Oren
‘No,’ Lexi said. ‘Seriously. Shut up.’
‘And far, far away in the land of California,’ I said, ‘there was a grave robber who—’
‘Stop it,’ she said.
‘This is a true story,’ I said. ‘In the late nineteen-nineties, he cut up—’
‘I mean it,’ Lexi said.
‘What?’ I said. ‘Too close? Too recent? Fine. Plenty of other examples. These things are surprisingly common. Let’s return to an old one. Up until the early nineteenth century, do you know what they did with the bodies of executed criminals – let’s say the body of a woman who had killed her husband and child?’
‘Enough,’ Lexi said.
Kay’s eyes were wide. She said to me, ‘I know you now.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘No one knows anyone. You said it yourself. We don’t even know ourselves.’
She pulled another Newport from her pack with trembling fingers, hung it between her lips, and flicked her lighter three times before it lit.
‘Until the nineteenth century, they gibbeted the bodies,’ I said. ‘You know what gibbeting is? Do you know exactly what’s involved?’
‘We don’t want to know,’ Lexi said.
‘To gibbet a corpse,’ I said, ‘you dip it in tar – pine tar works well – and hang it up in an iron cage. It’s all about the spectacle. The tar keeps the body from rotting too fast. You want to give the townspeople plenty of time to see it. And the crows don’t mind. They peck right through.’ I ruffled Cristofer’s hair with my fingers, and he laughed. ‘But nineteenth-century medical sciences advanced as the medical sciences will, and doctors needed the executed bodies for anatomical study. The doctors convinced politicians to change the law. So no more gibbeting, which saddened many members of the public, especially the tar makers.’
‘You talk like a snake,’ Walter said.
I said, ‘Then, with an eye toward the popular vote, politicians – being politicians – passed new laws saying that the worst criminals would be publicly dissected, which made the public happy again since everyone likes a corpse. But if for each problem there’s a solution, for each solution there’s also a problem, the problem in this case being that a dissection is much quicker than a rotting, and the public was hungry – I don’t think that’s too strong of a word – for the flesh and bones of criminals.’ I looked at Kay to see if she was listening. ‘As a quick aside, when we prepare bodies for medical study today, we use the chemical phenol, which also comes from tar, and along with keeping a corpse fresh, the phenol has a smell that makes you salivate. So every time medical students cut into cadavers they daydream about cheeseburgers—’
‘Will you be getting to the point of this?’ Walter said.
‘The first point – and there are two –’ I said, ‘involves supply and demand. Nineteenth-century scientists had eager or, if you will, hungry crowds, but they quickly ran out of dead criminals for dissection. That left the scientists with limited options. They could stop studying human anatomy and take up plant biology, for example. Or they could lobby the government to pass laws that would criminalize more behaviors – say, sex with another man’s wife or even simple trespassing – and increase the number of executions. Or they could find new sources of bodies. I don’t think that the scientists voted, but the last option won the day. I’ll give you another example. Once upon a time—’
‘Please don’t,’ Lexi said.
‘There were two canal diggers,’ I said. ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one. There were two canal diggers with time on their hands. Other canal diggers with time on their hands might go to the pub or gamble or, if they were inclined differently, attend church services, and in truth these two did have a taste for whiskey and dice, but while they had time on their hands, they had little money in them. So, having tastes but no means of satisfying them, they kept their eyes open for any opportunities that might present themselves, whether in the form of a careless lady’s silver necklace or a drunk with a pocketful of coins – nothing that would get them gibbeted or dissected but enough to buy them a night or two of pleasure.
‘The wife of one of the canal diggers ran a boarding house and, late on a winter evening, the oldest of her tenants died – without paying his bill. Who could blame the canal diggers if they saw opportunity? Who could blame them if they wrapped the man in a blanket, threw him into a wheelbarrow, and pushed him over the cobblestones to the house of a doctor who had advertised his need for bodies – big and small, young and old – and his willingness to pay top dollar, no questions asked. Who could blame them if, after giving the canal digger’s wife the money that was due to her, they spent Sunday in whiskey, dice, and whores? Who could blame them if, on Monday morning, they failed to show up at the canal and instead went on the prowl for bodies – big and small, young and old – and, when they discovered a scarcity of already dead ones, living too, because, as far as they were concerned, a living body was just a dead one in the making.
‘The doctor paid them twenty dollars a pop – not bad for the time, though now if you cut up a body right, you can do much better. Strip out a spine today and you can get three or four thousand bucks. A cornea, four or five hundred. A knee, seven hundred.
‘Over the next year, the canal diggers lured most of their victims into the boarding house and smothered them – vagrants, poor widowers, old prostitutes, anyone who might disappear with little concern from the neighbors. Some, though, they killed out in the open. Once, they found an eight-year-old orphan and broke his back in an alleyway. His body weighed so little that they didn’t need the wheelbarrow. One of the canal diggers slung him over his shoulder like a sleeping child and a half-hour later they were knocking at the doctor’s door.’ I looked from Lexi to Kay to Walter. ‘Have you heard this before?’
Lexi said, ‘I’ve read something.’
‘Sure, they were famous,’ I said. ‘Their mistake, like the mistakes of most criminals, was in getting sloppy, though it’s unclear whether their sloppiness resulted from overconfidence or from guilt over what they were doing. The fact is, though, that they rushed some jobs. And they sometimes got drunk before a killing instead of after. And when they had killed all of the least visible people in the neighborhood, they turned to others with closer social connections – young prostitutes with watchful pimps, old men known on the street for their talkativeness. They got caught after stowing a girl’s body under the bed of one of the boarding-house tenants instead of taking her straight to the doctor.
‘But – and this is where we can learn some lessons – only one of the canal diggers was found guilty – the one whose wife owned the boarding house. See, there was very little evidence. The doctor had chopped up the bodies in public dissections and then fed the pieces to his dogs. He had burned the clothes.
‘A crowd of twenty thousand came to watch the execution of the one convicted man. The next day, another crowd rioted when the police turned away those who had no tickets to see the dissection of the corpse. At the dissection, the anatomist poked a feather into the executed man’s skull and held the quill high so that the crowd could see the gore. Then he wrote with it on a piece of parchment, “This is written with the blood of a hanged man. This blood was taken from his head.” Which shows that every fool wants to be a comedian.’ I looked from Lexi to Kay to Walter. ‘The end,’ I said.
‘That’s the other point of your story?’ Walter asked, scornfully. ‘Every fool wants to be a comedian?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘The point is, what goes around comes around, because where there’s a will, there’s a way, and when opportunity knocks, don’t necessarily open the door, but if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.’