Bertillon

Detective Generale Alphonse Bertillon unveils his newest innovation of the Parisian justice system.

Bertillon, still inside the bunker Pátele for as long as it takes, strains his forehead upon the window to the last of the Parisian twilight and flicks open his eyes. Nothing to worry about outside. Just another sleepy evening over le Petite Couronne, the sky purple and charring black in a slow burn towards dusk. A flight of ducks paint the only scar on the canvas above, dotting a quick, smooth arc to the Louvre gardens while there remains enough light to see and land. He whirrs the gears softly in his mind, feeding them with his calm, spinning them faster, tonight when the world outside winds down bereft of the usual insanity.  Absent tonight is that fleeting madness which seems to cast a shadow onto darkness itself, inside every house and under every bridge, the pulsing drum beat marching behind the first scene of humanity’s last act. Are we succeeding? Tonight, maybe, the change has occurred, the nodal point bending to … not hope but …

 

“Justice,” grins Bertillon, the detective turning from the window. “It’s what you’ll be feasting on tonight, Father Grigori, and what is undoubtedly going to eat you up in the end.” Grigori, shackled into the strange chair in the white room, “For all your persistence, justice will outdo you. It will wait patiently, dormant for your guilt to grow into a different monster entirely. You can forget about your crime, Grigori, you impotent preacher, but justice … it will remember you, and its forgiveness will not dampen.”

 

Bertillon steps forward, enough to reproach the coward in the measuring-chair and to provide room for his men to carry out their sordid tasks upon him. Each appendage lifted, bent to a certain theta, mark that down, and then measured in millimeters in five places, the figures penned down again and again onto the chart, the sail of numbers that spanned the wall but for Bertillon’s window. Calipers onto the arms, legs, torso, head, hands and feet, mark all those down. Proportions defined and verified, myriad calculations of the accused, approaching unique, like a painting or a chorus. Such was anthropometry, the way a crime connects to its criminals, the bright line through the night that stabs down on the runaway thief, a screaming from across the sky, Here is your culprit!

 

Whoever is apprehended in Paris now, years of Bertillon’s work to amend the system, gets the chair and chart. Order of one ratio for every crime, every conviction totally sure, the scalpel of the law used to shred off that lingering doubt, the disgusting human error, the injustice, entropy, disorder, the chaos, the blacker than black insanity inside all the shadows gets cut away. Gone are the lies. The min/max width ratio of the nose does not lie. The dee theta dee tee response of a knee-jerk reflex does not lie. And if they did, they were two in a million revolting measurements Bertillon’s men would pry away from the accused. The documents, the ultimate in criminal profiles, flowing from the walls in Bertillon’s chamber, the most incriminating similarities between observed and expected values prioritize chi-square funtime data tables in scratchy crimson ink, do we have a match? and then recur.

 

Alphonse Bertillon stands back to behold his gleaming reinvention of the justice system, Grigori wrestling against the measuring shackles. There is something else behind his grin, though, an inscrutable mysteriousness borrowed from the Cheshire cat, lurking from tooth to tooth. Is there something more, Bertillon? it begs beneath Grigori’s whimpering. What is it you’ve come up with now? At the counter now, crossed the entire measuring room in four steps, back turned to the subject and documenters, exchanges his tan tweed overcoat for a more scientific white smock, clinking of vials against graduated cylinders, not there before, and produces for Grigori a beaker of ink, either black or so deeply red it seems so, and sloshes some of the liquid into a fresh Petri. “This substance, Father, is the perfection, the divine adjudicator in a dish. One to one matchups, Grigori! This is the end! The system cannot possibly be improved any further.”

 

Cradles the Petri, tiptoes back to the chair, and leans over, actually descends his eyes to meet Grigori’s, swirls the murky liquid under the captive’s nose. “You likely know it as ink.” Yes, the insanity is gone from tonight, the strange just departed from the sublime truth of the law, fashionably absent, omitted as if a long-owed favor to this illustrious science of justice. Bertillon grins again, time to at last be silent, to watch Grigori’s eyes go wide as the measurers seize his hand and thrust it upwards so that Bertillon may accept it and stab it down, scared thumb screaming into the ink in the Petri like a bolt of lightning over the sea, staining itself red, blood dripping away, and then pressed against the chart. The image is Grigori’s echo, the mirror-Father stolen and copied and condensed into formless swirls marked on the measurement paper.

 

Grigori’s voice coughs and trembles. “What does this mean?”

 

To the accused, “There is only one thumbprint of this Father Grigori in the world.” Bertillon victorious, turning to the measurers before donning his overcoat again, sliding out the blithe commands, “Get for me all his prints. Then let him free.”