intimacy here; two strangers startled and delighted to discover they share a common passion.
“See that left acetabulum?” Konig whispers, and the young man stoops to peer into the hip socket on the reconstituted trunk.
“Busted up pretty badly.”
“Right. Femur’s obviously been yanked out by force.”
“It’ll be hard to fit it,” says McCloskey. “Maybe we oughta start with the right instead.”
“Good idea,” Konig snaps. “Hand me those two right femora.”
Konig holds both femora in his hands thoughtfully, as if he is weighing them. Getting the heft of them. One is clearly shorter than the other, and both femur heads are clearly different in circumference. When Konig inserts the smaller of the femora into the right hip socket, it slips easily in and can be moved around in all directions. It is just as easily withdrawn.
“A little loose,” McCloskey remarks.
“Let’s try the longer one.”
They do, and with a little manipulation the larger head belonging to the longer set of limbs can also be made to enter the socket and fit snugly there.
“More like it,” Konig mutters, quietly pleased. “But just to make sure, we’ll dissect out all the remaining ligaments around this hip joint and make a plaster cast of the acetabulum for comparison with the femur head. Then tomorrow morning, when the cast has hardened, we’ll measure the vertical diameter of the cast with calipers on a vernier scale. Hopefully the correspondence between the size of the cast and the femur head’ll be pretty even—You seem skeptical.”
“I just can’t get it out of my head that we might be dealing with more than two bodies. What if—”
“—we should find an odd part that can’t be matched to either the long or short set?” Konig smiles. “Then we can toss out everything we’ve done so far. The minute one odd part like that shows up, the mathematical odds of numbers of bodies we’re dealing with jumps to approximately seventeen and that means we haven’t even begun to salvage a quarter of the parts buried somewhere along the river. Too grim a notion to contemplate. Wipe it from your mind, Thomas, my boy.” The Chief cocks an amused eye at the young man. “Anyone waiting for you at home?”
“Waiting for me?”
“A wife? A concubine? A small dog? Anything?”
“No, sir.” McCloskey laughs. “I’m not married.”
“Well then, how about a break for supper? My treat.”
And so they pause for a bright, warm hour in a small Italian restaurant where, under the spell of two martinis and a well-chilled bottle of Verdicchio, Konig waxes more expansive.
Somewhere near 9 p.m. they are back again in the sub-basement level of the mortuary. Returning with a jug of Chianti and some paper cups, they post themselves once more before the trays of bone and tissue, the gobbets of flesh, all waiting to be sorted out.
Alcohol and a bit of companionship have brought a roseate glow to Konig’s cheeks. Not only has he grown more expansive, he is, curiously, even more lucid. Alcohol seems to have sharpened his perceptions, honed the dexterity of his fingers to a remarkable pitch. “Now, Thomas”—his voice fairly lilts—“hand me that long left femur.”
In the next hour or so they manage to fit the left femur to the badly broken left hip socket, so that the reconstituted trunk now sports a full set of thighbones. Their next job is to match a pair of patellae to each. All of the four kneecaps they have still bear loose portions of flesh and tendon, making the job of identifying a pair more difficult. In the next hour or so Konig and McCloskey go about the business of sorting out these strips of tissue and cleaning the margins of the patellae. Then, finally, Konig fits a kneecap to the right and left femora respectively. “Voilà,” he cries out when he sees the ease with which they both articulate. “We’re now ready for the lower legs.”
And so, before the night is over, somewhere around midnight, two complete sets of lower limbs are reconstructed, and one set attached to the reconstituted trunk. Both sets have been matched by such factors as dimension and texture, as well as by the careful measurement of the bones of individual segments. Once reassembled, the two sets of lower limbs are so manifestly different in length that it is now easy to think of them in terms of the shorter and longer set. Already, each set is able to divulge crucial nuggets of information regarding age and stature; even, but somewhat more vaguely, the sets tell something of the racial history of their former owners and how, possibly, they met their ends.
It is well past midnight when Konig glances up from his work and catches the young pathologist suppressing a yawn. “Call it a day?” The wicked, slightly mocking grin crosses his features. The “I can work you under the table, kid” look that McCloskey knows so well.
Konig stands and stretches. “First thing in the morning we’ll X-ray both sets of limbs, make sure the articulations at the hips and patellae are correct. Those acetabulum casts ought to be ready by about ten a.m.” He thumps the young man on the back. “Oughta be able to start on the arms tomorrow.”
»23«
TUESDAY, APRIL 16. 2:00 A.M. RIVERDALE.
Sometime around 2 a.m. Konig is back home in Riverdale, padding about upstairs in his bathrobe after a hot shower. He cannot sleep. Even with the heightened dosage of Demerol, the sciatic pain in his leg is once again gnawing remorselessly at his bone.
