The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  Bern looked at her. She had laid her sketch pad on a nearby table edge and had put her hands between her legs on the seat of the stool, her arms locked straight as she leaned toward the sketch. She seemed to be trying to see something she couldn’t quite make out, the way she had studied the drawing with the contradictory facial expressions that he had made for her the previous day. Then he saw her look at the drawing in a couple of the mirrors, as she had learned to do from him, and he saw a distinctive change in her eyes and brow.

  “Something wrong with it?” he asked again. Unlike her reaction to the picture yesterday, when her puzzlement at what she saw had resulted in a calming fascination, the sketch on the drawing board had the opposite effect.

  She hesitated, cocking her head another way. “In every certain way,” she said carefully, “it would be crazy if you put a face on it.”

  The drawing was finished, although it lacked detail. It was a mistake to overrender a drawing at this point of the reconstruction process. Some things were better worked out on the actual skull. But the proportional arrangement of the different features was in place, which, for identification purposes, was the key thing. Though some individual features may be rendered entirely wrong, the face will still be recognizable if the relationship between the features, and the proportions of some of them, is accurate. It is the correct relationship of the aggregate elements of a face that is the essential ingredient in the process of recognition.

  As Bern watched Alice, she slowly shrugged one shoulder defensively and unconsciously turned her head away slightly, though she was reluctant to stop looking.

  “It’s a black song with eyes behind,” she said. “Not even the music, not even if you cry.” She began shaking her head no, a little at first and then a lot, and finally she pulled her gaze away from the drawing and looked hard at Bern, her expression one of deep-seated disappointment.

  “I’m not want from this. Ever. No.”

  She solemnly got down off the stool, picked up her sketchbook, and headed for the sofa. Bern was completely surprised at her reaction, and puzzled.

  “Okay,” he said, watching her as she sat on the sofa and opened her sketch pad. “You want to watch me do the clay work, then?”

  She liked the clay modeling even more than the drawing because he didn’t do it as often, and she hadn’t seen as much of it. She knew he was already working on the skull, because she had seen it set up on the next bench, the eyeballs and first strips of clay already in place around the tissue-depth markers. But she wasn’t going to have anything to do with it. She didn’t even respond. She had put her bare feet on the edge of the coffee table and was drawing in her sketchbook, which was resting against her slanted thighs.

  Even more puzzled now, Bern sat on the stool to look at the drawings from her vantage point. He studied the face, trying to see it afresh. He was comfortable with the accuracy of the proportions. What the hell had she seen here that had been so disturbing? After a few minutes, he gave up and set to work on the skull.

  At noon, he stopped, and they drove to the Far Point Grill in the old Triumph, Alice looking like a carefree kid in her sunglasses and with her Côte d’Azur smile. They did this every couple of weeks when Dana volunteered at the battered-women’s shelter at Seton Hospital, as she was doing today. Alice liked watching the sailboats come and leave the marina, and the fact that she had almost been killed in a boating accident never seemed to bother her.

  Katie had known Alice before the accident, too, and out of sheer compassion had quickly learned the give-and-take of Alice’s nonsensical conversation. It was easier for some people than for others. There were those who still found it disturbing to have this attractive girl speaking to them in an Alice in Wonderland syntax. It required a little creativity and willingness to laugh at yourself.

  They were back at the studio in a little over an hour. Alice deliberately avoided the workbench where he had been reconstructing the face on Haber’s skull, returning to the sofa instead. Bern put on a Bach CD because Alice seemed in a Yo-Yo Ma mood, and within twenty minutes, he saw her put her sketch pad on the mesquite-slab table and curl up at one end of the sofa. She was soon asleep.

  He had trouble with the sculpture almost as soon as the contours of the face began to emerge from the clay applications. From the very beginning, he found himself making a mistake that was common to beginning forensic sculptors—that is, projecting his own features onto the clay model. He went back to his measurements again and again to double-check tissue measurements, bone projections, and spacing, figures that he had determined only hours before or already knew by heart.

  It was particularly frustrating because he was rebuilding and reshaping on a skull that was in perfect condition. The guesswork was as minimal as it was ever going to get. Which left his judgment to consider. He wasn’t arrogant, but he did have a lot of confidence in his ability to read a skull, and in his artistic skills.

  But something was wrong. This thing didn’t feel right at all. Each adjustment he made simply resulted in a variation on a theme. Nothing substantive actually changed in the reconstructed face, because the substantive indicators remained the same no matter how many times he measured the skull or checked the tissue charts. He was just shoving around clay.

  When Alice woke an hour later, she wanted to go swimming. She went to the lower bedroom, which opened onto the terrace, and changed into her swimsuit. When she came upstairs again, Bern quit working and sat on the deck outside the studio with a glass of iced tea and watched her swim back and forth in the cove below. Once in a while, he’d glance into the room and look at the head he had sculpted sitting on the workbench. The thing was beginning to get on his nerves. He had the vague feeling that there was something about it that was familiar somehow.

