Rage

by Zygmunt Miloszewski

  Of course he’d start running again, as soon as the weather got better. He buttoned up his coat. It was nearing eleven, but there was an icy fog, and dark clouds hanging so low that only a fraction of sunlight was getting through. It looked as if dusk were falling.

  He went into the anatomy building, and suddenly had a strong and pleasant sense of being home—he felt a wave of nostalgia for the innocent years of his happy childhood, when his family lived in an apartment block in Warsaw’s Powiśle district. The feeling was so overpowering that he stopped in his tracks. He looked around, but there was nothing eye-catching in the impersonal hospital hallway, with its fluorescent lighting and anatomical cross sections on the walls. It must have been the smell! A unique combination of floor polish and the wonderful aroma of beef stock—which he associated with childhood because on Saturdays there was always polishing, and on Sundays, beef soup. The minor rituals of traditional families in the days of the Polish People’s Republic.

  He was pleased to have recognized the source of his nostalgia. And then he was immensely surprised, because a morgue—even one where there’d been streamers hanging off the surgical lights a few hours ago—was hardly the place for beef soup.

  He went into the dissection room. The skeleton was lying on the chrome table, with its skull tilted to one side, as if it were curiously watching what was going on in there. With his back to the skeleton, Professor Frankenstein was standing at a long table from which all the laboratory equipment had been removed and replaced with various containers. Frankenstein’s assistant stood beside a large pot set on a gas burner, stirring its steaming contents. Seeing the bubbling liquid, Szacki imagined that any moment now eyeballs would come floating to the top. He coughed.

  Frankenstein and his assistant turned around. Frankenstein looked the same as yesterday—like a mad scientist out of a German movie. The side-buttoning gown, the long face, the white-blond hair, and the gold-rimmed spectacles. Whereas his assistant looked as if she had just stepped off the set of a porno flick where they screw among laboratory equipment. She was gorgeous, with the natural beauty of the girl next door, black wavy hair and curves she couldn’t have even hidden under a potato sack. Beneath her buttoned gown she wore black stockings, and she had on high heels so slender you could have pierced your ears with them. He tried not to think about the possibility that she had nothing on under the gown but her panty hose, but he couldn’t resist it.

  “Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, Miss Alicja Jagiełło,” Professor Frankenstein said. “Once my most able student, now my assistant, working on her doctorate on how to determine the date of death. She’s just back from an internship at one of the legendary body farms in the States. The experiments we’re conducting here will be part of her doctoral work.”

  Szacki held out a hand to the woman, wondering if her ostentatious sex appeal had anything to do with her work with dead bodies. He knew a lot of pathologists, and they all had their eccentricities to save them from going crazy. The legendary head of the Department of Forensic Medicine in Gdańsk had opted for motherhood, for instance, and had a special room for feeding her babies right next door to the dissection room. Her husband, once a top prosecutor, did so much around the house that finally he’d penned some bestselling books about healthy meals for small children, and then dropped the legal profession.

  Miss Jagiełło looked at Szacki with huge eyes, the pale-blue color of the sky on a very hot day. Her expression showed perspicacity and sharp intelligence. She made a major impression in every respect.

  “Any news on my client’s case?” He pointed at the skeleton.

  “Plenty,” she said, going over to the set of bones. She had evidently taken the initiative.

  The old professor seemed pleased about it. He was watching Jagiełło with the affectionate gaze of a proud father.

  “First I examined all the bones, looking for evidence that might point us toward the cause of death. Of course, they’re just bones, but they could have been damaged by a bullet, a knife, or a blunt instrument. Any breaks or fractures would also give us some idea of what he experienced when he was alive.”

  She put on a pair of latex gloves, picked up the skull, and held it on her palm in a Hamlet-like pose.

  “I found close to nothing. Definitely not the cause of death. On the occipital bone”—she turned the skull around to show him the back of it—“there’s a star-shaped crack. We often see them on the frontal bone. It’s the result of hitting the head against a flat surface, a wall, or a floor, and in people who suffer a fall, it’s a standard injury. It’s far less common on the back of the head. But something about it didn’t seem right, so I looked at it under magnification. These cracks imply that it wasn’t the result of a single blow, but lots of blows.”

  “As if someone had banged something flat against his head?” asked Szacki. “A snow shovel?”

  “I thought about it, but it’s hard to imagine anything quite like that. The victim must have been immobilized, with his head in the same position throughout, and someone must have hit him not just with something flat, a wide board for instance, but with precisely measured-out, identical force every single time.”

  “Not very likely.”

  “Right. Will you do the stirring, please, Professor?”

  Frankenstein gave a dignified nod, and went up to the bubbling stainless steel vat.

  “I thought it was more likely to be convulsions—spasms caused by an injury, poisoning, or a neurological disorder. I’m afraid I also have another theory, but I’ll come to that in a second.”

  She leaned forward and carefully put the skull down. Szacki watched closely, trying to see the edge of a skirt or blouse, a button, a belt loop, or a bra strap poking from under her gown.

  She went up to the cadaver and gently took hold of the middle finger of the right hand.

  “There are strange injuries on some of the fingers and toes.”

  “Strange?”

  “Unprecedented, or at least I’ve never come across anything like them, not in practice, nor in the literature. For want of a better term, the bones look filed down. As if someone had taken a blunt, old wood file and brutally filed the fingertip. Surgical precision doesn’t come into play—the bone is broken and jagged. Please take a look.”

  She held the little finger under his nose. The thin bone really did end in splinters. Szacki felt a shudder at the thought of how anyone could have sustained such an injury.

  “Interestingly, on the left hand the middle phalanges look like this, too, not just the outer ones.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If we stay with the file comparison, whoever was filing the finger didn’t stop when part of it fell off, just went on filing.”

  “How could such injuries occur?”

  She cast him the look of a woman who, despite her age, has already seen too much.

  “I do have a theory on that subject, but I’ll come to it later. Let’s consider how a man who was walking around in the forest a week ago can possibly have ended up in a state where an experienced prosecutor took him for an old German skeleton.”

  She smiled at him to show that her sass was meant in a friendly way. Jagiełło went over to the long table. Apart from the vat of broth sitting on the gas burner, there were four other containers, two made of steel and two made of gray plastic. An open laptop with its screen turned off was lined up with the containers.

  “The scientific truth is forged in the fire of experiments,” said Frankenstein in a deep voice. “And lying behind them are not paper and pencil, but heated coals, the bellows, and the strength of a smith.”

  “And strength of mind, obviously,” added Jagiełło, who had her back to Szacki, so unfortunately he couldn’t see her expression.

  She raised the lid of the steel vat.

  “This is the object of our experiments,” she said.

  Szacki leaned forward, and inside he saw a lot of red meat and white bones. He cast her an inquiring look.


  “My pugs and I are regular customers at the butcher’s,” said Frankenstein. “He immediately did as I wished. Shin of veal with the knee joints, meat, and skin, so we could have all the tissues for observation.”

  Frankenstein, his pugs, and their favorite butcher. Szacki thought it sounded like the title of a modern novel, in which literary form has a major role to play, and the author reinvents the Polish language.

  “Do you know what body farms are?” asked Jagiełło.

  “They leave cadavers in an enclosed area and observe the progress of decomposition, depending on latitude, temperature, weather, and season. Invaluable for later determining the time of death at the incident site.”

  She nodded her approval.

  “‘Body farm’ is the colloquial term. Officially they’re called ‘anthropological research centers.’ I worked for six months in Tennessee, where the oldest farm is. Curiously, they never complain of a lack of corpses. Most of them are donated by the families for research purposes, but here in Poland it’s out of the question. Over there, plenty of people are willing to declare that they want their remains to be eaten by maggots under a bush for the good of science.”

  She tapped a finger on one of the pots; it was some sort of lab equipment, with a few cables and gauges sticking out of it. The lid was tightly shut with butterfly screws. The container was shaking slightly.

  “And we’re going to start with the maggots.”

  “Larvae,” Frankenstein corrected.

  “Larvae of Lucilia caesar, also known as the common greenbottle, a member of the blowfly family. You’re probably familiar with this rather repulsive, buzzing beastie with a green abdomen. It’s a very handy little cleaner, capable of consuming everything disfiguring the landscape at rapid speed—excrement, corpses, stinking organic remains. People should put up a monument to it instead of turning up their noses. It lays its eggs in the body, the larvae hatch out of the eggs, eat a big meal, and metamorphose into a chrysalis, from which the fly emerges. The larvae are what interest us most because they’re the ones that feast on dead tissue. They’re fabulous epicures.” Jagiełło spoke with such rapture that for a while Szacki thought it was irony, but her glee was totally serious. “They’ll eat anything that’s dead and decaying, but they won’t touch live, healthy tissue. That’s why they’re used to clean infected wounds.”

  “Are they capable of reducing a man to bare bones in a week?” he asked, afraid he’d be spending the rest of the day listening to a lecture on entomology.

  “Theoretically yes, but you’d have to go to some trouble. Each Lucilia lays about a hundred eggs, from which the voracious larvae emerge several hours later. And then ten days go by before the larvae change into flies. So if we don’t have much time, we’ve got to have a lot of insects to start with.”

  Szacki’s imagination translated this into the language of criminology.

  “So for example, a month earlier we toss a chunk of pig somewhere, wait until the flies come along, then lock up the whole company and wait until a generation or two has replaced them, adding more meat if need be,” he said. “It’s simple mathematics. Even assuming a mortality rate of 50 percent, you only need to start with ten flies to have five hundred in the next generation, and twenty-five thousand in the one after that.”

  “You’ve got it. If we throw a human corpse in there, it’ll be consumed by tens of thousands of larvae, and it’ll only take them a few days to deal with it. Yesterday,” she said, laying a hand on the steel vat, “two pounds of veal on the bone was placed in this container with ten flies.”

  She broke off, noticing the look on Szacki’s face. He was hoping her talents didn’t extend to telepathy, because at that moment he was imagining her and the professor out catching blowflies in a parking lot in the woods, crawling about on their hands and knees around a huge turd left behind by some trucker nourished on pork neck.

  “Let’s suppose that if anyone did go to that much trouble, they also made sure to have the proper climate. The higher the humidity and temperature, the greater the chance of the eggs surviving, and the more energetic the larvae. That’s why we’ve been maintaining favorable conditions in this pot. Please take a look at the result after just a few hours.” She unscrewed the butterflies on the lid and nodded to him.

  Szacki reluctantly approached the pot—he loathed maggots.

  She opened the lid, and a fat, shiny green fly crawled out from inside, looking dopey. It tried to fly away but fell onto the table next to the pot as if it were drunk, and then sluggishly wandered off. Just then a rolled-up newspaper came down on it with full force. Szacki jumped—he wasn’t expecting that.

  “We won’t be needing the queen mother anymore,” said Frankenstein coldly, lifting the newspaper. There was a wet stain on the table.

  Szacki leaned over the pot and held his breath, but he could still smell the terrible stench of rotten meat. His stomach churned. The inside of the pot was pulsating with life. Hundreds of grayish larvae were wiggling in a frenzy, as if fighting for access to the decay, making it look as if the white bones sticking out of the veal were shaking with convulsions. It was truly revolting.

  As Jagiełło reached deep into the pot, the medical gown rode up her arm without exposing any other piece of clothing. With a flash of curiosity in her eye, she put her hand into the swarm of larvae and pulled out the veal, then used her other hand to brush the fat maggots off the meat. One of them landed on Szacki’s jacket. He flicked it off.

