assistant in a lowered, more respectful voice. “When she’s alone she imagines what your eyes must see when you look at her. She may take her clothes off in front of you, but she knows you’ve seen women far more naked. You’ve seen women stripped of life.”
The chief medical examiner did not respond. There was deep regret in his eyes for having said anything about it. He might have responded a decade ago, before death had become so completely empirical to him, so damned quantifiable. Lately his wife had stopped wearing makeup and she was letting the gray in her hair overrun the auburn. She had even stopped buying wrinkle cream.
“Fire them up!” he snapped.
His assistant nodded, then moved to the console near the back of the room. There he turned on the amplifier and tape recorder marked table 3. The first doctor tapped the microphone softly and watched the VU meters jump. Satisfied, he began to speak.
“Refer to crime scene investigation this date regarding original location of Jane Does 36 and 37, both pronounced dead at the scene. They are two women, one black and one Asian, both dressed, though number 36 has no panties and number 37 has no shoes. They are in a face-to-face position, each with her arms wrapped tightly around the other. Number 36, the larger woman,has herfingersinterlocked in the small of the back of number 37. Number 37 has her arms around the neck and head of the other. ”
“Do you think they were lovers?” asked the assistant, who was testing his own microphone. The chief medical examiner shrugged and continued his examination. Then he slowly nodded his head, yes. He disliked looking beyond the bodies to the people who were once there, and now he was beginning to dislike the assistant.
“The police and the paramedics at the scene were not able to separate the two. No medical intervention was attempted. ” He slid open a drawer and withdrew his favorite scalpel. “I shall do so now by cutting… ”
“Must be old age,” said Persephone Flyer. “My fingers are simply aching.” She flexed them and grinned. “Luckily there’s never been any arthritis in my family.” There was a frightened but hopeful intonation in her voice.
Her friend in the next room laughed. “You will never have arthritis. In my country an ache in the fingers means that you want something very badly; your hands are aching to touch something.”
“Certainly not these tomatoes.” Persephone laughed, tossing a large pile of tomato skins and seeds into a small garbage can beneath the sink. She cut the skinned pulpy flesh of thirty tomatoes into squares then tossed the pieces, dividing them evenly, into two eight-gallon pots. She walked to a second stove, where she used a wooden spatula to plow under a tall mound of steaming Italian sausages, rotating the cooked ones to the top and the uncooked to the bottom of an enormous black frying pan with a diameter that spanned two burners. The powerful fragrance of fennel and oil filled the room.
“How are the spices coming?” she called out, as she drew a sleeve across her sweating brow. Outside her makeshift kitchen the glorious scent of her handiwork had commingled with a breeze and was prying at her neighbors’ windows, pushing in over the usual smells of Potrero Hill and the housing projects and overwhelming everything with the combined perfume of Palermo, Baton Rouge, and Saigon.
The sublime aroma broke up baseball games in the street. It silenced a heated game of dice and caused a substantial lull in the local drug traffic. In the projects, the street gangs stopped cleaning their weapons to inhale the scent. Like all armies, they marched on their stomachs, and the boys on the hill were always hungry. For a moment, the Up the Hill Gang, the Down the Hill Gang, the Wisconsin Street Posse, and the Prisoners of the Projects called an uneasy armistice in order to breathe in a few molecules of the sauce. For a moment no one on the south side of the hill looked warily over his shoulder, then checked his waistband for the comforting bulge of a gun.
The aroma even found its way into the nostrils of a drunken sot and momentarily kept him from hitting his cowering wife.
It wafted down afternoon sidewalks and into nearby warehouses where greasy auto mechanics and squinting printers stopped working to anxiously peek at the time clock. Women in nearby houses and apartments were soon busy washing Mason jars,