Jutta Profijt - Morgue Drawer Four

The incision that Martin had just initiated from the throat to the sternum zigzagged. Martin’s colleague looked at him with a furrowed brow.

“What is it?” Martin asked me silently. “Are you trying to short-circuit every last one of my nerves?”

“I know that guy,” I said in a trembling voice. “I saw him here in the building yesterday. And I recognized him from somewhere, too.”

“Recognized, how?” Martin asked in return as his scalpel hovered over the corpse. “Well, who is he then?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

Martin moaned so loudly that the expression on his colleague’s face turned to one of deep, deep concern.

“If you recognized him, then surely you must know who he is,” Martin said.

Martin was right, but not entirely. I racked my brain and, since my thoughts in this case understandably somehow always returned to public transportation, I eventually arrived at the answer:

“I saw him the day I was pushed from the bridge,” I said.

“Really?” The question sounded like Martin couldn’t decide between incredulity and excitement.

“Yes,” I confirmed. “Quite sure.”

I very clearly remember that I had seen the tall, dark-haired and dark-complexioned man somewhere after that, too, but I couldn’t remember where right now. It would come to me. Now the main thing was to determine the man’s identity. And since we knew the guy had been here in the building the day before, we had a high-caliber clue.

“What’s wrong, Martin?” his colleague asked, now growing a bit impatient. “Shall we continue?”

“Yes. Uh, no. Well, soon,” Martin stammered. “This man has something to do with the Lerchenberg case. You remember, the guy who fell from the bridge…And this man was here in the building yesterday.”

Martin set his scalpel down on the corpse, peeled his gloves off, and charged out the door.

“Martin,” his colleague called after him in shock. “Come back!”

I didn’t really understand the fuss, but in the meantime I’ve learned that you really never, ever interrupt an autopsy. And if you do, then you have to specify a reason for the interruption in your Dictaphone comments, and then you remove and store the body properly and clean the autopsy room and yourself.

Martin apparently forgot all of that, racing through the building as though a snake had bitten him.

“Who was the tall, dark-haired man who was in the building yesterday?” he asked, bursting into the administrative office.

The secretary looked up from her papers, stared in horror at Martin’s blood-flecked scrubs, and didn’t say anything at all for a moment.

“Please, the man is downstairs,” Martin explained, slightly winded. “Dead.”

“What?” It sounded more like a shriek of terror than a question.

“The man who was here at the desk yesterday. I saw him in the hallway here,” Martin stammered.

“And he’s dead?” the secretary asked with tears in her eyes. “That poor man.”

“Who is he?” Martin yelled at her.

The door to the director’s office opened, and Martin’s boss stepped out into his secretary’s office. “What is going on here?” he asked, looking with shock at the scene unfolding before him. An unkempt Martin in a splattered surgical gown and a crying secretary staring at each other as though he had threatened her or suggested something lurid.

“Step into my office—” his boss said, and then paused. “Did you come directly from the autopsy room?”

Martin nodded.

“Then please go and take off your gown first and wash your hands—if you haven’t done so already.”

“But…” Martin began.

At that moment his colleague from downstairs joined them in the secretary’s office.

“What the hell is going on?” the man asked. “Are we interrupting the autopsy officially now, or are you coming back downstairs?”

The boss’s eyes narrowed into slits, and he looked at Martin with growing irritation. Then he turned to Martin’s colleague.

“The autopsy is being interrupted,” he said. “Please follow the applicable protocol.”

The colleague disappeared, Martin trudged back downstairs after him, grumbling, threw his gown into the laundry bin, scrubbed his hands, and went back up to his boss’s office.

“What on earth is wrong with you?” the boss asked.

“The dead man we were autopsying downstairs was here in this building yesterday,” Martin said, returning to a somewhat steady voice. “I wanted to know what he was doing here and who he is.”

“That is not something a professional interrupts an autopsy for,” his boss said sternly, the way bosses can get when their employees fuck up.

“In addition, that body is linked to another murder,” Martin added defiantly.

“Which murder?”

“Sascha Lerchenberg.”

“If I recall correctly, that was not a murder,” the boss said.

“Yes, it was. Sascha was pushed,” Martin explained. “And shortly before his death, and possibly even after it, he saw that man who is lying downstairs on the table.”

“What do you mean, ‘and possibly even after it’?” his boss repeated.

Martin realized his error. “Well, you know,” he mumbled. “When someone dies and his spirit floats up over the body…”

His boss nodded. “You’re referring to reports of near-death experiences,” the boss coaxed.

Martin nodded.

“But the people who have those are not really dead,” the boss said. “They have been to the threshold of death, but they come back to life and can talk about the experience afterward.”

Martin nodded.

“But Lerchenberg is dead, isn’t he?”

Martin nodded again, although no longer quite as convincingly.

“When would he have been able to make such a statement?” the boss asked. He was wording his questions very carefully.

I could sense the conflicted feelings in Martin. He knew that he could not explain the way things really were to his boss. So he was searching for an explanation that his boss would accept, but he just couldn’t find one. His spirit was depleted, exhausted, and he didn’t have any creativity left to invent anything. He capitulated.

“He only just now remembered seeing this man again,” Martin said. “When he saw the body on the autopsy table.”

“About whom are we speaking?” the boss asked.

“Sascha Lerchenberg,” Martin mumbled. “Incidentally he goes by ‘Pascha.’ Although his body is dead, his ghost is buzzing around here in the Institute.”

It was dead quiet in the room for rather a long time.

“I hereby approve the leave of absence that you are applying for right now. At least through the end of the week.”

“But…” Martin’s objection was only mild.

“No buts,” his boss made clear. “If you want to extend your leave on Monday, then that will also be approved. But on condition that you go and visit the Counseling Services Unit.”

Martin nodded.

“I’ll get the paperwork ready. Please stop back by here on your way home and sign it,” his boss said, standing up. He patted Martin on the shoulder. “Get yourself a little rest,” he said, sounding friendly but concerned. “Get a few good nights’ sleep, take some walks, go out to dinner with someone.”

Martin nodded.

“And please take only the most important things with you from your office.”

We crept back to Martin’s desk. Martin collapsed into his chair, put the cordless headset back on, and stared into space for a moment. Then he lapsed back into a frenzy of activity, waking his computer back up with a voice command, accessing the internal forensics database, and printing the photo of the dead man that he had taken at the start of the autopsy and saved nice and proper under—for want of the actual name—the ID number along with the date and time. Then he opened his dictation program. But before he could get blabbing, Katrin burst into his office saying, “Have you heard? That good-looking guy from yesterday who came in wanting to arrange international transportation to bring his sister’s body back home? Now he’s dead, too. Run over by a train.”