Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

“Very good, Paul. Excellent. Hats off to you. You’re a man after my own heart. Only a man like me could appreciate a man like you.”

Konig smiles in spite of himself. “True—it takes one son of a bitch to know another.” He starts to laugh and for a while they’re chuckling together like old friends.

“But, Paul,” Strang says, suddenly serious and wiping his teary eyes, “I must tell you that I don’t share your gloomy views on my prospects for the future. There are several people in very high places in this Administration who are determined to see you out as soon as possible and me in as the new Chief ME.”

“I don’t doubt that, Carl.” Konig smiles wearily. “There have been for the past twenty-five years. Blaylock for one.”

“Blaylock among others.” Strang smiles back maliciously. “So I’m afraid, Paul, you’re not the last word on this question.” He starts to chuckle again softly.

“No, not the last, Carl.” Konig chuckles lightly. “The first. And I can assure you, with what I have in my files now on Blaylock and you, the question of your advancement will never get any further than that.”

For a long while after Strang’s departure, Konig sits in the close gathering shadows of his office, gazing with an oddly rapt expression at Lolly’s painting of Ida and the beach house in Montauk. It is comforting to sit there quietly in the partial dark, letting the throbbing at his temples gradually subside. It is comforting to sit there looking at the painting of Ida and Montauk and think of nothing else.

“Good night, Doctor.”

Konig’s reverie is jolted by Carver’s husky, lilting voice. Poking her head through the half-opened door, she waves at him.

“Good night, Carver.”

“You go on home now, Doctor,” she exhorts him. “Don’t you hang around here all hours. Get some rest.”

“I will. I will.”

She starts to turn, then turns back. “Oh—you had a call while you were downstairs this afternoon.”

“Who?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“Oh?” Konig’s ears cock. For some reason he can feel his bowels turn. “Any message?”

“No. Only that he’d call you at home tonight. Very nice, soft-spoken gentleman. Lovely voice.”

“Hah?”

“Janos.”

“Hah?”

“Janos Klejewski.”

“Your son—Janos,” Frank Haggard barks at an ancient, doll-like figure stooping on the other side of a chained door. He is standing in a dimly lit hallway redolent of boiled cabbage and cauliflower.

“Oooh?” she asks, craning her hag’s neck up at him, blinking through the narrow open space.

“Janos,” Haggard nearly bellows. “Janos.”

“Oh—Janos.” She blinks into the shadows, peering at the badge he holds in his hand.

“Your son,” Haggard barks again, leaning toward her cocked ear, extending the badge through the opening. “May I have a word with you?”

“Hah?”

“I said may I have a word with—”

The door starts to squeal closed and he just barely snatches his hand out of the narrow space before the door slams. “It’ll only be a minute, Mrs. Klejewski,” he shouts through the closed door, thinking she’s locked it on him. But in the next moment he can hear the chain scraping through the brass slide and several locks being turned. He can see the knob rotate and in the next moment the door creaks open. Standing there before him in the half-light is a stooped, wizened creature with bright little gimlet eyes and white frizzed hair, some of which has fallen out in great unseemly clots, revealing the pale, blotchy scalp beneath.

This then is what has brought the detective here on a tip from Wershba. This sticklike little crone in black bombazine, with a voice like a scraping violin. She is the mother of Janos Klejewski, confidant and first lieutenant to Wally Meacham. The detective has come to this shabby block of huddled, crumbling structures across the river in Astoria, Queens, another one of those old-world neighborhoods forged out of the 1900’s when countless immigrants, fleeing hardship and persecution, flocked to these shores as a haven of hope.

Then it was a neighborhood made up of working-class people—Irish, Germans, Poles, Jews—hardworking, brawling, pious, stolid people who managed somehow to reconcile differences and live in peace. They had no time to prey upon one another. Hardship and struggle were their common enemies, occupied all of their waking moments. Now suddenly that same neighborhood, like so many others throughout the city, has had to undergo the upheaval of a whole new wave of integration, that of the blacks and the Hispanics, as well as a flood of addictive drugs. And now change has come swiftly to this neighborhood, change often attended by violence.

Where once there was O’Malley’s corner saloon, now one finds the fried chicken kiosk and the bodega with the odors of burned gizzards and cuchifritos drying in the window. The German pork butcher’s is now an all-night check-cashing establishment. And the kosher delicatessen has become a storefront Pentecostal iglesia with a crude, almost childlike, crucifix limned on its windows.

The building that Janos Klejewski had grown up in is of a fairly common 1910 vintage. Six stories, red brick, fire escapes running up and down its rear face above an alleyway where wash flutters disconsolately in the balmy evening breeze. Its residents used to pride themselves on its solidity and safety. Also its eminent respectability. Now, entering the murky, dimly lit shadows of the hallway, with its peeling plaster and its single naked light bulb glowing eerily up ahead, one must be wary. Very wary indeed.

The elevator that Haggard rode up in, after having to strike a match and search out the apartment number on the ’mailboxes, once a handsome thing of brass and mahogany, was now in ruins. A shambles. Into every square inch of its wood, kids have gouged their initials, along with a rich intaglio of obscenities and pictoglyphs of sexual organs. Most of its brass has been stripped for resale at local junk shops, and the small space reeks of urine.

“I’m looking for your boy,” Haggard says, stooping as he enters and removing his hat.

“Hah?”

“Your boy—Janos. Janos—do you know where he is?”

“Hah?”

“Janos,” he cries at her over the noise of a small television, volume turned up to maximum, where a game-show master of ceremonies bounces and careens about like a buffoon.

The tiny, wizened figure hobbles on a cane to a rocking chair and with a great effort sits. While Haggard’s eyes tunnel through the shadows of the place a fat old calico cat rubs up against the detective’s leg and purrs.

“Police?”

“That’s right.” Haggard nods.

“I no see Janos for long time,” the little widow lady says, her head shaking with a mild palsy.

“For how long?”

“Hah?”

“Would you mind turning that TV down a bit?”

“Hah?”

“I say, how long since you’ve seen him?” the detective bawls at her ear.

“Oh, mebbe two year. He run from the prison. You find him?”

“No—I’m trying to.”

“Hah?”

“I say, I’m trying to find him. He never calls you? Writes? Nothing?”

“Writes?”

“Yes. Letter? Postcard? Anything?”

“No, no.” The old lady shakes her head, smiling sorrowfully. “He no write. Call. Nothing. He no good, Janos. Other brothers, sisters. All good. Work hard. Janos stupid. No good. Always trouble. School. Girls. Police. Always trouble. He in trouble now?”

As the old lady cranes her neck and squints at him, there is something strangely reptilian about her, something prehistoric, elemental; a lizard slowly switching its tail in a Pre-Cambrian twilight. Her toothless jaws move endlessly, gumming nothing.