City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  »36«

  “Sarcoma... myeloid... bone-marrow tumor... me-tastases... widespread massive invasion... three, four months at best.”

  “Lie.”

  “No lie... true... sorry... sorry... sorry.”

  Words, echoes in a locked room. A shuttered house. Dust of old lost summers. Sand blown beneath a door. Shuttered windows. Furniture shrouded in sheets. Cold floors covered with strips of yellowing newspaper. Small black pellets of mouse droppings and the tracks of innumerable small wild things everywhere in evidence. The creatures of dune and moor who have huddled there for winter.

  “How can they be so sure?”

  “Biopsy. X rays. Three of the biggest radiologists in the country... No mistake.”

  “What did Brainford say?”

  “Hopeless.”

  “And Keefer.

  “He said ‘cut.’”

  “Then in God’s name why not?”

  Sun flooding through an upstairs window beyond which can be seen a flat gray disk of ocean, timeless and immense, spreading to the sky. So still it seems almost to have been painted there. And from just below the window sounds the quick, purposeful click of garden shears.

  “Because it would be futile. They have to take off a leg. Why put her through the torture?”

  “But if there’s a chance—any chance—one in a million. Why not?”

  “Because there is no chanced “Then why did Keefer say cut?”

  Because he didn’t know what else to say. Because he’s a surgeon and ‘cut’ is almost axiomatic with surgeons. They say it the way you and I say ‘eat’ and ‘sleep.’”

  And you’re willing to take the responsibility of saying ‘Don’t cut’?”

  “I saw the X rays myself, Lolly. I saw the biopsy reports. Completely invaded. Massive involvement. Why torture and mutilate? For a few additional months of agony? And that’s a fallacy too. Soon as you touch these damned things they spread like wildfire.”

  Click... Click... Click. The garden shears, like the tick of time, click inexorably in the garden below. And the tall, striking lady in the wide-brimmed floppy sun-bonnet moves placidly on all fours through a profusion of blood-red poppies, causing the great fiery heads to nod gently on their tall stalks as she passes by. The plucking of each, taken in the moment of their fullest glory, is like an augury of her doom.

  “What will it be like?”

  “At first, nothing much. Anemia. Neuralgic pain. Then swellings on ribs and skull. Then spontaneous fractures. Very painful.”

  “And she agreed?”

  “Agreed to what?”

  “To do nothing? Not even try?”

  “Lolly, your mother and I have decided...”

  “You decided? What the hell does it have to do with you?”

  ... to live these last few months together calmly.”

  “I repeat: What the hell does that decision have to do with you?”

  “Calmly, I said, Lolly. Without tirades and histrionics, which we can all do without. She says she would like to stay out here. I’ve already arranged for a leave of—”

  “So it’s all agreed. All decided. What gall. What arrogance.”

  “Lolly—please stop shouting. She can hear you down there.”

  “Just let her die—without even trying.”

  “That is your mother’s wish. I respect it. It’s very wise. If you’d seen as many of these sarcomas as I have—and the aftermath of surgery—”

  “That’s just your own personal prejudice. You hate surgeons. You hate all other doctors. Because you’re jealous. They have all the glory and prestige of saving lives’ while you do nothing but poke around with dead flesh in a hell-house, a ghoul show that’s little better than an abattoir.”

  “It’s true,” he says, aching, full of hurt because she could never respect his work. It hurt him that his job was a source of embarrassment to his daughter. It always had been. Once, when she was still a child, no more than eight or nine, he overheard her chatting with another little girl, describing her father as a “great healer.” She carried that embarrassment into adolescence and young maturity. It hurt him. Not so much that she had to lie about his work, but that he wasn’t a great healer in her eyes. His work had nothing whatever to do with healing. He was not the least bit interested in healing.

  “Yes, it’s true—I do distrust most doctors. I am suspicious of surgeons with a lot of fancy, self-serving initials after their names. Most are numbskulls who don’t know a tumor from a wart, and I will not permit your mother to be the guinea pig for some prima donna’s megalomania. But the men I took your mother to I trust. I took her to these men because I have the highest regard for their work.”

