By 3:20 still no one has shown, and he has almost concluded that no one will. With a sense of sick, almost nauseous, grief, he is about to start up his car and drive away forever from that gray, cold, forsaken place. But just at that moment, almost spitefully, as if it had been watching all the while with a kind of vicious glee, a car rolls placidly around the corner, its headlights bearing down upon him, and moves like a white, phantomy object toward him out of the mist.
At a certain point, perhaps ten yards off, the car executes a graceful, unhurried U-turn, then backs around into the spot directly before him. Its motor and lights go off at once.
Scarcely breathing, Konig sits, frozen rigid, and waits. There is enough light from the bridge for him to see that the rear license plate of the car ahead has been covered over with a piece of burlap. He sits waiting there, watching the car, wondering if someone will get out, if he is to be given new instructions, if he should approach their car. Nothing seems to be happening—and still he waits.
Suddenly the lights of the white convertible switch on. He hears the engine turning over up ahead. Then the red blinker signals him right, and slowly, at last, they move out into the night.
It is a curious ride, aimless, meandering. Intentionally so. They turn here and there at random, stop and start for no discernible reason, all of it conducted at a speed of no more than twenty miles an hour. Clearly they are watching, and very closely, to see if any car attempts to follow Konig.
At that hour and in those narrow, huddled streets it would be impossible for anyone to follow without its becoming quickly apparent to the people in the car ahead. There is simply no one else out and driving at that hour. The cold, drizzly rain has even eliminated the occasional cruising cab.
From the bridge they move down Flatbush Avenue and out through Prospect Park. Somewhere in the middle of the park, on a road lined with woods, the white convertible stops. Konig rolls slowly up behind it and he too stops. Sitting there with his window open, listening to the rain dripping in the trees and his heart thumping in his chest, he waits.
In the next moment the white convertible moves out again, this time driving out of the park and onto Ocean Parkway. The stopping and starting business goes on exasperatingly—once at Ditmas Avenue and several times on Kings Highway.
At least a half-dozen times the white convertible swerves sharply, inexplicably, into residential blocks, winding slowly down them between large apartment buildings where people sleep unknowing and uncaring. Thus, traveling a bewildering route, the car ahead winds, turns, spins around on itself, while Konig is obliged to follow.
Several times during those interminable pauses, while the car up ahead merely sits there, its taillights glowing, malevolent and taunting, Konig is certain that this is the place. Now is the time. Any moment now they’ll signal him to pull alongside and pass the money. But no. Instead they start up again, driving back onto Ocean Parkway, moving toward Shore Parkway, the awful winding, zigzagging, spinning about, resuming itself. Are they moving toward the water? They don’t get on the Shore Parkway. Instead they go under the parkway, past Emmons Avenue, and out toward Coney Island.
It’s approaching 4 a.m. now and still they’ve made no signal to him, no gesture. It is still this exasperating stop-and-start business, then sit and wait in the red taillight glow a few feet behind.
It’s too early in the season for the amusement park to have opened, and they ride now parallel to the boardwalk in the shadow of those huge, unearthly, unattended structures—the Roller Coaster, the Whip, the Cyclone, the Parachute Jump, past the weirdly baroque architecture of the Steeplechase. All seem to be waiting there for some cosmic ringmaster to throw the switch. And then the lights going up, the music starting, and once again all the wild tumult of motion—swaying, dipping, lurching, whirling, rattling, roaring through the gaudy night.
The white convertible turns slowly into one of the fairground’s parking lots. It is deserted, and all around it are the boarded-up windows of concessionaires—frankfurter and pizza stands, custard and corn-on-the-cob joints. The convertible rolls to a stop now, motor off, lights out, and waits. They’re right at the water’s edge. The mist is thicker here. Foghorns boom dolefully far out to sea. The air is redolent of salt and rotting seaweed. Sitting by the open window, the chill night air on his face, Konig can hear the tolling of a buoy not far off shore.
In the dim light of his dashboard, he checks his clock—4:15 a.m. He pats the Gladstone bag beside him and waits.
