Still, no cigarettes, lighter, or matches were found on the body. Under the bench, in a black leather case, they had found a bunch of keys.
The body itself was clean and untouched. Untouched, that was the first word that came to mind when, still outside, they had first undressed the body for him and he in the beam of searchlights began to examine the carefully removed articles of clothing. This also made the body’s odor so surprising. The body laid out before him was that of a man who had probably been reluctant to touch anyone or anything. Not a rare thing among fetishists. They bow only to their strongest compulsions or most powerful attractions. They establish contact not with each other, not with the other person, but with symbolic objects touching the other’s body. In this sense, they truly and wholly deviate from ordinary urban egoists who, even in the presence of the other, pay attention exclusively to themselves.
As he looked at the almost hairless, smooth, and well-proportioned corpse, it occurred to Kienast that this was a dry man. He had first come across concepts of bodily dryness or moistness when he had studied ancient investigating techniques for his dissertation, reading original texts on Greek healing methods. This manner of death was not appropriate to dry persons. According to Galen, death by heart attack is most characteristic of damp or moist people.
Nor could he dismiss the notion that this odor was not the man’s own, was not caused by a scent he had used, but was an odor that he had received during his last hours from another body and that clung to him.
After a misstep, one always takes home a strange, unfit fragrance. Shower, soap, or thorough scrubbing notwithstanding, these strange fragrances, be they repulsive or sweet, are incredibly loyal.
Sometimes, on the morrow, one feels that such a fragrance is as pervasive as if it had settled in the fine hairs of one’s nostrils, and one cannot but yield to the guilty attraction and return to the source of it. Dr. Kienast had married when very young and was divorced soon afterward because of his continued missteps. While in the presence of the corpse and aided by undoubtedly pleasant memories, he was daydreaming of the sweet occasions of making up, he was recalling the hoarse, intelligent woman whom no one suspected was conducting a clandestine, insane, passionate, and desperate struggle against her ugliness, who on her wide bathroom shelves, which she could lock, had amassed an unprecedented arsenal of perfumes, creams, facial ointments, bubble baths, lipsticks, and powders, even though by profession she was an evaluator of fragrances and should have been wise about using cosmetics moderately, should have known that she could not achieve much with their help. That woman could probably have told, she could probably have identified the heavy scent with its deep-seated acrid undertone, he thought, and from his pressing thoughts it followed that he should lift the dead man’s dark blue woolen pullover to his nose. Perhaps he could recognize the smell by himself.
Perhaps that woman occurred to him only because he knew this smell from her body.
He seemed to feel the tension in his tendons, the fine and disciplined trembling of his muscles.
The body does not forget.
This woman reached her climax gaping mutely, she screamed only seconds later, once past the peak of her pleasure, and even then she did it as if she had hoped to swallow it all back into herself. But no, he could hardly smell the perfume on the dark blue pullover; it smelled more strongly of tobacco smoke.
The perfume’s scent issued only from the body.
From the large room illuminated by fluorescent lights, two swing doors led to the corridor. Corpses were trundled in through one; through the other they were taken to the refrigerated room and from there to the official autopsy. The wings of one door kept flapping quietly because somewhere someone had left a window open.
Dr. Kienast heard no steps in the corridor. While he listened, the telephone rang next to him on the desk; he started a little; the phone rang again but he didn’t pick it up.
It wasn’t the first time that professional curiosity had swept him into a critical situation, and sometimes he had to cross the boundaries of his own good taste or even those of the law. If it had not been so, he probably could not have followed the thinking of criminals and would not have chosen this profession. He put down the pullover, picked up the blue-and-white-striped shirt and could tell with absolute certainty that the unknown man had not spent the last day of his life in this shirt and most probably not in this pullover, but had changed clothes in the afternoon or, he quickly corrected himself, in the early evening. These are rather simple matters. One could still smell the laundry detergent and the rinse on these articles, or even the deodorizer in the clothes closet. And his last hours the man must have spent in a place full of tobacco smoke, in an inn or bar, a cheap restaurant, a place unworthy of his social standing.
The perfume was detectable only on the lower third of the shirt and on the underpants. On the latter, the quickly perishing sperm was also sensed as an odor. The telephone kept ringing, but otherwise no action was heard anywhere. He stepped up to the legs of the corpse and, as if begging the indulgence of a fellow human’s mortal remains for what he was about to do, he touched the man’s foot and leaned over his loins. That is when the telephone finally stopped ringing, and in the still existing draft one could hear again the wings of the swing door flapping. He closed his eyes, perhaps involuntarily, because he did not want to see the dead man’s genitals from so close up while he took a whiff of them. He was immediately assailed by the strong smell of the penis. Otherwise, everything was as he had expected it would be. This penis could have been involved only in oral intercourse, not in a vaginal or anal one; the secretion tests would provide exact details. The odorous perfume had been smeared on the thick rich pubic hair and on the graying thinner hair running in a wedge shape up on the abdomen; from there it permeated the air in the large room. He did not want to lose a moment. He heard steps approaching in the corridor and he wanted to check his observation before the coroner returned. There was no smell on the chest, around the armpits or behind the ears, the last questionable locations. And now he felt he had done everything that had to be done and found out what he wanted to find out: the perfume was not the dead man’s own but a freshly applied strange one that was later smeared over his body. The swing door’s wings flapped open just as he raised his head.
As if he had been kissing the corpse.
At the noise of the door he quickly turned around and said he had finished doing what he needed to do.
Have you found anything encouraging, asked the coroner pleasantly.
He was the Pathological Institute’s physician on duty, with whom the detective had a daily and very cordial relationship. That meant that they had their unavoidable smaller or larger frictions but, as they say, could live with them.
I’ll leave that to you, Kienast replied politely, but I’d be very grateful, he added without the slightest trace of embarrassment, if you also smelled his stomach and pubic hair. There’s some kind of perfume, scented soap, who knows what.
Maybe you’ll recognize it, he added.
Sometimes, out of sheer self-defense, his colleagues pretended not to hear what Dr. Kienast said or requested. And not only those with whom he had rare contacts but also his immediate subordinates. Most of them used the informal address among themselves, yet they tried to keep Kienast, along with his obsession, at a safe distance. He was considered weird, a person who had to be allowed to have his way and be told to stop only if he was about to mix one up in some dark or unclean business. That’s what happened this time. Dr. Kienast waited for a while to see if the other man would do his bidding, but he did not. And not as if expressing disapproval, but as if he hadn’t even heard Kienast’s request.