"You LOST his liver?" I asked, incredulous.
Herman the German was wringing his little pudgy hands and wiping the sweat from his forehead with something that appeared to be a tampon. The tails of his bloody lab coat flapped as he trotted down the hallway next to me, leaving little red spots on the pants legs of any of the Ambulatories who were too slow to get out of the way. We turned the corner to the elevator.
"Well, I had a lot of work that night, what with it being Saturday and all the snow outside! I had clients waiting halfway down the hall and I couldn't go fast enough to suit the Director -- he was hanging around with his little stopwatch, murmuring 'time is money, time is money.' So I hurried."
"Just calm down, Herr Rudolf," said my assistant, hurrying along on the other side. "We'll find it, don't you worry." The doors opened, and Herman waddled into the elevator like a mother goose worried about her children.
The Senator was an important man; his legislation on behalf of the medical profession was widely recognized as far-sighted and wise. He had made great strides, for instance, in keeping the price of malpractice insurance artificially low for decades, while also skewing the rules of evidence in favor of the physician. Now, while recuperating from his triple-bypass surgery, he had succumbed to a rare liver disease.
Or that's what the autopsy was supposed to show, anyway. In order for us to fake the tests, we had to have samples, and Herman never did well under time pressure.
The elevator doors withdrew to the sound of a faint chime, and I heard my assistant gasp. The hallway was crammed with gurneys, jammed helter-skelter from wall to wall, some with two or more sacks on them. "It's the holiday, you see," apologized Herman, dropping to his hands and knees and worming his way through the undercarriage of the nearest few tables. The freezer room door was blocked, so we went in through the main lab.
All three autopsy tables were in use. Herman had been working in parallel, it seemed; three sets of tools were in use. A few wisps of mist swirled around Herman's coattails as he pulled out a freezer shelf, seemingly at random.
"Now where was he," Herman muttered, "how was I filing them again? There was Bergman and Feldberg, and then I had Feldman and Lipschitz. Such a lovely heart she had..." Back in his demesnes, Herman was calmer, with a sort of dazed detachment. "Forms, forms..." he mused, poking through a large stack of them on a table to one side. "Records, Autopsy reports, bag orders, transplants... aha." He pointed.
In the drawer Herman indicated was a 57-year old black male, cause of death: ingestion of a ferret. "Hmm," said Herman. "If he is here, then who did I send to the Chang funeral?" We set to work searching the freezers one by one.
I heard a muffled cry from the storage room. We ran. On the floor, surrounded by spilled supplies, sat the Director, his eyes wild and his face contorted in childish glee. Before him sat a bed-pan atop a small fire kindled with tongue depressors.
"Never find it, will they! Never!" he cackled, as he used a specimen cup to scrape the last of his meal from the bed pan. We jumped for him, but it was too late. He had finished his pate'.