The Physiognomy (10 page)

She took a seat and immediately cut into the steak and began eating. I poured us each a glass of blue wine, hoping she did not realize it was the more potent of the two. Then I leaned back in my chair and said, “You did some very fine work today.”

“I told you I would,” she said.

I desired a slightly more respectful response and perhaps that she did not chew so loudly, but these were minor annoyances lost amid the deluge of her charm. We ate and exchanged pleasantries, had a good laugh over Morgan and his daughter, Alice, possibly having anything to do with the crime. Just when everything was moving along smoothly and I had gotten her to accept another glass of wine, Professor Flock materialized behind her. I had momentarily forgotten that at least half of my contentment grew from the beauty.

“You didn't think I'd miss this little get-together, did you, Cley?” he asked.

Arla looked up and around at this moment as if she detected the buzzing of a mosquito, but I realized she was merely reacting to my reaction. I couldn't very well yell to my old mentor to be gone in front of her. I focused on her eyes and worked hard to ignore him.

“Quite the little brisket, old boy,” he said, “and I'm not talking about dinner, though I may be talking about dessert, eh?” He was dressed in a loincloth and carried a shovel. His face was haggard, and the sweat dripped off him.

Arla took a drink and then said, “I have had more daydreams in which I remember pieces of my grandfather's journey.”

“Interesting,” I said.

Flock leaned over her and looked down the front of her dress. “I suggest the Twelfth Maneuver,” he said, snickering sardonically.

“Yes,” she said, “I recall him telling me, surprisingly enough, about a being he met that closely fits the description of Father Garland's Traveler.”

“You don't say,” I said, watching the professor make lewd movements behind her.

“Yes,” she said, “and I remembered him saying that this being told him the name of paradise.”

Flock said to me, “Watch, Cley, this is how I died.” Then I could see fumes rising around him, and the smell of sulphur permeated the room. Dropping the shovel behind him, he grabbed at his throat with both hands. His face turned red and then quickly to purple, his tongue protruded, his eyes popped wide.

“Wenau,” she said.

The professor fell forward over Arla, her head piercing his incorporeal chest, and I leaped to my feet in an attempt to keep him from crushing her. The hallucination faded in a moment, and I was standing before her, leaning over.

“Almost my very reaction,” she said.

“Interesting,” I said, and sat gracefully back down, trying to disguise my agitation.

We finished dinner with no more interruptions from unwanted guests. Arla stood up, taking her wine, and went over to the window. She looked out at the moon, which shone in full view, and asked, “Do you think we have seen the thief yet, or shall we discover him tomorrow?”

“From the information we have so far, I cannot tell. Remember, the Twelfth Maneuver requires that we read all inhabitants.”

“Tell me about the Well-Built City,” she said.

“It is all crystal and pink coral, spires, and ivy-covered trellises. There is a large park and broad avenues. It is the brainchild of Drachton Below, the Master. The story goes that he had been a pupil of the great genius Scarfinati, who had taught him a memory system by which you construct a palace in your mind and then adorn it and fill it with ideas that have been transformed through a mystic symbology into objects. Hence, when you need to remember something, you simply stroll through the palace in your memory, find the object—a vase, a painting, a stained-glass window—and the idea in question is again revealed to you. Below had been such a curious youth that instead of a simple palace, his knowledge could be housed in nothing less than a city. By the time he appeared in Latrobia, a young man of twenty, he had constructed every inch of the metropolis in his mind. He knew where every brick was to be laid, how every facade was to be ornamented before the work even began. It was said that he whispered something in the ears of the men and women he sought to work for him, and from that moment on, they were like joyous machines, tireless unto death, with no need of instructions. It was built well before I was even born, in so short an amount of time that that in itself is as much a miracle as its actual construction.”

“And did he bring the Physiognomy with him?” she asked.

