Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

The bowl is now held under the tap, the spigot turned on, and while the stream of water is played over the organs, Konig commences his examination of them. He cuts into larynx and tongue in order to detect signs of vomiting or hemorrhage. He rotates the heart in his hand, exposing its chambers, rinsing out the blood, testing each valve for signs of defect. Lastly, he takes a pair of scissors and snips his way up the arteries, searching there for plaque and emboli, as well as in the blood vessels of the heart itself.

“Nothing remarkable here,” he proclaims.

Returning to the body, he proceeds to remove the viscera, examining each organ in the same meticulous fashion. He draws off a sample of gastric contents into a small jar, as well as a sample of urine by merely pressing the bladder. He then turns these over to his assistant. “A little something for the toxicology lab, just in case of foul play.”

A few more deft motions and he has lifted out spleen and liver, sliced them up like a fresh loaf of bread, and dropped sections into several nearby cardboard buckets used for storage and transport of internal organs. “Still looks good,” he cries out.

The steel sink is now nearly full of organs submerged in roseate water. Konig is now ready for the coup de grâce —a single sweep of the blade across the top of the head that opens the scalp from ear to ear. Several additional slashes and the scalp becomes a pair of flaps which he yanks down over the man’s face in much the same way one might pull off a pair of gloves.

With the saw blade he then cuts around the skull slightly above ear level and at last lifts off the calvaria—the skullcap—like the lid of a cookie jar. Gleaming there in the cold white light are the membrane sacs containing the brain. Slashing these open, he then works his rubbered fingers under the frontal lobes of the brain, at last lifting it out, whole and intact, from the base of the skull. It is only a matter of moments until he separates the medulla oblongata from the spinal cord, then lets the entire brain slither into a steel bowl, examining it closely as he sluices water over it from the spigot.

“All appears quite normal, ladies and gentlemen. This is a bit of a riddle,” he announces, although it is really no great riddle to him. The diffuse hemorrhage at the base of the brain has told him all he needs to know. He proceeds to slice the brain into neat sections. “Ah—I beg your pardon. Not so much of a riddle, after all.”

He holds up a section of cortex dripping with blood. “Ruptured saccular aneurysm in the circle of Willis—a blowout, ladies and gentlemen. No more, no less.”

With small knives he carefully dissects out the damaged section of artery at the base of the brain, pointing out the weakness in the wall, a small point of fatal rupture about the size of a pea. “A tiny but lethal flaw in an otherwise very capable machine.” He casts a smiling glance around his audience. “Thus fate makes monkeys of us all.”

The warm, redemptive sun of April streams across Konig’s back as he chats wearily on the phone with the Deputy Mayor.

“I’m perfectly aware of that.”

“You are? Well, I certainly hope you are because you’re damned well going to have to be there.”

“I want to be. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Paul,” the Deputy Mayor whines in slightly crazed nasalities. “The Mayor doesn’t want—repeat, does not want —any further embarrassment. He’s had embarrassment enough. When barely a quarter of the year’s gone by and you’ve already got seven suicides in the Tombs, and now another—you know things are getting pretty hairy. I’ve had the Governor’s office, the ACLU, the NAACP, the B’nai B’rith, the Board of Corrections, a half-dozen assorted civil rights groups, and a charming fraternal organization calling themselves the Savage Skulls all eager to see me. Breaking down my door. Serving me with ultimatums and subpoenas. Shouting obscenities up and down the halls.”

“Well,” Konig says, his mind on some aspect of the curious little defense cuts he’d seen on the thumb and wrist of the young black man up in Harlem that morning, “that’s unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate?” There’s a sputtering sound, then laughter full of choking rage. “Goddamned right, unfortunate.”

“What would you like me to say? I fully realize your concern. I’m sorry. But I’m still going to stand with a verdict of asphyxiation by hanging.”

“Why won’t you say which of your people did the autopsy?”

“It’s of no consequence who did the autopsy. Suffice it to say, the conclusion of this department is self-inflicted death by hanging, and I’ll stand behind that.”

“I’m asking you, Paul, as the sensible man I’ve known for twenty-five years—who conducted the Robinson autopsy? It was Strang, wasn’t it?”

“Sorry, Maury. You’re wasting your breath. That’s privileged information, and I will not disclose it. Not to you, and not to the Mayor.”

Konig flinches and pulls his ear from the receiver as it starts to hiss and sputter a stream of invective. “Fine—fine. You love martyrdom. You always have. My friend, Saint Paul the martyr. Well, you will be martyred, because, my dear fellow, now that permission’s been granted to exhume the body and reautopsy this Robinson boy, I think you should know there are several people out for your ass.”

“I know just who.”

“Good. Then you know this is no minor-league stuff, and if there’s the slightest thing fishy—repeat, the slightest thing —you’re going to be hauled before the grand jury so fast it’ll make your head spin. If you think you can bullshit your way out of this one the way you do, Paul—the way we all know you do—with a lot of fast-talking technical argle-bargle, I’m here to tell you you’re sadly—”

“I told you—I’m perfectly willing to go before the grand jury.”

“I know you are, goddamn it,” Deputy Mayor Benjamin sighs wearily. “How Well I know that you are. Christ on the cross. Waiting for the spikes and the crown of thorns. Well, don’t worry, Calvary’s coming. You’ll get it, too. And you’ll love every minute of it. Goodbye.”

No sooner has Konig, fuming with rage, slammed down the phone and taken up his notes in preparation for his court appearance that afternoon than it rings again.

Muttering, he lets it go on ringing, waiting for Carver to pick it up outside. But she doesn’t. Then it occurs to him that it is noontime and she’s already gone to lunch.

He resolves not to answer the phone but to go on with his notes. The ring persists for ten or a dozen times, its jarring regularity taking on something of an almost human malevolence. Konig grits his teeth, determined to outlast it. But it is a war of wills and he is losing.

“Christ,” he snaps and snatches up the receiver. “Konig here,” he snarls, but hears nothing. “Hello. Medical Examiner’s Office. Konig here. Who’s this?” Still no sound other than a faint, distant ringing through the wires. “Hello—hello.”

He is about to fling the receiver back on the cradle when his arm freezes and he can feel the scalp beneath his gun-metal-gray hair begin to tingle. Then he hears something like a sigh—a long, rather weary exhalation of air—and in that moment he knows who is on the other end.

“Hello—Lolly?”

Another sigh.

“Lolly—Lolly—is it you?”

He waits. No response, only a rather agitated breathing. There’s no mistake in his mind now. He knows—is absolutely certain—it’s she. She’s trying to reach him from somewhere out there in the great wilderness of the city.