by Jeffrey Ford
"And who might I find who would not be?" I said, ending the conversation.
He laughed quietly all the way to the church.
Aria awaited me at the altar. I greeted her with an emotionless hello and she returned the salutation in the same curt manner. I laid out the instruments, and we began at once.
I wondered how life could be any more disappointing when, after sending Calloo for the first subject, he brought back with him Mrs. Mantakis. Not having the stomach to face her in the flesh, I told the old marsupial to leave her clothes on.
"But, your honor," said Aria, "do you not wish to inspect her biological possibilities?"
I lit a cigarette and said, "Very well," with as little reaction as possible. As Aria put her through her paces, having her assume all manner of horrid postures, I sat with my arms folded and stared like a man facing a wall. As she applied the callipers and other instruments, calling out the mathematics of her findings, I did not bother with the charade of the tiny notebook and pin, but simply nodded as if I were committing it all to memory. When Aria measured the earlobes, I believe I heard Mrs. Mantakis growl.
"A thief, for sure," Aria said to me after the old woman had dressed and left the church.
"A thief but not a liar," I thought to myself.
The morning wore on, a steady stream of the bereft, the congenitally damaged, geniuses of stupidity passed before my sight without leaving any impression but one of vague disgust. Aria, for her part, though I could palpably feel her hatred for me, worked methodically, keeping her snide remarks to a minimum.
I knew that eventually I would have to accuse someone of the crime if I wanted a chance to save my own skin. I knew also that the punishment for so serious an offense would be execution—the Master's new and efficient system of justice for any crime more serious than spitting on the sidewalks of the Weil-Built City. "Who shall it be?" I asked myself with each subject that passed before me. Then Calloo brought in Father Garland, and I conceived of my plan of revenge against Anamasobia.
Aria was visibly upset by the presence of the little holy man.
Her clear skin blushed a deep red as the father appeared before us, dressed for paradise. I took a quick glance to see if his shrunken penis came to a needle's sharpness like his teeth and nails. Imagine my surprise when my sight corroborated my suspicions. He said nothing but moved his hand in a sign of a religious blessing for us. I had so hoped that he would act up so that I could call Calloo and have him squashed. Aria's hands shook as she moved the instruments over his face and body. When she applied the Hadris lip vise, I almost told her to leave it on him as a good deed to all mankind.
After he was dressed and was preparing to leave us, he turned and said to me, "I have committed no crime but that of love."
"The charge is tedium," I said as he left, and I began working out in my mind how I would convince the town that he had stolen the fruit. I knew that a good measure of my scheme would need be lofty rhetoric, a commodity so exotic in Anama-sobia it would convince by way of its novelty.
"Next!" I yelled and Calloo made for the door. I thought that I could work out my speech as we went through the next few dozen unfortunates.
But Aria called out, "Wait, Willin," to the giant. "Go wait outside for a moment and we will let you know when we want the next one."
"Do you need a break?" I asked flatly.
She sat down and looked at me as if she were about to cry. Seeing her in this state melted my anger at her somewhat. "She has seen her error," I thought, "and is about to apologize to me for last night."
"Is there something you wanted to tell me?" I asked, speaking like a schoolmaster to a favorite pupil who has done some minor wrong.
"It's him," she said.
"What are you talking about?" I asked, confused by her response.
"Father Garland. He is the one." Tears began to roll down her face.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"I tell you, it's all there. It's as clear as was your face in my window last night," she said.
I remained silent. My guilt at being found out was canceled by my excitement at the thought that I might survive this nightmare. She then launched into a detailed explanation, using the logic of Physiognomy, which of course meant nothing to me but sounded mightily convincing.
"I wish it weren't so, but I can't deny what I read in his face." She wiped the tears from her eyes. "I hate you and this damn system," she said.
"Good work," I whispered. Then I bellowed for Calloo. When he appeared, I told him to get the mayor and to have him gather the citizens into the church.
The people of Anamasobia began filing into the church, filling the pews and then taking up positions in the shadows along the walls beneath the torches where the gallery of hardened heroes stood. There was a great hubbub of hushed conjecture punctuated occasionally by laughter or a loud proclamation of innocence uttered by those who naturally assumed guilt for everything.
The mayor came up onto the altar and shook my hand. He looked genuinely relieved that we had discovered the thief. To offer my congratulations to your honor," he said. 'T do not understand your methods, but they are obviously amazing."
I gratefully acknowledged his adulation and asked him to place one of his people at the door in case the suspect tried to escape. He motioned to Calloo to come to him, and then he whispered something in the big man's ear. Calloo made his way through the crowd to take up a position at the entrance to the altar chamber.
As Aria took down the screen and began putting my instruments neatly into my bag, I scanned the room in order to find Garland. I knew he must have been at least somewhat suspicious that we had called no one in after him. I found him easily enough, sitting in the front row, glaring up at me. I smiled at him and stared into his eyes for a good long time. When he did not avert his glance, I did, in order to look out at the crowd and call for silence. I clapped my hands as if calling a pet dog and the talking turned to whispers and then to silence.
