Twenty blue devils

Chapter 20

With Gideon at the wheel of the Renault and John navigating, they drove south on the coast road half a mile past the Centre Apatea mini-mall, then turned left onto a rutted, one-lane dirt road and began to climb the flanks of Mt. Iviroa, quickly leaving behind the coconut groves and rangeland of the coast and tunneling into the fragrant, gorgeous forest of the interior: frangipani, wild ginger, flame trees, gardenia trees, pandanus, wild orchid, everything prodigiously and brilliantly in bloom. A jungle of flowers. Overhead, the feathery leaves of acacias and eucalyptus filtered the sun; they seemed to be driving through a rolling net of shadows.

"Doc, we're doing the right thing,” John said, slouched in the passenger seat, one knee up against the dashboard. “In the great scheme of things."

"I know that, John. I'm not too worried about the great scheme of things."

"I know. You're worried about waking up tomorrow morning in the Papeete jail."

"Yes. Charged with grave-robbing.” Not, he admitted to himself, that such a prospect lacked a certain poetic aptness. John folded his arms and looked soberly out the window.

"Me too. You know, Doc, you really should have talked me out of this."

This afternoon mists that clung to the mountain suddenly enveloped them. One second they were in bright sunlight and sharp shadow, the next in a silvery fog that turned everything, even the air, a gauzy, spooky gray-green. The vegetation, profuse to begin with, became even more extravagant. Mosses hanging from the tree branches drooped like great, hairy swaths of drapery. Giant ferns ten feet tall pressed in on every side. And they began to catch glimpses of exotic birds-scarlet, blue, peacock-green-flitting through the foliage, and to hear strange calls.

"Welcome to Jurassic Park,” John said.. “Don't hit any pterodactyls."

They crested a ridge and swung downward into a broad valley after that, and, as suddenly as they had entered it they were out of the fog and back in the sun. A few minutes later the road, barely a road by this time, ended at an old, tin-roofed, falling-down greenhouse on a square plot of land that had long ago been hacked out of the jungle. Once upon a time it had been landscaped into a semiformal garden, but the plants hadn't been cared for in many years. In Tahiti that didn't mean they died, it meant they took over the place. Bougainvillea, poinsettia, and shrub acacia thrived, choking the yard and patio and clutching at windows, awnings, and porches.

"This is where the minister lived in the old days,” John said, then pointed directly across the road. “And that's the cemetery."

It was, as he'd said, tiny; a grassy plot perhaps a hundred feet square, with a slowly collapsing white picket fence around it. Unlike the lot across the road it wasn't totally abandoned, but it wasn't well cared for either. The grass had been mowed sometime in the last few weeks, the fence painted sometime in the last few years. The afternoon sunlight was harsh, the air still and hot-hotter by far than on the coast below-and the immediate scene stark and unwelcoming.

Gideon turned off the ignition and sat, squinting into the glare without moving, listening to the steady rasp of insects from the bush.

John, halfway out his door, glanced at him sharply. “You're not gonna get cold feet on me, are you?"

Gideon shook his head. “How can I? I already have cold feet.” But of course this was mostly to make John feel guilty, to let him know that if anything went wrong they both damn well knew whose fault it was.

They put on straw hats they'd gotten at the hardware store, took from the truck a plastic sack with digging equipment and a couple of liter bottles of Vittel mineral water, and stepped through the cemetery's open, leaning gate. There were about fifteen graves in all, scattered in no particular arrangement. A few were French burials with simple, straightforward headstones ("Ici repose Pierre Leblanc"). The rest were in the traditional Polynesian style; rectangular beds of white sand protected by low, lean-to roofs of corrugated metal and rimmed with a border of whitewashed stones. Some of the Tahitian graves had long-dead potted flowers on them, the pots overturned, the dry stems scattered. None had names or headstones.

John led Gideon to a grave along the far fence. “This is him."

"We think."

"Hey. Don't start that again."

Clearly, the grave was new. The lean-to roof had no stains of rust. The flowers were fresh; nine pots filled with gardenia and jasmine were set out in three equally spaced rows. A small, white wooden cross at what Gideon took to be the head distinguished it from the other Tahitian burials.

"Well, I guess we should start,” John said with noticeably less than his usual resoluteness.

So, Gideon thought, notwithstanding the oven-like heat it appeared they had four cold feet between them, not two. He finally took pity on his friend, knelt down decisively, and began to remove the potted plants and set them aside. “Come on, John, we'll see what we see.” He took two spade-shaped hand shovels from the sack. “We'll start at the center and work toward the ends. Just take it down about an inch at a time. Skimming motion. I don't think this is going to be very hard."

But it was. Although the sand was easy enough to get through, they had to dig on their knees because of the low roof. And while the layer of metal just above their heads shielded them from the direct rays of the sun, it focused the heat downward and kept it there. In less than five minutes they took off their shirts and then had to remove their sunglasses because the lenses were greasy with perspiration. Sweat ran down the hollows of their backs, gleamed on their forearms, dripped from the ends of their noses.

The sand turned out to be only a top-dressing. At about eighteen inches it gave way to a dark, moist, loamy soil.

