Mission Read Free

to say was as outrageous as I did.
    â€˜I’m way ahead of you. It’s a great idea but – ‘ I shook my head. ‘Forget it. Things like that just don’t happen.’
    The phone rang in the morgue attendant’s office. He leant backwards and stuck his head around the door without moving his butt off the chair. ‘Lazzarotti …’
    Miriam went across to take the call.
    I turned back towards the body on the slab and found him looking at me. A chill shock-wave rippled up my spine and I was still quivering when I reached the attendant’s office.
    Miriam lowered the phone. ‘What’s the matter?’
    I gestured wordlessly towards the body. But when we looked round, the cover sheet was lying flat on the top of the slab. The body had gone. My back had been turned for ten, maybe fifteen seconds.
    Miriam eyed me, took a deep breath and spoke into the phone. ‘Paul, uhh – hold those units. I’ll see you back up in Emergency.’
    Miriam and I went back to the slab, lifted up the cover sheet and looked at each other. ‘This is crazy,’ I said. ‘His eyes were open. What happened?’
    She shrugged. ‘You tell me.’
    â€˜Well, at least the blood’s still here.’ I went down on one knee andreached out a finger.
    â€˜Don’t touch it,’ said Miriam. ‘I want to put that on a slide.’ She folded the cover sheet over the foot of the table. There were smears on the slab where the lacerations on his back had started to bleed. She shook her head. I knew how she felt.
    â€˜There has to be a rational explanation,’ I insisted. ‘Just don’t ask me what it is. But even if one buys the idea of the whole event, it doesn’t add up. I mean, if the body disappeared, why didn’t the blood go with it?’
    Miriam gave me a look that spelled bad news. ‘That wasn’t the only thing he left behind.’ She took her hand out of her coat pocket and offered it to me, palm upwards. ‘I found these stuck in his scalp when I looked him over upstairs.’
    She was holding three dark inch-long spikes. I thought at first that they were nails. Then I looked again and saw that they were thorns.
    Terrific. On top of which, we had a signed death certificate and no body to go with it. I handed the problem right back to her. ‘What do we do now, Doctor?’
    Miriam decided that the best thing to do was play it straight down the line. The morgue attendant, who was totally absorbed in the twin activities of reading a paperback and picking his nose, had noticed nothing and looked unlikely to move from his chair until pay day. She reasoned, with a kind of Polish logic, that as no one was likely to come looking for the body we might as well pretend that it was still there. While I held my breath, Miriam calmly filled out a card for the front of the freezer drawer that would hold our invisible corpse, then we put a combination of our finger-prints on the sheet that had to go down-town. Since the NYPD was not going to come up with a match for the dabs, we figured that the freezer drawer would stay closed until the time came to ship the body to the city morgue. And when somebody opened it and found it empty, that would be their problem.
    Miriam transferred the blood from the floor on to glass slides then cleaned up the slab. We went back upstairs into Emergency where she did a quick snow job on Lazzarotti then we hung up our white coats and slipped out of the hospital.
    Needless to say, we gave the Fassbinder movie a miss. We went back to Miriam’s apartment on 57th and First, brewed up some strong coffee, bolstered ourselves with an even stronger drink and looked at each other a lot. Occasionally, one of us would pace up and down and start a sentence that foundered somewhere between theinitial intake of breath and the first three words. We were like a couple of characters from a play by Harold Pinter. In the second