City of the Dead

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“There is a better fit of the ends of the supraspinatus tendon on the right side than on the left. Portions of the lubricating bursa between the capsule of the shoulder joint proper on the top of the humerus and the under surface of the acromion are still in position and come together as the head slips under the acromion. Appear to come naturally together.” Konig scrawls hastily into his pad. “Thus the two humeri of the longer set of upper limbs appear to belong to the same body as the reconstructed trunk.”

Working steadily for the past four hours, all by himself in the solitude of the abandoned autopsy room, no sound within the place but the dripping of a water tap behind him, Konig has managed to assign all the remaining limbs to either one torso or the other. Both now have arms and legs.

Working that afternoon with both sets of arms, he has found that the heads of the shorter humeri were too small to fit the shoulder joints of the reconstructed trunk, just as the heads of the shorter femora were found to be too small to fit the hip joints.

But when he attached the longer set of humeri to the same trunk, not only did the sockets fit neatly, but with the addition of the longer pair of forearms, the arms appeared in correct proportion to the length of the trunk. The tips of the fingers, allowing for the removal of the terminal segments, were suddenly in correct relation to the thighs. But when the shorter pair of humeri and forearms were attached to that same pair of shoulder joints, the fingertips came just below the level of the hip joints, an impossible proportion for a normal body.

So Konig’s hypothetical case based upon only two bodies is building slowly toward an incontestable fact. He sits silently now before the two broken, battered things, which, albeit headless, nevertheless have begun to bear the unmistakable configuration of mortal man. Though still unidentified, still mysterious, unknown figures, it is now at last possible to see the lineaments of humanity in the reconstituted parts. Both bodies have undergone partial resurrection, and Paul Konig, like an old, demented dollmaker, sits before his half-creations now, still baffled by the numerous unassignable soft parts, odds and ends, human debris scattered all about him. He gazes down upon these half-creatures, pondering their curiously peaceful repose, trying to decipher the riddle contained in a handful of bones.

Number 1 and Number 2—the short and the long—already he knows a great deal about each. Even as he gazes over them, he feels a growing affection, a growing intimacy, a physician’s intimacy, as their various parts merge slowly into anthropomorphic form. They’re now a bit like old friends. Working on Number 1’s badly mutilated feet, which had been viciously slashed across the arches and had had several toes amputated in an attempt obviously to erase some identifiable feature, Konig has found a curious metatarsal deformity, an unnatural curving outward of the big toe, hinting at a painful foot problem. Then, too, Number 2’s back in the area of the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae reveals definite disc displacement as well as a pelvic asymmetry, as if he’d walked for many years with a compensatory gait in order to alleviate severe sacral pain.

It was curious the way the heads arrived, just as Konig was going to get up and go home. Not that he wanted to go home. He dreaded the prospect, but there seemed nothing left to do, and his leg had started shrieking again. Then they came, in a cheap vinyl suitcase plastered over with a lot of paper college pennants and swabbed with mud. They’re carried in by a young cop, looking frightened and a little queasy. He doesn’t know exactly what it is he is carrying, only that it’s “something” and that he wants to get shut of it as quickly as possible.

Konig, however, knows what it is, knows instinctively the moment he grasps the muddy handle and slings the case onto a table. The heft of the thing and the dull, sickening thud of the stuff inside bumping together tell him all he needs to know.

His fingers tremble as he fumbles with the clasps, and raising the lid of the case, he feels a rising sense of excitement, an inner gush, rather like the confluence of innumerable tiny streams suddenly merging into a single roaring torrent.

All he sees at first is a lot of old crumpled newspaper, as muddy as the case itself and spattered with innumerable tiny spots of red. The paper is evidently there as a kind of cushion for the contents, rather like the way you pack fragile porcelain or glass in excelsior. On top of all that newspaper lies a small white piece of bond, torn from a memo pad, upon which is indited in a large, hectic scrawl:

In the next moment, his hands are pushing through the crumpled newssheet, thrusting aside paper with tiny bits of adherent hair, shards of clotted gore. Then suddenly, there they are.

Konig is not a squeamish man. In nearly forty years of service at the Medical Examiner’s Office, he has seen some pretty grisly sights. For the most part, such things have left him unfazed, or at least inured. But the condition of these two heads, or rather what remains of them, has shown him a wholly new, undreamed of dimension of man’s capacity for visiting havoc on his fellow man.