He tries to read a magazine but his attention wanders, his mind too agitated and full of the day; the budget still due, the list of chiseling morticians from Angelo, the exhumation of the Robinson boy in Yonkers on Wednesday, the Doblicki business in Jersey, Strang’s treachery, and the matter of the missing heads. Without heads they will never be able to ascertain precisely the age of the two dismembered corpses. Without the dentition inside the jaws and without the terminal segments of fingers with which to make readable prints, they can never hope to make any real identifications. And despite the strange hand with the lacquered nails that seem to suggest a woman’s but feels more like a man’s, in the absence of a pelvis and lower trunk, any hope of accurately sexing that skeleton appears remote at best. And then, of course, Lolly. The thought of her comes creeping back into his head. Voices whisper through the room, all the old oaths, recriminations, guilts, and sorrows.
He rises and goes downstairs, padding through the empty house like a somnambulist. These nocturnal perambulations of his have grown more frequent. Over the past months since wife and daughter have gone, he has grown more restive and irritable. Less able to sleep. What a curse a bed is when you cannot sleep in it.
He goes to the kitchen—spotless, immaculate—where nothing has been cooked in nearly half a year, and nothing eaten, except small snacks nibbled late at night from the nearly empty refrigerator. He pours a glass of milk, hoping it will soothe his stomach, sour now from frayed nerves, too much gin and cheap Chianti. He wanders from there to the library looking for a book, something to get him through the night.
For a physician, Paul Konig is unusually well read. In his youth, fresh out of medical school, with textbook reading comfortably behind him, he developed a voracious appetite for books. Nowadays, his life being the hectic thing it is, he has scarcely time for that. But his library is stacked from floor to ceiling with the passion of those years—history, poetry, biography, novels. His favorite character in all literature is Prince Myshkin, probably because he is nothing like Myshkin. If anything, he’s like Coriolanus, proud, angry, incautious, scolding the mob, always confronting them with their stupidity. As a character, Konig
loathes Coriolanus.
Now his fingers wander up the shelves and search through the titles, pausing finally at an old, frayed copy of Lear. The story of the old, derelict king, bereft of throne, fortune, his daughters, careening over the stormy plain, blind and dotty, wondering what it was he’d lost, or ever thought he wanted, is an old favorite of his. As a senior in medical school he played the part of the mad old king in a laughably inept university production. Lurching and ranting around the stage in an ill-fitting costume—“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks” and so on—he elicited from his audience a number of embarrassed titters. And the young man who reviewed it in the school paper was able to remark that “Konig’s Lear was awesomely voluble if not entirely convincing.”
He takes the book down now and pads out into the sun parlor. It is a large, glassed-in hothouse-cum-terrace, moist and verdant, crowded with a tangle of assorted indoor flora, unpruned, unattended, growing wild since Ida’s death—the coleus, the schefflera, the huge luxuriant ficus with their great green paddle leaves, the myriad pots of blooming lilies, variegated and of every color, Ida’s passion.
He lies back in the sultry, near-tropical greenhouse air, recumbent on a chaise of rattan, aching leg propped high on a cushion, and sips his milk. He starts to read, but after a moment his eyes flutter and close, the glass balanced on his chest, and he nearly drowses. Then suddenly the harsh jangle of the phone, the ring, like a long, cruel needle, drills through the silence of the house. The milk nearly topples and, sitting upright, he waits for a second ring, already believing that, just as the other night, the second ring will never come.
But it does, and suddenly his heart is thumping. He’s up, spilling milk, lurching, staggering, hobbling to the phone on a leg with shooting stars in it Another ring and yet another. His bowels grind with fright. A premonition of danger. Who can it be at such an hour? Possibly the office. Or Flynn. No—they’d never call like this, unless—“Lolly—Lolly,” he murmurs even before the phone is in his hand.
“Hello.”
Only silence roaring back at him. Ominous. Anticipatory.
“Hello—hello. Who is this?”
“Dr. Konig?” A voice comes at him.
“Yes—speaking.”
“Dr. Konig,” the voice proclaims once more, as if he were being officially summoned.
“Yes, this is Paul Konig. Who is this?”
“Listen to this, Dr. Konig.”
There’s a moment of silence in which Konig can hear the other man breathing. Then suddenly a piercing, wrenching scream, followed by a lewd giggle in the background.
“Dr. Konig,” the voice comes again, “did you hear that?”
A cold sweat breaks out on Konig’s forehead. His heart is beating wildly in his chest. The voice continues now more softly. It is a refined, eerily gentle voice.
“Dr. Konig,” it resumes, “that was your daughter.” Another loud, wrenching scream. More ghastly. More anguished. Then the phone is slammed down.
»24«
“If you’ve got the whole New York City Police Department looking for your daughter and they can’t find her, what do you expect me to do?”
“Find her.” Konig slams a fist down on the desk.
10:15 A.M. WORLD-WIDE TRACERS ORGANIZATION.
OFFICE OF MR. DANIEL CORY, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR.
“And you say the FBI is apprised?”
“I told you.” Konig wipes a badly crumpled handkerchief across his brow. “Right after they hung up, I called a friend of mine with the Bureau here in New York. Told me they’d known all about it for several months now. Learned about it through a friend of mine. A Lieutenant of Detectives who’s been working on the case for almost six months now. They’ve been following it, they say.”
