Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

Watching her go, Konig calls after her. “How long have you been on drugs?”

She turns back, mouth open, trying to form words.

“How long you been on junk?” Konig’s manner grows more harsh and insistent. “Answer me.”

“Are you a cop?”

“Answer me, I said.”

“You’re a cop. I knew it.” She starts toward him imploringly. “Oh—hey, listen—I—”

“No, you listen to me.” He hold her off at arm’s length. “I’m not a cop.”

“Then how d’ya know?”

“I don’t have to be a cop. All I have to do is look in your eyes.”

Suddenly the girl starts to tremble. He shakes her violently.

“Now listen to me. You keep on that stuff and you’re going to wind up in a garbage can.” He gazes upward at the crumbling brick and plaster, the punched-out windows, the graffiti scrawl of myrmidon street kids. “As a matter of fact, you’re more than halfway there right now.” He crams twenty dollars into her tiny cold fist. “Go upstairs.”

The girl gapes down at the bill, her shoulders slumped wearily in defeat. He senses the struggle going on within her. She’d like to fling the bill back in his face, but he knows she won’t. He can see the need already too great upon her. The girl, he knows, won’t have her money long. Even now he can sense the avid burning eyes of the junk pusher crouching behind the brick wall with his precious little packets of forgetfulness, just waiting for him to go. “Take this, too.” Konig produces a small white professional card from his billfold. “When you’re ready to try and break out, come and see me. I’ll do what I can to help you.”

9:20. Konig limping back crosstown, some huge, vague, unspecified rage smoldering within him. No destination. Uncertain where his faltering tread impels him. Bone-weary, yet determined not to go home. No reason to. Dreading the empty house and its haunted shadows. Unaware of the pain shrieking down his leg, he hobbles through the green-red gridlike maze of traffic patterns blinking up and down Sixth Avenue, then starts up West 4th, unaware that at that very moment behind the yellow plate-glass storefront window he is passing, beyond which flicker the tawdry lights of cheap reproduction Tiffany lamps, Francis Xavier Haggard sits hunched and miserable over a cup of bitter-as-rue espresso, trying to assemble, make some sense of the odds and ends, the bits of trivia hailing down upon him in badly fragmented English from the lips of an excitable young Armenian waiter gesticulating above him.

Konig drifts across the moist, hazy April night, moving beneath bright white street lamps ringed with gauzy, spectral halations, past a flowing tide of young, laughing, animated faces. All the world is young here, making him feel suddenly ancient Some obscene, discarded, castoff thing. Full of curious envy and contempt and sick at heart. Their vitality taunts him. He searches those faces, all restless, eager, seeking life on the littered pavements. Searching, yet unaware that he is searching, seeking out one face. Suddenly, the small, frightened features of Heather Harwell, nee Molly Sully, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, waver momentarily before his eyes. He wonders, now that he’s dispatched her, why the need to have been so cruel about it. The final, heartless brutality of his rejection of her, he realizes now, afforded him some odd, unsavory pleasure. Then the need to humiliate her further with the twenty-dollar bill, proffered for nothing—no services rendered—with almost regal contempt. The faintly oily odor of her hair, mingled with that of cheap spray, still clings to him, and the memory of small, frail, pathetically childlike bones crushing up against him in the dark—not for lust, it suddenly occurs to him, but rather the small child’s need for protective warmth against the night—suddenly saddens him.

Up Broadway and over to St. Marks Place, he shambles through the gaudy night, pausing from time to time outside the yellow-orange windows of saloons and coffeehouses, small bistros and bookstalls, little Japanese gift shops reeking with incense, hung with paper lanterns, stuffed with fake jade, cheap brummagem, past endless pizza parlors, tiny hole-in-the-wall Greek restaurants, the smell of singed lamb, oily pilaf, sausages frying on vendors’ griddles, a hundred different smells licking outward from open doorways like a moist, sour tongue. And everywhere the young. A flood tide of the young—students, lovers, painters, poets manque, bearded teenagers plotting a better world in cheap all-night cafeterias, drug-crazed junkies hovering like lean, hungry jackals in shadowy doorways, pondering desperate solutions to desperate problems. Konig’s eyes sweep and scan these youthful faces. Oh, Lolly, Come home, dear. Please come home now . “Evening, Chief.”

Konig looks up into the smiling rubicund visage of the night guard.

“Working late tonight, are you, Doc?”

Konig gazes around like a stranger. A little startled to find himself there. “Oh, no—nothing, Scanlon. Just some paper work. Won’t be long.”

“Take your time. I’ll be here if you need me.”

The pleasant lilt of a Gaelic chuckle fades behind him; the echo of his own footsteps clatters through the long, empty green corridors, and once more Paul Konig has entered the green, comforting gloom of the world he knows best.

Full-time Deputy Chief Medical Examiner: $40,500

5 full-time Associate Medical Examiners: $33,000/$165,000

Silence. Only the ticking of the old Regulator wall clock, the gurgling of the coffeepot, the quiet hiss of the Bunsen burner sighing beneath it. Konig’s pen scratches across the large municipal ledger sheets of the office annual budget.

8 full-time Assistant Medical Examiners: $10,500/$84,000

Goddamn Strang anyway. He and Blaylock. Both of them oughta be sacked—hang ’em both.

Chief Toxicologist, full time: $19,500

No goddamned tissue study—no mention of ecchymosis in the protocol.

Hematologist, full time, 4 Assistants and—

Ought to send him up to Yonkers. Serve him right. They’d eat him alive. Carslin and those smart-ass ACLU boys. And me having to take all that goddamned guff from Benjamin. Flexing his muscles Threatening me with the grand jury. Chief Deputy Mayor and all that crap. Knew him when he was chasing ambulances. “The Mayor doesn’t want—repeat , does not want— any further embarrassment.” Well, screw the Mayor. And the Chief Deputy Mayor. Screw them all .

12 Scrubbers/Mortuary: $7,500/$90,000

Calcification at the pubic symphysis. That pelvic section on the river today. No spring chicken. Course, it’d been submerged a while.

3 full-time Van Drivers

Need two new vans. Be lucky if I get one to replace these goddamned antiques. Goddamn Strang lecturing me about my duties, my responsibilities. Insufferable prig. Stuffed ass. Sucking around for my job. Asking about my health all the time. Watching me. Keeping score on me. As if I didn’t know about that silly goddamned racket. Stupid ass — No CO levels in the blood. No cinders in the larynx or the trachea. Fools. Fools. Hope they get that body back for me.

1 new Prince-Hauser Autoclave: $16,500

1 new Barschach Gas Chromatograph: $12,500

That smug bastard in court today. Suicide? Christ, O Mighty. Can you imagine the gall? Suicide—with a straight face, mind you. All solemn and pompous. Next time that young gorilla kills, it ought to be — Oh, Lolly, Lolly — Something about that hand with the fingernail polish. Odd. Was it left or right? Can’t remember. Funny. Postcards. Pictures. Pretty views.

Konig laughs out loud. Looks up startled to hear the sound of his own laughter rattling through the quiet night around him.