“The Physiognomy had been in existence in one form or another dating back to when the first people looked into one another's eyes. But Below, needing some law to govern his creation, codified it and made it a mathematics of judgment concerning humanity.”

“I always hoped to go there someday to study in the great libraries and perhaps even attend one of the universities.”

“You are truly idiosyncratic, my dear. No woman there would ever dream of going to a university; no woman has access to the libraries.”

“And why is that?” she asked.

“They know full well that they are inferior to men in general, just as certain men are inferior to others. Not only do they know it, it is a law,” I told her in my softest voice.

“You can't really believe that,” she said.

“Of course I do,” I said. “Look, you've read the literature. Women's brains are smaller than men's; it is a scientific fact.”

She turned away from me with a look of disgust.

“Arla,” I pleaded, “I cannot change nature.” I could feel her growing cold. She took a step away from me, and I tried to think of something that would bring back her tranquility. “Women have certain attributes, certain, shall we say, biological possibilities. They have a place in the culture, but …”

She seemed to brighten and turned to face me. “Oh, I think I know what you mean,” she said, smiling.

“You do?” I asked. My mind reeled, and I felt gravity drop away. The beauty, the wine now thought for me as I put my arm around her and prepared to kiss her. In the back of my mind, I was wondering where I had left the leather glove I habitually employed in such crucial moments.

Then it came, as unexpected and devastating as the loss of the Physiognomy. She slapped my face and tore away from my grasp.

“Women have their place in the culture,” she said, mocking me. “Just remember, it is I who am conducting this investigation. I may be a woman, but I am smart enough to know you have somehow lost your abilities.”

“Arla,” I said. I had wanted to speak her name sternly, but instead my word came like the cry of a child.

“Don't worry,” she said. “I won't tell anyone. I will finish the investigation, because I want you to know, even if it remains a secret, that it was I who solved the case.”

I could not believe what I was thinking, but I was actually going to apologize. By Harrow's hindquarters, my world was shredding in every direction. “I'm sorry,” I said, and the words were like a pound of cremat on my tongue.

“You are sorry,” she said. “I will see you tomorrow at ten. This time, don't you be late. Hopefully you will exhibit a more professional demeanor in the morning.” With this she grabbed her coat, crossed the room, and was gone.

I was completely immobilized by both her revelation that she had perceived my loss of the Physiognomy and of her opinion of me. This was true humiliation—and worse, true loneliness. Because I felt the greatest need to get away from myself, I went next door, quickly put on my coat, and went after her.

Outside, the darkness of the night frightened me more than usual as the brisk wind, following Arla's lead, also slapped me in the face. I saw her distant figure as she made her way up the empty street. My plan, if you could call it that, was not to confront her—I knew that would be a mistake—but merely to follow her. I could not bear her leaving. Sticking to the deep shadows in front of the buildings, I ran, a skill I hadn't utilized since childhood.

She stopped once and turned around, standing and watching for a moment. I too stopped, hoping she did not see me. Then she took to the alley between the bank and the theater. I moved up to the end of the alleyway and waited until she had traversed its entirety. When she was out of sight, I made my move. In this manner, I tracked her from a distance through a thicket of pines and then across a small meadow, running along on the toes of my boots so that she would not detect the sound of the hardened snow crunching beneath them.

On the other side of the meadow there stood a one-story ramshackle house made of that splintered gray wood everything in Anamasobia was constructed of. I could see a warm light glowing from its one front window. She entered and closed the door behind her. I tiptoed up to the front of it and then, if you can believe this, got down on my hands and knees like a dog and cautiously crawled up beneath the window.

I peered in on a living room furnished with crude chairs made of tree limbs. Sitting in two of them, staring at each other, were an old man and woman. In the light thrown off from the fireplace, I could see that he had the telltale blue tinge that suggested he was well on his way to becoming one of the ghastly hardened heroes. Here was a tableau of utter dullness. Obviously, she had not lied about the mental capacity of her parents. I scowled and crawled around to the side of the house.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw there was another window. Making my way up beneath it, I reached into my pocket and took out the derringer. I had resolved to shoot myself if she discovered me. It would have been a humiliation I could not have endured. From inside I could hear someone moving around, and then I heard the most unworldly noise, a strange crying sound. “Perhaps she is repentant for having treated me so shoddily,” I thought. This gave me the courage to look.

