Gazing at both heads now, Konig is struck again by the somewhat curious fact that the mutilation inflicted on the first head is so dramatically greater than that inflicted on the second. The owner of that first head, he reasons, must have been the real object of contention here. The rage and hate visited upon that head are simply, even to him, horrifying.
The time now is nearly 8 p.m., though Konig is not aware of that. Indeed, since the awful moment when he drove everyone from the autopsy room, locked the doors, and hurled himself into the task of reassembling the arms, he has been unaware of the passage of time.
The task before him now is purely anatomical. He must assign each of these heads to one or the other torso.
The first part is easy and is solved by simple observation. Attached to head Number 1 are four complete cervical vertebrae, with fragments of the fifth still clinging. Attached to head Number 2 are five cervical vertebrae.
The reconstructed trunk has two cervical vertebrae attached to its upper end; the partially reconstructed upper trunk has three. Since the normal number of cervical vertebrae is seven, it’s obvious to Konig that head Number 1 with its four vertebrae belongs to the partially reconstructed trunk with the three vertebrae and that head Number 2 with its five cervical vertebrae belongs to the reconstructed trunk with the two cervical vertebrae.
As with the reconstruction of the trunk, Konig’s next job is to bring the two parts together by articulating the lower vertebrae attached to the heads with the uppermost of the vertebrae attached to the trunks. This is delicate work and requires considerable time since he must match badly shattered fragments of these vertebrae, upper to lower, in order to verify that they come from the same source.
This he does with the wholly reconstructed trunk and discovers that these two cervical vertebrae appear to fit together very well in all details. He repeats the operation with head Number 1, matching it to the partially reconstructed upper trunk, and with the same success.
But Konig cannot be content with this kind of facile observation. He must now verify these articulations with X rays, and in order to do this, he spends the next few hours dissecting out the cervical vertebrae from both heads, as well as both trunks, cleaning them by maceration in order to display the margin of the bones. After that, he is ready to connect both sets in complete anatomical series.
The work is laborious and painstaking. He must sit hunched over for a period of several hours under bright lights and wield his knives. But this is not labor for Konig. Time goes swiftly for him. It flies. The anxiety and tension of his day simply fall from him like old sour clothing, and as he works far into the night, he feels not the slightest fatigue, only a kind of strange, heady exhilaration.
Somewhere along about 2 a.m., he’s back upstairs in the radiographic room with two completely reconstructed cervical sections, taking X rays of each.
In a matter of minutes, he has taken photographs of both cervical series, front and back views, and while waiting for them to develop, has a cup of stale coffee in his office, smokes one of his dark, noisome cigars, and scribbles more figures into his requisition budget for the Comptroller.
A short time later he is back upstairs padding through the shadowy halls of the large empty building, back to the radiographic room for the developed X-ray pictures of both sections.
Scanning the gray-white ghostly pictures on the illuminated screen, there is a sense of victory. They confirm what he has known all along. Both sets of vertebrae fitted together give the general appearance of anatomical harmony, a harmony that becomes more and more pronounced to his trained eye.
“Marvelous,” he whispers to himself almost reverentially, studying the clear, beautiful articulations between these long links of vertebrae and discs. “Goddamn marvelous—what a goddamn marvelous miracle of engineering.”
With a small shock of amazement, he realizes that it’s nearly 3 a.m. Hastily he starts to scribble notes onto his pad preparatory to writing his longer, more elaborate protocol.
“... Radiograph 3 shows seven cervical vertebrae present—five in upper part removed from head Number 2—”
“Why can’t you be like other men? Come home at night for supper. She’s been asking for you all day—hasn’t seen you once this week—”
“—and two attached to the trunk—so that the bones of the upper vertebrae match the bones of the lower in anatomical detail, including bone texture, making them appear to be in perfect—”
“I’m not like other men .”
“—and proper sequence—that portions of intervertebral disc between 5th and 6th vertebrae exhibit cut anc torn surfaces with reciprocal features, making it highly probable that the portions adhering to the two vertebrae—”
“You know what she said today? She said ‘Daddy is dead.’ I overheard her telling her friends. She said you’d died and left us all alone .”
“—were part of the same intervertebral disc.”
“Go upstairs now and say good night to her.”
“Good night? For Christ sake, Ida, it’s two A.M.”
“I don’t care what time it is. She’s up. She’s waiting. Now you go up there and let her see you. For God’s sake go up there.”
“The plane of severance between head Number 2 and reconstructed trunk passes not quite cleanly through the junction of the larynx and trachea—”
“Paul—I want you to take that job in Rochester.”
“—between the cricoid cartilage of the larynx and the first cartilaginous ring of the trachea—”
“And sit on my ass for thirty years in some university teaching a lot of—”
“—both showing signs of damage, so that not only did cut surfaces fit each other exactly, but on each there was found an attached—”
“—lumpheads—nothing between their ears but suet?””
“Paul—we can’t go on this way—”
“—shaving of cartilage and a cut cartilaginous surface which fit in perfect reciprocal harmony—”
“What way? What’s wrong with this way?”
