City of the Dead

»64«

Paul Konig sits alone in his car on the edge of Chinatown. He is parked on the south side of Canal Street close to its extreme east end. The nose of the car is facing the huge illuminated towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. On the seat beside him is the Gladstone bag.

He has been sitting there now for well over a half-hour, having set out at approximately 1:30 from Riverdale. It is drizzly outside after a heavy April drenching and from time to time Konig wipes his windshield with a wad of Kleenex to keep it clear. The wide-arc street lamps poised like rows of sentinels along the street are all circled with white gauzy halations.

Once again Konig checks his wristwatch, following closely the progress of the minute hand creeping across the face of the dial.

If it was privacy Meacham wanted in order to negotiate their transaction, he certainly had it. At that hour of the morning there is no traffic, and except for the occasional Bowery wino huddling in a doorway or a Chinese waiter scurrying homeward, there is virtually no one in the street. Most of the restaurants have already dimmed their lights and closed. Only where Konig sits does a solitary red neon dragon, with lights that run up and down its silhouette, blink hypnotically in the mist-hung night.

At exactly 2:58 Konig turns the key in his ignition. The engine turns over and he slips the car into drive. Before edging out onto the causeway leading to the bridge, he glances back over his shoulder to make certain that he himself is not being followed by the police. Once he has satisfied himself on that score, he proceeds to roll out.

The cobbled road over the bridge is slick from the rain and he moves slowly, not so much as a matter of precaution, but as a matter of timing. He wants to arrive precisely at 3 a.m. With the exception of the big subway cars rattling along beside him on the bridge, there is nothing in sight.

Somewhere just past the midpoint of the bridge it occurs to Konig that his mouth is very dry, his palms moist. But aside from a few vague, unarticulated misgivings, he is sanguine about the outcome of events.

Approaching the Brooklyn end of the bridge, he wipes the misted windshield again with the balled Kleenex and squints through the glass. Up ahead he can see nothing, and at the prospect of that, his heart begins to sink.

Glancing quickly at the illuminated dial of his watch, he sees that it is now exactly 3 a.m. Konig rolls to a stop at the far end of the bridge, shuts down the ignition, turns off the lights, and waits. The cold drizzle drums forlornly on the roof and hood. There is nothing in sight and he is profoundly alone. It’s unthinkable that they would drag him out here at three in the morning and then, as a kind of test, or possibly just out of revenge, not show. Unthinkable. Or is it?

By 3:20 still no one has shown, and he has almost concluded that no one will. With a sense of sick, almost nauseous, grief, he is about to start up his car and drive away forever from that gray, cold, forsaken place. But just at that moment, almost spitefully, as if it had been watching all the while with a kind of vicious glee, a car rolls placidly around the corner, its headlights bearing down upon him, and moves like a white, phantomy object toward him out of the mist.

At a certain point, perhaps ten yards off, the car executes a graceful, unhurried U-turn, then backs around into the spot directly before him. Its motor and lights go off at once.

Scarcely breathing, Konig sits, frozen rigid, and waits. There is enough light from the bridge for him to see that the rear license plate of the car ahead has been covered over with a piece of burlap. He sits waiting there, watching the car, wondering if someone will get out, if he is to be given new instructions, if he should approach their car. Nothing seems to be happening—and still he waits.

Suddenly the lights of the white convertible switch on. He hears the engine turning over up ahead. Then the red blinker signals him right, and slowly, at last, they move out into the night.

It is a curious ride, aimless, meandering. Intentionally so. They turn here and there at random, stop and start for no discernible reason, all of it conducted at a speed of no more than twenty miles an hour. Clearly they are watching, and very closely, to see if any car attempts to follow Konig.

At that hour and in those narrow, huddled streets it would be impossible for anyone to follow without its becoming quickly apparent to the people in the car ahead. There is simply no one else out and driving at that hour. The cold, drizzly rain has even eliminated the occasional cruising cab.

From the bridge they move down Flatbush Avenue and out through Prospect Park. Somewhere in the middle of the park, on a road lined with woods, the white convertible stops. Konig rolls slowly up behind it and he too stops. Sitting there with his window open, listening to the rain dripping in the trees and his heart thumping in his chest, he waits.

In the next moment the white convertible moves out again, this time driving out of the park and onto Ocean Parkway. The stopping and starting business goes on exasperatingly—once at Ditmas Avenue and several times on Kings Highway.

At least a half-dozen times the white convertible swerves sharply, inexplicably, into residential blocks, winding slowly down them between large apartment buildings where people sleep unknowing and uncaring. Thus, traveling a bewildering route, the car ahead winds, turns, spins around on itself, while Konig is obliged to follow.

