The Face of the Assassin

by David Lindsey

  Then one day when she answered the phone at his house, a man told her that her husband was dead and that he had proof, but she would have to pay for it. After a long negotiation, she found herself on a dark street somewhere in that vast city. A kid handed her a paper sack, and she handed him the money. She thought she was buying photographs of his bullet-riddled body. Instead, she was horrified to find the skull.

  Becca Haber stopped here to gather her composure, but before Bern could speak, Alice, who had been squirming with increasing agitation, blurted, “Can you think of what if you should, Paul?” With an expression of disbelief, she asked, “Can you see through a flowing window on the outside of another thought that you believe?” She was incredulous. She turned her wide eyes on Becca. “I don’t think in a hundred wonders of it!”

  Oh shit.

  Alice scowled at Bern and screwed her mouth into a problematic pucker, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “Jesus.” Becca was taken aback.

  Bern was surprised by Alice’s reaction, too, but not for the same reasons as Becca Haber.

  “Just a second,” he said to Becca, and he got up and went over to Alice and squatted down in front of her. Her sketch pad was in her lap, and she was still holding her pencil, though she had lost interest in the Kewpie dolls.

  “Now listen, Alice,” he said softly, putting his hand on hers to get her attention. “It’s okay; it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Okay? It’s all right.”

  “What doesn’t matter?” Becca Haber asked suspiciously.

  “It doesn’t matter what I say to her,” Bern said, not turning away from Alice as he spoke to Becca. “She can’t understand me. I’ve got to make her understand the meaning of my words by the way I’m behaving, by my expressions.”

  What he wanted Alice to understand was that what the woman was saying was okay with him. What Alice had to do was to control her agitation. She couldn’t disrupt the conversation.

  It took some time. Alice kept wanting to look at Becca, moving her head from side to side to look around him as he tried to make eye contact with her to get her attention. It was as if Becca Haber had become the most outrageous thing Alice had ever seen.

  He reassured her again, telling her that it was okay, that it didn’t matter.

  Alice pulled her head back in dramatically mimed skepticism at his reassurances.

  “You’re in ropes if that’s on this very side,” she said, flinging an incredulous look at Haber.

  Bern took Alice’s oval face in his hands and gently guided her attention to the sketch pad in her lap. He began drawing a face, all the while telling her it didn’t matter, that it was all right.

  Gradually, the face he was drawing took on an expression that was not immediately understandable, one of conflicting emotions, of mixed signals. As Alice noticed this and began to focus on the problem of figuring out this emotional puzzle, she began to calm down.

  This went on for ten minutes or more, though it felt longer to Bern, who was acutely aware of Becca Haber’s close observation from behind. Finally after several jerky sighs, Alice became absorbed in trying to decipher the expression on the face that Bern had drawn.

  After a few more minutes, he stood and returned to the coffee table.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said, deliberately taking a different chair at the coffee table now. “I know it’s hard enough for you to talk about this without that kind of distraction. It must seem strange to you, I know. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Becca said, glancing warily at Alice. “Is she going to be all right? What was the matter?”

  “Yeah, she’ll be fine. Who knows what the deal was,” he said.

  Now Bern had a clear view of both Becca’s face and Alice’s. Becca took a moment to decide where to start over; then she leaned forward and put the skull on the table, facing Bern, and took the mandible off her knee and laid it beside the skull.

  “You know, there’s probably a better way to do this,” Bern said. “If you need positive proof of identity, you’d be better off getting a DNA test.”

  “Can’t,” she said, her hands now gripping the short lemon hem of her dress to keep it from working up.

  “They can do it with bone now,” he said. “Mitochondrial DNA—”

  “I’ve already been through all that,” she said. “He was an orphan. Abandoned. Parents unknown. Siblings, forget it. We don’t have any children. No medical records. No dental records.”

  “He never went to the doctor or the dentist?”

  “Not while I knew him.” She nodded at the skull. “There’s dental work there. Not much, just a little. But he never went to the dentist while I knew him.”

  “What about before then?”

  “I don’t know anything about him before then, except what I’ve already told you.”

  Alice stifled a groan and rolled her eyes at Bern.

  Chapter 5

  The awkward little drama of Alice’s adolescent histrionics had the unintended effect of convincing Becca Haber that Alice really was beyond understanding what Becca was saying. But, in fact, that wasn’t precisely true.

  The truth was more complex, as almost everything was when it came to dealing with Alice’s disability. The accident had deprived her of the ability to understand the meaning of words, either written or spoken. But even stranger than this was what Alice had gained as a result of her loss.

  Human speech is automatically accompanied by an elaborate, and often unconscious, repertoire of facial expressions, voice inflections, tonal shifts, and gestures. These sometimes delicate and subtle expressions are called “feeling tone,” and they play a key role in our understanding of the meanings of spoken words because they give them an emotional context beyond the simple meaning of the words themselves. As we converse with others, we usually process these feeling tones unconsciously, hardly even aware of what we are doing.

