The Cobra Event (15 page)

She opened the bag. It contained a black hooded sweatshirt, balled up in a lump, and a roll of silver duct tape. There was also a clear plastic bag. It contained two Hohner harmonicas.

“Harmonica Man lived here,” she said.

THE TRANSIT POLICE
brought the body out in a bag, working with city mortuary drivers. Austen left instructions for them to be especially careful about taking universal biohazard precautions with the body, and she asked that it be placed in a double pouch. She then called Nathanson at his office.

“You can do the autopsy tomorrow,” Nathanson said. “The guy’s so putrefied, you could wait until Monday, I think.”

“I’d like to do it right now.”

“It’s Friday. It’s rush hour,” Nathanson said, sighing, but he asked Glenn Dudley to stay while Austen did the autopsy. She couldn’t sign the death certificate.

Annoyed, Dudley hurried the body into the X-ray room and took dental X-rays. They were alone in the Pit, except for Kly, who had stayed to help them. All the other tables were empty.

They cut Lem’s clothing away, and found that rats had eaten his genitalia.

“They go for that first,” Dudley remarked.

There was what looked like a maggot infestation in his left eye socket. Austen took light breaths, barely able to draw air into her lungs. The smell was so thick it had a greasy quality. She had to force her hands to make the Y incision to open the body.

Dudley stood to one side with his arms folded.

She was cutting now, and as her scalpel crossed the belly, there was a hiss of escaping gas. The abdominal fat had liquefied. It wept oil and stank.

“Oh,” Austen said. She backed away.

“You work around it, Austen,” Dudley said.

Dudley removed the skin hanging from Lem’s right hand. It came off easily. He put his rubber-gloved hand inside the skin glove, his fingers sliding up inside Lem’s finger-skins. The finger-skins still had fingerprints. Dudley inked the fingertips and rolled a set on a fingerprint pad. She noticed that Dudley’s hands were trembling inside Lem’s skin. She wondered if Dudley had a drinking problem.

The internal organs were a foul stew. Austen took samples and dropped them into the stock jar. She inspected the mouth carefully. It seemed to be marked with dark spots, possibly blisters, but it was hard to tell.

Dudley said, “When you look at that meat in a microscope you won’t see anything.” The cells had been dead a long time, and they would have ruptured and would appear, at best, like ghosts.

The smell filled the Pit and got out under the doors into the morgue area, where two attendants on the night shift noticed. “They’re doing a mean one in there,” one of them remarked.

Island

SATURDAY MORNING

THE STATEN ISLAND FERRY
left South Ferry Terminal at the tip of lower Manhattan and rumbled across Upper New York Bay, churning through water the color of pavement. It was a gray, misty Saturday morning. Alice Austen stood outside on the forward deck, behind a folding rail, watching Governors Island pass on the left, a low expanse of trees and brick buildings. The trees on Governors Island were breaking bud, bursting into an indistinct bloom, a haze of russet and pale green flowers. Yellow splashes of color suggested to her that the forsythia was in flower. The wind threw her hair around. She looked the other way, at the Statue of Liberty passing in the mist. There weren’t many people on the ferry. The deck trembled and bounced under her feet. Delicate small terns with black heads flipped and pirouetted over the water, and a bell buoy passed the boat, clanging.

The boat docked at the ferry terminal at St. George, on the northern tip of Staten Island. It was a shorefront of abandoned piers that stretched into the bay. Austen walked through the terminal building, lugging her knapsack, with its weight of computer and notebook, consulting a map. She found the platform of the Staten Island Rapid Transit train, and took a train to Stapleton, then walked inland until she came to Bay Street. She looked left and right, and found a Victorian house with yellow aluminum siding. A sign on the ground floor said “Island Antiques.” The house was next to a dog-grooming salon. A smell of salt air filled the neighborhood.

Austen found an entryway with a buzzer button, and she pushed it.

Long pause. “Who is it?”

“It’s Dr. Alice Austen. We spoke on the phone.”