"Bad sign,” said Gideon, breathing hard.

"No problem,” said John, also huffing. “It's easy to dig.” He tossed a shovelful onto the growing pile beside the plot.

Gideon sat back on his haunches to unkink his spine and to gulp from one of the blue plastic bottles. “That's not what worries me. When you put an unprotected corpse in ground like this it can bond with the soil as it decomposes. It can take days to get it free."

"That could be a problem,” John agreed. He took the bottle from Gideon, drank deeply, worked his shoulders, and picked up his shovel again. They returned to the first-Gideon-then-John-then-Gideon pattern they had fallen naturally into and dug, rhythmically and silently, for twenty minutes. They had gotten down to about two feet below the surface, kneeling face-to-face in a trench about three feet by five, when Gideon spoke abruptly.

"Stop."

John stopped instantly, looking at the lumpy, earth-colored protuberance that the last sweep of his spade had exposed.

"What is it?"

"The left knee, I think. Slightly flexed.” With his hands Gideon brushed the dirt away.

They were looking directly down into the open joint. Gideon could see the knucklelike distal end of the femur, the smooth concavities of the tibial condyles into which it fit, the small, pointed eminence of the fibula's styloid process. There were still some shreds of ligament and meniscus-the slippery, round pad of fibrocartilage that kept the bones from grinding on one another-but all in all a relatively clean joint. This was good news; it suggested that the defleshing process had advanced since the time the photos had been taken. The fibrous ligaments and capsular membranes of the knee were among the toughest tissues in the body. If they were gone, then maybe there wouldn't be much left on the bones anywhere else, and that would make his job easier and faster, not to mention a great deal less unpleasant.

Bone, ligament, and cartilage were all the same color: an ivory-brown, somewhat lighter than the surrounding soil, but with the same reddish tinge.

"Here's where we get the trowels out,” Gideon said. “We want to more or less scrape the dirt away layer by layer-carefully, a few millimeters at a time. You work up from the knee. I'll work down from the head region."

John studied the bone from several different angles. “Which way's up?"

"Behind you.” Gideon tossed him a few wooden tongue depressors from the sack. “When you're anywhere near the body, use these or your fingers. And we just want to uncover it; don't try to dig it out."

Gideon quickly troweled down to the level at which he thought the skull would be, then laid the metal tool aside and worked through the soil with his fingers. Within seconds he touched a hard, curving surface.

"Skull,” he said.

John troweled for a few seconds longer, then silently put down the tool and watched.

It took only another few minutes, working with fingers, tongue depressor, and a two-inch-wide paintbrush, to expose the area from the crown of the head to the throat.

"Jeez,” said John when he got a good look.

Jeez is right, thought Gideon. The head, not as skeletonized as the knee, was horror-movie stuff, with greasy rags and scraps of red-brown tissue clinging to the bone. A few clumps of hair, still blond in places but already fading to a dingy reddish brown, adhered to the sides of the skull. Where the nose and eyes had been were black holes with dried larval casings in them. The throat musculature had congealed into an unrecognizable, Iiver-colored mass, the mandible gaping and disarticulated from the skull.

John stared at it, obviously shaken. Below his eyes, under the natural bronze of his skin there was a muddy pallor that Gideon had never seen before. “God,” he murmured.

They had looked at more than one decomposing body together before, and if anybody was going to get queasy it could always be counted on to be Gideon; by now it was a running joke between them. But John had never before had to look at someone he'd known closely-one of the family-in this condition. Gideon had, and he remembered what it felt like.

"Listen,” he said gently, “why don't I just finish up here myself? The hard work's done anyway; you'll just get in the way from here on. Take a walk and come back, oh, in half an hour, and I'll tell you if-"

But John, still staring at the skeleton-face, was shaking his head. “It's my fault for getting us into this. I'll stick around. I owe you that much."

"Oh, hell,” Gideon said, “don't start making me feel guilty. If I didn't think it was the right thing to do, all I had to say was no."

"You did say no."

"Well, all I had to do was say it two or three times, then. And I didn't. Because it is the right thing to do."

"Thanks, Doc.” John smiled wanly.

"He was blond, wasn't he?” Gideon asked after a moment. John nodded.

"What about the diastema? Does that look right?"

"Diastema, what the hell is a diastema?"

Gideon gestured at the skull. “That space between his front teeth."

"Yeah, he did have a space between his-oh, I see what you mean. Look at that.” He rubbed his hand back and forth over his eyes. “Look, on second thought maybe I'll go sit under a tree and cool off for a couple of minutes. It's just so…I mean, to see him like this…you know, he was so…"

"Go, already,” Gideon said gruffly. “Here, take some water."

He went back to work. There had been no bonding; the cool soil came away easily in his fingers. And, thank God, there was little stench, no more than an earthy, tomblike odor with only a vague, intermittent edge of rankness. Just your basic, everyday grave smell.

In fifteen minutes John strode back looking his old steadfast self, picked up his tools without a word, and got to work on the lower half of the body. Twenty minutes after that the two of them sat back on their heels to catch their breath and use their wadded shirts to swab perspiration from neck, back, and forehead. The entire upper surface of the body was now exposed, and Gideon took his first long, considered look at it.

