Cemetery of Angels (22 page)

“You asked for five books. Subject matter was grave robbery and body snatching? Was that it?” And at the five key words “grave robbery and body snatching” Van Allen felt several heads jerk up around the room. Instantly several lines of vision dropped upon him. He could feel it. He could see it. One young blond girl directly across the worktables and carrels in front of him looked aghast at Van Allen, as if she suspected that he had ordered “How To” manuals on the subject. There was a sallow faced man with glasses to Van Allen’s left who seemed telepathically to share her thoughts.

“Yes. That was it. Thank you,” Detective Van Allen said to Librarian Canary.

“There was a fifth title, too,” Mildred said, forging onward. “But it appears to be unavailable. It has probably been stolen.” She paused. “Imagine. Stealing a book on stealing bodies.”

“Any way to learn who checked it out before it went missing?” Van Allen asked.

“We do not keep track of suck things!” Mildred snapped.

Nothing she said did anything to stop people from watching Van Allen. From a corner desk rose another curious head.

“Maybe these four titles will answer my questions,” Van Allen responded. He took the books. She gave him a weak smile that suggested that, personally, she too thought he was a very sick man. Then she abandoned him to his subject matter.

The detective prepared a fresh set of pages in his notebook. He took out his Mont Blanc fountain pen and readied the writing end to take notes.

Van Allen drew a breath and scanned the room as he prepared to examine his books. Two heads, including that of the blond girl, were still trained upon him. Both quickly returned to their own work when he offered them a toothy smile.

Arbitrarily, he took up the thin book first. It was on top, and it was the closest. If anyone had warned him twenty-five years ago, he thought as he opened it, that in the autumn of 2010 he would find himself sitting in the public library perusing the known literature on hoisting human remains from graves.

The first volume was ancient history. Van Allen scanned it. There were several sections on the Egyptians. The pyramids along the Nile. The curses of the pharaohs.

Van Allen flipped through a chapter dealing with the attempted grave robberies of the great pyramids. Trained as a cop, he quickly saw the sole motive of the robbers. Financial gain. They wanted to plunder whatever treasures had been buried with the pharaohs. Human nature at its most basic.

He thought of the actor Billy Carlton and was unable to connect with any profit motive that could have been assigned to the actor’s corpse. He kept prowling through the death rites of the ancient Egyptians. He went off on a tangent and read a few paragraphs about the mysterious relics left in the tombs of the ancient kings.

Wrote the author:

The ancient artifacts, artwork and writings are unquestionably still possessed by the spirit that created them. They remain capable of revealing to psychometric discovery the modern or enduring human and spiritual realities to which they are connected. But at present their meaning remains encoded. They await a wise man who will press the intellectual key into their lock, just as the hieroglyphics themselves awaited the arrival of the Frenchman Jean François Champollion in 1815.

Van Allen browsed forward. It was not lost upon him or the author of this book that Champollion, who had unlocked the mysteries of the Rosetta Stone, had died a premature death at age forty-two under ghastly circumstances.

Van Allen abandoned the book. As far as he could tell, nothing in it bore much relevance to the world four thousand years after the construction of the pyramids.

He went on to the next volume. It was much more modern and began to suggest some relevance. Van Allen found an account of the robbery of Lincoln’s tomb in 1888. Robbers took the president’s body and attempted to hold it for ransom, only to be captured and imprisoned without ever collecting a nickel. There followed some similar cases over the course of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries. Not the least of which was one with a definite Los Angeles angle.

The body of the movie industry’s greatest actor, Charlie Chaplin, had been pilfered from its resting place in Vevey, Switzerland, in the 1970s.

Van Allen’s attention perked. Here was a case involving another actor, albeit a much more famous one. Van Allen read the entire account of the case. A diversionary note emerged:

… most Americans were unaware of the meaning of the Latin term “fellatio” until it was introduced repeatedly at Chaplin’s divorce hearing from Lita Gray Chaplin in 1927…

Van Allen winced, smirked and skipped back to the 1970s’ when the great actor’s legendary appetites were as dead as the rest of him. A bunch of low-rent European thugs had figured that they could extort money from Chaplin’s survivors in return for his remains. Van Allen grinned. He imagined the ghost of Chaplin snarling to authorities not to give the extortionists a farthing. In the end, the fools had been captured by Swiss police and had landed some serious stretches in a Chateau Gray Bar for their efforts.