  Alice messed around in the water, swimming, floating on a rubber raft, letting the breeze move her around in the sunny water. When she finally climbed out of the lake about an hour later, she sat on the deck with him and ate an ice-cream bar. She was just finishing it when Dana called to say that she was leaving the shelter early and would be there in half an hour.

  After Alice had dressed and dried her hair, Bern thought he would try to get her to look at the reconstructed face again, now that it was finished. He tried to coax her over to the workbench, but she wouldn’t go, wouldn’t even look that way. He even tried humoring her, playfully putting his hands on her shoulders and guiding her toward the bench. But she wouldn’t be humored, either, and she pulled away from him, throwing him a painful look, mumbling something he couldn’t hear. She returned to the sofa, where she remained absorbed in a kind of distant sadness until her mother arrived.

  After they had gone, Bern poured a gin and tonic, added a big chunk of lime, and went back to the reconstructed face. He sat down at the workbench and studied what he had done. Should he photograph the head now, and then go back and put a smile on the face? Since the teeth are the only part of a person’s skull that is seen by others while the person is living, sometimes showing them can be crucial to identification.

  He decided against it, but he couldn’t resist doing a little more detailing, articulating the individual hairs in the eyebrows, and using the tips of the bristles of a toothbrush to lightly texture the area of the face where a beard would grow. By the time the gin was gone, he felt like he had taken it about as far as he should.

  It was a little after 8:00 P.M. when he finally ate dinner on the terrace outside the dining room, a light meal of warmed-up quiche and a fresh green salad. The summer days were long and it was still more than an hour before dark, though the shadows from the house and studio now stretched far out into the water and the light on the hills across the lake was taking on the amber tones of the dying sun.

  He had had a couple more gin and tonics since the first one, and now he made another as he finished putting the dishes in the dishwasher. He was feeling the drinks as he crossed from the terrace to the deck outside the studio. On the lake, the last of the sailbo
ats were heading for the marina, which was just out of sight around the bluffs to the south, and the lake was growing still and glassy in the cove where Alice had been swimming.

  As he pushed on the panel in the glass wall and stepped into the studio, the light of the reflected sunset was flooding everything inside in a honey haze. He was no more than a few steps into the room when he stopped and saw his own reflection in two of the three mirrors around the workbench.

  It was odd that his image was perfectly framed in that one brief moment. Odder still was that he had caught his own reflection in a frozen moment, as in a snapshot. Profile. Frontal. His features softened in the muted honey light. It was a weird moment: The world stopped; his reflection gave no sense of movement or of life. It was as if he were looking at a wax image of himself.

  Then with a sudden dizziness that he did not attribute to the gin, he realized that he was looking at the reconstructed sculpture that he had finished only hours before.

  In an instant, he understood what Alice had seen in the drawing that disturbed her, why she had furiously refused to look at the sculpted head. With very careful calculation and with all of his experience and talent brought to bear on the task, he had meticulously reconstructed the skull that Becca Haber had brought him, only to discover that when the skull belonged to a living person, that person had lived with his face.

  The glass slipped out of his hand.

  Chapter 10

  The glass hit the concrete floor with a sharp smack-and-shatter. Bern didn’t even notice. Shards of glass crunched under his shoes as he moved past the coffee table toward the reconstructed skull as if mesmerized, his eyes fixed on the face he had made but hadn’t seen. At least he hadn’t seen the face within the face. He had been intimate with its technical construction but not with its spirit. It was Alice who had seen the spirit of the thing.

  Focused on the sculpture, to the exclusion of all other sensory awareness, Bern went to the workbench and turned on the lights. He sat down on a stool in front of the face and looked at it, his eyes moving over the details of its features as if they were the fingers of a sightless man. Good God. It was as if he had had some kind of myopia when he was building the face, some kind of break in visual-cognitive synapse, much like Alice’s disconnect from words that she had heard all of her life but could no longer comprehend.

  But now, suddenly, he had been startled from a daze. He remembered that from the very beginning he had fought the tendency to reproduce his own features on the skull. What the hell was this? What was going on here?

  He moved the stool over beside the face. After readjusting two of the mirrors, he sat down beside the reconstruction and put his own face inches away from it, side by side. He looked in the mirrors.

  A warm flush spread over him. It wasn’t exact, but the accuracy of the proportional relationships was unmistakable. It was easy to see why he had tended to put his own exact features on this skull. Everything indicated that he should have. It was all there. He had indeed understood what he was looking at when he had been sketching the naked skull and then reclothing it with clay flesh. The bony architecture had told him that his own face had every right to be there.

  He could hardly pull himself away from the mirrors, where the reverse angle emphasized the similarities between his own face and the reconstructed face even more. Jesus Holy Christ. What was he supposed to think?

  Suddenly, he got up from the stool and hurried up the steps and out of the studio. A few years earlier, maybe four years ago, he had been working on a pergola that stretched along one side of the terrace. He’d been working alone, as usual, and needed an extra pair of hands to hold a raw cedar four-by-four while he drilled a hole at one end of it for a bolt. Tess had been helping him, but she had run into town to the hardware store. Rather than waiting for her, he contrived a complex balancing act for the beam. It slipped, and he fell from the top of the pergola and the beam fell on top of him as he landed. It broke his jaw.