  People with brain injuries like Alice’s, however, being deprived of the ability to understand the literal meaning of words, compensate for this disadvantage by carefully observing the speaker’s feeling tone. They develop, to an uncanny degree, the ability to understand the intent of the spoken words without being able to understand the actual words themselves.

  This complex sensitivity enters into an even stranger process when spoken words are used to disguise truth, to deliberately deceive. When people lie, they try to camouflage their deception by miming genuine feeling-tone characteristics.

  However, not even the most accomplished liar can re-create genuine feeling tone. False feeling tone is always off-key. But most of us are distracted from noticing these off-key signs of lying because we are more intent on parsing the meaning of the words that the speaker is choosing.

  People who suffer from receptive aphasia, like Alice, are almost supernaturally sensitive to the unconscious quiver of a facial muscle, to a strained nuance in a syllable, to a manipulated vocal modulation, or self-conscious intonation. They know intuitively that there is an emotional truth in feeling tone that transcends the speaker’s merely verbal expression, and they focus on the distortion of this truth as if it were a sour note in a solo.

  It is this uncanny ability to sense when someone is lying that has prompted doctors and scientists to refer to people with this particular form of aphasia as “human lie detectors.” It was this sensitivity to the subliminal tones of deception that Alice was reacting to with such anxiety.

  Bern knew what was happening.

  Becca Haber didn’t acknowledge Alice’s audible moan, but she heard it, and from the disconcerted look on her face, Bern thought that she understood its derisive tone, as well.

  “Look,” she said, “do you mind if I smoke?” And she bent down to her purse on the floor and took out a pack of cigarettes before Bern could respond. She quickly lighted one, and then stood, her eyes still avoiding Alice, and walked over to the glass wall, where she looked out at the late-morning light on the surface of the lake. She stood t
here, her back to Bern, the smoke billowing in front of her as white and dense as spun sugar in the summer glare.

  She was nervous, and he thought there was more to it than the awkwardness of Alice’s undisguised skepticism. He stood and threw a look of admonishment at Alice, who rolled her eyes again, this time in silence, and then he joined Becca at the glass wall.

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Why didn’t you just take this to the police to start with? Why come to me?”

  “Because I want to know first . . . if this is, or isn’t, him,” she said without turning to him, her face inches from the glass. “If it isn’t . . . well, then, I was just screwed out of my money. If it is, then I want to check into my legal rights, from an international perspective. I want to know what my options are—what I can expect to encounter—when I walk in there and tell the police that some kid in Mexico City sold me my husband’s skull in a paper sack.”

  “Why not go to the lawyer right now?” Bern suggested. “That seems reasonable. Then you’d know what you’re up against no matter what happens.”

  She turned to him.

  “That’s not the way I see it,” she said. She drew on the cigarette, her eyes on him. “There are just too many unanswered questions the way it is.” She turned her head aside, lifted her chin, and blew the smoke into the room. “I don’t have anything. Nothing. Just that he’s gone and this kid sold me this . . .” She nodded toward the skull. “And if it’s not . . . him, then I don’t have anything. Just a missing husband, which is nothing but a conversation, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

  “Well, it’s not a conversation I want to have,” she said.

  That sounded reasonable. What could he say? The lies could be insignificant, embarrassing things, private things that were legitimately none of his business. The circumstances weren’t the normal kind that he was used to dealing with. Usually, these requests came from state or federal law-enforcement agencies or some other institution.

  “How’d you get it across the border?” he asked, hoping he sounded curious rather than suspicious.

  “Yeah, well, I paid someone to smuggle it across,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t going to go through customs without a hassle, some kind of long rigmarole.”

  “And you just happen to know people who do that sort of thing.”

  She smiled for the first time. “I was in Mexico City. All things are possible there. Things like that anyway.”

  “How do you know it’s the same skull?”

  “I made teeth impressions in modeling clay, top and bottom. I told them I wouldn’t pay the rest of the money on the other side unless the impressions matched. They did.”

  “Oh! For in the single sort of thing!” Alice blurted.

  Again, Becca resolutely ignored her, but when Bern glanced Alice’s way, he saw her head was tilted dramatically to the side, and her eyes were rolled heavenward, as though she were enduring the most unbelievable silliness.

  “I’d have to consult an anthropologist,” he said. “I’ll have—”

  “I’ve already done that,” Haber said. “I knew from the article that you’d need to know the race and sex of the skull before you could work on it. And besides, I needed to know if I’d been sold some . . . thing out of a graveyard in one of the colonias. I took the skull to Dr. Graciela de Aceves, an anthropologist with the Autonomous University of Mexico. She thought it was an American Caucasoid, based on data presented in Rhine and Moore’s findings. She said to mention those names to you, that they’d mean something to you.”

  They did. And he knew of Dr. de Aceves’s work, too. She was a well-respected medical anthropologist.

  “I have a letter from her,” Becca added, “if you want to see it.”

  Bern was surprised. If he had been in Becca Haber’s shoes, Dr. de Aceves would have been the one person in all of Mexico that he would have gone to. The fact that she didn’t go to one of the scores of less qualified professionals scattered throughout the country meant that Ms. Haber knew a thing or two about doing things the right way.

  She was studying him, trying to read what he was thinking. She was six feet away, her arms folded as she leaned one shoulder against the glass wall. The truth was, he wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with work right now, and she had offered over the telephone earlier to double his fee if he would drop everything and get right on it. That was enticing. He saw no reason why he shouldn’t go ahead with the project.

  Of course, there were Alice’s dramatics, but again he reminded himself that if Alice was detecting falsehoods in Haber’s story, it didn’t necessarily have to mean that they were in the category of mortal sins. Maybe Haber was having an affair with her husband’s best friend and didn’t want to bring that into the equation. Maybe her husband had been having an affair with her sister, and she understandably wanted to leave that out of it, too. Maybe she wasn’t even married to the guy. Maybe . . . hell, maybe anything.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Great,” she said, but her face didn’t register great. Maybe there was a little relief, but if that’s what it was, there wasn’t a whole lot of emotion in it. It wasn’t as if she was happy to finally be headed toward a situation that might bring her closure. It was more like she had gotten a business negotiation settled.

  “You’ll have to leave it,” he said.

  “Yeah, okay. How . . . long?”

  “Let me spend some time with it. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

  She gave him her name and a telephone number at a residential hotel downtown on the lake.

  That was it. She didn’t want to hang around to ask him questions. She didn’t want him to explain anything about his process, about what he would do first. She didn’t ask, as private individuals often did, if she could watch him work. Becca Haber had done what she wanted to do, and she wanted out of there.

  He could hardly blame her. Alice’s behavior had been a little over the top.

  Becca stepped over to the coffee table, put out her cigarette in an ashtray, and picked up her purse. With Alice staring rudely at her, she headed for the door without looking around.

  At the courtyard gate, he told her he’d call her the next day, then watched as she walked to her car and drove away.

  When he got back to the studio, Alice had opened one of the tall, narrow windows along a side wall and was dumping out the cigarette that Becca Haber had left in the ashtray.

  “If there was a tune flight into the sails,” she said saucily, “it was a long way from the side of her hair.”

  She returned the empty ashtray to the table.

  “Good going,” Bern said sarcastically. “You were terrific, Alice. What the hell got into you anyway?”

  She shrugged, went back to her stool, and started drawing. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at the skull on the table.

  “Well, I’m going to do it anyway,” he said.

  “Over without a care,” she said with deliberate indifference, not looking up from the sketchbook. “Anyway, the brushes won’t feel like lady flowers.”

  Bern looked at her. Sometimes he wondered about the two of them. Talking to her was like talking to yourself, because it really didn’t go anywhere. But somehow it seemed to make sense a lot of the time anyway. If Alice didn’t know that they weren’t communicating, then who the hell was he to worry about it? They seemed to do all right whatever was happening.

  “She really got under your skin, didn’t she?” he said, walking over to the coffee table. “I’ve never seen you quite like that before.” He sat on the sofa in front of the skull and studied it.

  “It could be anything,” he said after a little while. “Who knows how many people tell you lies during the course of a day.” He reached out and picked up the mandible. “Little lies. Big lies. And we don’t even know it. And I wonder how much difference it would make if we did know?”

  The teeth were set solidly in the bone. This guy wasn
’t that old. Could’ve been his age. He picked up the skull and carefully fitted the mandible’s condyle into its temporal socket. He looked at it from the side and then turned it so that it faced him.

  “I wonder how many lies these jaws have spoken,” he said. “Maybe that’s what got the poor devil killed.”

  Alice closed her sketchbook with a loud slap, and Bern checked his watch. She was always right on the second. Alice got down from her stool and together they walked outside and through the courtyard to wait under the mesquite tree for her mother.

  Chapter 6

  When Bern returned to the studio after walking Alice to her mother’s car, he picked up the letter from Dr. de Aceves that Haber had left on the coffee table. It was brief, clinical, to the point. Beyond what Haber had already told him about Dr. de Aceves’s conclusions, she also estimated that the skull was that of a man in his late thirties or early forties. Bern was indeed going to be reconstructing the face of a man approximately his own age.

  He sat down at his computer and created a file for “John Doe (Haber?).” After recording the requisite data for a new file, he turned around in his chair and looked across the room at the skull, which was still sitting on the coffee table. Since the thing was in such good condition, he decided that he would do a two-dimensional reconstruction of the face as well as a three-dimensional one. The drawing wouldn’t take that much longer, and it would give him a quick idea of where he was going.

  He looked at his watch, which confirmed what his stomach was already telling him. He backed out of the computer program and hurried up the steps. He turned right into the white corridor and followed the arc around to the kitchen. Glancing out through the dining room, which overlooked the terrace and the lake beyond, he saw a Jet Ski cut a lateral white wake across the water just below the house. In the distance, a trio of sailboats tacked in the meridian heat like single-winged butterflies lofting on the breeze.