"Alice," I said, "did you eat the white fruit?"
"Eat the white fruit," she said, staring at me with an expression that made Calloo look like a savant.
"Alice," I said, "have you changed recently in your thinking?"
"Stinking," she said.
I shook my head in exasperation.
"Have you seen the fruit?" I asked.
"Clean the suit," she said.
"Am I missing something here?" I asked Aria.
She shook her head and came over to whisper to me that the girl was a retrograde two on the intelligence scale and that the measurements showed her to be pure of heart.
"Next," I yelled.
It turned out that her father was no less brilliant than she. He had an inordinately large penis, which obviously revealed the curse of his ignorance. Aria showed great diligence in measuring this organ, but I cut her off in the middle of her work, saying, "There's nothing there. Next!"
With our lead suspects cleared by Aria's computations and my necessarily more intuitive approach, we began to go to work on the rest of the town. So far, my plan to make it seem as if I was using this opportunity to mentor my assistant had worked well. "And what did you find?" I would ask her with each instrument she applied. She handled the chrome tools with great adeptness, calling out numbers for me to record in my book. I was, of course, going to allow her to catch the thief for me. Occasionally, her confidence would falter, and she would look to me with a question in her eyes. Then I would say, "Go on, continue. I am watching. I will let you know when you have made an error." With these words of encouragement, she would smile, as if thanking me for my generosity, and I began to think that the whole affair might work out better than I had imagined.
They filed in one by one, a never-ending nightmare of the repulsive and displeasing. With my new blindness, picking a thief out of this populace was like trying to identify a scoundrel in a room full of lawyers. Their nakedness was very unsettling. All that flesh and their blatant sex staring me in the face made my stomach queasy. When Aria ordered the mayor's wife to bend over, I lit a cigarette, hoping the smoke would obscure from me her dilapidated mysteries.
Then, on our twentieth subject, a man named Frod Geeble, the owner of the tavern, Aria stopped in her application of the calibrated navel standard and said to me, "You'd better double-check me here."
I gave her a nervous look, and she squinted as if for an instant she saw through to my unknowing. Quickly, I put down my notebook and approached the subject. She held out the instrument to me; although I could recall the name of it, I had no idea how it worked. Instead of accepting the standard from her, I bent over and put my left eye up to the fat man's navel, looking in as if peering through the end of a telescope. Unable to think of what else to do, I stuck my index finger into the flesh ditch. Frod Geeble belched.
"Interesting," I said.
"What number do you come out with?" she asked.
"That was my question for you," I said.
"I feel uncertain after having discerned evidence of depravity in the abundance of eyebrow hair," she said.
"Forget your uncertainty," I said.
"But I read last night, in your work The Blemished Corpulence and Other Physiognomical Theories that the physiognomist should never operate out of uncertainty."
In order to circumvent her discovery of me, I stood up and looked Frod Geeble in the eyes, asking myself, Could this man have stolen the sacred fruit? It struck me then that this was the only method of judging another human being that the uninitiated had. The slovenly nature of such a method of discovery made me shudder at the utter darkness so many lived in. Still, I had a feeling he hadn't done it.
"He has brown eyes," I said. "This negates your concern."
"Very well," she said. "He is innocent."
"Free drinks at the tavern for your honor," said Frod Geeble as he dressed.
Calloo was on his way out to fetch the next subject when I called him back. "Bring me the mayor this time," I said.
The hulking miner broke into a broad grin at this suggestion and, for the first time, spoke intelligibly. "Pleasure, your honor."
I had to smile myself.
The mayor held his hands cupped over his privates as he stepped forward for inspection. Aria showed no timidity but went at him with all of my devices just as she had the others. When she was done calling out her findings to me, and I had gone through the charade of jotting them down with the pin, I asked her to step aside. She moved back. The mayor, though no physiognomist himself, took one look at me and very astutely read the malicious intent in my gaze. The folds of loose flesh on his chest and stomach as well as his bottom lip began to quiver.
"I know," he said, giving a nervous laugh, "you have never seen such a resplendent specimen."
"On the contrary," I said, "very piglike."
"I am not a thief," he said, losing his sense of humor.
"Undoubtedly, but I do see a small character flaw that I may be able to adjust," I said. I got up and went over to where my coat hung on the back of a chair and retrieved the scalpel from its pocket. With the instrument in hand, I walked up in front of the mayor, waving the blade inches from his eyes. "I detect an asinine sense of humor that may be your undoing if we cannot correct it early enough."
"Perhaps I can simply work at being more serious," he spluttered.
"Now, now, Mayor, this won't hurt a bit. I'm just trying to see where to make the appropriate cut. Perhaps lower down, near the seat of your intelligence," I said, and stepped back in order to run the dull side of the blade across his testicles.
"Aria, please," he said over my shoulder.
Then I remembered that she was there, watching. I wanted badly to vent the entirety of my frustration on him, but the stronger urge to not let Aria see my anger stole my initial impulse to cut into him like a cake.
After I had dismissed him and he was dressed and gone, Aria said to me, "I saw through you."
"Whatever are you talking about?" I said.
"You were trying to get him to confess," she said.
"I was?"
"You did notice the aberrant nature of his posterior, did you not?" she asked.
"Be specific," I said, as if I were quizzing her on her determination.
"The patch of hair he had growing on his left buttock. I believe it is called the Centaur Quality? Unremitting proof of the potential for thievery."
"Very good," I said. "I have already put him in the suspect category."
We saw half the town by nightfall, and I was as far from resolving the case as when I had started. For all I knew, the Traveler had awakened and stolen the fruit. Aria had come up with a short list of possible criminals, but none of them seemed as if anything miraculous had befallen them. Perhaps they were hoarding the fruit till the case was over. I paid Calloo a few belows for his work and just barely caught myself from thanking him. My near slip came, most likely, from the fact that I was so thankful the day was over. I packed my bag, put on my coat, and watched longingly as Aria let her hair down.
"Meet me at the hotel in an hour," I said to her.
She nodded and left the church. Her abrupt departure made me wonder if she was on to me. I needed to consider if I could safely put my trust in her. But what I needed more than anything was the beauty. I could not remember when I had gone so long without it. My hands were shaking slightly, and I was beginning to feel my skull itch, a sure sign that I was overdue for a violet fix. Garland was still kneeling there praying as I left. I slammed the front door behind me as hard as I could, hoping his wooden Gronus would topple down upon him. Instead, I tripped again on the bottom step and landed facedown in the snow.