Now that it was time for me to speak, I paced back and forth gathering my thoughts and turning them into the raw material of oration. The crowd watched my every move, and I felt powerful again for the first time in days. In a dramatic flare, designed to heighten the tension, I turned my back on them and stared up at the droll portrait of the miner god that hung behind the altar and for the past two days had born witness to the entire investigation. The idea came to me that I would start by relating my run-in with the demon, so that they might see me as a man of action as well as a superior intellect.
All the time I was strutting and posing, Aria had continued putting away the chrome tools. I wanted to wait until she was finished and had left the "stage" so that all attention could be focused on the revelation I was about to proclaim. She was almost done but for the callipers. When she went to lift them, they slipped out of her grasp and hit the floor with a sound that ricocheted off the cavernlike walls of the chamber. As she bent over to pick them up, her gray work dress hiked up an inch or two, and my eyes automatically traced the shapely lines of her legs from ankle to thigh. That is when I saw it.
There, on her left leg on the back of her thigh was a prominent mole with what appeared to be an inordinately long black hair growing from it. I blinked my eyes and took a step closer, forgetting that there was a crowd of people awaiting my determination. She must have heard me move, or perhaps she felt my eyes upon her—I was staring so intently—for she turned before straightening and looked up at me. In that very instant, with an audible popping sound in my mind like a cork being pulled from a bottle of champagne the knowledge of the Physiognomy returned to me completely. My eyes again teeming with their old intelligence, I saw immediately that she was no Star Five, as I had been somehow duped into believing by her youthful, feminine beauty, but that those features seen anew brought back Professor Flock's original profile of the criminal: a tendency toward larceny and a religiopsychotic reliance on the miraculous. I remembered why the child the woman had begged me to read
in the street that day had later on seemed so familiar. He had many of the same facial features as I now perceived Aria to have. The woman had, in fact, been her.
I turned to the crowd and said, "Ladies and gentlemen of Anamasobia. We have in our midst a thief." I stepped back and pointed at Aria, who was now closing the clasp on my bag. "It is Aria Beaton who has stolen the miraculous fruit of paradise."
She turned and stared at me dumbfounded. Garland sprang from his seat and made a move toward the altar with his claws out. With all my regained confidence, I stepped gracefully forward and kicked him in the head before he could jump me. As he landed on the bottom step leading to the altar, I took the derringer out of my pocket and fired a warning shot into the ceiling. Splinters of wood fell on those in the first row of pews, and the near riot subsided back to near silence.
Aria sat down slowly in the chair I had used for the past two days and stared, as if in shock, out over the heaving sea of physiognomies.
The mayor stood up and begged everyone to be quiet. Then he turned to me and said, "This is a serious offense, your honor. Can you please explain for those of us who do not comprehend the intricacies of your science. If I may say so, this comes as a great shock to us all." For once, he wasn't smiling.
I wanted nothing better than to explain. "It is accepted among the learned," I began, "as certainly as the sun comes up in the morning or that Drachton Below is our munificent Master, that the visible structure of our physical features, when analyzed by the well-trained eye, reveals one's moral aptitude in general and specifically exhibits the details of one's personal foibles and virtues. If you take a look at the subject ..."
Here I approached Aria, who did not move a muscle but continued to stare as if dead. I ran my finger the length of her nose and then pointed to the small hollow just beneath her bottom lip. "In these features, I have just pointed to," I said, "we find a combination of intrinsic signs that disclose a personality prone to reckless action."
I moved around her to the other side and pointed to the arch of her eyebrow. "Here we see an effect known to my colleagues and me as the 'Scheffler conclusion,' named, of course, for one of the fathers of the Physiognomy, Kurst Scheffler. What this effect denotes is, amazingly, both a tendency toward thievery and a desire to participate in miraculous events. There is also a mole on the left thigh, with a long hair growing from it, that nails shut this case once and for all." I stepped forward and brushed my hands together as if wiping the taint of crime from them.
By the number of open, expressionless mouths in the audience, I could tell that I had made my point. I bowed and applause broke out in the pews and along the walls. Father Garland had just then come to and was crawling back to his seat when the first cries of "death to the thief," were heard to echo through the hollow heart of the wooden Gronus.
"And what now?" asked the mayor.
We stood outside the church as evening fell. The stars and moon were beginning to appear, and the snow had stopped falling sometime in the day. The crowd had gone home, many of whom had thanked me personally for having apprehended the criminal. From the words of appreciation, I got the feeling that these simple people had, for their own reasons, always harbored a certain fear of this girl. As for Aria, she had been taken away to the one cell in Ana-masobia—a small, windowless locked room in the town hall.
"I suppose justice must be served," I said.
"If you'll beg my pardon, your honor, you may have found the criminal, but the white fruit is still missing. How are we going to retrieve that if I have the girl executed?" he asked.
"Interrogate the prisoner," I said. "You must be aware that there are methods for making people talk. Search that hovel she lives in. My belief is that she probably fed part of it to her bastard child in order to offset its obvious physiognomical deficiencies."
He nodded sadly, which took me by surprise.
"Nothing to laugh at, Mayor?" I asked.
