The Physiognomy (11 page)

“A splendid selection of our populace awaits your educated opinion,” he said, and took up walking next to me.

Then it struck me that if I could not shoot him, I might make some use of him. “Why was I never informed that the Beaton girl had a child?” I asked.

“An excellent question,” he said, and stopped to look bemusedly at the falling snow. “I suppose I never thought it was important.”

“How is it she has a child and is not married?” I asked.

“Please, your honor,” he said with a laugh, “need I really explain to you, a man of science, how it happens?”

“No, you dolt. I mean, what was the situation?”

“Well, I believe she was in love with one of the young miners, a fellow by the name of Canan, who, after creating the situation, as you so delicately put it, was done in by another situation, namely a cave-in,” he said.

“They were not married?” I asked.

“You have to understand something about Anamasobia,” he said. “The rules of refined society are sometimes bent a little here and there, living as we do in such proximity to the ungodly, as I explained to you a few nights ago. I'm sure they would have eventually taken the vows.”

“I see,” I said. “Is the child male or female?”

“Male,” he replied, and we continued on our way toward the church.

“She is a promiscuous young woman,” I said.

“Promiscuous in her mind, making love to many ideas, and always has been very rebellious.”

“How can you allow such things to go on among your people?” I asked, stopping again.

“In the territory, such qualities are not always a detriment,” he said. “She is a fine person, though, sometimes too serious for me.”

“And who might I find who would not be?” I said, ending the conversation.

He laughed quietly all the way to the church.

Arla 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 Arla, “do you not wish to inspect her biological possibilities?”

I lit a cigarette and said, “Very well,” with as little reaction as possible. As Arla 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 calipers 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 Arla measured the earlobes, I believe I heard Mrs. Mantakis growl.

“A thief, for sure,” Arla 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. Arla, 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 Well-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.

Arla 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. Arla'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 had 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 Anamasobia 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 Arla 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. “I offer my congratulations to your honor,” he said. “I 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 Arla 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, Arla 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 calipers. 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 Arla 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 Arla, who was now closing the clasp on my bag. “It is Arla 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.

Arla 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 Arla, 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.

11

“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 Arla, she had been taken away to the one cell in Anamasobia—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.