The Florentine Deception Read online

“What do you say we head back and look on the Radiology side?” I said.

  “Fine by me.”

  Seeking to raise my spirits on our way back, Papa entertained me with one of his many teenage orderly stories; remarkably, I hadn’t heard this one. Responsible for removing dead patients from their hospital beds, apparently Papa had mistakenly wheeled the wrong patient (heavily sedated from surgery) to the morgue. The patient later woke up, nearly frozen and surrounded by corpses, and was only discovered three hours later, screaming, by the coroner. Sometimes I wondered if I was adopted. In any case, the story served its purpose, and by ten-thirty, we were back by the first set of elevators heading toward Radiology.

  On the floor, a set of red foot-shaped stencils evidently led to the waiting room. Slowing my speed to a more casual pace, I pushed Papa along the footprints about twenty feet, past a pair of handicapped bathrooms, before pausing for a nonchalant look into the waiting room on our left. Along the wall, an elderly African American man in a ruffled tuxedo sat beside a younger woman, probably in her late fifties. The elder slouched forward, his face buried in his hands, crying quietly. The woman, probably his daughter, rubbed his back sympathetically. A male attendant sat at the counter reading a novel. No one bothered to look up at me, and before Papa could engage any of the visitors, I rolled him farther down the hall, leaving the footprints behind. Two more doors, both unmarked and with opaque glass windows, lined either side of the hallway before it terminated at yet another T.

  “Let’s hope we’re getting close,” I whispered into Papa’s ear.

  “Come again,” he said, stopping his humming.

  “I said I hope we’re getting close.” He nodded.

  As we approached the intersection I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and offered a silent, nondenominational prayer.

  “All the lights are off,” he whispered.

  I opened my eyes. He was right; someone had switched off the lighting on both sides of the corridor, doubtless to save electricity. It was impossible to see more than ten or fifteen feet down the right side of the hallway as it disappeared around another bend; however, about a dozen steps left of the intersection, a muted glow issued from the panes of a service alcove and the glass window set into its adjacent door. An empty gurney with a stack of folded white sheets and several boxes of surgical gloves sat against the far wall. Just as I was about to take a step forward to examine the placard next to the service window, someone inside the office cleared their throat, and, from the looks of the shadow cast on the hallway floor, stood up and began walking toward the door. Panicked, I accelerated the wheelchair down the opposite corridor into the gloom.

  Chapter 25

  I stopped just around the corner, breathless but ensconced in a comforting haze of darkness.

  “What the hell?” Papa whined, vexed by my impulsive dash.

  “Shhhhh,” I whispered, gripping his shoulder firmly. “Someone’s coming.”

  We both heard the door jerk open and a second later the squawk of a walkie-talkie.

  “Just be patient. I’ll be up in a minute,” growled the voice. Whoever it was wasn’t much younger than Papa and had soles worthy of a tap dancer. When the clopping receded I extracted my keychain from my pocket, careful to stifle the jangling.

  “Let’s see where we are.”

  I juggled my keys until Steven’s inch-long lithium light settled between my thumb and forefinger, then depressed the button. About midway down, my beam illuminated the object of our expedition: a wide, stainless steel freezer door and an accompanying keypad. The door’s twin sat embedded in the opposite wall. These had to be the two cadaver storage rooms.

  “Eureka!” I whispered to Papa.

  “Now we’re cooking with gas, kid,” replied Papa, equally excited.

  I wheeled him between the two doors, both of which were clearly labeled: “Instructional Morgue” and “Hospital Morgue.” That made things easier.

  I pulled out my smartphone and looked up the code Linda had given me: five-four-five-five.

  “Want to try to unlock it?” I asked Papa. Never mind the fact that if we did open the door, there was no way in hell Papa would agree to wait in the lobby. I’d worry about that on the off chance that the code still worked.

  “How?” he said, looking up at me.

  “I have an old code for the door. It might still work. Stand up and I’ll give you the code.”

  Papa rose from the chair and scratched the back of his neck.