“Don’t you see it? Can’t you see for yourself? Nothing in common but an address, and a little child—”
“—and therefore provide conclusive corroboration of the opinion based on purely anatomical evidence—”
“Hello, Lolly. Good morning, honey. It’s Daddy. How are you, sweetheart?” that head Number 2 belongs to the same body as the wholly reconstructed trunk and head Number 1 belongs to the same body as the partially reconstructed upper trunk.”
“—and therefore by mutual consent, this Court concurs—for a period of trial separation, not to exceed one year—at which time such matters as disposition of property—parental custody—to be remanded to—”
Konig gazes up into the cavernous quiet of the radiography room, a gray-white picture of a complete vertebral series flickering ghostly patterns on the wall, ghost voices of his imagination ricocheting off the walls, receding now like a dying echo through the room. He rises stiffly, flicks off the scanning screen, and gathering up his developed X-ray plates, he starts back down for the mortuary.
Standing once again before the two reassembled bodies, he is now absolutely certain that he is dealing with only two bodies. What remains for him to determine is the approximate time and manner in which these two hapless creatures met their untimely ends. Already, for purposes of identification, he knows a great deal about the relative stature of both. Based upon even perfunctory examination of the skulls, he can say with fair certainty a number of things about the sex and age of each.
Holding head Number 1 up to the light, rotating it at a variety of angles, he sees a male skull, wonderfully harmonious, with steep forehead, narrow face, delicate lower jaw, and elegant but markedly prominent chin. The rounded eye sockets with thin margins are very large, the cranial sutures not yet occluded, and the third molar not yet erupted.
All that speaks of a very young man, Caucasian, no more than eighteen or nineteen, with fine, rather effeminate fe
atures. Konig has been right all along. The lacquered nails had not really fooled him. The mandible, too,-of this skull, while small, is somewhat heavier than a female mandible, and the dentition that still remains in the mouth is definitely masculine; the teeth in absolute volume and shape, with the first incisor and canine of about the same height, and the canine of the lower jaw markedly higher, all speak unequivocally of the male of the species.
The state of cloture in the sutures of head Number 2 seems already quite well advanced. From the state of the parietomastoid and the squamous sutures, Konig can read an age of between thirty and thirty-five, leaning more toward the former than the latter figure.
This skull, too, is male—ovoid, cheekbones well defined, forehead high, fairly broad, with heavily developed relief. The eye orbits are large, angular, with strongly sloping margins. From the nasal aperture, Konig can visualize a sharply projecting nose, possibly curved, the bridge of the nose high, the root narrow.
The arch of the lower jaw is narrow and prognathous, that of the upper, massive, suggesting a sharp, projecting chin accentuated by an astonishing degree of alveolar prognathism.
Using the well-known techniques of the Russian anthropologist Gerasimov, Konig can visualize a heavy, coarse, rather brutal face, slightly Slavic in cast.
What in God’s name ever brought these two men together? Konig now speculates. What fatal union brought them to those muddy crypts beside the river—the one with the fragile, patrician lineaments of an Egyptian princess, the other with the coarsely brutal aspect of a Tartar horseman.
It is then that his eye is inexplicably drawn to the spattered, crumpled newssheets in which the heads were wrapped. Limping across the room, he removes them from the carrying case and spreads them out on the table. For several moments he sits there in a chair reading them, his head tilted to the side, a little myopically, like an old man reading in a dim light When he looks up again after a while, slats of gray dawn are painted like bars against the mortuary windows. A small noise sounds behind him. He turns, and there, stooping in the doorway in a rumpled raincoat, neck stretched, oddly craning, like a large, dirty heron, regarding him silently, is Francis Haggard Konig watches the detective’s gaze wander to the tables where lie the two reconstructed corpses.
“Good morning,” Konig growls. “Say hello to Ferde and Rolfe.”
»29«
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17. 5:00 A.M. MORTUARY.
“Been here all night?” Haggard asks.
“Guess I have,” Konig replies, a little astonished. He’s had no sense of the fleeting of fifteen hours. “What time is it?”
“Five a.m.,” says the detective. “It’s five a.m.” Once again his gaze drifts past the Chief to the reconstructed corpses, the gobbets of flesh and bone still in trays all about him. “Why do you do it?” he asks, staring at the bleared, red-rimmed eyes, then at the ashtrays full of burned-out cigars, the beaker full of cold, rancid coffee gulped through the long reaches of the night. “Twelve, fifteen hours a day in this rotting, stinking place. You don’t need the money.” Haggard’s face is full of loathing. “Why the hell do you do it?”
But Konig is no longer looking at the detective. Instead he’s staring down at Ferde and Rolfe, the two creatures he gave birth to during the night. Already, almost in the moment of having named them, they’ve become old friends. He feels a curious camaraderie with them. They’ve exchanged intimacies. Konig knows their little secret. He has the gist of their story. He holds a picture of their faces in his head, and like the inveterate physician that he is, he even knows something of their daily aches and pains. Ferde’s foot problem—bunions probably. And Rolfe’s osteosacral miseries. What backaches that fellow must have had.
