Book 2—Dead Corpse
Dear Stan,
Good luck with the new book.
All best,
ED McBAIN
BAMM! BAMM! Two shots in rapid succession, at close range, like in an American film. The first bullet drilled a tunnel right in the middle of her forehead and snot and slime spat from the beautifully rounded bullet hole, as if it were sperm. Her glass eye jumped out of its socket and tumbled in the grass. The second bullet entered her body in between to ribs, close to the heart and some of the main arteries.
‘Laura?’ he said. ‘Laura?’
A dead eye looked into the muzzle of his gun.
Djeeezus, he thought.
She spun around and smacked in a flowerbed.
‘Sleep well, sweetheart.’
He staggered and fired again and again and again.
No reply came from her mouth.
‘Shut up now,’ he hissed between gritted teeth.
BAMM! BAMM! BAMM!
He kept shooting, above her left ear, in her neck, her shoulder, three bullets per second, a ballet of bullets as gracious as a silent movie, until the chamber was empty and his pistol stalled. She was on her back under a lime tree, between the flowering puppies in the glimmering shine of a street lamp, red foam on her lips and black blood sprouting like a fountain from the holes in her body. She wore a Rolex. The glass was splintered and the diamonds were dispersed all over the parkland and sparkled in the moonshine. Dammit, dammit, she’s dead, he groaned, what did I do? Two lives down the drain. He laughed nervously and shrugged his shoulders. Her white bathrobe was drenched in blood. No one has seen anything, he thought, perhaps no one has heard anything. In the twilight, he hastily collected the cartridge cases and made his way in the dense shrubs under the lime trees and the weeping willows.
Djeeezus.
Stay calm now, he thought, calm now.
Try to control your breath.
Inhale deeply.
In, out. In, out.
Sandra was sitting on a mattress, cross-legged, naked, and reading an Ed McBain novel. The soft sweet smell of a balmy summer evening drifted through the open window. In one corner of her room, a life-size doll was dressed in the flimsy frock she wore the night she had been crowned the most beautiful girl in the country and given the honorary title of Miss Belgium, some years ago. On the ground floor, a Japanese musician practiced her scales and Strauss waltzed through the house. Midnight almost. The sky was dotted with stars. The telephone rang and Sandra picked up the phone.
‘Sven?’ she asked.
No answer.
‘Is it you, Sven?’
‘Bare breasts,’ a strange voice said. ‘I can smell bare b-b-b-breasts.’
Sandra pulled a sheet over her breasts. There was also a pink cover on the bed. The sheet was dotted with sperm stains.
‘You’re not wearing your panties today, Sandra. You’re stark na-na-naked. Naughty girl!’
She turned her head left and right, frightened and wide-eyed.
‘I can see everything, Sandra, and I know everything.’
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Why do you shave your pubic hair, Sandra?’
‘I always do. I like it that way.’
‘Shaven?’
‘Yes, shaven. Smooth. A smooth pussy.’
‘Why?’
‘Otherwise it’s so… sweaty. All that hair.’
‘What a surprise!’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. And I find it…strange.’
‘Strange? Why strange?’
‘I know no other girl that shaves her pussy.’
‘Now you know. You know me.’ Startled by her own words, she gasped for breath. ‘Who are you? Do I know you?’
‘Time will learn, Sandra.’
I don’t know him, she thought, I don’t know who he is, haven’t got a clue. Her heart pounded. She couldn’t identify his voice. Never heard before. She shivered and her brow was beaded with sweat and perspiration.
‘One minute still, Sandra. Sixty seconds.’
‘Why? What will happen?’
He laughed. ‘Fifty… forty… thirty…’
‘Who are you?’ she shouted in the telephone. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘Ten seconds, Sandra. Seven, six, fucking five,...’
Tongues of flame shot from the car park opposite the house and the tiny yellow Fiat that had been Sandra’s bonus as Miss Belgium exploded in a blazing ball of fire and a thousand shattered, burning pieces illuminated the night sky like a festive display of fireworks.
‘Did you hear that, Sandra? Bye-bye, Sandra, I’ll call you if I need you. I’m blowing you a kiss, Sandra. On your smooth pu-pu-pu-pussy.’
Midnight on the stroke of the clock.
‘Mirror mirror on the wall, who has the fairest pu-pu-pu-pussy of them all…,’ the strange voice hummed into the telephone.
Thirteen bullets, one dead body, no witnesses. A corpse floating in the hot, stinking sewers underneath the city. A man jumped from the twenty-fifth floor of the oldest skyscraper in Europe. Or didn’t he jump and therefore wasn’t it a suicide at all? A homoerotic stabbing in the Jewish park. Long hours ahead for the police detectives puzzling over the scant evidence. In his interrogation room, the Chief Constable picked his nose and studied forensic reports. There are no easy murders, as every law enforcement officer knows, though some are far easier to solve than others. Because the killer had been careless. Perhaps he dropped a stitch. Or desperately wanted to get caught. Still, no two killings are the same. The crime squad was overbooked and overworked. Enough! the Chief Constable thought. Stop the world, I want to get off! But death, like life, is a mystery and mysteries don’t take an understaffed crime squad or cancelled meetings or redundancies into account. The detectives donned their bullet proof vests. Sofie Simoens cocked her service revolver. ‘I’m terribly sorry, I feel naked without my cannon,’ she said. The only female detective on the squad wore tight jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots.