The buzzer sounded and the lock was released. Austen climbed up a flight of stairs to another door on a landing.

“Walk in,” a voice croaked.

When Austen opened the door a smell of cats hit her.

Sitting in a recliner, facing a plate-glass window with a view of warehouses and the bay beyond, was a heavy, wrinkled woman about eighty years old. She was wearing a nightgown with a bathrobe, and slippers. Her ankles were thick, puffy, blue with edema. “I can’t walk good. You have to come over here.”

It was Mrs. Helen Zecker, the mother of the decedent.

“I’m working with the City of New York,” Austen said. “We are trying to find out what happened to your daughter, Penny. We are concerned it might be an infectious disease. We’re trying to trace it.”

There was a long pause. Mrs. Zecker shifted her bulk and looked at Austen with terrified eyes. “It got my Penny.”

“What did?”

“The monster thing I kept tellin’ the doctors about! They wouldn’t listen to me.” She began to cry.

Austen sat down on a chair next to her.

“It got my Penny. It’ll get me, next.” She waved her hand in a gesture that seemed to say, I’m finished with you.

“May I ask you some questions?”

Helen Zecker rolled around in the chair and looked at Austen with a tear-streaked face. “You’d be a darling and feed the cats.”

The kitchen was filthy and disordered. The moment Austen opened a can of food, four cats came hurrying in. She filled two teacup saucers with chopped chicken liver, and the cats crowded around them. She rinsed out the cats’ water dish and refilled it.

Back in the living room, she said, “I’m interested in Penny’s activities in the time before she died. Can you help me?”

“It got her. That’s all I know. It got her.”

“Let’s try to figure out what it is that got her.”

“There’s all these things happening and they never tell us anything!”

Mrs. Zecker’s memory of recent days was not good. Her memory of her earlier years was very good. “I grew up in this house,” she said. “It was nice before the city went to hell. On New Year’s Eve, Papa and Mama, they’d take us up to the attic.” She pointed to the ceiling. “Papa would open the window up there. It was so cold. We’d have blankets around us.”

“About your daughter, Penny—”

“You could smell the smoke from the freighters coming in the window. On New Year’s Eve you’d hear the sailors singing on the ships. Right at midnight, Papa would hold up his hand and he’d say, ‘Quiet! Listen!’ And we’d be quiet. And we’d listen. And it would start. Over there….”

Austen followed her gaze, to where the silver-gray towers of Manhattan seemed to float in the distance.

“It was a roar like the wind,” she said. “It went on and on.” It was the sound of Manhattan on New Year’s Eve. “I don’t hear it anymore.”

Austen sat down on a chair next to her. She touched Mrs. Zecker’s hand. “Can you remember? Did Penny go anywhere, do anything unusual? Anything you can remember?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know…”

“Where did she buy the things for the shop?” Austen asked.

“All over. I don’t know. She always paid the taxes. Once she went to Atlantic City. That was a bus tour…. My Penny is gone.”

“Do you mind if I look at the shop?”

“I can’t go with you.”

“That’s all right.”

Mrs. Zecker pulled a handle on the side of her lounge chair. The back came forward, raising her up. She put her feet on the floor and grunted. Austen took her by the hands and helped her up, and she shuffled across the room, her slippers dragging. She picked up a coffee cup from a bookshelf, and tipped it over. A key fell out.

Austen went down the stairs, out to the sidewalk, and let herself in through the front door of Island Antiques. She switched on a fluorescent light. It was chilly in the room; the heat was off. The walls were painted lemon yellow, and there was dingy lace trimming around a plate-glass window. A number of glass cases and cabinets displayed cheap-looking “antiques.” It was really a thrift shop. There was a rack of musty women’s dresses, and a metal desk with the dried remains of a sandwich sitting on a piece of waxed paper. Next to it was a glass ashtray full of cigarette butts. Penny Zecker had been a heavy smoker. There were bookshelves holding forgotten paperback best-sellers. There was an oak display case with items of costume jewelry in it. On the display case was a sign: “Case not for sale. Don’t even
ask
.” There was a caned rocking chair selling for seventy-five dollars, which seemed a high price, and a scuffed chest made of stained pine selling for forty-five dollars. She opened the chest. Inside was a stack of
National Geographic
s.