Deservedly, thought Van Allen. Then he examined the particulars of the case. Once again, profit had been the motive. And once again, the dumb-assed robbers had found themselves sitting in jail, not a penny richer for their troubles.

Grave robbery. The literature on the subject was meager.

In another book, Van Allen found a case from New York City in 1826. A Dr. William Senfelt had been sentenced to seven years in prison for hiring immigrants to steal fresh bodies from an unnamed “Negro burying grounds near the Battery.” Dr. Senfelt had wanted the corpses for medical experiments and research on human anatomy, or so he had claimed in court. Senfelt served two years of his sentence and apparently never was heard from again, at least not in New York.

Van Allen sighed. He was grasping at straws. All he was finding were isolated cases with predictable motivation. Not that it wasn’t strange stuff.

In another book, for example:

Disinterment. St. Louis, Missouri. 1898. A saloonkeeper of apparently sullen and quarrelsome temperament was murdered by one of his customers, the identity of whom remained unknown. Three days after the barkeep’s burial, his ghost was reported wandering the streets of the city at night, turning over property and frightening horses.

A priest was called. A mass was given “to drive out the demon” that was believed to be in the corpse. When that didn’t work, some upstanding citizens got together, dug up the corpse with shovels, and attacked it directly. A former Confederate Army medic, who was now a local butcher, was given the duty of cutting the heart out of the corpse. The doctor’s knowledge of anatomy turned out to be somewhat sketchy as he couldn’t locate the heart. So he rummaged around through various intestines until a “truly foule (sic) and odious smell came forthe (sic) from the remains,” causing such a stench that the entire body ended up being tossed on a makeshift funeral pyre later that evening. The pyre, in turn, ignited the neyghboring (sic) house …

Van Allen stopped reading as the account of a grave robbery transformed into an account of a municipal fire. He flipped pages. This stuff was stranger than some of the stuff that happened in his station house. Maybe contemporary man didn’t have any sort of lock on weirdness, after all. He found another lively section in the same book:

Grigory Rasputin, the Mad Monk who had been advisor to Czar Nicholas II, was cornered by Bolshevik conspirators in Petrograd on December 28, 1916. He was beaten, shot and stabbed. But, according to those who murdered him, his body was still flailing when it was dumped into a hole in the ice in the frozen River Neva. Three days later, his frozen body was disinterred from its icy grave and paraded around before cheering revolutionaries…

Van Allen sighed and went onward. He waded through a short history of modern burial techniques, particularly one detailing the breathtaking casualness with which Europeans discarded the remains of the dead. He found an article published by a French historian named Maurice DeMaison who had written in the early nineteen hundreds. The article focused on the Parisian cemetery of
Les Saints Innocents
which was established in the Middle Ages and closed in 1780.

The cemetery was a sprawling sector of land, adjacent to a small church. Its management, if it could be called that, typified the practices of the day.

Remains did not linger at
Les Innocents
. The cemetery’s fame derived from the qualities of its soil, which were said to reduce a body to bare bones within a day. When the process was complete, or maybe sooner, the remains were disinterred to make way for a fresh corpse. The bones were moved to a “charnel house” where disjointed skeletons were piled up for the public to come and admire.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

cheerfully wrote DeMaison,

Les Innocents was a successful place of commerce, where merchants set up shops and where strollers might pass the time, same as they might at Palais Royale. There were several successful charnel houses in Paris before the Revolution, and two lasted well until the Second Empire, until closed by order of the Bishop of Paris…

Van Allen was getting tired. He turned in three of the books and went for coffee. He returned half an hour later and continued, though a certain veil of exhaustion was starting to descend upon him.

