“You should wear your gloves,” he said, his tone apologetic.
“I do wear my gloves, but they’re awkward, and they slow me down. And I can’t hear their stories with my gloves on.”
“Why do you want to?” he asked.
“Because . . . because no one else ever will.”
“Do you always cry?”
“No. I do not,” she sniffed. He dug a handkerchief from his pocket—a task not easily done with the layers he was wearing—and blotted at her cheeks like a nurse assisting a surgeon. He didn’t want her wiping death all over her face.
“So why are you crying now?” he asked.
“Because this poor man . . . Ivan. His name was Ivan. He was in love. She died a while ago, and he . . . he was glad to go. He wanted to die. But his love for her is here.”
“Here?”
“Here in the cloth.”
“Oh.” The man’s coat—if it could even be called a coat—was so black with soot it could have been the color of apples and no one would know it. Malone stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket and hoped he wouldn’t need it again.
“The woman he loved was Johanna,” Dani said, her voice rising like she needed to convince him. “She . . . had a lovely smile and she wore a flower in her hat. A poppy. One of those paper ones that you can buy on street corners. He gave it to her. And every time it wore out, he’d buy her another.”
“All right,” he said, guarded, and she sighed. She turned to her clipboard and made some notes, her handwriting graceful and neat, gliding across the page like she was writing invitations to a party instead of descriptions of the dead. Then she set the clipboard aside and added another set of notes to what appeared to be an official record.
He didn’t ask about the particulars; he didn’t find he cared all that much, but when they finished removing the outer layers of “Ivan’s” attire and dressed him in a clean shirt and trousers, Dani removed a paper from her clipboard and tucked it in his breast pocket.
“What’s that for?” Malone frowned.
“I write their stories—in a few words—and put them in their pockets.”
“Why?”
“Nobody’s going to say words at their unmarked graves. These are their eulogies.”
“Is that part of the job?”
“No. And Mr. Raus—and the men who come to retrieve them for burial—probably think I’m mad. I don’t know if they toss the papers I tuck inside their clothes. But it makes me feel better. I keep good records so that someday . . . if someone comes looking, they can be found.”
“Good God, Dani.”
“You say that a lot, Michael.”
“Yeah. Well. I don’t know what else to say.”
“He’ll have to wear those old boots. That is one thing I can’t spare. Look at his poor toes,” she mourned.
He had no wish to look at the man’s toes protruding from the ends of the boots, but he obeyed and immediately wished he hadn’t.
“Move along, Dani,” he demanded, and she did.
She mended a button here and there, washed the grime from frozen faces, and tidied tangled hair. They rolled another man to his side, as filthy as the first, and removed his layers, one by one, and eased him into a new shirt, buttoning it to the top and tucking the tails into a clean pair of trousers.
“I think his name was Wally. I don’t know if it was his first or last. He liked ragtime music and whistled wherever he went. Whistling Wally.” She wrote his description in her book, tucked his eulogy in the man’s pocket, and moved on to the next body.
Poor Wally, unlike Ivan, didn’t even have a bad pair of boots, and Malone did his best not to look at his bare feet.
A woman with scraggly gray hair and no teeth was next. She wore so many layers, it took Dani and Malone both to strip her down to the blue dress with faded lilies that she wore next to her skin.
“We’ll leave her in this. It’s the nicest thing she had. That’s why she put it on the bottom. It kept it from getting soiled or too worn. She liked it. It made her feel like a girl again.” Dani said all this slowly, almost like she was repeating something that was whispered in her ear.
“What will you do with the rest of her clothes? With the rest of all their clothes?”
“She doesn’t need those now. None of them do. Check her pockets for possessions. If it’s something small, a picture or a trinket, I like to leave it with them for burial.”