  “The first digit is a five. Push five, Pop.” Papa directed a shaky index finger toward the keypad and onto the five button, holding it down a good second before retracting his finger.

  “Next hit four.” Papa repeated the procedure. “Then five again,” I paused. “And finally another five.”

  Papa released his trembling finger and looked expectantly at the door. A half-second later, the keypad emitted three rapid chirps. With my second prayer of the day, I grabbed hold of the hefty, stainless steel handle and tugged.

  The handle refused to give. Fearing Papa’s trembling hands might have inadvertently mashed an adjacent button, I re-entered the four-digit code. The door vetoed me once again.

  “Damn,” I whispered. Although I knew that the code had little chance of working, I’d still hoped.

  “All right, Pop, I’ve got to get you back up to the lobby and find the combination.” Pop turned, now partially stooped, and looked at me gravely.

  “I don’t want to go up. I want to help you here.”

  “Papa, I don’t want you to get in any trouble.”

  “Ah, to hell with trouble. I’m eighty-eight years old, what are they going to do to me, send me to Leavenworth?”

  I looked down at my watch.

  “We don’t have time for arguments. You want to stay? Stay. I need to get a look in the office around the hall. Do you want to stay here, or should I bring you over to the bathroom by Radiology?”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  “Fine. Don’t move. Don’t talk. Don’t fart. I’ll be right back.” Papa eased himself back into the chair and began kneading his swollen, arthritic knuckles.

  It had been a minute since the tap-dancing septuagenarian left his post. I didn’t know how long before he’d return, so I walked briskly back down the hall, took a quick look toward Radiology—the hallway was empty—and over to the alcove. The door was closed. A carved wooden block resting just behind the service window read “Clarence.”

  Reaching for the doorknob, I was gripped by a surge of anxiety. I looked back over my shoulder, then leftward down the darkening hallway. Both clear. A single bead of sweat accumulated on my temple.

  The doorknob to Clarence’s station turned effortlessly and with infinite care I inched the door open just a hair, peered in to make sure there wouldn’t be any surprises, then swung the door fully open and lowered the door stop. If the guy came back I’d say the door was open, that I was just looking for help.

  The office consisted of a storeroom and the service alcove we’d seen from the hall. An old CRT monitor sat on a severely nicked, antique metal desk, along with a keyboard, a phone—its handset tagged “X7519,” and coffee dregs in a formulaic paper poker-card cup. I held my breath, listened for footsteps, and then slid open Clarence’s desk drawer. Aside from a handful of pens, a blank pad of stickies and a small notebook, the drawer was barren. The notebook—the miniature variety with the tightly wound spiral aluminum coil—had seen better days. I gently lifted its green cover, which remained attached by just the bottom few coils, to find a series of notes shakily scrawled in pencil. Unfortunately, neither the inside cover nor the first few pages offered any tantalizing clues—only a few phone numbers and a reminder to buy milk, denture cleanser, and walnuts. Later pages contained similar minutiae, coffee stains, and a creased gas station receipt.

  Thirty seconds of additional flipping led me to the second-to-last page, which to my delight contained two columns of four-digit numbers. Though neither column was labe
led, I knew these were the codes. The list ran the length of the page and from the spurious pencil marks on the opposite page, I guessed it also ran down its back. A flip confirmed my suspicion and simultaneously raised and dashed my hopes. Midway down the page, Clarence had decided to start concealing his codes, replacing the four-digit numbers with four-letter codes. This in itself didn’t bother me; his unbreakable code was almost certainly just a substitution of the digits with letters from the telephone dial. What did bother me was that the last line of the right column didn’t end in a four-digit code, but rather in the words “Andrea’s birthday”—a mnemonic that was obviously trivial for Clarence to remember but utterly useless to me.

  Loathe to waste any more time, I wrote the last four-letter code, “BYNE,” on a stickie, dropped the notebook back into the desk and rushed for the doorway.

  Papa’s tightly cropped head bobbed from behind the corner three times before I completed the forty-odd-foot walk back.

