The Exile Kiss (26 page)

Dr. Besharati pulled off one pair of rubber gloves and put on another. "Ever watched an autopsy before?" he asked. He seemed to be in great spirits.
"No, sir," I said. I shuddered.
"You can step outside if you get squeamish." He picked up a long black hose and turned on a tap. "This is going to be a special case," he said, as he began playing the water all over Maxwell. "He's been in the ground for several weeks, so we won't be able to get quite as much information as we would with a fresh body."
The stench from the corpse was tremendous, and the water from the hose wasn't making any headway against it. I gagged. One of the assistants looked at me and laughed. "You think it's bad now," he said. "Wait until we open it up."
Dr. Besharati ignored him. "The official police report said that death came about as the result of being shot at close range by a medium-sized static pistol. If the range had been greater, the proper functioning of his nerves and muscles would've been interrupted for a brief time, and he'd have been rendered helpless. Apparently, though, he was shot close up, in the chest. That almost always leads to immediate cardiac arrest." While he was talking, he selected a large scalpel.
"Bismillah,"
he murmured, and made a Y-shaped incision from the shoulder joints to the sternum, and then down to the top of the groin.
I found myself looking away when the assistants lifted the skin and muscle tissue and sliced it free of the skele-ton. Then I heard them snapping the rib cage open with some large implement. After they lifted the rib cage out, though, the chest cavity looked like an illustration in an elementary biology book. It wasn't so bad. They were right, though: the stink increased almost unbearably. And it wasn't going to get better any time soon.
Dr. Besharati used the hose to wash down the corpse some more. He looked across at me. "The police report also said that it was your finger on the trigger of that static pistol."
I shook my head fiercely. "I wasn't even—"
He raised a hand. "I have nothing to do with enforce-ment or punishment here," he said. "Your guilt or inno-cence hasn't been proved in a court of law. I have no opinion one way or the other. But it seems to me that if you were guilty, you wouldn't be so anxious about the outcome of this autopsy."
I thought about that for a moment. "Are we likely to get much useful information?" I asked.
"Well, as I said, not as much as if he hadn't spent all that time in a box in the ground. For one thing, his blood has putrefied. It's gummy and black now, and almost use-less as far as forensic medicine is concerned. But in a way you're lucky he was a poor man. His family didn't have him embalmed. Maybe we'll be able to tell a thing or two about what happened."
He turned his attention back to the table. One assis-tant was beginning to lift the internal organs, one by one, out of the body cavity. Khalid Maxwell's shriveled eyes stared at me; his hair was stringy and straw-like, without luster or resiliency. His skin, too, had dried in the coffin. I think he'd been in his early thirties when he'd been mur-dered; now he wore the face of an eighty-year-old man. I experienced a peculiar floating sensation, as if I were only dreaming this.
The other assistant yawned and glanced at me. "Want to listen to some music?" he said. He reached behind himself and flicked on a cheap holosystem. It began to play the same goddamn Sikh propaganda song that Kandy danced to every time she took her turn on stage.
"No, please, thank you," I said. The assistant shrugged and turned the music off.
The other assistant snipped each internal organ loose, measured it, weighed it, and waited for Dr. Besharati to slice off a small piece, which was put in a vial and sealed. The rest of the viscera was just dumped in a growing pile on the table beside the body.
The medical examiner paid very special attention to the heart, however. "I subscribe to a theory," he said in a conversational tone, "that a charge from a static pistol creates a certain, unique pattern of disruption in the heart. Someday when this theory is generally accepted, we'll be able to identify the perpetrator's static pistol, just as a ballistics lab can identify bullets fired by the same projectile pistol." Now he was cutting the heart into nar-row slices, to be examined more thoroughly later.
I raised my eyebrows. "What would you see in this heart tissue?"
Dr. Besharati didn't look up. "A particular pattern of exploded and unexploded cells. I'm sure in my own mind that each static pistol leaves its own, unique signature pat-tern."
"But this isn't accepted as evidence yet?"
"Not yet, but someday soon, I hope. It will make my job—and the police's job, and the legal counselors'—a lot
easier.
Dr. Besharati straightened up and moved his shoul-ders. "My back hurts already," he said, frowning. "All right, I'm ready to do the skull."