Shortly he hears the motor of the convertible start up again, and with a sinking heart, he prepares to roll out once more. But this time something is different—a white-gloved hand protruding from the front right-hand window is waving him forward.
Eager to comply, Konig jerks and lurches his car forward, the white hand signaling him to stop directly parallel to it. He does so, shuddering to a halt directly opposite an open window.
It is pitch-dark in the parking lot, and in that mist-thick darkness he cannot see the occupants of the car, or even tell how many there are. He knows there are several, but all there is between him and them is that disembodied white-gloved hand thrust out toward him, waiting patiently and immobile.
Clumsily but without hesitation, he tugs the Gladstone bag across the seat, hoists it through the window and passes it anxiously to that waiting white hand. In all of that transaction not a word passes.
In the next moment the bag and the hand withdraw into the pitchy darkness of the convertible, the car’s motor guns, and it roars off into the night, its headlights still extinguished. Far up ahead, Konig can hear its tires squeal around a corner, then nothing more.
He is all alone now in the parking lot, by himself there at the water’s edge, the mist licking his windshield and the foghorns booming and the harbor buoys tolling like poor lost, stricken creatures far out to sea.
Somewhere near 5 a.m. Konig is driving back to Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge. The sky is still dark and a pale moon hangs low in the west, just above the jagged skyline of the sleeping city.
The car slides easily now between the tall, mist-hung towers, the tires singing on the slick cobbles. Spent, but curiously exhilarated, Konig drives. He has no way of knowing that only five minutes before, Frank Haggard had passed over that same bridge at a high speed, a crumpled sheet of paper with the scribbled address he’d finally extracted from Klejewski in his pocket, and two patrol cars from the 23rd Precinct winging along behind him.
Going home now to Riverdale is unthinkable. And, as Meacham said, Lolly would not be released until twenty-four hours after the payoff, presumably giving him plenty of time to get far out of the state. The only place Konig could go now, even at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning, is his office. After all, it is the only refuge, the only solace, he’s known for nearly forty years.
Ten minutes or so up the FDR Drive, exiting at 23rd Street, driving up First Avenue to 30th Street, and he’s there. Parking his car in the private lot in the back, he walks around the building and through the front gate, past the startled, drowsy night man still on duty there.
Shortly he’s at his desk, coffee boiling in a beaker over the Bunsen burner, and a cigar already smoking in the littered ashtray on his desk. He busies himself there, making a concentrated effort to think neither of the night he’s just spent nor of the past five months. Only the future and Lolly and getting “to know each other again.” Isn’t that what the Mayor said? Well, he would make up now for lost time. He would make up for a lot of things.
Whistling softly to himself, he goes about watering his plants, which have been sadly ignored—the poor drooping Dracaenas and the philodendrons, the spider plants and various succulents, looking ragged and parched. Only the glorious wandering Jew flourishes there in the window.
Then, with a sense of relief, he is once again settled at his desk, the good familiar feel of wood and old, cracked leather, the not unpleasant smell of cigar smoke and formalin wafting all about him.
There, on top i
f everything, lies a large, brown manila envelope with a Fort Bragg imprint. In it he finds the complete medical and dental records of Browder and Ussery. Included with the records and clipped to each are two standard military ID photographs. He leans back in his chair now and studies them.
Browder is precisely as Konig imagined him from his skull conformation—a tough, craggy face with a rather brutal Slavic cast to it. The closely cropped hair, worn GI fashion, and the heavy, prognathic jaw that he’d seen in the skull all tend to heighten the rather brutal mien. But the eyes are not brutal at all; indeed, there’s something even shy and rather vulnerable in them.
Ussery, on the other hand, comes as a complete surprise to him. Even something of a shock. Recalling the hand with the luridly lacquered nails, Konig had naturally expected something fey and effeminate. But what he sees before him now takes his breath away. It is a strikingly beautiful face—small, delicate bones, large, oddly haunted eyes—a kind of male Nefertiti. A rare orchid, exquisite, ephemeral, will-o’-the-wispish. There is, too, something about it unspeakably sad. Perhaps it is the sense of doom that it conveys.