The morgue was situated in the middle of the Schoonselhof cemetery, next to a pond with goose and black swan and eighteen different kinds of duck. On all four sides, the modern, white-painted building was surrounded with tall cypress trees, known to be the symbol of mourning in Christian mythology. Over the flat roof towered a blackened chimney, billowing clouds of sulphury smoke. The chimney gave the mortuary the despicable look of an Auschwitz crematorium. As usual, an eerie calm reigned inside the overheated rooms where pathologists and mortuary technicians had a day job in determining the cause and manner of death of crime victims. A medical examiner in green Teflon coveralls unlocked a steel door that gave access to a giant refrigerator known as ‘a cooler’ and pulled a steel trolley out of one of twelve individual fridge boxes. There was a grey body bag on the trolley.
Dead corpses are bundled together in coolers, the Chief Constable thought. I can accept that. What’s the alternative? If not, they’re buried deep down in the earth and if they’re not dumped and deep-rooted in the earth, they’re microwaved to dust and ashes. Either way, they’re dead and gone. A dead corpse doesn’t have a choice. Life is cruel and, to be honest, death is even worse.
A mortuary technician unzipped the bag.
Under half-closed lids, the man’s eyeballs had been rotting away. His cheek were sunken and his lips curled back in a wry smile. A cellulose cushion between his chin and his pronounced Adam’s apple prevented his mouth from falling open. Both nostrils were stuffed with yellowed cotton balls drenched in formaldehyde.
‘To eliminate the stench of rot. It radiates from the entrails once a body starts decomposing,’ the pathologist said.
Does he try to apologize for the stink of death and putrefaction that permeates this building? the Chief Constable wondered.
Auschwitz wasn’t a fairy-tale either.
In the harsh glare of the neon lamps, overwhelmed by the strange mixture of repulse and revolt he always felt whenever he faced a stiff body that had violently been snatched from the world of the living, the Chief Constable looked at the dead man while the mortuary technician lifted the head and made an incision from ear to ear along the hairline, using a stainless steel scalpel that looked deceptively like a simple paper cutter. He pulled the skin over the scalp and turned it inside out, as if it were a glove or a swimming cap. Using both hands, for comfort and strength, he pried the roof from the skull. It made a sucking, plopping sound. A colourless liquid slowly seeped on the chopping bench. The technician wriggled his fingers in the opened box of the skull, lifted the brain from the dead man’s head and dropped it on a pair of butcher’s scales.
1.5 kilograms.
Surprisingly, the doctor and his technicians wore not one but two sets of transparent vinyl gloves on each hand.
Why would that be?
‘Homo homini lupus,’ the pathologist said. ‘That’s Latin. Man is a wolf to man. Two bloody murders and not a soul in the world who lifts an eye. But when a rhino or a monkey dies in the Zoo, ostensibly of old age, people start snivelling and crying their eyes out. Are you familiar with the secrets of human anatomy, Chief Constable?’
‘Hardly.’
‘I won’t blame you.’
The mortuary technician scooped some more blubber from the skull. ‘No knots or lumps that are a typical by-product of Alzheimer’s disease,’ he said. ‘No small holes in the body tissue that make the nervous system look like a sponge. In other words, no visible injuries in the hardware. The software wasn’t damaged either. This man was bound to live another twenty years. What a pity his neck and vertebra wore broken.’
The pathologist pried the dead man’s mouth wide open and stuck his index finger in his throat. ‘See this?’ he asked. ‘One: black tongue. Two: a horizontal ridge on his few remaining teeth. Clear signs of stress. He must have suffered a lot in life.’
Who hasn’t? the Chief Constable thought and shrugged.
Anyway, I have.
The pathologist lovingly caressed the old man’s taut skin. It had a pasty, blanched colour, which isn’t a colour at all, like mould on dough sprinkled with wheat flour, and its texture had the feel of dried paper. Although half of the skull was missing, the body on the workbench looked peaceful and relaxed. ‘There certainly is beauty in death,’ the pathologist said contentedly. ‘Did you know, Chief Constable, that five centuries ago, Andreas Vesalius performed the first public autopsy in a packed church in Padova, in Italy? Scaffolds were erected and five hundred seats were sold out weeks in advance. Only a few days ago, my mother-in-law came to see me at work. She really enjoyed it. It was so beautiful, she said. I sliced the belly of an old woman and shit and excrement spurted from her bowels.’
‘Do you dream of dead bodies, doctor?’ the Chief Constable asked.
‘I’ve got something better to do at night.’
The Chief Constable sighed and looked at his watch.
Four in the afternoon.
Please, doctor, hurry up, he thought.
I haven’t got all day.
‘How long does an autopsy take?’ he asked nervously.
‘Three hours, on a good day.’
The mortuary assistant lifted the dead man’s brain from the scales. ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ he yelled and quickly dropped the brain in a bucket containing formaldehyde diluted in a fifty-fifty solution of alcohol and tap water.
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