Several times during those interminable pauses, while the car up ahead merely sits there, its taillights glowing, malevolent and taunting, Konig is certain that this is the place. Now is the time. Any moment now they’ll signal him to pull alongside and pass the money. But no. Instead they start up again, driving back onto Ocean Parkway, moving toward Shore Parkway, the awful winding, zigzagging, spinning about, resuming itself. Are they moving toward the water? They don’t get on the Shore Parkway. Instead they go under the parkway, past Emmons Avenue, and out toward Coney Island.

It’s approaching 4 a.m. now and still they’ve made no signal to him, no gesture. It is still this exasperating stop-and-start business, then sit and wait in the red taillight glow a few feet behind.

It’s too early in the season for the amusement park to have opened, and they ride now parallel to the boardwalk in the shadow of those huge, unearthly, unattended structures—the Roller Coaster, the Whip, the Cyclone, the Parachute Jump, past the weirdly baroque architecture of the Steeplechase. All seem to be waiting there for some cosmic ringmaster to throw the switch. And then the lights going up, the music starting, and once again all the wild tumult of motion—swaying, dipping, lurching, whirling, rattling, roaring through the gaudy night.

The white convertible turns slowly into one of the fairground’s parking lots. It is deserted, and all around it are the boarded-up windows of concessionaires—frankfurter and pizza stands, custard and corn-on-the-cob joints. The convertible rolls to a stop now, motor off, lights out, and waits. They’re right at the water’s edge. The mist is thicker here. Foghorns boom dolefully far out to sea. The air is redolent of salt and rotting seaweed. Sitting by the open window, the chill night air on his face, Konig can hear the tolling of a buoy not far off shore.

In the dim light of his dashboard, he checks his clock—4:15 a.m. He pats the Gladstone bag beside him and waits.

Shortly he hears the motor of the convertible start up again, and with a sinking heart, he prepares to roll out once more. But this time something is different—a white-gloved hand protruding from the front right-hand window is waving him forward.

Eager to comply, Konig jerks and lurches his car forward, the white hand signaling him to stop directly parallel to it. He does so, shuddering to a halt directly opposite an open window.

It is pitch-dark in the parking lot, and in that mist-thick darkness he cannot see the occupants of the car, or even tell how many there are. He knows there are several, but all there is between him and them is that disembodied white-gloved hand thrust out toward him, waiting patiently and immobile.

Clumsily but without hesitation, he tugs the Gladstone bag across the seat, hoists it through the window and passes it anxiously to that waiting white hand. In all of that transaction not a word passes.

In the next moment the bag and the hand withdraw into the pitchy darkness of the convertible, the car’s motor guns, and it roars off into the night, its headlights still extinguished. Far up ahead, Konig can hear its tires squeal around a corner, then nothing more.

He is all alone now in the parking lot, by himself there at the water’s edge, the mist licking his windshield and the foghorns booming and the harbor buoys tolling like poor lost, stricken creatures far out to sea.

Somewhere near 5 a.m. Konig is driving back to Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge. The sky is still dark and a pale moon hangs low in the west, just above the jagged skyline of the sleeping city.

The car slides easily now between the tall, mist-hung towers, the tires singing on the slick cobbles. Spent, but curiously exhilarated, Konig drives. He has no way of knowing that only five minutes before, Frank Haggard had passed over that same bridge at a high speed, a crumpled sheet of paper with the scribbled address he’d finally extracted from Klejewski in his pocket, and two patrol cars from the 23rd Precinct winging along behind him.

Going home now to Riverdale is unthinkable. And, as Meacham said, Lolly would not be released until twenty-four hours after the payoff, presumably giving him plenty of time to get far out of the state. The only place Konig could go now, even at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning, is his office. After all, it is the only refuge, the only solace, he’s known for nearly forty years.

Ten minutes or so up the FDR Drive, exiting at 23rd Street, driving up First Avenue to 30th Street, and he’s there. Parking his car in the private lot in the back, he walks around the building and through the front gate, past the startled, drowsy night man still on duty there.

Shortly he’s at his desk, coffee boiling in a beaker over the Bunsen burner, and a cigar already smoking in the littered ashtray on his desk. He busies himself there, making a concentrated effort to think neither of the night he’s just spent nor of the past five months. Only the future and Lolly and getting “to know each other again.” Isn’t that what the Mayor said? Well, he would make up now for lost time. He would make up for a lot of things.

Whistling softly to himself, he goes about watering his plants, which have been sadly ignored—the poor drooping Dracaenas and the philodendrons, the spider plants and various succulents, looking ragged and parched. Only the glorious wandering Jew flourishes there in the window.

Then, with a sense of relief, he is once again settled at his desk, the good familiar feel of wood and old, cracked leather, the not unpleasant smell of cigar smoke and formalin wafting all about him.

There, on top if everything, lies a large, brown manila envelope with a Fort Bragg imprint. In it he finds the complete medical and dental records of Browder and Ussery. Included with the records and clipped to each are two standard military ID photographs. He leans back in his chair now and studies them.