Included is a letter from Colonel McCormick saying that the Army had notified the next of kin. Browder had a wife from whom he was separated. She had already instructed them that the remains were to be sent to her for burial. Ussery’s people, however, were Southern Baptist farmers—pious, hardworking, churchgoing. They were mortified at the scandal and wanted no part of the boy’s remains.
Putting the records aside, Konig is now ready to turn to the stack of unopened mail before him. Letters from clinics, foundations, universities, and hospitals; correspondence from colleagues, old classmates practicing all over the world. Each seeking some favor, petitioning advice, questioning him on aspects of cardiovascular diseases, central nervous system injuries, narcotic deaths, sudden unexplained natural death.
A Chief of Police in Philadelphia wanted ballistics advice in the murder of an old grocer there. A coroner in Cincinnati queried him on a complex toxicological problem. A district attorney in Coos County, New Hampshire, petitioned his services as an expert witness in a crime of passion. A physician in Rangoon, Burma, sought his guidance in establishing a department of forensic medicine at the university there.
Then came the letters of a more personal nature—a grieving mother, a bereft father. These letters, though the details differ widely, are always the same. The same strain of grief and puzzlement runs through them. Written by good, often simple, people who’d been hurt and wanted to know why. Often he couldn’t tell them. The mystery was as deep to him as it was to them. But when he had answers, or solace, he gave them. A woman in Topeka had just lost her infant child as a result of crib death She had read somewhere that he was doing research in the subject and wanted to know why this had happened to her child and if somehow she was responsible. A father in Wilmington thanked him for concluding that the death of his daughter was due to natural causes and not suicide. He and his wife were Catholics, he explained, and the question of suicide was unbearable to them.
“Dear Paul,” wrote an old classmate practicing in Spokane, “Here’s a lulu for you—”
Konig laughs out loud, recalling suddenly a bright, boyish face belonging to a young man who used to sit behind him in Bahnhoff’s pathology lectures.
When he looks up again it is half-past six and the first gray, sooty fingers of dawn streak the sky outside his office windows. He is just about to resume his reading when the phone rings. He sits watching it impassively, as if he’d never seen such a thing before. It rings again, and in the large, empty building, at that hour, it has a ghostly and foreboding sound.
First he’s annoyed, then apprehensive. Who could be calling him there at such an hour? Who would even know he was there? Someone who’d tried to reach him in Riverdale and found him not at home.
The phone rings again, shrill, insistent, echoing through the empty corridors of the building. Reaching for it, he pulls his hand back. It rings once more. Suddenly he’s aware of sweat on his forehead. His body feels clammy beneath his clothing.
Finally he picks up the receiver, but he doesn’t bring it immediately to his ear. Instead he holds it at arm’s length, only a few inches off the cradle, hearing then a man’s voice, very far off, repeating the word “Hello” over and over again.
“Hello,” Konig murmurs hesitantly into the phone.
“Hello.”
A pause follows, portentous and clumsy, in which both parties sit there listening to each other breath.
“Paul, it’s me.”
“Where are you?” Konig snaps, his heart starting to sink.
“Sheepshead Bay,” Haggard says gruffly. “I got Meacham—” Another interminable pause. “But I’m afraid—”
Konig doesn’t actually hear the rest of it but he knows what the detective is saying.
For a long time, it seems, neither man speaks. Konig merely sits there looking at the pile of opened letters on his desk, feeling nothing. It’s as if someone had just spoken to him in some old, lost tongue. It is information he cannot begin to comprehend. Then finally, clearing his throat, he speaks. “When?”
“Just before we got there. They waited for your bag of cash to arrive. Then they did it. Had no intention of ever freeing her. They were getting ready to dump her in the bay when we busted in.”
Nodding his head ever so slightly, Konig hunches over his desk while Haggard waits wordless at the other end for him to react. But there’s no reaction. No shrieks. No groans. Not even a choice obscenity hurled at the gods. “Bring her in” is all he can say. “Bring her in now.”
