The Physiognomy

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 begi

"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."