Once inside the hospital, they descended into the labyrinthine bowels of the nearly century-old building to the morgue. It was malodorous and poorly lit and filled with outdated equipment. The morgue served as a way station for the dead: In simple cases, bodies would be picked up by a funeral home. A van from the OCME, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, would come if there were complicating factors.
Both Pia and George found it difficult to reconcile this run-down, dirty place with the hospital and medical center as they knew it. Some campus buildings were slightly shabby on the outside but pristine and modern within. The morgue was unkempt inside and out, and at this time of the evening seemed to have been deserted by anyone from the realm of the living. Old-fashioned wooden meat-locker-style doors with metal signs proclaiming that only authorized personnel were to be admitted were the order of the day. The only noise in the godforsaken place was a low-grade electrical hum and the drip of water onto cement floor.
Following their noses, they walked into the tiered amphitheater of the abandoned autopsy room, which looked like the set of a horror movie depicting Victorian times. Some of the seats were broken. The pit area, with its two ancient autopsy tables, was being used as storage for a random collection of pipes, old sinks, and discarded toilets. With the constant fight for space in the medical center, George wondered out loud why the area hadn’t been retrofitted.
Finally Pia and George walked into the morgue itself. Arranged along the walls was a series of walk-in coolers. The fifteen or so corpses in the room were on separate gurneys, some covered by sheets, others fully exposed. Still in place on a few of the bodies were the various tubes and wires used to treat and monitor them while they were still alive. A couple of the bodies were clothed, others naked. Most still wore the hospital johnnies they expired in. Mixed in were a couple of long black body bags.
Pia and George were wondering why they couldn’t find anyone working there when the night diener, or mortuary attendant, startled them.
“What do you want?” the man asked. It was obvious he was unhappy at being disturbed. He was perhaps fifty or sixty, small of stature, wearing a stained lab coat. He had a bulbous head too large for his body with a badly maintained comb-over wedged on top. He wore small oval glasses and squinted through them at his uninvited guests. The casting department for the Victorian horror movie had done a good job.
“And how did you get in?” he added before Pia or George could answer his first question.
“We came in that way,” Pia said, indicating their entrance route.
“That’s the back entrance. Visitors are supposed to come in the front. No one ever comes in the back way.”
“We’re here to ask about a couple of autopsies,” George said. “Autopsies that might have been performed down here today. The patients would have been two staff members who died early this morning, Dr. Rothman and Dr. Yamamoto?”
The attendant laughed cynically, as if this was the funniest thing he had heard in ages.
“There hasn’t been an autopsy done down here in fifty years. I never heard of either of those patients. They’re not here, if that’s what you want to know. And if there was an autopsy, it would be done in the anatomy department of the medical school, where they still do them. On account of the teaching. You need to get in touch with the pathology resident on call. And you can go out the front way.” The man pointed in the direction of the usual exit. He then stood there implacably.
George looked at Pia, who didn’t seem in the mood to argue.
“Okay,” George said. “Thanks.”
As Pia and George waited for the elevator to rumble its way down to them, George snuck a look back toward the chamber of horrors.
“Can you believe that guy?”
“I’ve been in some creepy places, but that’s the creepiest.”
“Do you think he ever leaves?” George said.
“You get the impression that he lives down here.”
“I’ll be happy if I don’t see that face again.”
“I should think so,” said Pia. “If we come back down here, it means we’re dead.”
Back in the land of the living, George called the on-call pathology resident. Dr. Simonov agreed to meet with them and asked that they come up to the clinical path lab. When Pia and George found him, Simonov was taking a break in a small windowless office with a giant mug of strong coffee on the desk in front of him.
“So what can I do for you guys? It’s not often I get called by medical students. What’s up?”
Simonov was Russian but had lived in the West long enough to almost completely lose his accent. Only the occasional dropped article gave him away. He’d gone to both college and medical school in the States.
“We’re wondering if there was an autopsy performed today on either Dr. Rothman or Dr. Yamamoto or both,” George said. He had suggested to Pia that he do the talking this time. She didn’t care. “They died early this morning when-”
“Yes, I know who they were,” Simonov said. “Everybody in the medical center knows about them. Why are you asking?”
“There are questions about how quickly they died,” Pia said before George could speak. “It was a relentless downhill course despite maximum treatment so that we-”
“No autopsies were done on them here,” Simonov said, cutting Pia off. “Not a lot of autopsies are done anymore in general. It’s a pity, but it is reality. There’s no money. But Rothman and Yamamoto, they would not have been done here under any circumstances. Having died like they did of an infectious disease while working meant that they are definitely medical examiner cases, pure and simple. All we did here was put the bodies in body bags, seal them up, and decontaminate the exterior. They were then picked up by the OCME.” He spelled out the acronym, explaining it stood for Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
“I know what the OCME is. So do you know the results?”
“Results!” Simonov laughed at Pia’s question. “Maybe in three weeks or more,” he said. “They get a lot of bodies down there, and they generally take their time.”
“Down where?” Pia said. “Where exactly is the OCME?”
“You gonna go down there now? I wouldn’t advise it. But, okay, whatever. It’s on East Side, First Avenue and Thirtieth Street, near NYU Medical Center.”
“Thanks. If we call them up, do you think they’ll answer our questions?”
“Now?”
“Tomorrow.”
“How would I know? Maybe they never had medical students asking questions. But then again it is affiliated with NYU Medical Center, which is a teaching hospital. For all I know they may have a medical student elective.”
“Who should we call? Should we ask for someone in particular?”
“I knew one of the MEs, but he’s no longer there. But they have a PR department. I’d call them. Maybe call the medical legal investigator on the case.”
“Do you think they’d tell us the results if we called?” George asked.
“You mean call the ME’s office?” Simonov smiled and let out a quick, knowing laugh. “You think in this great big city bureaucracy you can just call and they jump and tell you results? Not in a million years. This case is important, they were important guys. It’s going to be a media event. There’s probably going to be lawsuits about safety, that kind of thing. Since it’s an infectious case, the autopsies have probably already been done, but they’re not going to release any results for three, four weeks after the toxicology screens are completed. But there’s not going to be general access to the information, and they definitely won’t give the results to a couple of green medical students.”
“You’re probably right,” Pia said. She knew more than most people about city institutions.
“If I were you, find something else to do. But it’s your life. If you insist on looking into the case, I’d go down there. I wouldn’t try calling on the phone. If you’re there in person and meet with someone who more or less takes pity on you or likes you, you might learn something.” Simonov winked at Pia. She got his inference but ignored it.