John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

Lionel considered what I had said. “And you can’t get to Joe Bones without me.”

Beside me, Louis’s mouth twitched. Lionel caught the movement.

“That’s not entirely true,” I said. “But if you’re going to be calling on him anyway, we might tag along.”

“I go calling on Joe Bones, his fucking place is gonna be real fucking quiet by the time I leave,” said Lionel softly.

“You do what you have to do,” I replied. “But I need Joe Bones alive. For a while.”

Lionel stood and buttoned the top of his shirt. He took a wide black silk tie from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to put it on, using his reflection in the window to check the knot.

“Where you staying?” he asked. I told him, and gave Leon the number of my phone. “We’ll be in touch,” said Lionel. “Maybe. Don’t come out here again.”

Our discussions appeared to be at an end. Louis and I were almost at the car when Lionel spoke again. He pulled on his jacket and adjusted the collar, then smoothed down the lapels.

“One thing,” he said. “I know Morphy out of St. Martin was there when Lutice was found. You got cop friends?”

“Yeah. I got federal friends too. That a problem?”

He turned away. “Not as long as you don’t make it one. If you do, the crabs gonna be feeding on you and your buddy.”

Louis fooled around with the car radio until he found a station that seemed to be playing back-to-back Dr. John. “This is music, right?” he said.

The music segued uneasily from “Makin’ Whoopee” to “Gris Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya” and John’s throaty rumble filled the car. Louis flicked the presets again, until he found a country station playing three in a row from Garth Brooks.

“This be the devil’s music,” mumbled Louis. He turned the radio off and tapped his fingers on the dash.

“You know,” I said, “you don’t have to hang around if you don’t want to. Things could get difficult, or Woolrich and the feds could decide to make them difficult for you.” I knew that Louis was what Angel diplomatically referred to as semiretired. Money, it appeared, was no longer an issue. The “semi” indicated that it might have been replaced by something else, although I wasn’t sure yet what that was.

He looked out the window, not at me. “You know why we’re here?”

“Not entirely. I asked, but I wasn’t sure that you’d come.”

“We came because we owe you, because you’d look out for us if we needed it, and because someone has to look out for you after what happened to your woman and your little girl. More than that, Angel thinks that you’re a good man. Maybe I think so too and maybe I think that what you brought to an end with the Modine bitch, what you’re trying to bring to an end here, they’re things that should be brought to an end. You understand me?”

It was strange to hear him talk this way, strange and affecting. “I think I understand,” I replied quietly. “Thank you.”

“You are going to end this thing here?” he said.

“I think so, but we’re missing something, a detail, a pattern, something.” I kept catching glimpses of it, like a rat passing under streetlights. I needed to find out more about Edward Byron. I needed to talk to Woolrich.

Rachel met us in the main hall of the Flaisance House. I guessed that she had been watching for the car. Angel lounged beside her eating a Lucky Dog, which looked like the business end of a baseball bat topped with onion, chili, and mustard.

“The FBI came,” said Rachel. “Your friend Woolrich was with them. They had a warrant. They took everything: my notes, the illustrations, everything they could find.” She led the way to her room. The walls had been stripped of their notes. Even the diagram I had drawn was gone.

“They searched our room too,” remarked Angel to Louis. “And Bird’s.” My head jerked up as I thought of the case of guns. Angel spotted the move. “We ditched them soon as your FBI friend put the stare on Louis. They’re in a storage depot on Bayonne. We both have keys.”

I noticed that Rachel seemed more irritated than upset as we followed her to her room. “Am I missing something here?”

She smiled. “I said they took everything they could find. Angel saw them coming. I hid some of the notes in the waistband of my jeans, under my shirt. Angel took care of most of the rest.”

She took a small pile of papers from under her bed and waved them with a small flourish. She kept one separate in her hand. It was folded over once.

“I think you might want to see this,” she said, handing the paper to me. I unfolded it and felt a pain in my chest.

It was an illustration of a woman seated naked on a chair. She had been split from neck to groin and the skin on each side had been pulled back so that it hung over her arms like the folds of a gown. Across her lap lay a young man, similarly opened but with a space where his stomach and other internal organs had been removed. Apart from the detail of the anatomization and the alteration in the sex of one of the victims, it resembled in its essence what had been done to Jennifer and Susan.

“It’s Estienne’s Pietà,” said Rachel. “It’s very obscure, which is why it took so long to track down. Even in its day, it was regarded as excessively explicit and, more to the point, blasphemous. It bore too much of a resemblance to the figure of the dead Christ and Mary for the liking of the church authorities. Estienne nearly burned for it.”

She took the illustration from me and looked at it sadly, then placed it on her bed with the other papers. “I know what he’s doing,” she said. “He’s creating memento mori, death’s-heads.” She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands together beneath her chin, as if in prayer.

“He’s giving us lessons in mortality.”

IN THE MEDICAL SCHOOL of the Complutense University of Madrid there is an anatomical museum, founded by King Carlos III. Much of its collection derives from the efforts of Dr. Julián de Velasco in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Velasco was a man who took his work seriously. He was reputed to have mummified the corpse of his own daughter, just as William Harvey was assisted in his discovery of circulation by his decision to autopsy the bodies of his own father and sister.

The long rectangular hall is arrayed with glass cases of exhibits: two giant skeletons, the wax model of a fetal head, and at one point, two figures labeled despellejados. They are the “flayed men,” who stand in dramatic poses, displaying the movement of the muscles and the tendons without the white veil of the skin to hide it from the eye of the beholder. Vesalius, Valverde, Estienne, their forebears, their peers, their successors, worked in the knowledge of this tradition. Artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci created their own écorchés, as they termed their drawings of flayed figures, basing their work on their own participation in dissections.

And the figures they created were more than merely anatomical specimens: they served, in their way, as reminders of the flawed nature of our humanity, a reminder of the body’s capacity for pain and, eventually, mortality. They warned of the futility of the pursuits of the flesh, the reality of disease and pain and death in this life, and the promise of something better in the next.

In eighteenth-century Florence, the practice of anatomical modeling reached its peak. Under the patronage of the Abbot Felice Fontana, anatomists and artists worked side by side to create natural sculptures from beeswax. Anatomists exposed the cadavers, the artists poured the liquid plaster, and molds were created. Layers of wax were placed into them, with pig fat used to alter the temperature of the wax where necessary, allowing a process of layering that reproduced the transparency of human tissue.