which he only vaguely understood-and used the empty threat of dismissal to force the two mortuary attendants, his only assistants, to help him lift and maneuver all three bodies to strip the clothes away intact.
Having done that, he left the naked body on the slab to go through each item of clothing, stopping painstakingly to itemize by hand each article he found. From the Englishman, in total, there was twenty British sterling, in notes and ten coins; 100 German war-script marks and $43, both currencies all in notes; a gold watch with a worn leather strap, the hands stopped at 12:43; a gold cigarette case containing six American Camel cigarettes and engraved with an inscription in Roman lettering that Novikov could not understand; a cigarette lighter, uninscribed; four keys, one designated by a twist of red cotton around its shank; a British-made Parker fountain pen, the ink inside still frozen; and a tie pin in the shape of a bayonet. The pin was still in a plain, army- issue tie, but the tie itself was snapped, close to the neck.
The clothes consisted of brown leather shoes, showing little sign of wear; army-issue cotton socks; cotton singlet vest with half-thigh-length underpants; starch-collared khaki shirt, the top four buttons undone, with two missing but already found lodged at the waist during the undressing; and a well-tailored khaki officer’s uniform, around the jacket of which there was what Novikov described in his notes as a leather harness, a belt encircling the waist of the jacket, which continued to midthigh, with another leather strap looped over the man’s right shoulder to be joined, front and back, to the waist belt at the left. There was brass shoulder insignia, which Novikov noted, although he was not able to identify the denoted rank. All the clothes were so perfectly preserved that Novikov thought that with cleaning-the brass buttons and leather polished-everything would have been wearable again.
The body was that of a blond-haired, well-nourished male Caucasian, approximately thirty years old. From its condition the man could have died that day. Novikov concentrated upon the obvious cause of death. At least half the cranial casing had been lost, a considerable amount driven into the brain pulp. It was easier than Novikovexpected to extract the single bullet, which had entered in a downward trajectory and lodged at the Atlas vertebra at the spinal tip. The pathologist had no forensic ballistic knowledge or experience, but the bullet looked quite large and appeared reasonably intact. There were minor facial abrasions, dark with after-death lividity, and there was a lividity burn around at the rear of the neck. Apart from that there was no body wound. The wrists and ankles were bruised, predeath, indicating the man had been tightly bound.
He sawed into the sternum, continuing the chest opening to the man’s pelvis, and braced the rib cage apart. Novikov extensively photographed the exposed organs before examining each intently. None looked enlarged or diseased. Finally, still working downward, he extracted and weighed the heart, aorta, both lungs, the thymus, stomach, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, spleen, both kidneys, both adrenaline glands, bladder, prostate and urethra. Having done that, he returned to the skull and removed, weighed and preserved what remained of the cerebrum and cerebellum, inserting a pencil to show the trajectory of the wound on the photographs.
Only when he finished did Novikov remember the manual guidance about stomach contents and remove enough to discover it contained a largely undigested meal: even without using his microscope, the mirror of which was tarnished, Novikov identified meat and what looked like cheese. He had actually to consult the manual to learn that stomach evidence should not be preserved in formaldehyde. He immersed everything else, carefully labeling each jar as he did so. Without a name, he used the believed nationality. Again following the manual, he took fingernail scrapings, which just looked like dirt but which he fixed onto a microscope slide.
It was at that moment he remembered he hadn’t weighed the body intact, which he should have done. He weighed it anyway, adding the minimal additions of the now-removed organs. After doing that, he took height and body measurements, something else he should have done at the outset. An inevitable second, more accurate autopsy, with better equipment, would probably pick up his error.
He didn’t make it on either of the other two bodies. He chose that of the believed American next. The uniform was similar to the first, without the leather harness. Again it was all army-issue, cotton socks, boxer shorts underwear and singlet. The tie was completely missingand the three top buttons of the shirt unfastened. The tunic jacket again had shoulder ranking designation, which Novikov noted.
