Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

“I’m sorry, too.” Konig’s voice lowers with contrition. “I apologize. I had no business saying that. I’ve had a lousy day and—”

“Tell me something,” Strang cuts him short. “Do you at least intend to find out who it is here leaking information to these morticians?”

Konig’s eyes lower once more to the tiny figures and ruled lines of the departmental fiscal budget. “I already know who it is.”

Eyes still lowered, nevertheless he can sense Strang sitting there, open-mouthed, gaping at him. He turns his pencil once more to the budgetary sheets, shortly hearing Strang rise and the sharp, percussive click of his feet striding swiftly from the office.

2 full-time Deputy Chief Medical Examiners: $40,500

2 Associate Medical Examiners: $33,000

Recommended promotion of two Assistant to Associate Medical Examiners at increments of: $13,000

The phone rings. Konig jumps. His pencil snaps, and while the phone continues to ring, he carves large, fierce circles over the face of the budget with the shattered edges of the pencil.

“Hello.”

“Hello—Chief? That you there?”

“No. I’m home. You’re talking to a recording. What the hell do you want, Flynn?”

“Listen. You gotta get down here.”

“No way. It’s after six. I’m not—”

“You gotta. We turned up a graveyard. Regular butcher shop. Arms. Legs. Balls. The works.”

“Forget it. I’m on my way home.”

“You can’t,” Flynn gasps breathlessly. “I mean you just can’t. The place is right down at the river’s edge. The tide’s risin’. I’m afraid we’re gonna lose half the goddamned stuff. Somebody who knows somethin’ has gotta look at this stuff right here before we can move it. Don’tcha have someone up there you can send?”

“Everyone’s left. It’s after six. What the hell do you think this is here—an all-night car wash?”

A stand-off pause. Both men listen to each other breathing. Finally Konig breaks the silence. “How far down’s the stuff?”

“Not far. Two, three feet. Might’ve been deeper once, but the tide’s been workin’ on it pretty regular. We’re findin’ it all over the place and I’m just afraid we’re gonna lose—”

“Okay—okay,” the Chief sighs. “Where the hell are you?”

“Coenties Slip. Right off Water Street—on the river.”

“Okay. Send a car.”

“It’s probably out front there right now,” Flynn’s voice smirks. “I sent it about twenty minutes ago. Pick me up on the corner of South and Cuyler’s. We’ll go in together.”

“The guy’s out walkin’ his dog, see? Right along the river. ’Bout six a.m. The dog’s runnin’ around off the leash, see? And the guy’s just suckin’ up the breeze. Enjoyin’ the sunrise—”

“Skip the poetry, will you, Flynn? Just get on with the details.”

Flynn seems momentarily injured by the Chief’s impatience, but he continues. “Anyway, the guy whistles for Rover. The dog starts runnin’ toward him, see? Tail wag-gin’. All full of piss and vinegar. Only he’s got a goddamn hand in his mouth.”

“A hand?”

“Yeah—a human hand.”

Konig and Flynn are speeding down Coenties Slip toward the river. The car streaks in past Jeanette Park and the Seamen’s Church. At the Heliport they turn left and start to nose into milling crowds streaming toward a brilliantly illuminated area up ahead. The siren on the patrol car whoops frantically and ‘a path clears, falls away before them.

They wheel into a large cleared circle, a police cordon of patrol cars, vans, sawhorses, badly harried foot patrolmen. A soft, pale purple has fallen over the day with a kind of tangible weight. The bright beacons and guide lights from the Heliport have begun to shimmer and flash on the brown pasty surface of the river.

Somewhere between the Heliport and the Old Slip, the police have set up a number of temporary floodlights. Also, the klieg lights of a TV mobile camera crew have just begun to bore through the twilight indigo dusk.

Just at the edge of the river, where the water slaps and lollops at the shoreline, a dozen men in rubber hip waders, armed with lantern helmets and shovels, move calf-deep through the mucky water like a flock of crows foraging a meadow. It is into this glaring circle of illumination that Flynn and Konig come.

“Watcha got?” the Chief says to a beefy young Irish cop with a high flush who appears to be directing the operation.

“Shoulder loin. Top round. Ground chuck. Ribs. Filet mignon. Fricassee. You name it, we got it.”

A burst of laughter and crude joking. Konig scowls and barges over to another area where several patrolmen appear to be standing guard over a number of ill-shapen parcels strewn about the place and wrapped in clear plastic bags.

“Here’s a little goody for you, Chief.” Eyes glinting wickedly, Flynn holds out one of the bags to Konig. In it is contained a severed hand, the fingernails of which have been lacquered a bright, lurid purple.

Unimpressed, Konig scowls first at the hand, then at Flynn. “All right—let’s have a look.”

“Help yourself, Chief.” The beefy young cop slings down before Konig a package containing what appears on first glance to be a large section of quartered beef. A few of the others laugh and shuffle nervously.

The Chief kneels down, the same sciatic agony of the morning shooting rockets from his back down into his leg. He opens the bag, and beneath, the white glare of klieg lights and the puttering drone of an ascending helicopter from the nearby terminal, he studies the contents.

There before him, spilling out of the bag, are the remains of a badly hacked thoracic section. A great deal of the outer flesh has been stripped from it, but even in that light, and with the most cursory glance, Konig can see several stab wounds on its surface, one of which, he is certain, has penetrated the pericardium.

“That’s fairly recent,” he says, making a mental note of the degree of putrefaction. Slowly he rises and moves down the line from one parcel to the next. Here is a leg minus the foot; there a forearm; after that a thigh encased in a covering of mud and slime, the arteries and smaller blood vessels sheared off and dangling like disconnected wires. The next parcel contains a pelvic section. Then come several packages containing gobbets of flesh and innards hacked indiscriminately out of various parts of the anatomy. In addition, there are a number of smaller parts, odds and ends, toes and ears, a full set of male genitals, the split testes gleaming gray-white, like broken eggs.

More plastic bags are hauled up from the river and stacked with the others. Konig, in turn, examines these. They are a chaos and tangle of unrelated bits and pieces. He has no idea how many bodies are represented by all those parts. But already his cool professional eye has picked up a pattern of regularity. Great quantities of flesh had been stripped from all the parts; the blood had been drained from the bodies; and there are no heads. The massive stripping of flesh had been done to make the job of identification difficult. The absence of heads would make it nigh onto impossible.

“Never seen nothin’ like it,” murmurs an older Italian cop standing behind Konig, shaking his head in disbelief.

“No heads?” Konig snaps.

“Not yet. We’re still lookin’.”

The Chief rises wearily, still pondering the plastic parcels, rates of calcification at the epiphyses, formation of pelvic bones, size of sacral bones, while police cameras flash all about him and batteries of technicians scavenge meticulously over the surrounding area.

A number of detectives and patrolmen hover about, staring, speechless at the incomprehensibility of it all. The Chief knows their thoughts. He can read them as if they were writ on parchment. The marvel and mystery of it all, these broken bits and pieces lying there beneath cold white light like shattered toys, once a part of life. Once walked and talked. Incomprehensible.