He found another curious section in the final book he examined, a meditation upon the ways Western culture had re-examined its relationship with its dead starting in the middle of the eighteenth century. Moldering tombs and dank crypts gave way to burials in churchyards and even for those wealthy enough who wished to lie for eternity with the saints within the stone foundations of churches.

But by the late seventeen hundreds, many churches had had experiences with noxious fumes and diseases emanating from under-the-church burial yards.

The book cited a case in Virginia where the pastor of a Charlottesville church and twenty-one parishioners fell fatally ill after a body, only nine months in the ground, was accidentally unearthed by grave diggers.

A feeling took hold that the noxious dead should be moved away from the living as far as reasonable, for public health reasons if no other. Subsequently, the concept was born of the modem cemetery, a tidy burial ground usually at the edge of the city limits. The word “graveyard,” for example, didn’t enter the English language until the 1820’s. And for the first time in Western Christian history, the remains of the dead no longer huddled around churches.

Van Allen rubbed his eyes. He had had enough for one day. He flipped forward in the final book and his eyes gravitated to a section that someone had highlighted.

Nearby, the librarians were readying to close the annex. Meanwhile, he read quickly some ruminations from some writer — probably now long dead, Van Allen reasoned — from several decades earlier.

The effects of death are horrific, but immortality redeems them. Yet, we’ve turned the consolation of immortality into another source of horror. For us, the notion that death is not the end, that the dead are among us in spirit, is terrifying. If the dead sprout choir robes and white wings, as they do in newspaper cartoons, all is well. But what if their bodies or their spirits really could return? What if they can walk through walls, move things, and affect the living?

If we deny afterlife, we get what solace we can from the prospect of a painless oblivion. Yet what if — like most cultures in the world — we suggest that a living death might exist? Then the souls of the departed may haunt us, as will the prospect of a loss of Christian faith.

Van Allen closed the book and spent several moments in long, difficult thought. For some reason, he thought of an advertising tag line that he had seen several years earlier on a movie poster for
Pet Semetary
.

Sometimes dead is better
, read the line.

“Sometimes?” he asked himself. “Why not ‘always’?”

But then again, he attempted to reason, the tag line was nothing more than a mid-1980’s marketing gimmick. A catchy phrase relying on the proper flow of words to sell a movie to a public that was anxious to be scared, then quickly reassured, over the course of a hundred ten minutes.

Van Allen, on the other hand, was working on a real criminal case in which a corpse was missing from a tomb. What Van Allen had before him wasn’t a book and wasn’t a movie. It was an actual situation.

Now, for the first time in this case, a deep shudder gripped him. He had always considered himself to be a man who was willing to entertain any new idea, no matter how preposterous.

He began to ask himself questions to which the answers bordered on the unthinkable.

Sometimes dead is better?

Okay, he pondered, what if “dead” doesn’t always mean dead in the way he had always accepted it. The possibility of heaven and hell aside, what if mortal death didn’t always signal the end of one’s earthly involvement?

Mildred Canary trundled past Van Allen’s table. “Five minutes, sir,” she said. “We’re about to close.”

Van Allen nodded, thanked her, and slid the fourth book back to her. But he remained sitting there. Thinking. If he had had another hour in this place, he thought, he might have done some digging into spirituality.

He methodically replaced the lid on his Mont Blanc and set it down next to his notepad. He thought back, ransacking his own memory. What were his own experiences?

Point: When he had been a boy, he and his entire family had been at the dinner table one evening. They all heard a car on the road by their house. There had been a terrible sound of skidding automobile tires, then a large ugly thump, following quickly by the yelping scream of an animal. They had looked out the window and seen their neighbor’s Dalmatian running away from the sound, running faster than they had ever before seen the old dog move. Then there were the sounds of voices. Animated. Distraught. Twelve-year-old Eddy Van Allen came out of his home with his parents. The body of the dog was lying bloody on the road, exactly where the car had hit it. There were no other Dalmatians in the neighborhood. What, then, had the entire Van Allen family witnessed fleeing the scene of the accident?