An assistant made an incision from ear to ear along the back of the neck, just below the hairline. Then the other assistant pulled Maxwell's scalp grotesquely forward, until it fell down over the corpse's face. The medical examiner selected a small electric saw; when he turned it on, it filled the echoing chamber with a loud burring sound that set my teeth on edge. It got even worse when he began cutting in a circle around the top of the skull.
Dr. Besharati switched off the saw and lifted off the cap of bone, which he examined closely for cracks or other signs of foul play. He examined the brain, first in place, then he carefully lifted it out onto the table. He cut the brain in slices, just as he'd done the heart, and put one piece in another vial.
A few moments later, I realized that the autopsy was finished. I glanced at my watch; ninety minutes had sped by while I was wrapped in a kind of gruesome fascination. Dr. Besharati took his samples and left the Chamber of Horrors through an arched doorway.
I watched the assistants clean up. They took a plastic bag and scooped all the dissected organs into it, including the brain. They closed the bag with a twist-tie, pushed the whole thing into Maxwell's chest cavity, replaced the pieces of rib cage, and began sewing him back up with large, untidy stitches. They set the top of the skull in place, pulled Maxwell's scalp back over it, and stitched it back down at the base of the neck.
It seemed like such a mechanical, unfeeling way for a good man to end his existence. Of course it was mechani-cal and unfeeling; the three employees of the medical examiner's office would have twenty or more autopsies to perform before suppertime.
"You all right?" asked one of the assistants with a sly grin on his face. "Don't want to throw up or nothing?"
"I'm fine. What happens to him?" I pointed to Max-well's corpse.
"Back in the box, back in the ground before noon prayers. Don't worry about him. He never felt a thing."
"May the blessings of Allah be on him and peace," I said, and shivered again.
"Yeah," said the assistant, "what you say."
"Mr. Audran?" called Dr. Besharati. I turned around and saw him standing in the doorway. "Come back here and I'll show you what I was talking about."
I followed him into a high-ceilinged workroom. The lighting was a little better, but the air was, if anything, even worse. The walls of the room were entirely taken up with shelves, from floor to ceiling. On each twelve-inch shelf were a couple of thousand white plastic tubs, stacked four high and four deep, filling every available inch of volume. Dr. Besharati saw what I was looking at. "I wish we could get rid of them," he said sadly.
"What are they?" I asked.
"Specimens. By law, we're required to keep all the specimens we take for ten years. Like the heart and brain samples I removed from Maxwell. But because the form-aldehyde is a danger, the city won't let us burn them when the time is up. And the city won't permit us to bury them or flush them down the drain because of contamina-tion. We're about out of room here."
I looked around at the roomful of shelves. "What are you going to do?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe we'll have to start renting a refrigerated warehouse. It's up to the city, and the city's always telling me it doesn't have the money to fix up my office. I think they'd just rather forget that we're even down here."
"I'll mention it to the amir the next time I see him."
"Would you?" he said hopefully. "Anyway, take a look through this." He showed me an old microscope that was probably new when Dr. Besharati was first dreaming of going to medical school.
I peered through the binocular eyepieces. I saw some stained cells. That was all I could see. "What am I looking ^at?" I asked.
"A bit of Khalid Maxwell's muscle tissue. Do you see the pattern of disruption I mentioned?"
Well, I had no idea what the cells were supposed to look like, so I couldn't judge how they'd been changed by the jolt from the static pistol. "I'm afraid not," I said. "I'll have to take your word for it. But
you
see it, right? If you found another sample that had the same pattern, would you be willing to testify that the same gun had been used?"
"I'd be willing to testify," he said slowly, "but, as I said, it would carry no weight in court."
I looked at him again. "We've got something here," I said thoughtfully. "There's got to be a way to use it."
"Well," said Dr. Besharati, ushering me out through the Chamber of Horrors, to the outer waiting room, "I hope you find a way. I hope you clear your name. I'll give this job special attention, and I ought to have results for you later this evening. If there's anything else I can do, don't hesitate to get in touch with me. I'm here twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week."
I glanced back over my shoulder. "Seems like an awful lot of time to spend in these surroundings," I said.
