The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  The Texan heard a door behind him open and close and then footsteps approached. Somebody set down something with a thud. A man stepped around in front of him, holding two insulated electrical cables with bare ends. He wore a mismatched jogging suit, which was unzipped to his hairy stomach.

  When the wires touched either side of the Texan’s neck, it was as if a bomb had gone off in his throat. He thought his head had been blown off his body. But that was only an illusion. The sensation that he was involuntarily pissing his pants was not.

  The stranger who had spat on him yawed back his head, mouth wide open, wide as a baboon’s maw, his eyes glittering, the veins in his neck engorged, standing out like great plum-colored worms.

  They were all standing. Suddenly, Ahmad’s arms flew out wide, as if he were conducting an orchestra with brio, and the spray of his brains fled the blast from Khalil’s outstretched arm. No more Ahmad.

  The wires again, rammed precisely into his ears.

  Silence.

  The stranger was straddling him, his face contorted like a Francis Bacon portrait, his mouth twisted grotesquely up the right side of his head, one eye pig-size and wandering, the other protuberant and goggling.

  The Texan felt the man inside his mouth, and for a split second he thought the whole man was in there, because he couldn’t see him, but he could feel him walking around.

  Then the stranger held something in front of the Texan’s face, jabbing at it insanely with his knife for him to see, then slapping his face with it, again and again.

  But the Texan was already drowning, and he found it difficult to care too much about what the man was doing. It was hard to drown in your own blood, even so much of it. He found that drowning wasn’t a progressive event, as he might have imagined. Rather, it was a lurching sort of thing: Choking on the surge of blood, he faded; then he coughed, spewing a geyser of blood, and was instantly back in the brutal clarity of the moment.

  He tried to go ahead and die, but he was disappointed to realize that he couldn’t force it. He went through the whole cycle again. Then he smelled the feces, which were undoubtedly his own, and he was surprised to feel a sad, profound embarrassment.

  Then, just when he began to die after all, and he knew for certain that he was dying, he saw the man with the contorted features toss to the dog the thing that he had been flourishing and stabbing in his wild rant. The poor cadaverous creature pounced on it in an instant, and with hunched shoulders and great gorging efforts of his outstretched neck, he wolfed it down.

  It was only then that the Texan realized that the man had cut out his tongue.

  Chapter 3

  Austin, Texas

  “I’ve got a client coming in about half an hour,” Bern said, leaning over and blowing eraser crumbs off the sketch he was finishing. He was making a last-minute alteration to the composite drawing of a man accused of raping a University of Texas student.

  The victim had been brought to him the night before, and in sporadic, sharp observations she had described the face that had now emerged from under his pencil. Early that morning, the detective had called and asked for a variation in detail.

  Alice was sitting on her stool, an arm’s reach away, a sketch pad on her lap, watching over his shoulder. When he stopped drawing, she immediately returned to her own creation for the morning, a conga line of Kewpie doll stick figures, each with a single curl of hair standing upright on its head, all marching toward a cliff.

  Alice Lau was seventeen.

  Paul Bern sipped coffee from his black mug and looked at her. She was oblivious now, absorbed in her drawing. Wearing designer-faded hip-hugging jeans that revealed her navel, and a cutoff T-shirt that exposed her midriff, she was sitting with one leg crossed over the other at the knee, waggling her bare foot in the universal teenager’s fidget. She was spreading a piece of gum with her tongue and lips, as if she were about to blow a bubble, but the bubble never materialized. Her straight black hair was pulled back in a long braid that was draped over the front of one shoulder.

  She was the only child of Bern’s closest friends, Dana and Philip Lau. He and Philip had been undergraduates together at Rice, and though their careers had taken them to different parts of the world, over the years they and their wives had regularly managed to spend a few days of vacation together every couple of years. When Philip became a tenured professor of political science at the University of Texas, he and Dana started lobbying Paul and Tess to move to Austin. Eventually, they were persuaded, and it had been a wonderful decision in every way . . . until just about a year ago.