Browder is precisely as Konig imagined him from his skull conformation—a tough, craggy face with a rather brutal Slavic cast to it. The closely cropped hair, worn GI fashion, and the heavy, prognathic jaw that he’d seen in the skull all tend to heighten the rather brutal mien. But the eyes are not brutal at all; indeed, there’s something even shy and rather vulnerable in them.

Ussery, on the other hand, comes as a complete surprise to him. Even something of a shock. Recalling the hand with the luridly lacquered nails, Konig had naturally expected something fey and effeminate. But what he sees before him now takes his breath away. It is a strikingly beautiful face—small, delicate bones, large, oddly haunted eyes—a kind of male Nefertiti. A rare orchid, exquisite, ephemeral, will-o’-the-wispish. There is, too, something about it unspeakably sad. Perhaps it is the sense of doom that it conveys.

Included is a letter from Colonel McCormick saying that the Army had notified the next of kin. Browder had a wife from whom he was separated. She had already instructed them that the remains were to be sent to her for burial. Ussery’s people, however, were Southern Baptist farmers—pious, hardworking, churchgoing. They were mortified at the scandal and wanted no part of the boy’s remains.

Putting the records aside, Konig is now ready to turn to the stack of unopened mail before him. Letters from clinics, foundations, universities, and hospitals; correspondence from colleagues, old classmates practicing all over the world. Each seeking some favor, petitioning advice, questioning him on aspects of cardiovascular diseases, central nervous system injuries, narcotic deaths, sudden unexplained natural death.

A Chief of Police in Philadelphia wanted ballistics advice in the murder of an old grocer there. A coroner in Cincinnati queried him on a complex toxicological problem. A district attorney in Coos County, New Hampshire, petitioned his services as an expert witness in a crime of passion. A physician in Rangoon, Burma, sought his guidance in establishing a department of forensic medicine at the university there.

Then came the letters of a more personal nature—a grieving mother, a bereft father. These letters, though the details differ widely, are always the same. The same strain of grief and puzzlement runs through them. Written by good, often simple, people who’d been hurt and wanted to know why. Often he couldn’t tell them. The mystery was as deep to him as it was to them. But when he had answers, or solace, he gave them. A woman in Topeka had just lost her infant child as a result of crib death She had read somewhere that he was doing research in the subject and wanted to know why this had happened to her child and if somehow she was responsible. A father in Wilmington thanked him for concluding that the death of his daughter was due to natural causes and not suicide. He and his wife were Catholics, he explained, and the question of suicide was unbearable to them.

“Dear Paul,” wrote an old classmate practicing in Spokane, “Here’s a lulu for you—”

Konig laughs out loud, recalling suddenly a bright, boyish face belonging to a young man who used to sit behind him in Bahnhoff’s pathology lectures.

When he looks up again it is half-past six and the first gray, sooty fingers of dawn streak the sky outside his office windows. He is just about to resume his reading when the phone rings. He sits watching it impassively, as if he’d never seen such a thing before. It rings again, and in the large, empty building, at that hour, it has a ghostly and foreboding sound.

First he’s annoyed, then apprehensive. Who could be calling him there at such an hour? Who would even know he was there? Someone who’d tried to reach him in Riverdale and found him not at home.

The phone rings again, shrill, insistent, echoing through the empty corridors of the building. Reaching for it, he pulls his hand back. It rings once more. Suddenly he’s aware of sweat on his forehead. His body feels clammy beneath his clothing.

Finally he picks up the receiver, but he doesn’t bring it immediately to his ear. Instead he holds it at arm’s length, only a few inches off the cradle, hearing then a man’s voice, very far off, repeating the word “Hello” over and over again.

“Hello,” Konig murmurs hesitantly into the phone.

“Hello.”

A pause follows, portentous and clumsy, in which both parties sit there listening to each other breath.

“Paul, it’s me.”

“Where are you?” Konig snaps, his heart starting to sink.

“Sheepshead Bay,” Haggard says gruffly. “I got Meacham—” Another interminable pause. “But I’m afraid—”

Konig doesn’t actually hear the rest of it but he knows what the detective is saying.

For a long time, it seems, neither man speaks. Konig merely sits there looking at the pile of opened letters on his desk, feeling nothing. It’s as if someone had just spoken to him in some old, lost tongue. It is information he cannot begin to comprehend. Then finally, clearing his throat, he speaks. “When?”

“Just before we got there. They waited for your bag of cash to arrive. Then they did it. Had no intention of ever freeing her. They were getting ready to dump her in the bay when we busted in.”

Nodding his head ever so slightly, Konig hunches over his desk while Haggard waits wordless at the other end for him to react. But there’s no reaction. No shrieks. No groans. Not even a choice obscenity hurled at the gods. “Bring her in” is all he can say. “Bring her in now.”