He just shrugged. "Right now, I've got seven murder victims waiting to be examined, in addition to Khalid Maxwell. Even after all these years, I can't help wondering who these poor souls were, what kind of lives they had, what land of terrible stories led to their ending up on my tables. They're all people to me, Mr. Audran. People. Not stiffs. And they deserve the best that I can do for them. For some of them, I'm the only hope that justice will be done. I'm their last chance."
"Maybe," I said, "here at the very end, their lives can acquire some meaning. Maybe if you help identify the killers, the city can protect other people from them."
"Maybe," he said. He shook his head sadly. "Some-times justice is the most important thing in the world."
I thanked Dr. Besharati for all his help and left the building. I got the impression that he basically loved his work, and at the same time hated the conditions he had to work in. As I headed out of the Budayeen, it occurred to me that I might end up just like Khalid Maxwell someday, with my guts scattered about on a stainless steel table, with my heart and brain sliced up and stored away in some little white plastic tubs. I was glad I was on my way anywhere, even Hajjar's station house.
It wasn't far: through the eastern gate, across the Bou-levard il-Jameel, south a few blocks to the corner of Walid al-Akbar Street. I was forced to take an unplanned detour, though. Papa's long black car was parked against the curb. Tariq was standing on the sidewalk, as if at attention, wait-ing for me. He wasn't wearing a cheerful expression.
"Friedlander Bey would like to speak with you, Shaykh Maiid," he said. He held the rear door open, and I slid in. I expected Papa to be in the car, too, but I was all alone.
"Why didn't he send Kmuzu for me, Tariq?" I asked.
There was no answer as he slammed the door shut and walked around the car. He got behind the wheel, and we started moving through traffic. Instead of driving toward the house, though, Tariq was taking me through the east side of the city, through unfamiliar neighborhoods.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
No answer. Uh oh.
I sat back in the seat, wondering what was going on. Then I had a horrible, icy suspicion. I'd come this way once before, a long time ago. My suspicions mounted as we turned and twisted through the poverty-ridden eastern outskirts. The suppressor daddy was doing its best to 'damp out my fear, but my hands began to sweat anyway.
At last Tariq pulled into an asphalt driveway behind a pale green cinderblock motel. I recognized it at once. I recognized the small, hand-lettered MOTEL NO VA-CANCY sign. Tariq parked the car and opened the door for me. "Room 19," he said.
"I know," I said. "I remember the way."
One of the Stones That Speak was standing in the doorway to Room 19. He looked down at me; there was no expression on his face. I couldn't move the giant man, so I just waited until he decided what he was going to do with me. Finally he grunted and stepped aside, just far enough for me to squeeze by him.
Inside, the room looked the same. It hadn't been dec-orated since my last visit, when I first came to Friedlander Bey's attention, when I was first made a part of the old man's tangled schemes. The furnishings were worn and shabby, a European-style bed and bureau, a couple of chairs with rips in their upholstering. Papa sat at a folding card table set up in the middle of the room. Beside him stood the other Stone.
"My nephew," said Papa. His expression was grim. There was no love in his eyes.
"Hamdillah as-salaama, yaa Shaykh," I
said. "Praise God for your safety." I squinted a little, desperately trying to find an escape route from the room. There was none, of course.
"Allah yisattimak,"
he replied bluntly. He wished the blessings of Allah on me in a voice as empty of affection as a spent bullet.
As I knew they would, the Stones That Speak moved slowly, one to each side of me. I glanced at them, and then back at Papa. "What have I done, O Shaykh?" I whispered.
I felt the Stones' hands on my shoulders, squeezing, tightening, crushing. Only the pain-blocking daddy kept me from crying out.
Papa stood up behind the table. "I have prayed to Allah that you would change your ways, my nephew," he said. "You have made me unutterably sad." The light glinted off his eyes, and they were like chips of dirty ice. They didn't look sad at all.
"What do you mean?" I asked. I knew what he meant, all right.
The Stones kneaded my shoulders harder. The one on my left—Habib or Labib, I can never tell which—held my arm out from my side. He put one hand on my shoulder and began to turn the arm in its socket.
"He should be suffering more," said Friedlander Bey thoughtfully. "Remove the chips from his implants." The other Stone did as he was told, and yes, I began suffering more. I thought my arm was going to be wrenched loose. I let out one drawn-out groan.