  “And one of them told you to operate. To cut.”

  “Because, as I said, there was nothing else he could tell me. I could look in his eyes and see that. But I don’t need Keefer to tell me what the prognosis is for your mother. With or without surgery. And if you want to talk about abattoirs, I’ll tell you a few things about the surgical ward. I’d be glad to take you to one and let you see for yourself. In the absence of any real hope, that’s an abattoir I will not subject your mother to.”

  “Goddamn you.”

  “Lolly, for God’s sake—”

  “You’ve written her off. Goddamn you. You killed her.”

  “Lolly.”

  “You killed her. You killed her. You killed her.”

  3:00 p.m. Konig’s Office.

  Voices reverberating. Receding through the shadows of the dying afternoon. Paul Konig’s wet, red eyes stare fixedly at the sun-flooded canvas propped on the arms of the chair opposite his desk. And even as the colors of it waver and fade, the foreground of the painting with the bright, smiling face of the doomed lady moving serenely through the poppies, a nimbus of light glowing all about her, still shimmers brightly before him. But up above, in the right-hand corner of the painting, where a breeze-blown curtain billows gently outward from an upper casement, there is still the large gray spot, the gray eminence... shapeless, oddly foreboding. It is, he knows, the single bitter note in a canvas otherwise flooded with love. And looking at it, ever more closely, he also knows quite well, quite beyond any reasonable doubt, that the spot, that dirty gray stain, like some obscene unspeakable filth, is without question himself.

  Somewhere far away a phone rings. Three... four... five times. Eyes still riveted on the smiling visage in the sun-drenched painting, Konig reaches for the phone on his desk.

  “Hello.”

  “Deputy Mayor for you, Doctor.” The warm, husky tones of Carver’s voice summon Konig back once more into the real world. He sighs and feels a throb of tension commencing at the back of his head.

  “Put him on,” he growls.

  So here it is at last. Sooner, actually, than he’d expected. He’d thought they’d at least spend a few days whispering amongst themselves behind closed doors. Planning a campaign of retribution and self-righteous face-saving. The Mayor and the forces of justice combining to ferret out mischief and incompetence within City agencies. What the editorial writers are wont to call “houseclean-ing.” Castigation and disgrace. But very gentle, of course. Civilized. Full pension. Early retirement for reasons of health. The mushy cudgel of justice in high places.

  “Hello, Paul.” Maury Benjamin’s voice is gruff with fatigue. “Long day?”

  “They get longer as you get older, Maury.”

  “Nasty up there today. Don’t like cemeteries. Opening that box. Watching Carslin go through that grisly charade—”

  Konig chuckles wearily. “Bet you could hardly get your lunch down at Caravelle.”

  “Don’t be funny, Paul. You’ve got yourself a peck of trouble here.”

  “How much is a peck?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. How much does the Mayor know?”

  “How should I know? He reads the papers. He’s got a mob of people on payroll around here with fancy salaries and nothing better to do all day
than whisper in his ear. This body-snatching thing infuriated him. And now the Robinson business. You know your friend Carslin has been down here all afternoon beating war drums about that. He tends to beat louder when he sees a reporter around. I don’t like your friend Carslin.”

  “Charley? I don’t see why.” Konig’s fingers pry loose the cap from the phial of amyl nitrite in his lower drawer. “Very talented boy.”

  “He’s a goddamned fink. Self-righteous, self-serving, stuffed-ass, son-of-a-bitch prig.”

  “All of that?” Konig chuckles and pops the small spansule into his mouth.

  “Like all the rest of them,” the Deputy Mayor fumes into the receiver. “Whoring after a bit of glory.”

  “Which you’ve never done. Right, Maury?” Konig taunts wickedly. “You’ve never been interested in ripping off a bit of glory here and there.”

  “I’ve never been so goddamned brazen about it, like these guys.”

  “Nothing wrong with a bit of glory,” Konig goes on, chuckling. “Good for the soul. And more important, the blood pressure. Glory has a salubrious effect on the blood pressure.”