  They were listening to Tom Waits’s CD Alice, an appropriate choice for many reasons, all completely lost on the girl on the stool. She couldn’t understand anything Waits was singing. She couldn’t understand anything Bern was saying, for that matter, but he always talked to her as if she understood everything. And, mysteriously, it seemed that she often did.

  He stood and looked down at his drawing, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the mug of coffee. The guy’s eyes were wide-set, his nose was broad and slightly upturned, and his maxilla was distinctly sunken, emphasizing his prominent front teeth. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t a flattering combination, and it stuck very clearly in the victim’s mind. She also remembered that his hair was worn in a mullet, a feature that only added to the stupidity of his appearance.

  “This is as far as I’m going to take it,” he said. “Don’t want to push it.”

  Alice looked up while he was talking and glanced at the drawing, too.

  “It’s no way through the legs so,” she said, “but if there’s a really wrong, then who would fly on it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “They only asked for one variation, and I’ve given them three. I don’t want to start putting ideas in her head.”

  Alice shrugged and smiled and then went back to the Kewpie dolls.

  He looked at his watch. No time to start anything else. Tom Waits was singing about Poor Edward—“On the back of his head/He had another Face/Was it a woman’s face/Or a young girl?”—and Alice’s foot was waggling, but not in time with the music. Bern knew she appreciated music and understood the beat and rhythm of it, if not the words.

  Over a period of months, he had experimented with her and had found that she responded to particular musical moods. Sometimes she was upset if he put on Miles Davis, and she wouldn’t settle down until he switched to Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach. Other times, it was the other way around: Not Bach; let’s have Tosca’s tangos.

  But she wasn’t often so definite about it. Usually, anything he liked, she liked. She was pretty simpatico that way. The way Tess had been. Jesus. Alice didn’t often remind him of Tess anymore. Not often. Still, sometimes . . . But he didn’t let it derail him now like it used to.

  He had gotten used to having Alice around. It was a little awkward at first, and he had worried that it was awkward for Alice, too. But it didn’t take him long to get to know the new Alice, and he realized that his concern was unnecessary. For her, the situation was not so complex. Not in the same way it was for him anyway.

  When the doorbell rang, Alice looked up at him, waiting for his reaction.

  “That’s my client,” he said, starting back across the room.

  He passed the drawing tables, easels, and workbenches cluttered with the tools of his craft—cans of paintbrushes, partially used tubes of oil paints, sketchbooks, sticks of charcoal and pastel chalks. There were cabinets of materials and supplies, books on shelves, and a complete skeleton dangling from a chrome stand. He went up the six steps, which were nearly the width of the room itself.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” he called back.

  Alice said something in response, the tone and cadence of which sounded reasonable, though the syntax of the words made no sense whatsoever.

  “Okay,” he said as he opened the door. “Be right back.”

  He saw the woman through the heavy grillwork of the iron gate as he approached her across the interior
courtyard. She was standing in the lacy morning shade of a mesquite tree, holding a cardboard carton about the size of a small hatbox in her hands.

  He quickly took her in: a simple sleeveless summer dress of lemon yellow, straight, just above the knees. She had a berry-brown suntan. Five eight or nine. Early thirties. Dark blunt-cut hair worn just shorter than shoulder length, but long enough for her to pull it back out of her way and fix it with a practical rubber band. At this moment, she had the sides of it tucked behind her ears. She was trim and fit, not in the sense of an athlete, but more like someone who enjoyed the outdoors, maybe hiked a lot.

  “Becca Haber,” she said, peeping at him through the grille as he approached. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “It’s all right. Everybody gets lost out here,” he said, sliding back the bolt on the gate to let her in. “I’m used to it.”

  Bern lived in one of the countless bends of the Colorado River, which had been dammed up more than half a dozen times as it passed through the hills of central Texas. The dams formed a chain of wooded lakes northwest of Austin, with the lower two lakes coming right into the city where Bern had built his semisecluded house.