There was a silver-cased, khaki-strapped wristwatch which Novikov took to be army-issue, stopped at 1:20, and a silver ring surmounted by a large red stone on the small finger of his left hand. The pocket of the uniform contained $75 in notes and twenty-five cents in coin and 100 war-script D-marks; five keys in a flat leather case, none with any identification; a small, ivory-handled penknife; a pocket magnifying glass with what appeared to be a matching set of tweezers; a Zippo lighter but no cigarettes or cigarette case; a silver propelling pencil; and a packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, with two sticks missing.
The body was again that of a well-nourished male Caucasian, age about thirty-five. The fatal wound was once more to the back of the head but more to its right than that of the first victim. Less cranial bone had been shattered. It was again comparatively easy to recover the bullet, the trajectory of which had taken it from the right to the left of the man’s skull and been slightly more damaged by impact against the rear teeth to the left of the jaw. There was a lividity burn almost completely around the neck. Novikov made the same gullet-to-crotch opening, broke open the rib cage and this time used the man’s own magnifying glass to examine each of the organs, none of which showed any indication of damage or disease. He patiently went through the same weighing and preserving process, once more leaving the brain until last. Again, for the photographs, he marked the trajectory with a pencil. There was undigested vegetable matter as well as meat among the stomach contents. There didn’t seem to be debris beneath the man’s fingernails, but Novikov made scrape slides. He continued using the supposed nationality to identify his specimen jars.
The dead woman’s clothing-a dark blue three-quarter-length jacket and skirt-resembled a uniform, although there was no indication of any service or rank. There were no pockets in the jacket but two in the skirt. In that on the left side there was a single key. In the right a cellophaned pack of Camels, from which two were missing. The remainder were crushed and broken. Her watch, which had stopped at 12:05, was tin-cased, the strap imitation leather.
The woman’s shoes were down at heel, the mock leather uppersscuffed. There were no stockings. Her underpants were string-tied, with half-thigh legs. She wore only a bra beneath a long-sleeved white shirt, which was marked with several days’ wear at the cuffs and collar. As with the two men, some of the front shirt buttons were open-three, in her case. Around her neck, which was unmarked, a thin chain held a bare silver cross.
Although heavily blood-matted now, her hair had been black and would have been long, practically to her shoulders. Her mouth had frozen into a grimace of agony, and although that had relaxed, the features were still distorted, destroying what once would have been an attractive, even beautiful, high-cheekboned face. Her heavy- breasted body would have been exciting, too. The pelvis was marked with the striae gravidarum of childbirth as well as an appendectomy scar. The shattering wound was more to the left side of the skull and only when Novikov inserted a probe to trace the entry line and locate the bullet did he properly realize that what he’d thought to be leaked blood from the head entry was in fact congealed around an exit wound in her throat, just above the larynx. And that the bullet had not lodged in her body. As he was examining the exit wound-again with the American’s magnifying glass-he isolated small black specks he couldn’t immediately identify, until separately placing them under the closer and more direct arc light on his desk. They were long-dead mosquitoes and gnats. He at once returned to the two men whose postmortems he had completed, making a scalpel incision in each throat. Both windpipes contained insect debris.
The chest, stomach and pelvic opening had virtually become routine. He went almost automatically through the process of examining, extracting, weighing and preserving the organs, all of which appeared perfectly normal. Additionally, with the woman, he extracted the ovaries. They, as well as the spleen, pancreas and remains of the brain, had to go into vegetable pickle jars. Only when he was transferring the scant debris from beneath her very short and in places bitten nails did Novikov remember he had not estimated an age. It was difficult, because of the distortion he now knew to have been caused by the exiting bullet, but he guessed between thirty and thirty- five.
So intently had Novikov worked that only when he looked, virtually for the first time, toward his supposed laboratory and sawdaylight through the skewed window did he become aware he had worked completely through the night. His watch showed six-thirty. Abruptly he was engulfed in a physically aching tiredness he doubted would bring any sleep, so much was there to try to understand.
He stored all three bodies, squinting at the temperature gauges outside each cabinet to ensure the refrigeration was working, shuffled across to his office and slumped into a chair that had lost most of its seat stuffing. He couldn’t immediately decide whether it was good or bad. Mixed, maybe. For him, personally, more good than bad. Certainly enough to make what he hoped would be a sufficiently impressive presentation.