  “So what do you think?” she asked.

  “If someone really did go to the trouble of breeding a swarm of flies in advance, which I doubt, then maybe so. For two pounds of veal, there’s not much left.” Indeed, there were just some scraps of meat hanging off the bone. “What do you think?”

  “I think this experiment is useful for my work, but it won’t help you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Lucilia larvae are very good at gnawing off the flesh, but they leave the connective tissue. Which means that if they were responsible for dealing with our victim, the bones would still be connected by joints and tendons. Instead of a heap of dry bones, we’d have a complete skeleton, an exhibit for a freak show.”

  “By the way, we should do something like that next time we get a young corpse,” said Frankenstein. “In an old one, the joints are already distorted; they’re no good for anything. Some use they are to science!”

  The assistant smiled radiantly at her mentor. What a delicious thought! said the look in her eyes.

  Szacki didn’t comment. The fact that the state entrusted the education of its youth to lunatics was disturbing, of course, but the penal code didn’t provide any sanctions for it.

  “Unfortunately the Australian experiment failed for the same reason,” she said. She tossed the meat back into the pot, her gloves into the trash, and went up to the computer. “I asked a colleague in Sydney to drop a piece of veal into a nest of fire ants, in other words Solenopsis invicta. Quite a nasty, omnivorous insect. And not at all hard to obtain. I admit they disposed of their dinner much faster and more thoroughly than the larvae. Snip snap, it didn’t even have time to stink. They ate the skin, too, and licked the bone clean.” She pressed a key, and on the screen in a small window he could see a slightly pixelated image from an Internet camera, showing small red ants fussing around a piece of bone. “It’d be great, if not for the fact that once again the cartilage proved indigestible for our little guys.”

  She closed the computer, went up to the pot of broth, and stirred.

  “Hypothesis number three: mos teutonicus.”

  Szacki gave her a quizzical look.

  “I thought lawyers knew Latin.”

  “They do.” Szacki straightened up—he wanted to be the one making an impression too. “Mos teutonicus is the Latin for ‘Teutonic custom.’ But I don’t understand what it has to do with the decomposition of a corpse.”

  “In this particular instance I would translate the word mos as ‘ritua
l.’ The Teutonic knights devised it during the Crusades, so they wouldn’t have to bury their noblemen in the land of the infidel. When their commander died, they chopped him to pieces and boiled him until the flesh came away from the bones. Then they took the bones home to the North, where they held the burial.”

  “The chronicles don’t say what happened to the flesh,” said Frankenstein. “But perhaps they had a plentiful supper at the camp that day. It’s worth remembering that the king of France himself Saint Louis IX was boiled after his death in Tunis, and what’s more they boiled him in wine. You can still see some of his stewed bones in reliquaries, I can’t remember where . . .”

  “Unfortunately it’s another blind alley,” said Jagiełło, removing a white veal shin from the pot with a pair of tongs; there were some remains of boiled gray meat clinging to it. “For many reasons. Above all, the corpse wasn’t cut up—it would have to be done by a skilled surgeon for no marks to be left on the bones. And it’s hard to imagine a cauldron big enough to hold an entire adult male corpse, and then boil it for days on end.”

  “That long?”

  “To dissolve the cartilage. Even so, I doubt it would be possible to dissolve it entirely. Maybe if the cauldron were hermetically sealed and if pressure increased the temperature.”

  “Too many ifs.”

  “Exactly. Apart from that, there would always be something left that would either have to be burned off or scraped away. Either way there would be traces. The remains of the brain would have to be scraped out of the skull. Sadly, we have to drop this elegant solution.”

  She gently put the bone back into the bubbling broth. Szacki thought the old professor should come out with the vegetables now.

  “But do you have any other hypotheses?” he asked.

  “Unfortunately, there is one theory.”