"Torture is not my strong suit," he said. "For that matter, neither is execution. Is there no other way to go about this? Couldn't she, perhaps, just apologize?"
"Really, now," I said, "the Master would not perceive such leniency with a kind eye. With that course of action, you might jeopardize the entire town's very existence."
"I see," he said. "It's just that I've known this girl from when she was a child. I knew her grandfather. I know her parents. I saw her grow up, and she was such a sweet, inquisitive little thing." He looked into my eyes, and I could tell he was on the verge of tears.
Although I met his gaze with complete silence, his words about Aria forced me to remember those things about her that had, for the past days, kept her constantly on my mind. I was now certain that it had not, after all, been the Traveler who had blinded my perception, but instead it was Aria's own special beauty and intelligence that had bewitched me.
The mayor, getting no reply from me, began walking away, and, with this, I experienced an unfathomable emotion, almost like sadness. I wasn't sure if it was because I also could not bear the thought of Aria's execution, or if it was that, although I had my thief, little had truly been resolved.
"Wait," I told him.
He stopped but remained with his back to me.
"There is something I might try."
He turned and came slowly back to stand before me.
"It is an experimental procedure that I am not sure will work," I told him. "I wrote a paper on it a few years ago, but it was not favorably acknowledged by my colleagues, and the idea died out after a few weeks of heated debate."
"Well?" he said as I searched my mind for the particulars of the theory. When I hit upon it, it seemed rather daring if not reckless, but in light of my newly regained powers, and the feeling of great inner strength their rediscovery gave rise to, I began to think that this case might be the perfect opportunity to test this untried method.
"Listen closely," I said to him. "If the physical features of the girl's face are an indication of the character traits she harbors deep within, then does it not make sense that if I were to * rearrange those features with my scalpel, creating a structure that would indicate a more morally perfect inner state, would she not then be re-formed from the congenital criminal malaise, resulting in the willingness to reveal the location of the fruit and rendering her no longer in need of execution?"
Bataldo rolled his eyes and took a step back. "If I am understanding you," he said, "you are saying you can make her good by performing surgery on her?"
"Perhaps," I said.
"Then do it," he said, and like the lion lying down with the lamb, we each smiled for different reasons.
I made arrangements with the mayor to have her brought to my study at the hotel the next morning promptly at nine. He then asked me if I would join him for dinner at the tavern, but I declined, knowing that there was much preparation to be done if I was going to rescue her from herself.
For the first time since I arrived at Anamasobia, I truly felt at ease. On the way back to my quarters people greeted me with the deference befitting my station. Even Mrs. Mantakis, seeing me enter the lobby of the hotel, addressed me with a certain air of subservience that had obviously been lacking heretofore. I told her to send away all visitors and to bring me some of that blue wine and a light dinner. She told me she had prepared something special for me that evening that had nothing to do with cremat, and I couldn't believe myself that I actually thanked her. She purred like a cat at my grateful response.
Had I still been in the thick of the mystery, I would have been alarmed to see how little of the beauty I still had in my valise—only enough for three or four real doses, but with my new self-assurance that the case would be completely resolved by sometime the next evening, I took a full vial without a second thought.
Then I undressed, put on my robe and slippers, and had a cigarette. True to my old form, I was able, with the enhanced power of the drug, to readily envision Aria's face and the changes that would have to be made to it in order to save her
life. I quickly got pen and paper and began sketching my vision of the new Aria.
It must have been hours after Mrs. Manktakis had delivered my dinner and wine that I finally finished making my plans. By now the town was perfectly quiet, a condition, after having come from the City, that I could never really get used to. The sheer beauty was still active in my system, bringing me intermittent visions of splendor. Not one paranoic image found its way into my head as I worked, but occasionally I would daydream vividly about my idyllic childhood on the banks of the Chottle River.
Finally I sat down on the bed to consider the fame this next day's procedure would bring me if it was successful, and that is when Professor Flock made his appearance.
"You again," I said.
"Who else?" he asked, now dressed in his teaching uniform and toting the dress cane with an ivory monkey-head handle it had been his practice to carry at official events.
"You're a traitor," I said to him.
"Did I not suggest the appropriate method with which to apprehend the criminal?" he asked, smiling.
"That you did, but I'm done with you. I'm going to banish you from my mind," I told him.
"That may be a little difficult since I am really you talking to yourself in a drug-induced haze," he said. "I can only say and do, can only be, what you desire."
"Well, what do you think of my plans for tomorrow?" I asked.
"Be certain that you cut some of the intelligence out of the poor girl; she's too smart for her own good. And, by all means, let's have a cut in the center of the chin to ward off those delusions that there is anything in store for her but the meanest existence here in this shit village at the end of the world. The rest of it seems quite good. I don't think I could have done better myself," he said, tapping the cane on the floor.
"Very well," I said, "I can't argue with that."
"My real reason for coming tonight is to bid you farewell. I don't think I will be seeing you again," he said. Then he held the cane up and out toward me, and the ivory monkey head came magically to life, screaming in its small voice, "I am not a monkey. I am not a monkey." As always, Flock left his laughter behind, and I bid him good riddance.