  “Your blood pressure won’t be too salubrious, my friend, now that Carslin’s report has hit the DA’s desk.” The high, shrill, accusatory thing is back in Benjamin’s voice. “Don’t expect any favors here.”

  “I’m too old to expect favors, Maury.” Konig smiles wearily into the receiver. “When the DA is ready to see me, I’ll be there.”

  There is a pause in which the two men listen to each other breathing through the receiver.

  “Maury?”

  “Paul?”

  Their voices collide and halt but it is Benjamin who quickly takes up the slack. “Paul—don’t you want to tell me something?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t see why you should take the heat for some son of a bitch who did a sloppy job down there.”

  “My sloppiness too. I never questioned the report.”

  “You’ve got thousands of reports to process. How can you possibly question every one of them?”

  Konig can now sense in the Deputy Mayor’s beseeching voice, in his thread of reasoning, an old friend already building a line of retreat for him. A way out. “Forget it, Maury. Who conducted what autopsy around here is strictly the Chiefs business and the Chief’s business only. That was one of Bahnhoff’s cardinal principles and it’s a good one. The man who did the PM on the Robinson boy is one of my deputies. I know what he did and I’ll deal with him in my own way—privately, in this office. But don’t expect to ever learn his name.”

  There’s another pause in which Konig can hear the agitated breathing of the Deputy Mayor’s mounting fury.

  “Okay, my friend,” Benjamin finally snarls. “That’s fine with me. Remember, I told you that Calvary was coming. Well, get that old crown of thorns out. It’s just about here. And when it comes I’m sure you’ll love every minute of it. God—you are a fool.”

  Konig hunches wearily over the phone and nods his head. “You run your office, Maury. Let me run mine.”

  “Well, quite frankly, my friend,” Benjamin snarls, “I don’t think you’ll be running yours too much longer. If you think your press was bad the other day, wait’ll you see tomorrow morning’s. I tried to keep Carslin quiet but the minute he saw those reporters he swung right into his Lincoln Steffens number—that ol’ muckrackers’ shuffle. That’s all I have to say. PS—the DA wants you down here Friday.”

  “What for?”

  “What for?” Benjamin starts to giggle a little insanely. “What for? Listen to the man. Oh, I can’t believe it. What for? Why, to have a cup of tea. Talk about the funnies. Swap dirty jokes. What would you think for?”

  “What time does he want me there?” says Konig, wanting very much to get off the phone.

  “Ten a.m.,” Benjamin shouts. “Repeat, ten a.m.—Friday. You be there, goddamn it,” Benjamin howls through the speaker. “What in God’s name was wrong with you up there today? My God—you looked awful.”

  »37«

  “Twenty-nine out of the full complement of thirty-two teeth gone. Fifteen of those old extractions, fourteen recent.”

  “Postmortem?”

  “No doubt. See how the bones healed in the old extractions and the sockets closed completely? Now look at the recent.”

  “No clotting.”

  “Right. And the sockets are still open. Those were yanked to make identification by charts impossible.”

  3:20 P.M. DENTAL LAB, MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE.

  Dr. Barnett Rossman, forensic odontologist, squints up at a series of freshly developed X rays illuminated on a scanner. The room in which the two men stand is full of skulls, jawbones, grinning dentures mounted on stands, plaster casts of jaws and mandibles with teeth set in them. And all around them teeth—thousands of teeth—and gold crowns, and the air reeking with the thick, smarting fumes of the hypo in the developing tanks.

  “And something else,” Rossman goes on. “Those extractions were made with dental forceps, and by someone who knew how to use them.”

  “Oh?” Konig’s brow cocks upward. “Anything else?” He scribbles something onto a pad under a list of general data headed “ROLFE.”

  Rossman shrugs. “With only three teeth left in the jaws, there’s not a helluva lot to go on. And two of those three are just stumps—the upper left second premolar and the third molar. The other one—the lower right third molar—has a crown, but the tooth’s nearly completely destroyed by that large cavity you see there.”