“Why do I do it?” Konig murmurs aloud, more to himself than in response to the detective. “I do it for them,” he says, gazing down at his new friends. “For them I do it. Because I hate the goddamn creeps. The zip-gun freaks and the boys in the back alleys with the razors and machetes. If it’d been your wife and kid on those tables”—he flings a thumb backward at Ferde and Rolfe—“wouldn’t you want to know that someone was going to get the creepy bastard that put them there? And believe me, I’m going to get the bastard. Why do I do it?” Konig laughs scornfully, working himself up to a tirade. “I do it because no one else will do it. No one else cares. All these here, working with me now—you think they’ll do it? They won’t. They play at doing it. But they don’t really do it. They’re all trimmers and fakes. Come here three, four years, put in their time with me, then go scurrying off to some cushy job in the suburbs—a hospital or a university seat. I do it because it has to be done, and no one else will do it. I do what all your fancy-pants Park Avenue sons of bitches with their fancy office hours won’t do. I do the shit work. I clean up after the goddamn party.”
Konig is red in the face, while the detective stands there impassively, taking the lash of his tongue. “Does that sound arrogant?” Konig rants on. “Very well, it’s arrogant. I am arrogant. That’s me. And if they don’t like it—”
“If who doesn’t like it?”
“All of them. The Mayor. The Police Commissioner. The New York Times. You. The whole goddamned kit and caboodle of you. If you don’t like it, you all know where you can goddamned well shove it. I do this work because I love it. I do it the best way I know how, and I’m going to continue doing it till they carry me out of here kicking and screaming—Where the hell have you been, goddamnit?” Konig snarls, but something like a sob, full of outrage and hurt, issues from his throat. “I’ve been looking for you high and low. I can’t find you. I can’t find anyone. All I hear is excuses. Where the hell is everyone when you need them?”
Haggard stares at him quietly. For the first time in the more than twenty-five years he has known the man, Konig appears close to tears. Racked with exhaustion and worry, his body trembles. His voice, full of anger and recrimination, is modified by a deep sense of helplessness—something he is personally unfamiliar with. The effect results in something like whining. “They’ve got her. They’ve got my kid. Some kind of freaks have got her. They’re hurting her. And they’re going to kill her. Where the hell have you been?”
The detective is seething from the lash of that voice. He too has not yet been to bed. He’s been out all night crisscrossing the boroughs, chasing down false leads, running up blind alleys. The two of them gasping at each other now in the clammy gray of early morning, disheveled, sleepless, burned-out, have the look of two old derelicts, both off on an all-night rip, whose paths suddenly cross.
Finally Haggard stirs from some private musing. “I’ve been out looking for Wally Meacham.”
Konig gapes uncomprehendingly. “Wally who?”
“Wallace Meacham. Alias Walter Eames. Alias Wendell Barker. Alias Warren Eggleston. Three years Dannemora, armed robbery. Eighteen months Leavenworth, aggravated assault with intent to kill. Busted out of Danbury about a year ago. He was doing six-to-twelve for blowing up a bank. The Bureau knows him as 86438 912. Their file describes him as ‘Educated. Logical. Shrewd. With a tendency to brag, and possibly vicious.’ He’s a dilly. One of the beautiful people. Going to make the world a better place for us all to live in.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Konig booms. “They’ve got my kid. They’re gonna kill her and you talk riddles. What the hell has—”
“Paul,” snaps the detective, his voice so full of authority that it brings Konig up sharply. He peers, suddenly mute and petrified, into the detective’s face.
“Come upstairs, Paul. I’ve got some things to tell you, and you’re not going to like them.”
»30«
“You might have told me before.”
“I didn’t know before.”
“But you suspected.”
“I did suspect. That’s true.”
“And yet you didn’t tell me. Not a word.”
“About my suspicions? Why? What the hell for?”
“You could’ve at leas
t let me know.”
“Know what?”
“For God’s sake, man, just to let a person know that things are going on.”
“Things were always going on—I couldn’t tell you more than that until I knew for sure.”
“And you know for sure now?”
“Now I know for sure.”
5:30 A.M. KONIG’S OFFICE.
Konig and Haggard sit opposite each other across a narrow space of cluttered desk over which they shout back and forth. Their conversation is like an angry tennis match in which two old rivals bang, chop, and slash at each other remorselessly. It has a Vengeful quality about it and the room is hot, like a gymnasium, just as if men had been exercising strenuously there.
“What the hell are you doing for me now?” Konig bawls, red in the face.
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
“Right now I’m sitting here wasting my time talking to you.”
Konig’s eyes bulge; the red in his face deepens. “Don’t smart-ass me. I warn you. I asked you a question. I want an answer. Now what are you doing for me?”
“For you?” Haggard’s expression is a smirk of bitter delight. “For you?”
Konig, catching the significance of that smirk, falters, suddenly aware that he has overstepped the bounds of propriety.
“For her, then,” he snarls, suddenly all self-righteousness. “You know what the hell I meant.”
For a moment they sit there not speaking, regarding each other warily, getting their second breaths, while the big Regulator wall clock ticks and black, vaporous coffee gurgles in the beaker over the Bunsen burner behind them.
City of the Dead Page 18