  “I told you to stay out of view!” I sniped.

  “What did you find?”

  “Cross your fingers,” I said, meaning it. “Let’s see.” I approached the door to the student freezer and extended my finger to key in the code.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I need to translate the letters into numbers.” Papa grimaced uncomprehendingly. I whipped out my smartphone and pulled up the phone-dialing screen. “Okay, here we go. B translates to a two, Y into a nine, N into a six, and E into a three.” I keyed in the four digits in rapid succession.

  “Beep beep beep,” whined the door. I tried the handle anyway.

  “Shit.” I reentered the code.

  “Beep beep beep.” No, no, no!

  “Let’s see if we’re at least on the right track,” I said to Papa, who was still thoroughly befuddled. I walked across the hall to the other door and punched in the code.

  Before I could lift my finger from the final button the door issued a loud click. I grabbed the cool, steel handle and pulled, if only for a momentary sense of accomplishment.

  “Wonderful!” said Papa enthusiastically.

  “Not quite, Papa. This is the wrong door. I couldn’t find the code for the other door.” Papa just stared at me.

  “That’s the room we want to get into.” I pointed across the dim hallway. “I only found the code for this door.”

  “The body we’re looking for isn’t in there?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  I collapsed onto the ground and grabbed my knees in a thinking pose; Papa, seeing that we weren’t about to go anywhere, lowered himself back into the chair and stared at me.

  “Why the hell can’t they just use a key?” asked Papa rhetorically. “What’s wrong with a cockamamie key?”

  “Give me a few minutes to think,” I said. So much for my carefully laid plan. What were my options?

  “Why don’t you bribe the watchman?” I looked up at Papa. “Offer him five bucks.” I shook my head.

  “Five bucks isn’t what it used to be, Pop.”

  “The veterans used to offer me fifty cents to bring them whiskey. If the head nurse had caught me, that would’ve been it.” He drew his finger across his throat.

  “Give me a second.” I had a kernel of an idea. “I’ll be right back.” I held up a finger indicating “stay put.”

  A moment later I’d returned with the gurney and one of the white sheets we’d found outside the alcove.

  “I’ve got an idea. Up for a little adventure?” I asked Papa with raised eyebrows.

  “Of course.”

  “Can you play dead? I mean really pretend you’re dead?”

  “Absolutely.” Papa immediately dropped his head onto his shoulder, closed his eyes, and gently slacked his jaw. I had to admit, my grandfather had serious talent in this department. The sight also made me strangely nostalgic; at eighty-eight, I didn’t know how much longer he’d have, yet I’d rarely given it any thought. I took a deep breath. “Impressive. Now do you think you could play dead like that for five or ten minutes? You think you could fool the watchman?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re positive you can hold that look no matter what? Even if you have a sudden urge to urinate?” I tilted my head and looked him in the eye. “Even if you have a hot flash?” Hot flashes, Papa’s latest affliction, were the result of the testosterone-depriving prostate cancer treatments he’d been receiving and which had recently taken him to the edge. “No matter what?”

  “No matter what,” he replied. I knew the odds of such resolve were roughly 100 to 1, but I was desperate, and I figured if all else failed, Papa could talk us out of the predicament, geezer to geezer.

  “Okay. I’m going to call this guy’s phone when he gets back to the office and tell him you just died. Follow me?” Papa nodded. “I’ll tell him you died, and that you had indicated your body be donated to the medical school cadaver program. I’ll tell him that I’ll wheel you down right away from your room upstairs in the medical tower. So we’ll put you on the cart,” I pointed to the gurney, “cover you, and wheel you over to the office, and then have the guy escort us over to the morgue. I’ll wheel you in, thank the guy, and then walk away. Once he goes back to the office, I’ll come back, knock on the door, and you can let me in.” I paused. “Make sense?”

  “Sure.”

  “And if the guy pulls the sheet up—you’re delivering a performance, right?”

  “Say again?”

  “If the guy lifts the sheet, you play dead—just like you did a second ago.”