  Together the two men ponder the ghostly gray-white illuminations on the screen.

  “But here’s something that might be of interest.” Ross-man jabs a pencil up toward one of the illuminated negatives. “Look at this area right here. See the gap? Upper left lateral incisor, canine, and first premolar?”

  “It’s continuous,” says Konig, catching instantly the seed of an idea.

  “Right. Would have been very obvious and very unsightly during life, unless—”

  “—he wore a denture,” Konig says, completing the thought.

  “A possibility. Probably a Nesbitt type. Lousy dentristry. Anyway, I took a few X rays of the upper left second premolar.”

  “And?”

  “Well, see for yourself.” Once more Rossman’s pencil jabs upward at something that looms on the screen like an immense Arctic ice floe seen through curling mists. “See how the convex surface of the stump is nearly level with the gum? There’s a complete root canal there. Has the appearance of having been recently ground with a dental drill.”

  Konig glances away from the screen. “Meaning that at one time the stump might have carried a supporting clasp for a denture.”

  “I’d say so.” Rossman beams. “I’d say very probably.” Konig scribbles hastily onto his pad. “Anything you can tell me about the age, Barney?”

  Rossman sighs, removes his bifocals and set them carefully on the desk, then proceeds to slowly rub his eyes. “Well, all the wisdom teeth were erupted. Two of them shed for some considerable time. So he had to be over twenty-five years of age. Afraid that’s all I can offer you there.”

  “Over twenty-five,” Konig murmurs aloud as he scribbles more notes. “Well, at least that gives me the lower range. I’ve got an upper range in my figures here of about forty to forty-five. Truth probably lies somewhere in between those limits, but I’d say more toward the upper.”

  “What’d you get from the skull?”

  Konig licks his thumb and flicks back several pages through the pad, his eyes skimming up and down the dirty, hectic scrawl there. Slowly, he starts to read &loud. “‘Cloture of sagittal, coronal, lambdoidal sutures nearly complete.’ That starts somewhere around age thirty. Then I found incipient cloture of the parietomastoid and squamous sutures on the inner surface. You don’t get that till somewhere between thirty-five and forty.”

  “What about the limb bones?” asks Rossman.

  Konig starts to mumble over his
pad again. “‘Epiphyseal ends of all limb bones completely united.’ That takes place between twenty-two and twenty-five years. Which jibes with your minimum figure of twenty-five.”

  “So you’re between twenty-five and forty-five, but leaning toward the upper limit?”

  “Only because of the skull sutures and the amount of calcification at the epipyhses. There was also a great deal of ossification in the thyroid and cricoid cartilages, and osteoarthritic changes in the right hipbone—sacroiliac joint. Lipping changes in the cervical vertebrae. You don’t see that sort of thing until middle age. Poor bastard must have had some God-awful backaches. Also the entire thymus had turned to adipose tissue.”

  “So the total picture sounds pretty much like”—Ross-man’s eyes narrow as he calculates aloud—“oh, I’d say—about age thirty-seven.”

  “Right.” Konig nods. “And that’s just where I’m placing poor Rolfe. Thirty-seven years—maybe forty. Now what d’ya have for me on Ferde?”

  Rossman moves quickly around his desk and back to the scanner. “Ferde’s mote interesting. Wait a sec while I stick up his pictures.”

  In the next moment both men are back at the scanner, staring up at a row of seven X-ray negatives depicting skull, jaw, mandible, and dentition from various angles. “Now Ferde,” Rossman begins, “was left with twenty-five teeth. All seven of the missing teeth are postmortem extractions.”

  “Postmortem.” Konig scribbles into his pad.

  “There’s extensive abrasion due to bruxism. He was a tooth-grinder. Probably high-strung. Nervous type.”

  “Fine.” Konig scribbles rapidly. “Keep going.”

  “I found innumerable carious lesions. Ferde was undoubtedly a big candy eater. And absolutely no fillings at “None?” Konig glances up questioningly.

  “None. Not a filling in his head.”