16
A small woman, her hair cut fashionably short to her jawline, wearing a wool coat a few seasons out of date, had been waiting all morning in the hallway outside the coroner’s office in the city building on Chambers Street in Manhattan. The building was strange, a labyrinth of veined brown marble, underlit and loud with echoes. Civil servants came and went through a vast atrium, sorting themselves into a warren of cramped, carpeted offices.
She smoked while she waited. There was a machine that gave out numbers, and she held her number on its fragile pink paper in one gloved hand as if she had forgotten it was there. The hallway was cold and she didn’t remove her coat or hat.
‘You’ll have to give us more information,’ they said at last when her number was called. ‘This will take a long