  He and the woman crossed the courtyard under a canopy of wisteria, which spanned the open space, draping across it from the high stone walls of the surrounding house. He had been watering plants earlier, and the odors of dampened soil and stones still filled the warm morning air.

  “You got into town last night?” Bern asked. The woman was walking just a step behind him as they entered a barrel-vaulted corridor of brick and stone slurried over with white plaster.

  “Yes, more or less,” she said.

  Okay. The light from the other end of the tunnel spun toward them, as if anticipating their arrival, but they turned into an open doorway halfway around the tunnel’s arc and stepped into Bern’s studio.

  The woman paused on the landing and took in the large airy room that lay below the short flight of steps. Built piecemeal over a period of years, much of the work having been done by Bern himself, the studio was an assimilation of concrete, angled glass walls, and limestone boulders, with a high, sloping ceiling supported by steel beams. The glass wall on the far side of the room was slightly cantilevered over the lake, which was twenty feet below the floor of the studio.

  He saw Becca’s eyes come to rest on Alice, who, knowing the routine, had moved her stool over to the sitting area near the glass wall, awaiting their arrival.

  Becca said nothing as they crossed the room to the massive slab of mesquite that served as a coffee table. There were several armchairs and a sofa.

  “This is Alice,” Bern said.

  Alice smiled. Becca Haber nodded soberly.

  Bern offered her a place on the sofa, but she chose one of the armchairs instead. She sat down with her sandaled feet close together on the concrete floor, holding the box on top of her thighs. She glanced at Alice.

  “This is, uh, this is very personal,” she said softly to Bern.

  He nodded. “I know, but it’s okay. She’s—she can’t understand you.”

  Becca Haber kept her eyes on Bern. “She’s deaf?”

  “No—”

  “Oh. Chinese.”

  “Chinese, yes, but her family’s been in the United States for more generations than mine. She can’t understand you because she has brain damage. A waterskiing accident about a year ago.”

  “What do you mean, ‘she can’t understand’?”

  “It’s complicated,” he said. “Brain injuries, they’re quirky things. There’s a cognitive disconnect of some sort.”

  “‘Cognitive disconnect’?”

  Bern had hoped she would just accept that and they could go on. But he could see what he always saw in people who were told about Alice’s condition: puzzlement and a ton of questions.

  “Basically, she can’t recognize or understand the meaning of words,” he said. Over the past year, he’d developed a long and a short version of this explanation. She was going to get the short one.

  “Even though she doesn’t understand the meaning of the words you’re speaking, she’s verbally fluent. I mean, she’ll hold a conversation with you. She’ll pause to let you have your turn at the appropriate time; then she’ll take her turn. She even punctuates her sentences correctly—for the most part. But it just doesn’t compute. It makes no sense whatsoever. The strangest part is, she thinks she understands the conversation. So I just go along with it.”

  Becca glanced again at Alice, who was staring back at her with a birdlike curiosity, insensitive to the indelicacy of her frank gaze.

  “Who, uh, who is she?”

  “She’s the daughter of old friends. Actually, I’m her godfather.” He pulled around another chair and sat on the other side of the coffee table from her. “It calms her to watch me draw, and we’ve discovered that it has a kind of therapeutic effect on her. So Alice’s mother brings her by here a couple of times a week to watch me work. It frees her up for a few hours to do some shopping, run errands.”

  “She doesn’t bother you?”

  “Nope. We just talk, listen to music.”

  “But she doesn’t make any sense?”

  “Nope.”

  Alice was still looking at Becca Haber with a penetrating concentration, waggling her foot, working her gum. It was as if the woman were a newly discovered object and Alice was trying to figure out her meaning and usefulness. It wasn’t exactly a calming thing for Becca Haber, who already seemed to be a little tightly wound.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got,” Bern said.