Brian was dressed in the T-shirt and shorts that Gideon remembered from the morgue photos. Either he'd been put back into the clothes he'd been wearing when he'd died or he had never been undressed at all. The shirt, stiff with dried blood to begin with, was now black with mold as well, the shorts speckled with blotches of gray-green fungus. Most of the body's soft tissue, as he'd expected, was gone. What was left was rotted to tatters in some places, gummy and shriveled in others. Still, getting down to clean bone for even a cursory examination wasn't the sort of thing that could be accomplished in a few minutes or even a few hours, especially under that roasting pan of a roof. Other things aside, they'd have heat prostration before they were halfway finished.

John heard his sigh. “Doc? What's the matter?"

Gideon jerked his head. “Nothing.” All he could do was what he could do. “Let's get down to business. I'm going to start checking him out.” He opened and laid out a worn leather packet of dissecting tools that they had stopped to pick up from his cottage: Gideon had had it ever since his student days at the University of Arizona. “May as well start with the right hand. If those really were defense wounds, there's a good chance there'll be some corresponding nicks in the bones. If not…"

"If something's there you'll find it,” John said with his appealing but slightly irritating confidence.

The hand lay in a natural position at the body's side, still largely articulated, palm uppermost. That is to say, where the palm had been was uppermost. Stuck to the metacarpals was a mass of tarry, unidentifiable tissue, which Gideon examined with care, hoping to find unambiguous signs of the wound, but without success. It would have to be cleaned off, and he used a tongue depressor to rub away at it, a slow, necessarily painstaking process. Both men kneeled over it, absorbed.

"ARRETEZ-VOUS, S'IL VOUS PLAIT!"

The thunk that followed immediately upon this was the sound of Gideon's and John's near-simultaneous cracking of their skulls against the underside of the metal roof. Clutching their heads, they spun around to see a large, bearded, patently displeased Tahitian policeman looming over them, blocking the sun, his hands on his hips.

It is no easy thing to look intimidating in short blue pants and sky-blue knee socks, but this particular cop, about the size and shape of a UPS delivery van, brought it off with no difficulty.

And standing beside him, not as physically impressive, but no less formidable and every bit as displeased, was the small, globular form of the commandant of the Gendarmerie Nationale de Polynesie-Francaise, Colonel Leopold Guillaume Bertaud.

"Now why is it,” wondered the colonel with his hands clasped behind him, “that I fail to be amazed?” He sounded cheerful, even happy.

"We can explain,” John said. His arms and hands were filthy, his face streaked with sweat and dirt.

Bertaud, crisp and dapper, looked down on him from what seemed to be a very great height.

"No doubt,” he said.

"Give us one more minute,” John said. “One lousy minute, that's all we ask."

"And what will happen in one more minute?"

"Doc'Il prove to you we're right."

Gideon winced. Thanks, John.

"By all means, then,” Bertaud said, “continue."

It took five minutes, not one, of painstaking scraping and probing, but at the end of that time Gideon picked a last bit of tissue off with his fingernails and looked up from his knees with a sense of satisfaction.

"Now then,” he said, shifting instinctively into professorial gear. Bertaud moved in closer and leaned over Gideon and John, his hands on his knees. The big Tahitian cop, on the other hand, appeared to be happier keeping his distance.

"As you see, some of the smaller bones have come loose-” He gestured at four terminal phalanges, heaped together like miniature arrowheads. “-but the dirt and the ligaments have held the rest of the hand together pretty well. These, here, are the metacarpals, the bones that form the body of the hand; the fingers themselves start here."

"We are seeing the palm?” Bertaud asked.

"Yes, the palm. And can you see this little notch near the head of the second metacarpal-this one, the one that leads to the first finger-and then this notch a little more distal on the third metacarpal, and then this groove on the first phalanx of the fifth digit's-"

"No, I see nothing,” Bertaud snapped. “Bones have many natural grooves and notches. They all look very much the same. Make your point, please."

"In English,” added John.

"Does anybody have a knife?” Gideon asked.

At a nod from Bertaud, the Tahitian took a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and handed it to Gideon, who opened it to its largest blade, about four inches long, and gently laid it, edge down, across the skeletal palm. It fit so perfectly into the line of notches that when he let go of the knife it remained upright, lodged in the bones.

He looked up. “There are no such natural grooves, Colonel. These are defense wounds."

Bertaud peered intently at the knife, eyes keen, lips set. It didn't look as if he was taking this very well. Gideon carefully lifted the knife from the bone, laid it across his own palm in approximately the same position, and closed his fist around the blade. When he opened it fifteen seconds later for Bertaud's inspection there was an indentation in his skin, running from the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, diagonally across the palm, and onto the bottom portion of his little finger.

"Ho!” John exulted, and then, just in case Bertaud failed to comprehend: “That's just where those maggots were, remember?"

"That son of a bitch,” was Bertaud's surprising response. He walked a few paces off and stared fretfully into the jungle.

Gideon and John looked at each other and shrugged. It was nice to have the colonel ticked off at somebody else for a change.