Both heads have been drastically mutilated with the deliberate intention of making the possibility of identification extremely remote. Just as the fingers and toes on each corpse had been either mutilated or hacked off, to remove all identification marks, so, too, in the case of the heads, the features of each had been obliterated—eyes, ears, nose, lips, almost all flesh cut away from the face, and nearly all of the hair and scalp removed—violently excised. The skin tissue had been peeled off like a glove so as to reveal the skull beneath; also, many of the teeth in each head had been extracted in order to make identification by means of dental charts very difficult. The less mutilated of the two heads is clearly that of a man. The other—a smaller, somewhat slighter skull—is of equivocal sex. It might well be that of a woman.

The first head, the more mutilated of the two, had been severed from the neck immediately below the level of the chin. Not only have all the visible facial features been removed, but nearly the whole of the skin of the head and face as well. Two small portions of scalp remain, one over the lower quadrant of the right side and the other just behind the left ear opening. The lips have been entirely cut away; the two upper central incisor teeth have been drawn and the tongue, its tip cut off, protrudes slightly in the gap.

The second head had been severed from the neck at a level slightly lower than that of the first. A huge chunk of scalp is missing from the right side of the head and most of the skin and underlying tissue of the forehead and face have been removed. Flaps of skin still adhere to each cheek, trailing down to the chin and below it. Both lips have been almost completely cut off and nearly all teeth have been drawn. Between the jaws protrudes a swollen tongue.

Just before the stump of the left ear there is a tuft of dark hair. The portion of the scalp remaining on the left side of the head bears a curious Y-shaped laceration covered with dark hair. It is clear to Konig that the wound was caused by forcible contact with a blunt instrument. He cannot say for certain whether or not the wound was produced before or after death.

Konig, examining the first skull under a magnifying glass, quickly locates two fractures. The first is a depressed fracture measuring three-quarters of an inch by a half inch, shelving from behind forward. The injury has broken the outer table of bone, causing a slight depression on the inner table. Slightly behind this fracture, and to the left of the midline, Konig pinpoints the second fracture, affecting the outer table only. This measures a quarter inch in diameter. Once again Konig is uncertain whether the fractures have been inflicted before or after death. But he is certain that they resulted from two separate blows with a blunt instrument. Undoubtedly the same instrument that had produced the Y-shaped laceration on the second head. Had they been inflicted during life, the blows would probably have been sufficient to produce unconsciousness, but they do not appear to have been sufficiently violent to have caused death. He must look elsewhere now for the cause of death.

In the adherent tissue just under the left eye of the first skull, Konig’s sharp gaze spies a deep-seated bruise, roughly an inch in diameter. Then a similar but smaller bruise on the lower border of the jaw on the left side. These bruises lead his eye down further to the place where that purple, swollen tongue, with its tip cut off, protrudes grotesquely just beyond the margin of the jaw. It is that tongue that really starts to tell the story.

The tip cut from the tongue is about an inch and a half in length. It seems to Konig that it had been removed to facilitate the extraction of teeth. If that is so, its removal is of importance as proof that the tongue protruded just at or immediately after the time of death.

Studying the tongue further, he notes that the contour of the palate is imprinted on both the upper and lower surface with indentations that correspond perfectly with the remaining dentition in the jaws. These indentations are shallow in front and become deeper toward the back of the tongue. Such marks can be made only when great pressure is exerted on the tongue for an uncommonly long time, and such a condition is sometimes found after throttling.

Immediately Konig is looking for the telltale bruising signs of manual strangulation. None are to be found in the soft tissue around the neck because this tissue has been stripped away, as if there had been a need to erase all evidence of throttling. But in some of the adherent tissue, Konig discovers several small half-moon impressions, suggestive of those caused by fingernails. He has only to examine next the hyoid bone in the throat to discover there the clean fracture going through it and to know finally that the neck had been forcibly compressed and that the poor, hapless owner of the skull he is now holding in his hand had died an asphyxial death from violent throttling.

Gazing at both heads now, Konig is struck again by the somewhat curious fact that the mutilation inflicted on the first head is so dramatically greater than that inflicted on the second. The owner of that first head, he reasons, must have been the real object of contention here. The rage and hate visited upon that head are simply, even to him, horrifying.