  “Yeah sure.”

  “You want to use the bathroom first?”

  “Ah shit,” he said. “I can take care of myself. I’ll tell you if I want to use the damn bathroom.”

  “All right, get up on the cart,” I said doubtfully, one hand stabilizing the gurney and the other supporting Papa’s arm. A few seconds later, I draped the sheet over his body and face. “Comfortable? Can you breathe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, I’m going to wheel you past the elevator back into the other wing. Don’t forget, you’re dead. No talking, farting, or any other noises.”

  Several hallways later and now in relative seclusion, I pushed the gurney up against a wall and drew the sheet from Papa’s face.

  “Here goes nothing.” It took just a second to remember Clarence’s extension, and another minute or two to look up the hospital’s area code and phone prefix on my smartphone. I entered the ten digits and hit Send. Six rings later Clarence’s voicemail answered.

  “Not back yet,” I explained. Papa nodded sullenly.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I’m just thinking about Mawtha.” Martha—my maternal grandmother had meant the world to my grandfather—and to me; she’d passed away of brain cancer ten years ago and Papa had never been the same. “Laying under the sheet just got me thinking.”

  “Mmm,” I responded.

  The next five minutes passed in contemplative silence, and jarred by a chirping reminder on my phone’s calendar, I tried Clarence’s extension again.

  On the fifth ring, Clarence picked up.

  “Hello?” Clarence’s gruff voice boomed equally from the phone and from down the hallway. I froze.

  “Hello?” A pause. “Dammit.”

  “Eh-excuse me,” I stammered, “is this the morgue office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you can help me then?”

  “I can try. What do you need?”

  “I’ve got a patient here in the North Tower. The guy just passed away. Doctor … Doctor Pascul finished filling out the paperwork and asked me to wheel him down to the med school freezer.”

  “Okay. Bring him down quick then. I’m taking my lunch break in fifteen.”

  “No problem. I’ll be right down,” I said.

  “So far, so good,” I said to Papa. “Ready to play dead? Need to use the bathroom first? Pass any gas? Scratch?”
<
br />   “I’m fine,” he replied.

  “Fine. For good measure, let’s wait a few minutes. The North Tower is a good ten-minute walk from here.” I looked down to Papa again. “You think you can get off of the gurney by yourself to open the door?”

  “I think so.”

  “Give it a try.” I lifted the sheet with a flourish. Papa sat up, slowly rotated his body and extended his legs off the side of the gurney, then gently lowered his feet six inches onto the floor.

  “Genius,” I said, helping him back up. “Just remember, wait until I knock on the door before you open it. Otherwise just stay put on your cart once you’re in. It might take me five minutes to come back, so don’t get nervous. Close your eyes.”

  I pulled the sheet back over Papa’s face, and gave his slightly protruding nose a loving squeeze through the sheet.

  Chapter 26

  “Hello?” I addressed the empty service alcove.

  “One second,” replied Clarence. A moment later, he emerged from the storage room carrying a thick folded plastic tarp.

  “Hi. I called a few minutes ago.” I pointed toward the gurney. “I’ve got the body right here.”

  Clarence, easily seventy years old, bounded with unusual agility to the gurney and lifted the sheet, exposing Papa’s thirty-year-old coffee-colored loafers. He gave me a confused look.

  “What’s with the shoes?” He lifted the sheet farther. “The guy’s still fully clothed.” This, from Clarence’s voice, was not as expected.

  “The doctor said to bring him right down,” I muttered.

  “He died in his shoes?” replied Clarence disbelievingly. “The guy’s ready to go to a senior center dance, for God’s sake.”

  “I asked the same thing,” I improvised, “Doctor Pascul said the guy was a complainer, wanted to go home, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He pulled on his clothes and a minute later keeled over from a massive infarction.”

  “Has he been added to the database? Where’s his tag?”

  “I assume Doctor Pascul added him.” I ignored the second question.

  “He needs to be processed before they put him in the med school freezer. You need to take him to Embalming.”