This was looking good. Somewhere in this room was a clue. Penny Zecker was a packrat. Like Kate Moran. There was a similarity in their behavior. And they are now dead.

She began making photographs with her electronic camera.

Austen went through the room carefully. There were trays and boxes of kitchen tools. A meat grinder. There were children’s toys made of plastic, and a veneered coffee table for sale. A nice-looking brass ship’s lamp, for thirty dollars. A Sylvester the Cat jelly-jar drinking glass. A chrome samovar, a lobster buoy. On the walls there were reproductions of snow scenes in frames, everything for sale.

Something was nagging at her. She opened the desk drawer. There were some file folders. She pulled them out, and found a folder marked “Profits.” In it was a list, handwritten, on lined paper. The list was Penny’s way of keeping track of her costs and profits as she bought and sold junk.

There were dates on the sheet, and names. Austen scanned the sheet quickly: “4/18—small chair—$59 cost $5.” It looked as if Penny had bought a chair for five dollars and had sold it to someone for fifty-nine dollars. Penny Zecker was no fool. She had been keeping herself and her mother alive with her business.

Penny seemed a little obsessive about the entries, but this was her means of survival.

4/18—6 Ave. flea—black dress—woman—$32 cost $0 found garbg.

4/18—sharp bone knife—Mr. ? Clow—$18 cost $1

4/19—6 Ave. flea—box (joke)—$6 traded for postcards

4/19—jewel pin (green)—$22 bot $5

She photographed the page.

Austen said good-bye to Mrs. Zecker and promised to let her know immediately if anything further was learned about the cause of the death of her daughter.

Back on the ferry she stood at the rear deck, in the open air, looking over Bayonne and down the throat of the Kill Van Kull. Then she walked to the bow of the boat, and watched the stone crystals of Wall Street approach. The clouds were beginning to break apart, revealing a brownish blue on the face of the sky over the city. The city was looking sick, but there was no diagnosis.

She decided to call Walter Mellis at the C.D.C. In the ship’s passenger cabin she took out her cell phone and punched up Mellis’s home number. The phone beeped at her. The battery had drained.

“Damn,” she whispered.

Feeling more alone than ever, out of contact with the C.D.C., she put the phone in her knapsack and leaned back in her seat. She was exhausted. The ferry ride took almost half an hour, giving her time to think. Austen felt that somewhere in her data there existed a hidden door. If and when she found it, it would lead into a maze of biological systems and relationships, to the inner workings of nature as it played out its billion-year games with the human species.

She opened her laptop computer and started it up. By now she had three memory cards full of images taken with the electronic camera. She slid the memory cards into the computer, one by one, reviewing all the photographs on the computer screen.

Two of the four cases had been people who collect things, namely Kate Moran and Penny Zecker. What about Harmonica Man? He had been a collector, too. He had collected money in his cup, money that had passed through many hands. She didn’t know much about Lem.

Hitting keys on her laptop computer, she brought up the images of Kate Moran’s art collection. Some were close-ups. There was a geode of crystals, she remembered that. Austen hit a key on her laptop and zoomed the image until it was a checkerboard of pixels. She couldn’t see anything. Rocks didn’t carry diseases. She zoomed on the image of the box that held the little beetle with the green eyes. No. The image of the dollhouse. Anything unusual in it? She zoomed images of the boxes Kate had collected. A tin box. What was inside it?

She had not taken any photographs of Harmonica Man’s things. She and Kly had been in a hurry to get out of the tunnel.

The ledger. Zecker’s ledger. She called up the images, and studied the pages. Something caught her eye, something brushed her memory: