David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

After a few more minutes of visiting, Dana called bye to Alice and left, and Bern walked back to his drawing board, where Alice had already pulled up her stool and was looking at the two views of the face that had emerged from the paper in the past two hours. She was intent.

“It’s a single, very purple mix,” Alice said with some concern in her voice. She looked at Bern, frowning. “Why walk under a seen sky?”

“What’s the matter?” he asked. He was standing in front of the drawing, while Alice sat on the stool beside him. She smelled of morning freshness and a douse of perfume.

“You’re taking a lot more than a pencil would make,” she said slowly, and maybe with a tinge of agitation.

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 Cote 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.