  Chapter 4

  Glancing tentatively one more time at Alice, Haber leaned forward, carefully placed the box on the mesquite slab in front of her, and opened it, revealing the underside of a human skull cradled in a nest of shredded paper. Inserting her thumb into the foramen magnum on the underside of the skull, she lifted it out of the box. With her other hand, she took out the skull’s detached mandible, its horseshoe-shaped lower jaw.

  With an odd expertise, she put the mandible just behind her suntanned bare knee, its two sides straddling her thigh like a beret, the teeth pointing away from her. Then she turned the skull upright, facing Bern, and held it on her thighs.

  “It’s in good shape,” she offered, as if this were an audition. She looked down at the top of the skull.

  He had already noticed that. It was in excellent shape. Rare. It looked as if it had been harvested from a hospital for academic purposes. Usually by the time he saw them, they had been through a lot of abuse, buried and etched by soil acids or worms, or left out in the open for months or years, teeth missing, gnawed by animals, bleached by the stresses of exposure. But this one was perfect in all respects, except for the separated mandible. It was pristine, all the teeth firmly in place.

  Becca Haber had called early that morning and introduced herself. She said that she was from Atlanta and that she had just come into Austin. She told him she had a skull and that she hoped he would agree to reconstruct its face.

  He’d asked her if she had been referred to him by someone at a law-enforcement agency. She’d said this was a personal situation. She had read an article about him in Atlanta a few years ago.

  How did she happen to have the skull? he’d asked.

  There had been a pause at the other end of the line.

  “I’d rather explain that to you when I get there,” she’d said. Her voice had a southern lilt, but that hadn’t disguised the underlying hint of tension.

  Now here she sat, holding a skull that looked eerily fresh. He didn’t reach for it, though he wanted to. Instead, he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms.

  “Why don’t you start by telling me how you happen to have this,” he suggested.

  “Sure,” she said, nodding. “I understand.” She squared her shoulders. “I bought it from a street kid in Mexico City.”

  But she didn’t go on. At first, Bern thought she was reconsidering what she was about to say, but as he looke
d at her face, he realized that she was looking at him without seeing him. Something seemed to be happening. He waited.

  As a forensic artist, he was used to talking with clients who were upset. The people who were brought to him were victims of rape or attempted murder or kidnapping or mutilation, or had been witnesses to such things. Re- creating in one’s mind the faces of the people who have done such things is often an excruciating experience, and sometimes the mind rebels at being asked to recall the horrors it has recorded. Memory is a fragile and mercurial thing, and responds most reliably, he’d found, to tender treatment. He glanced away, giving her time to gain control of her emotions.

  Becca Haber looked up.

  “I’m positive . . .” she said, looking down at the skull in her lap, “almost positive, that this is my husband.”

  The corners of her mouth pulled down involuntarily as she fought her emotions.

  Out of his peripheral vision, Bern saw Alice’s foot suddenly stop waggling. He glanced at her. She had stopped kneading her gum and it rested like a little pink pellet exactly in the center of her slightly parted lips. She was staring at Becca with slack-jawed fascination, as if she were watching the woman metamorphose into something alien right there in the stream of sunshine.

  Becca Haber launched into a story that sounded like a million other stories. She had met her husband a couple of years earlier and had married him after knowing him only a few months. He was an artist. They’d had about half a year of glorious marriage, followed by a half year of hell, before they’d agreed to separate and see if things wouldn’t cool down.

  He moved to Mexico City, where he had lived several years before. They sent each other E-mail messages every day; she flew down a couple of times for long weekends. Then, about four months ago, he’d stopped sending her E-mail. After a couple of weeks, she went down there. She found his house in perfect condition, but he was gone.

  She stayed a few weeks, asking around about him, but his few friends said they hadn’t heard from him, either. The police couldn’t even stir up a modest curiosity about her panicked concern, implying these things happened all the time and that eventually he would come back when he got tired of the other woman.