“Says here they found a Red’s revolver?” I asked as I jotted down some key notes from the documents into my own pad.
“Small piece,” Lloyds nodded, blowing smoke unceremoniously at my face, “still solid for an iron, but it looked hadn’t been fired since what must have been the war. I assume you took it off some rogue Ivan? Buddy of mine got a pair of the type himself, taken from a couple of Commie corporals that were a little too eager about rough-housing with some of the local girls in Berlin.”
“Yefreytor,” I said absentmindedly, running over the details of the folder again.
“What?”
“It’s their word for corporal.”
Lloyds grunted again, blowing smoke unceremoniously into my face. “Didn’t know you spoke Motherland,” Lloyds said, suspicion creeping into his voice again.
“I know how to order vodka and six different ways of calling your mother a dog too, if you’re ever up for being tutored. I take my payment in ounces of bourbon. Also, it’s not mine.”
“What isn’t?”
“The gun you found on the body. Never owned a Nugent, but I did keep my army piece. A Colt.”
I tapped on the details of what had been found in the safe in thought.
“But it’s not listed here,” I said musingly.
“So, what? You lost your peacemaker?” Lloyds whistled low as he ran a hand across his balding head in thought and for a moment I couldn’t help but wonder why he no longer bothered wearing a hat. He wasn’t doing himself any favors not wearing one, looking the way he did these days.
“Looks like.” I replied.
“Registered?”
“Not officially. It was left in the wash when I handed in my fatigues back in 1946. I haven’t gotten around to swinging by an army barracks since then. Silly me.”
“Silly you,” Lloyds agreed knowingly.
“Report’s in your name,” I said. “They got you smushing paper trails these days, huh?”
Lloyds thumbed over his shoulder at the precinct building. “I’m the only one that knows how to write down here.”
“Noticed some things were stenciled out in the report. Anything else you think I should know?” I asked.
Lloyds looked me keen in the eye, settling my gaze with an unsettling one of his own. “Yeah,” he said. “But you’re not going to believe me until you see it for yourself.”
His left eye twitched unpleasantly as he searched for the words to convey what he’d seen. When he spoke, he spoke in between exhalations of layered cigarette-smoke.
“Your skin had sloughed off, already being eaten by maggots,” said Lloyds, his tone that of a man who’d seen too much. “Your guts were slimy ribbons leaking soupy shit and the insects were a wet buzz in the air, so thick a curtain I thought I might choke on a lungful of fly. And your brains were *everywhere*, bits on the floor, the desk, the wall. It was the sorest sight I’d seen since the war. But the worst part? The worst part was at first that I wasn’t even realizing what I was seeing, ‘cause of the complete lack of smell, you see? There you were, rotting like carrion in the summer heat, but I didn’t smell a thing coming off of you.”
It was an uncomfortable, distressing thing to have someone describe your own guts to you in such vivid detail.
"The sight of it all didn't match with what I knew I had to be smelling. There wasn't even the whiff of rot. All that sweltering, putrid mess of you all over the place, but the strongest stench in the room was my own cologne," Lloyds finished.
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“I'm not sure how I feel about another man having seen my insides. Feels a little too personal,” I said. "But if there wasn't any reek coming off of the body, that'd definitely explain why nobody had complained about any smell in the middle of summer."
My eyes ran over the description of the crime scene again.
My crime scene.
“Saw more of you than I’d ever care to admit,” said Lloyds, agreeing. “I had you bagged up quick before the press got there, just to stop them from asking any questions. You ever encountered anything like that before? Corpse with no smell?”
I shook my head. “No. But all that does is narrow down the possibilities as to what it could be.”
“It?” asked Lloyds, not understanding.
“Yes, *it*,” I said, nodding. “Whatever's down at the morgue, it’s some matter of Weird, alright. Even some sort of body-copy of me would have had to have some sort of reek to it. That thing you said about frog-men? It’s real, except it’s not just something either us or the Soviets came up with first. The Krauts have been experimenting with trying to influence the human breeding process since well before the war, trying to create the perfect human specimen. Why do you think that bastard kept on screaming about racial purity all the time? We went there to stop him from messing with things he shouldn’t.”
“I thought we went over there to save the free world.”
“There can be more than one noble cause as to why a man might pick up a gun.”
Lloyds watched me for a moment, assessing me like a man might assess a rabid animal. It was obvious from the look in his eyes that he no longer thought I was a communist, but rather a lunatic. His Cocky had ashed to a nub, but despite this he kept it clenched tightly in between the corners of his mouth like an old dog chewing.
“It’s fine if you don’t believe me,” I said, shrugging off his skepticism as I handed him back the folder. I’d gotten everything out of it that I needed.
“Just keep an eye out for two men named Watson and Crick in the papers over the next year or two,” I continued. “They’re from across the pond, working on something big that’ll change the world.”
“Yeah? And what’re they going to do?”
“They're going to prove that the biggest difference between you and a banana is the fact that bananas don’t sleep.”
“And you know this how?”
“Strange ships tend to carry stranger sailors. I meet a lot of interesting people in my line of work. ”
“Sounds like insanity.”
“More insane than having a conversation with a man whose brains you saw splattered across an office floor?”
That gave him pause. Lloyds kissed his teeth and brought a hand to his eyebrow, rubbing it in consternation.
“Look. This is all doing my head in. God’s truth, even if I get the wheels of justice turning properly on this, it’ll be a hell of a time to try and get them turned onto the right track. You know the NSPD, they like their men dirty and their cases cleaned. They’ll want to know why a man declared dead thought it a good idea to get back out of his grave. I wouldn’t put it past the brass to have another bullet put into your brain just to keep the papers pristine for when inspection day comes ‘round.”
“Nothing you can chalk up to a mistake? It wouldn’t have been the first time that I’d taken a left turn on my way to the graveyard.”
Lloyds shook his head. “Not that simple. There’s still an extra body unaccounted for and I signed off on your name being attached to it. Not my best moment, but I didn’t really have a choice with Carlyle and Johnson getting to the scene first.”
I dug my hands deep into my pockets, my fingers feeling for my pad, my pack of Cockies. All I was missing was the cold comfort of my Colt to get me safely through the next few nights.
“Any chance I can swing by the morgue tonight? I want to take a good, long look at myself.” I asked.
“I’ll ring the coroner,” Lloyds replied thoughtfully, “he’s an old friend of mine. Let him know he’s got a shadow swinging by in an hour. He knows not to ask too many questions when I come calling in for favors after midnight.”
I extended my hand. “Thanks, Lloyds. I owe you.”
Lloyds gripped my hand firmly, giving me a solid shake. “Looks like you owe me your life.”
“Something like that, sure,” I replied. “And one last thing.”
“Yeah?”
“The report mentioned something about a manuscript found in my safe. You got any idea as to what happened to it?”
“Probably bagged up as evidence.”
“Any chance I could get it back?”
“I’ll have a rookie swing by in the morning, drop it off in your post. You know Paixley, I don’t envy the burden of your own death.”
I shrugged and adjusted my hat, making ready to leave. “The way I see it, there’s no cleaner slate than a fresh grave.”
Lloyds and I stared at one another in the hazy dark of the last light of his cigarette’s dying embers. A moment later he wordlessly turned to walk away, already striking up another Cocky. Smoke played him on his way out, leaving me in the dark to fend for myself.