  Now he was in the bedroom, going through boxes stored in one of the closets. Somewhere in here he had the X-ray films of the lower part of his head.

  When he found them, he hurried back to the studio, turned on the light table, and grabbed the photographs he had made of the skull. At the time he broke his jaw, he had insisted, despite the pain, that the X rays be done life-size and with particular care to avoid distortion. As a forensic artist, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to have an accurate record of his own skull. Now he realized that it might have been the most fortuitous thing he had ever done.

  In actual fact, using photographic negatives for comparison was rarely practical. For the comparisons to be helpful, you had to have two perfectly photographed skulls, without any of the perspective distortions that were usually present in photographs. In Bern’s experience, that had never happened before. Until now.

  With his heart hammering, he laid his own negatives over the skull’s negatives that he had done earlier and began aligning the lower part of the eye sockets, noting the precise angles of the orbital edges, the shapes of the frontal sinuses, and going from point to point down the skull. The teeth provided the startling finale.

  The skulls matched.

  Bern’s legs went rubbery, and he sat down hard on the stool, unaware of what he was doing. Stunned, he stared at the glow of the light table, which seemed to take on a creepy pale aura. He didn’t even know how to think about this. What in the hell was his frame of reference here? The possibilities? The implications? This was beyond strange. Way beyond strange.

  He swallowed. He stood shakily. Bracing his arms, palms down, on the light table, he looked at the two overlaid skulls. But he saw only one. Oh Jesus. He flipped off the light.

  He thought of Alice’s preternatural reaction to the sketch. He thought of Becca Haber. His thoughts went directly to her quick departure after he had committed to reconstructing the skull. That wasn’t right. Thinking back now, that was suspicious. Shit, she was suspicious.

  He went to his desk and found the piece of paper on which she had written the phone number of the hotel where she was staying. He dialed the number and asked for her room.

  “Yes, sir,” the night clerk said.

  Silence.

  The night clerk came back on. “How do you spell that name, sir?”

  He spelled it.

  “Sir . . .”

  Bern felt it coming.

  “We don’t show anyone by that name as a guest with us.”

  He put down the phone. There was no use in checking anywhere else. He looked at the piece of paper. She had written it herself. If he had written it . . . maybe . . . but he hadn’t. Immediately, he cast his thoughts back over former cases. What was going on here? Did this have something to do with one of his former cases? Was somebody doing something here, coming back at him for something they thought he’d done? Someone who felt like they were wrongly convicted because of one of his drawings or reconstructions? Is that what this was?

  He sat down at his computer and flipped it on. He went to his index and started with A. One at a time, he called up each case and thought about it, re-created it in his mind, remembered it, brought it back to life. Who were the oddballs? Who were the bitter convictions? Who were the angry ones?

  Fifteen years flew through his head. Names, stories, and faces came to mind that he hadn’t thought about in years. The files were reminders of a sad and murky world, of ruined lives, of unthinkable deeds, of men and women who had spent their last living moments in some madman’s private hell. But there were happy endings, too; a child found, a lost relative relocated, an unsolved crime finally puzzled together to give closure to a tortured family.

  After a little more than an hour, he had no ideas whatsoever. There was nothing here that even hinted at the creepy coincidence that was sitting on the light table a few feet away.

  Without a cue, he remembered the gin and tonic he had dropped, and the broken glass. He got up and went to the broom closet, got a roll of paper towels, a d
ustpan, and a hand broom, then crossed the room to clean up the mess.

  While he searched around for the scattered glass, he replayed Becca Haber’s performance, which is the way he now thought of her interview. Okay, so what was the purpose of her visit? To get him to do the job. Why?

  He threw the glass into a trash can with a loud crash, and then began mopping up the gin that had splashed nearly to the edge of the sofa. He could see the slivers of glass glinting in the paper towel, and was careful to get all of it, thinking of Alice, who liked to walk around barefooted.

  When the mess was finally cleaned up, he put everything away and turned off all the lights except a lamp near the sofa. Then he went outside and stood on the deck and looked out at the lake.

  For a moment, he tried to be aware of everything around him. A motorboat moving away from the marina and into the darkness headed up the lake. From a home on a point of land to his left came the faint, comforting sound of music traveling across the surface of the water. It was a summer sound, and it brought to mind youth and love and possibilities. From the woods nearby, a little screech owl sent its strange warbling concerns out over the water.

  Suddenly, it hit him like a slap to the side of the head. Everything . . . everything paled into insignificance in the light of one shocking and incomprehensible reality: The skull on the workbench inside the studio was identical to the one that contained his own brain . . . and the entire existence of what he had always understood to be the one and only Paul Bern.

  Chapter 11

  It was just after 3:30 when Bern’s racing mind slipped over the edge into dreams, and he was able to get a few hours of sleep. He didn’t wake up until 8:15.

  Before he even got out of bed, he rolled over and picked up the telephone and called the hotel again. He knew there would be a different desk clerk on duty by now. Again he asked for Becca Haber, and again he got the same “no one here by that name” response.