The Physiognomy Read Free Page B

corruption of nature,” I countered.
    â€œI don’t give a fig,” he said. “I’m a corruption of nature. Religion is about fear, and miracles are monsters.” He reached over and, with graceful sleight of hand, pulled a goose egg from behind my ear. When he cracked it on the edge of his desk, a cricket jumped forth. “Do you understand?” he asked. That was when I noticed his continuous eyebrow and the small tufts of primate hair adorning each of his knuckles.
    The sheer beauty was coursing through me, transforming the ineffable into images, susurrations, aromas. In the mirror, behind my reflection, I saw a garden of white roses, hedgerow, and morning glory vine that, drop by drop, melted into a view of the Well-Built City. The chrome spires, the crystal domes, the towers, the battlements all shone in the sunlight of a more hospitable region of the mind. This also began to swirl and eventually settled out again into the drab surroundings of my room at the Hotel de Skree.
    I thought for a moment that the drug had played one of its time tricks on me, compressing the usual two-hour hallucination into mere minutes, but that was not the case, for standing behind me, looking over my shoulder into the mirror, was Professor Flock, my old mentor from the Academy of Physiognomy.
    The professor was looking rather spry, considering he had passed away ten years earlier, and he wore an affable expression, considering it was my own prosecution that had sent him to the most severe work camp—the sulphur mines at the southern extremity of the realm.
    â€œProfessor,” I said, not turning around but addressing him through the glass in front of me, “a pleasure, as always.”
    Dressed in white, as was his habit back at the academy, he moved closer to me and put his hand on my shoulder. I felt its weight as if it were real. “Cley,” he said, “you sent me to my death, and now you call me back?”
    â€œI am sorry,” I said, “but the Master could not tolerate your teaching of tolerance.”
    He nodded and smiled. “It was foolishness. I have come to thank you for eradicating my crackpot notions from the great society.”
    â€œYou hold no grudge?” I asked.
    â€œOf course not,” he said. “I deserved to be baked like a slab of ham and strangled on fumes of sulphur.”
    â€œVery well then,” I said. “How should I proceed with this case?”
    â€œThe Twelfth Maneuver,” was his reply. “Anamasobia is a closed system. Merely read every subject in town, review your findings, and look for the one whose features reveal an inclination toward larceny and a religiopsychotic reliance on the miraculous.”
    â€œHow will the latter be revealed?” I inquired.
    â€œAs a blemish, a birthmark, a wart, a mole with an inordinately long black hair growing from it.”
    â€œAs I suspected,” I said.
    â€œAnd Cley,” he said as he began to vanish, “full body exams. Leave no stone unturned, no dark crevice unexamined.”
    â€œNaturally,” I said.
    I lay down on my bed and stared across the room at the illusion of Arden slowly moving, the mirror becoming a waterfall in his hands. Off in the muffled distance, the Mantakises were emitting screams of either lust or violence, and I recalled my own last romantic encounter.
    One night, a few months earlier, after working on the Grulig case, a ghastly homicide in which the Minister of Finance had had his head separated from his body, I decided to stop at the Top of the City for refreshment. I rode the crystal enclosed elevator up the sixty floors to the roof, where, beneath a crystal dome, there was a bar with tables and chairs, a woman playing a harp, a twilight view of what seemed like the entire world.
    I walked up to a fetching young thing seated by herself at a window table and told her I would buy her a drink. I cannot remember her name or her features, but I