Martin Amis - Night Train

Maybe I’d better point out that the process itself, for me, means close to nothing. When I worked homicides, the autopsy room was part of my daily routine. And I still get down there on business at least once a week. Asset Forfeiture, which is a subdivision of Organized Crime, is a lot more hands-on than it sounds. Basically what we do is: We rip off the Mob. One whisper of conspiracy, out there by the pool, and we confiscate the entire marina. So we deal with bodies. Bodies found, almost always, in the trunks of airport rental cars. Impeccably executed and full of bullets. You’re down in the ME’s office half the morning sometimes, on account of all the bullets they have to track...The process itself doesn’t mean much to me. But Jennifer does. I am confidently assuming that Colonel Tom didn’t watch this, and would have relied on Silvera’s summary. Why am I watching it? Take away the bodies, and the autopsy room is like the kitchen of a restaurant that has yet to open. I am watching. I am sitting on the couch, smoking, taking notes, and using the Pause. I am bearing witness.

Silvera is there: I can hear him briefing the pathologist. Jennifer is there, wearing her toe-tag. That body. The scene photographs in the case folder, with the moist eyes and mouth, could almost be considered pornographic (arty and “tasteful”—kind of ecce femina), but there’s nothing erotic about her now, stiff like out of the deepfreeze, and flat on a slab between striplights and tiles. And all the wrong colors. The chemistry of death is busy with her, changing her from alkaline to acid. This is the body... Wait. That sounds like Paul No. Yes, the cutter is Paulie No. I guess you can’t blame a guy for loving his job, or for being Indonesian, but I have to say that that little slope gives me the creeps. This is the body, he is saying, echoing the sacrament: Hoc es corpus.

“This is the body of a well-developed, well-nourished white female, measuring five feet ten inches in height and weighing approximately one hundred and forty pounds. She is wearing nothing.”

First the external examination. Directed by Silvera, No takes a preliminary look at the wound. He shines a light into the mouth, which is rigored half open, and rolls her on to her side to see the exit. Then he scans the entire epidermis for abnormalities, marks, signs of struggle. Particularly the hands, the fingertips. No takes nail clippings, and performs the chemical tests for barium, antimony and lead deposits—to establish that she fired the .22. I recall that it was Colonel Tom who bought her that gun, years back, and taught her how to use it.

Brisk as ever, Paulie No takes oral, vaginal and anal swabs. Too, he inspects the perineal area for tearing or trauma. And again I’m thinking of Colonel Tom. Because this is the only way that his read works. I mean, for Trader to be involved, it has to be a sex deal, right? Has to be. And it feels all wrong. Some funny things can happen on the cutter’s table. A double suicide can come back a homicide-suicide. A rape-murder can come back a suicide. But can a suicide come back a rape-murder?

Autopsy is rape too, and here it comes. In the moment that the first incision is made, Jennifer becomes all body, or body only. Paul No is going in now. Goodbye. The elevation makes him look like a school child, glossy head dipped, and the scalpel poised like a pen as he makes the three cuts in the shape of a Y, one from each shoulder to the pit of the stomach, and then on down through the pelvis. Up come the flaps—it makes me think of a carpet being lifted after damage by flood or fire—and No goes through the ribs with the electric saw. The breastplate comes out like a manhole lid and then the organ tree is removed entire (the organ tree, with its strange fruit) and placed in the steel sink to the side. No vivisects heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and takes tissue samples for analysis. Now he’s shaving the head, working in toward the exit wound.

But here’s the worst. The electric saw is circumnavigating Jennifer’s cranium. A lever is being wedged under the roof of the skull, and now you wait for the pop. And now I find that my body, so ordinary and asymmetrical, the source of so little pleasure or pride, so neglected, so parched, is suddenly starting up, acting up: It wants attention. It wants out of all this. The cranial pop is as loud as a gunshot. Or a terrible cough. No is pointing to something, and Silvera leans forward, and then the two men are backing away, in surprise.

I watch on, thinking: Colonel Tom, I hear you. But I’m not sure how much this means.

It appears that Jennifer Rockwell shot herself in the head three times.

No. No, I don’t live alone, I said. I live with Deniss. And just that once I shed tears. I don’t live alone. I live with Deniss.

As I was speaking those words, Deniss, in actual fact, was scowling through the windshield of a U-Haul, taking himself and all his belongings at high speed toward the state line.

So I did live alone. I didn’t live with Deniss.

Is that Tobe now, starting up the stairs? Or is it the first rumor of the night train? The building always seems to hear it coming, the night train, and braces itself as soon as it hears in the distance that desperate cry.

I don’t live alone. I don’t live alone. I live with Tobe.

Just come back from my meet with Silvera.

The first thing he said to me was: “I hate this.”

I said you hate what?

He said the whole damn thing.

I said Colonel Tom thinks it plays to homicide.

He said what does?

I said the three shots.

He said Rockwell never was any good. On the streets.

I said he got shot in the line for Christ’s sake. He got shot in the fucking line.

Silvera paused.

“When was the last time you took one for the state?” I asked him.

Silvera went on pausing. But that wasn’t it. He wasn’t thinking of the time, way back in company lore, that Tom Rockwell stopped one in the Southern, as a beat cop, while flushing hoodies from a drug corner. No, Silvera was just contemplating his own career curve.

I lit a cigarette and said, “Colonel Tom has it playing to homicide.”

He lit a cigarette and said, “Because that’s all he’s got. You shoot yourself once in the mouth. That’s life. You shoot yourself twice. Hey. Accidents happen. You shoot yourself three times. You got to really want to go.”

We were in Hosni’s, the little gyro joint on Grainge. Popular among police for its excellent smoking section. Hosni himself isn’t a smoker. He’s a libertarian. He threw out half his tables just to skirt city law. I’m not proud of my habit, and I know that Hosni’s crusade is one we’re eventually going to lose. But all cops smoke their asses off and I figure it’s part of what we give to the state—our lungs, our hearts.

Silvera said, “And this was a .22. A revolver.”

“Yeah. Not a zip. Or a faggot gun. You know like a derringer or something. The old lady upstairs. She said she heard one shot?”

“Or she’s woken by one shot and then hears the second or the third. She’s blacked out on sherry in front of the TV. What does she know.”

“I’ll go talk to her.”

“This case is so fucking cute,” said Silvera. “When Paulie No fluoroscoped her, suddenly we’re looking at three bullets. One’s still in her head, right? One’s in Evidence Control: The one we dug out of the wall at the scene. After the autopsy we go back. There’s only one hole in the wall. We dig out another round. Two bullets. One hole.”

In itself this was no big deal. Police are pretty blase about ballistics. Remember the Kennedy assassination and “the magic bullet”? We know that every bullet is a magic bullet. Particularly the .22 roundnose. When a bullet enters a human being, it has hysterics. As if it knows it shouldn’t be there.