The time now is nearly 8 p.m., though Konig is not aware of that. Indeed, since the awful moment when he drove everyone from the autopsy room, locked the doors, and hurled himself into the task of reassembling the arms, he has been unaware of the passage of time.

The task before him now is purely anatomical. He must assign each of these heads to one or the other torso.

The first part is easy and is solved by simple observation. Attached to head Number 1 are four complete cervical vertebrae, with fragments of the fifth still clinging. Attached to head Number 2 are five cervical vertebrae.

The reconstructed trunk has two cervical vertebrae attached to its upper end; the partially reconstructed upper trunk has three. Since the normal number of cervical vertebrae is seven, it’s obvious to Konig that head Number 1 with its four vertebrae belongs to the partially reconstructed trunk with the three vertebrae and that head Number 2 with its five cervical vertebrae belongs to the reconstructed trunk with the two cervical vertebrae.

As with the reconstruction of the trunk, Konig’s next job is to bring the two parts together by articulating the lower vertebrae attached to the heads with the uppermost of the vertebrae attached to the trunks. This is delicate work and requires considerable time since he must match badly shattered fragments of these vertebrae, upper to lower, in order to verify that they come from the same source.

This he does with the wholly reconstructed trunk and discovers that these two cervical vertebrae appear to fit together very well in all details. He repeats the operation with head Number 1, matching it to the partially reconstructed upper trunk, and with the same success.

But Konig cannot be content with this kind of facile observation. He must now verify these articulations with X rays, and in order to do this, he spends the next few hours dissecting out the cervical vertebrae from both heads, as well as both trunks, cleaning them by maceration in order to display the margin of the bones. After that, he is ready to connect both sets in complete anatomical series.

The work is laborious and painstaking. He must sit hunched over for a period of several hours under bright lights and wield his knives. But this is not labor for Konig. Time goes swiftly for him. It flies. The anxiety and tension of his day simply fall from him like old sour clothing, and as he works far into the night, he feels not the slightest fatigue, only a kind of strange, heady exhilaration.

Somewhere along about 2 a.m., he’s back upstairs in the radiographic room with two completely reconstructed cervical sections, taking X rays of each.

In a matter of minutes, he has taken photographs of both cervical series, front and back views, and while waiting for them to develop, has a cup of stale coffee in his office, smokes one of his dark, noisome cigars, and scribbles more figures into his requisition budget for the Comptroller.

A short time later he is back upstairs padding through the shadowy halls of the large empty building, back to the radiographic room for the developed X-ray pictures of both sections.

Scanning the gray-white ghostly pictures on the illuminated screen, there is a sense of victory. They confirm what he has known all along. Both sets of vertebrae fitted together give the general appearance of anatomical harmony, a harmony that becomes more and more pronounced to his trained eye.

“Marvelous,” he whispers to himself almost reverentially, studying the clear, beautiful articulations between these long links of vertebrae and discs. “Goddamn marvelous—what a goddamn marvelous miracle of engineering.”

With a small shock of amazement, he realizes that it’s nearly 3 a.m. Hastily he starts to scribble notes onto his pad preparatory to writing his longer, more elaborate protocol.

“…Radiograph 3 shows seven cervical vertebrae present—five in upper part removed from head Number 2—”

“Why can’t you be like other men? Come home at night for supper. She’s been asking for you all day—hasn’t seen you once this week—”

“—and two attached to the trunk—so that the bones of the upper vertebrae match the bones of the lower in anatomical detail, including bone texture, making them appear to be in perfect—”

“I’m not like other men .”

“—and proper sequence—that portions of intervertebral disc between 5th and 6th vertebrae exhibit cut anc torn surfaces with reciprocal features, making it highly probable that the portions adhering to the two vertebrae—”

“You know what she said today? She said ‘Daddy is dead.’ I overheard her telling her friends. She said you’d died and left us all alone .”

“—were part of the same intervertebral disc.”

“Go upstairs now and say good night to her.”

“Good night? For Christ sake, Ida, it’s two A.M.”

“I don’t care what time it is. She’s up. She’s waiting. Now you go up there and let her see you. For God’s sake go up there.”

“The plane of severance between head Number 2 and reconstructed trunk passes not quite cleanly through the junction of the larynx and trachea—”

“Paul—I want you to take that job in Rochester.”