To my utter astonishment, it was not she who was crying. It was, of all things, a baby. I watched, hypnotized, as she held the bawling runt in one arm and took down the top of her dress, revealing her naked breasts. I could not help it, but I sighed audibly. In spite of the hazardous situation I found myself in, I felt my manhood give a tiny nudge against my trousers.

At that moment, I heard a strange hissing noise behind me and turned quickly to look, adrenaline shooting through my system. I saw nothing at first. The noise came again, and I could make out that it was up high. In the lower branches of a huge tree approximately twenty yards behind me I detected a pair of yellow eyes glaring at me. I did not have time to wonder what it was, because as soon as I saw it, I noticed the huge batlike wings begin to move.

Now I thought nothing, cared for nothing, but stood straight up and began to run. I could hear the demon following above me, could feel the air it sent out from the beating of its wings. I dashed across the meadow, actually running like an athlete, with the monstrosity in close pursuit. Even with my terror to drive me on, I was quickly winded. I tripped and went sprawling in the snow. Hearing it hovering just above me, I turned on my back, raised the derringer, which was still in my hand, and fired. Through the residual smoke of the blast, I caught a vague glimpse of the creature as it quickly ascended. With that momentary, hazy glance, I could tell that old man Beaton had gotten the description right: a hairy, horned devil with cloven feet and a spiked tail—exactly as I remembered from the religious books I had collected as objects of ridicule during my student years.

When it was almost completely out of sight, I could barely make out that it had released something it had been carrying under one arm. “A boulder,” I thought, and began rolling over in the snow as fast as I could, there being no time to get up and run. The missile hit with a distinct noise, like a large melon squashing against the earth, only a foot or two to my left. When I was certain the demon had departed, I crawled over to it. On inspection, I found it was not a melon but, instead, the head of what I took to be poor Gustavus, Father Garland's missing dog.

I don't recall my walk back to the hotel. I was surprised no one had heard the gunshot and come to investigate. I do remember taking a large dose of the beauty and crawling beneath the covers. Of course, I left the lamps burning, for now the evil night had shown me the face of its minions. Sometime near morning I woke in a cold sweat, filled to brimming with a nauseating anger born of jealousy. “So,” I said to my reflection in Arden's mirror, “not only has Arla lied to me, but she has already cheated on me.” I spat out the word “impure.” By dawn, the only regret I had was that I had apologized to her.

10

My miserable rooms at the Hotel de Skree were a veritable earthly paradise compared to the thought of what I would face at the church that morning. I would have preferred to wrestle a demon than go and meet Arla and pretend at cordiality, while all the time I knew that she knew I had, through the diseased magic of Anamasobia, been transformed into a fraud. “The slut could easily give me away in front of the whole rogue's gallery,” I thought. Even if I were to make it through the day's proceedings without trouble, I had given up hope of ever solving the case, which meant that whatever tribulation and torture I would escape in the territory would later be heaped a hundredfold upon me by the Master.

Still, I got up, bathed, dressed as neatly as always, put my instruments in order, donned my coat, and went to work. It was lightly snowing by the time I left the hotel. Standing outside, dressed again in his absurd black hat, was the recurring nightmare of Mayor Bataldo, smiling as broadly as ever. After having run the scalpel over his testicles the day before, I now wondered what it would take to subdue his idiocy. For a moment, I pictured cutting it out of him, a large laughing black mass, like a comedic tumor on the brain.

“Your honor,” he said, waving as though we were longtime friends who had not met in months.

I had run out of imprecations and could do no more than nod tersely.