Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

“— 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 features. 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.”

“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?”