“—between the cricoid cartilage of the larynx and the first cartilaginous ring of the trachea—”

“And sit on my ass for thirty years in some university teaching a lot of—”

“—both showing signs of damage, so that not only did cut surfaces fit each other exactly, but on each there was found an attached—”

“—lumpheads—nothing between their ears but suet?””

“Paul—we can’t go on this way—”

“—shaving of cartilage and a cut cartilaginous surface which fit in perfect reciprocal harmony—”

“What way? What’s wrong with this way?”

“Don’t you see it? Can’t you see for yourself? Nothing in common but an address, and a little child—”

“—and therefore provide conclusive corroboration of the opinion based on purely anatomical evidence—”

“Hello, Lolly. Good morning, honey. It’s Daddy. How are you, sweetheart?” that head Number 2 belongs to the same body as the wholly reconstructed trunk and head Number 1 belongs to the same body as the partially reconstructed upper trunk.”

“—and therefore by mutual consent, this Court concurs—for a period of trial separation, not to exceed one year—at which time such matters as disposition of property—parental custody—to be remanded to—”

Konig gazes up into the cavernous quiet of the radiography room, a gray-white picture of a complete vertebral series flickering ghostly patterns on the wall, ghost voices of his imagination ricocheting off the walls, receding now like a dying echo through the room. He rises stiffly, flicks off the scanning screen, and gathering up his developed X-ray plates, he starts back down for the mortuary.

Standing once again before the two reassembled bodies, he is now absolutely certain that he is dealing with only two bodies. What remains for him to determine is the approximate time and manner in which these two hapless creatures met their untimely ends. Already, for purposes of identification, he knows a great deal about the relative stature of both. Based upon even perfunctory examination of the skulls, he can say with fair certainty a number of things about the sex and age of each.

Holding head Number 1 up to the light, rotating it at a variety of angles, he sees a male skull, wonderfully harmonious, with steep forehead, narrow face, delicate lower jaw, and elegant but markedly prominent chin. The rounded eye sockets with thin margins are very large, the cranial sutures not yet occluded, and the third molar not yet erupted.

All that speaks of a very young man, Caucasian, no more than eighteen or nineteen, with fine, rather effeminate features. Konig has been right all along. The lacquered nails had not really fooled him. The mandible, too,-of this skull, while small, is somewhat heavier than a female mandible, and the dentition that still remains in the mouth is definitely masculine; the teeth in absolute volume and shape, with the first incisor and canine of about the same height, and the canine of the lower jaw markedly higher, all speak unequivocally of the male of the species.

The state of cloture in the sutures of head Number 2 seems already quite well advanced. From the state of the parietomastoid and the squamous sutures, Konig can read an age of between thirty and thirty-five, leaning more toward the former than the latter figure.

This skull, too, is male—ovoid, cheekbones well defined, forehead high, fairly broad, with heavily developed relief. The eye orbits are large, angular, with strongly sloping margins. From the nasal aperture, Konig can visualize a sharply projecting nose, possibly curved, the bridge of the nose high, the root narrow.

The arch of the lower jaw is narrow and prognathous, that of the upper, massive, suggesting a sharp, projecting chin accentuated by an astonishing degree of alveolar prognathism.

Using the well-known techniques of the Russian anthropologist Gerasimov, Konig can visualize a heavy, coarse, rather brutal face, slightly Slavic in cast.

What in God’s name ever brought these two men together? Konig now speculates. What fatal union brought them to those muddy crypts beside the river—the one with the fragile, patrician lineaments of an Egyptian princess, the other with the coarsely brutal aspect of a Tartar horseman.

It is then that his eye is inexplicably drawn to the spattered, crumpled newssheets in which the heads were wrapped. Limping across the room, he removes them from the carrying case and spreads them out on the table. For several moments he sits there in a chair reading them, his head tilted to the side, a little myopically, like an old man reading in a dim light When he looks up again after a while, slats of gray dawn are painted like bars against the mortuary windows. A small noise sounds behind him. He turns, and there, stooping in the doorway in a rumpled raincoat, neck stretched, oddly craning, like a large, dirty heron, regarding him silently, is Francis Haggard Konig watches the detective’s gaze wander to the tables where lie the two reconstructed corpses.

“Good morning,” Konig growls. “Say hello to Ferde and Rolfe.”