“Well, that’s very good. If you’ve got the police and the Bureau—”
“Not good enough.” Konig’s fist comes down again. “I want you to find her. Find her. I’ll pay. I’ll pay you anything.”
Mr. Cory is a small, impeccable man with ruddy features and a waxed mustache. The sort of man whose toilet and wardrobe, you gather, are all rather carefully calculated. The disheveled specter seated opposite him, unshaved, in sour, rumpled clothing, a slightly crazed look in his eyes, makes a striking contrast. As Konig’s voice grows louder, more demanding, as his fist flails the air more violently, Mr. Cory grows cooler.
“It’s not a question of money, Dr. Konig. If it were merely a question of money—”
“Then what is it a question of?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Cory goes on soothingly, a more placatory approach. “Your daughter is not a missing person. If she were, I might be able to do something. From what you’ve told me, she’s right here, somewhere in this city. A captive of some person or persons. That’s not a missing person. That’s kidnap. Forced confinement. If I’d heard a daughter of mine scream like that—Well, this is simply not a matter for an agency like this. It’s a police matter. A Federal matter—”
“The police have done nothing. The Feds are fools.”
“That’s a strange thing for a man in your position to say.”
“Forget about my position, goddamnit.” Konig’s fist explodes once more on the desk, causing Mr. Cory to recoil and gaze uneasily at the outer door, as if he deplored such a breach of decorum.
“But your position is unique, Dr. Konig. If you weren’t the Chief Medical Examiner, if you weren’t such an influential man, with such a vast reputation, I’d be more inclined to take you on. But because you are who you are, I’m sure the efforts made by the police and the Bureau to locate your daughter have gone far beyond their normal range of operation. If I were to set out now to find your daughter, I’d only be duplicating what I know they’ve already done. I don’t want to take your money for that kind of duplication, or raise your hopes unjustifiably.”
“The police—” Konig blurts out but Mr. Cory cuts him short.
“No, please let me finish, Doctor. The police are really very good at this sort of thing. I repeat, your situation is unique, your daughter does not fall into any of the usual categories. Number one, she’s no longer a minor. Number two, she’s being forcibly detained somewhere. She’s a kidnap victim. Kidnap is not our sphere of operation. That, as I say, is a police matter, or a Federal matter.”
Konig slouches wearily in his chair, all the fire suddenly gone from him.
“You’ve already got the police and the Bureau involved,” Mr. Cory goes on. “That’s very good. That’s a one-two punch.”
A look of scorn creeps into Konig’s eyes. “One-two punch, ay?”
Mr. Cory is momentarily flustered. “By all means. If the police and the Bureau are coordinating—”
“Coordinating?” Konig’s eyes glint more spitefully than ever. “Oh, yes. They’re coordinating. And knowing what I do about the reliability of both organizations, I’m reasonably certain that with all their coordination in due time they’ll eventually locate my daughter’s corpse. Meanwhile, these crazy bastards have my kid. They’re hurting her, and no one—nobody—seems able or willing to do a goddamned thing about it.”
»25«
“Well goddamnit—you find him.”
“I told you, Chief. I don’t know where he is.”
“And I told you to find him,” Konig bellows at a young assistant detective, sitting in shirt sleeves, gaping goggle-eyed up at him. “Now go on. Go find him.”
11:20 A.M. CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE,
DIVISION OF MISSING PERSONS.
The young detective’s name is Zymansky and all he can manage to do is move his lips but no words come.
“Why the hell isn’t he here in his office?” the Chief rants on, flailing the still, musty air of the little office. “What if somebody needed him? What if there was an emergency? Christ—what the hell is he being paid for anyway if not to—”
“But I told you, Chief. He’s out on a job—”
“What job?”
“No.” Konig smolders, as if the question asked him was an impertinence. “There’s nothing you can do for me. There’s nothing Haggard can do for me. I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for the whole goddamned kit and caboodle of you.”
The Chief wheels sharply, veers toward the door, knocking over a decanter of water as he goes, not even bothering to glance back as it gurgles over the papers and blotter on Haggard’s desk.
“Should he call you when he gets in?” the assistant detective, dabbing furiously at wet mail, cries out after him. “What should I tell him?”
Tell him to go to hell.” Konig slams the door behind him.
“Deputy Mayor on the phone again, Chief.”
“I’m not in.” Konig barges past Carver, making for the door of his office.
“Already told him that three times. You better speak to him.”
“Oh, Christ.” Konig flings his palms heavenward. “Okay—put him on.”
Inside the cluttered, airless sanctity of his office once again, Konig bites off the tip of a fresh cigar, spits it vehemently over his shoulder, and snatches up the phone.
A buzz. A high ringing. Then suddenly the harsh, crazed nasalities of the Deputy Mayor crackling through the wires. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Are you trying to fuck me, Paul?”
“What in God’s name—”
“Are you trying to screw me? Because if you are, I can assure you—”
“What the hell are you—”
“I’ve stuck my head out—”
“What is this,Maury? What are you talking about?”
“You know goddamned well what I’m talking about. If you don’t you’re a bigger fool than even I—”
City of the Dead Page 15