»65«
At 6:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning the city has a soiled, spent look. The revelry and carnage of the night are over and soon the ragpickers and sweepers will come to clean up the mess. The big, buglike sanitation trucks will double-park in the side streets, grinding up the debris of today to make room for that of tomorrow.
Standing at a window now, Konig gazes over to the west. The sky is glowing neon pink and crimson above the Times Square area where some of the night lights have not yet gone out. It has the look of a city in flames.
Down below on the street the stray cats are picking among the overflowing trash cans. A few dirty pigeons wamble in the gutter and an old tart in a rumpled dress weaves precariously down 30th Street. Her hair is hennaed; she has a Kewpie-doll face heavily made up like a mask, a hideous maquillage. At a certain point she bumps into one of the trash cans, nearly knocking it over, but only dislodging the lid, sending it clattering to the pavement with a loud crash.
A few early risers are already out there too, walking the dogs, picking up the milk and The New York Times. Soon all the bells of the churches will be pealing. The great cathedral bells—St. Patrick’s, St. Bartholomew’s, St Clement’s, St. Mark’s—all the church bells of the great Empire City calling the faithful to worship. Great gorgeous bells tolling diapasons, their huge bronze throats sending great lead circles of sound skyward.
From somewhere far to the south Konig can hear the sound of a distant siren screaming northward up the FDR Drive. He gazes toward the river now. The water has a choppy, sullen look. A tugboat and a sand barge are out there plying upriver.
It had never occurred to him before how close the morgue was to the river. And then quite suddenly it dawns on him that its placement there was not merely fortuitous, that most of the morgues of the great cities of the world had been built either on the banks of or in close proximity to mighty rivers. Similarly, all the great necropolises of antiquity. All had been built on or near water. Some ancient superstition, no doubt, he thought, trying to recall some passage in Herodotus about that Something about facilitating the voyage of the soul back into the great ocean of time. Suddenly, as if in a flash, he has a vision of all the great rivers of the world-flowing at that moment into the East River: the mighty Nile and the Tiber, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Danube and the Ganges, the Rhine and the Volga, and the Father of Waters, t
he Mississippi, all flowing past his window, bearing their cargoes of dead souls out to sea. Then suddenly, in another flash, he sees all the great necropolises of the world rising below him on the banks of the river—Memphis, Thebes, Carthage, Tyre, Persepolis. There, King Djoser’s mighty tomb, Saqqara, with its huge pentagons of marble columns. And there, the great mortuary temples all along the Nile—Luxor, Karnak, Birket Habu. He sees the Roman catacombs—St Calixtus and St Sebastian—those intestinal tunnels winding along beneath the Via Appia, and then, the funerary pyres, the burning ghats, beside the muddy Ganges. And there, the great efficient incinerators of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Then, that even greater marvel of technological efficiency—Hiroshima, and its thousands incinerated in a flash. All those burial grounds, he sees. All those graves suddenly open and yawning. All those souls suddenly flowing past him on the river below his window.
Then, in another blink of an eye, the vision has boiled past, sinking slowly beneath the brown, sullen waters of the East River, leaving in its place only a view of the Queens skyline sprawling gray and squalid beyond it.
The sound of wailing sirens has grown louder and closer. Dozens of them appear to be converging on the spot where Konig stands, looking down into the street. Shortly several patrol cars turn into 30th Street, followed by a large black police van, swaying and tilting as it rounds the corner. Then come several more patrol cars and another van, causing a small crowd to collect outside the courtyard at the rear entrance.
Half a dozen night men from the morgue stream’ out into the courtyard, wheeling their steel gurney carts up to the vans. The doors of the patrol cars are opening and slamming, their dome lights still rotating slowly. Police pour out from them into the street, many of them sooty, unhatted, their eyes bleared, their uniforms strewn with ashes. The drivers of the big Black Marias are out now too, moving around in the courtyard, swinging open the big rear doors of the vans.
City of the Dead Page 39
