Twenty blue devils

Chapter 26

Two minutes later, having slipped into shorts and polo shirt, he was banging at the door of John's cottage.

"What, what?” came from within, peevish and muffled.

"John, it's me. I need to talk to you."

A groan. “Jesus, Doc, it's the middle of the night."

"It's almost five,” Gideon said. It was nice to be waking John for a change, he thought. “Come on, let me in."

"Let yourself in, the damn door's open.” A light went on in the cottage. John was sitting up in bed in a worn T-shirt, squinting at the light but managing to glare at Gideon as well. “Almost five,” he snarled. “Really? I must have overslept."

"You're not in a very good mood."

"I wonder why."

"You're probably just a little out of sorts from those Boom-Booms."

"God,” John said, which Gideon took as assent.

"Listen, I need to ask you something."

John yawned and massaged his face. The stubble sounded like sandpaper. “Okay, okay, all right, sit down. What?"

Gideon pulled up a chair. “What do Klingons look like?"

John stopped rubbing his face and studied Gideon with one of his less readable expressions. “Well, I can certainly see why you couldn't wait till daylight with a question like that,” he said mildly. “How come you didn't wake me up hours ago?"

"Seriously, what do they look like?"

"What do you mean, what do they look like?"

"I mean, what do they look like?"

"You know what they look like. What's the matter, you never watched Star Trek? "

"No. Well, once. It had something to do with a lot of these cotton balls taking over the universe. I don't remember how it came out."

John shook his head and addressed the opposite wall. “The weird thing is, I believe him."

"What's so weird?” Gideon said, honestly puzzled.

"Look, Doc, you've seen pictures of them, haven't you? In magazines, in previews…haven't you just once accidentally flipped by a rerun or something?"

"Of course I have,” Gideon told him impatiently, getting to his feet again, “but I don't know which ones the Klingons are."

"Worf is a Klingon.” John was practically shouting. “Gowron is a Klingon. Duras is a Klingon, Kahless the Unforgettable-"

"John!" Gideon yelled back at him from all of two feet away. “Just tell me what they look like, for Christ's sake!"

"Like this, for Christ's sake!” John exploded, holding his hands out from his head to suggest enormous size. “Big, bulgy foreheads-"

"That's what I thought.” Gideon slapped his own forehead with the flat of his hand. “Good God, why didn't I see it before? Why didn't you see it before? How could we never think to-"

"See what?" John cried, baffled. “What are we talking about?"

Gideon fell back into his chair. “John, I may be four hundred feet out in left field, but I don't think so. I think-get set for this now-I think Brian Scott was Klingo Bozzuto."

John stared. “Brian was… you're saying…"

"That they were the same person: your clean-cut, good-looking, upright Brian, and Klingo Bozzuto, sleazy Mob accountant-turned-stool-pigeon. Same guy."

"But-no, I told you, they gave Klingo a new ID and got him a job in the Midwest somewhere-Chicago, I think."

"That was a dozen years ago, John. When was the last report you got on him?"

There was a long silence. “I need some coffee,” John said, swinging himself out of bed. He was wearing a pair of threadbare, cutoff sweatpants to go with the T-shirt. “You want some coffee?"

"Do I,” Gideon said.

While John made it (his cottage, like Gideon's, was stocked with an electric coffee-maker and, courtesy of Nick, a pound of Blue Devil), Gideon did his best to summarize the stream of early-morning thought of which he himself didn't yet have too firm a grasp. There were actually two separate streams, he explained, or three, really, but all of them had ended up in the same place. The first, the one that his mind was already working on when he woke up, was the fabric of lies and lacunae that Brian had woven around his past and his present: the nonexistent teaching assistantship at Bennington; the job that wasn't there at the company that didn't exist in Michigan; the shadowy vacuum that represented his past life; and the avoidance since he'd come to Tahiti of work permits, salary checks, passport, medical records, dental records, marriage records, and anything else that might be used to document his whereabouts and his very existence.

Put it all together and it added up to someone who wanted as little known about himself as possible, someone who was quite possibly keeping his very identity a secret. And from there it wasn't much of a leap to wondering if, somewhere along the way, he had perhaps taken the extreme step of changing his identity.

"And what,” asked Gideon, now rolling along in full professorial mode, “is the first thing you do if you're serious about changing your identity?"

But John wasn't in the mood to play student. “Just tell me, okay?” he grumbled, bending over the coffee-maker. “It's too early in the morning for the Socratic method."

"You change your face, is what you do,” said Gideon. “Which led me straight into stream number two; that huge operation-that operation that nobody seems to know anything about-on Brian's skull.” He got up, walked to where John was, and spoke with quiet conviction. “It wasn't on account of an accident, John-it was a face-change operation. You told me the FBI gave Bozzuto a new identity and put him into a witness protection program after he testified, right? Well, there you are; don't they do plastic surgery on them to change their faces?"

"Sometimes,” John allowed, not quite ready to go along yet, “not always. In fact, usually not.” He poured two cups of coffee and added sugar and creamer to his own. “Now if I don't know whether they changed Bozzuto's looks, I sure don't see how you do."

"Easy,” Gideon said. “He looked like a Klingon, right?” He made the same bulbous-forehead gesture that John had made earlier. “Now that doesn't happen to be a very common look down here on Planet Earth, so if they were trying to keep his identity a secret they'd pretty much have to change it; they wouldn't have any choice."

John was reflective. “Well, yeah, sure, you're right about that…"

"Is there any problem with their ages? How old was Bozzuto?"

"Um, let's see, he was probably, oh, maybe thirty at the time of the trials, so that would make him a little over forty now, and Brian was thirty-eight-so, yeah, the ages could fit, and changing his black hair to blond wouldn't be any problem, but-” He shook his head.

"But what?"

"But I tell you, it's hard to imagine that anybody could change a strange-looking bird like Bozzuto into a good-looking guy like Brian without giving him a brand-new head altogether. I mean, can they really do that with plastic surgery?"

"In a case like this, yes. Look, I think I understand what was wrong with Bozzuto, why he looked like that. From what you've said, I believe he had something called fibrous dysplasia of the skull. It's something like von Recklinghausen's disease-"

"English, please."

"You know, the Elephant Man syndrome-only it's a localized version, pretty much restricted to bony exostoses on and around the supraorbital torus."

"Really,” John said, “bony exostoses on and around the supraorbital torus."

"Right, and if you get a plastic surgeon who knows what he's doing, it can be fixed. It's a massive operation-you have to take out a chunk of the frontal bone, do some hammer-and chisel sculpting on it, and then put it back…which, if you remember, is exactly what was done to Brian. All that scaring-even the fractures-wasn't the result of an accident; it was done on purpose, by the surgeon himself. You have to do it to make the piece of bone fit back in after you change the shape; sometimes you even have to put it back in upside down to make it fit. And of course you have to do some substantial whittling around the orbits too, to make it all go together."

"Mm,” said John.

"And the reason that you never saw any scars on his face was that they weren't accidental wounds; the surgeon could pick his places to make his incisions-hairline, behind the ears, and so on."

"Mm,” said John.

"Ergo," Gideon said, “unless we can come up with something better, which I very much doubt, we now have the reason that Brian Scott was so stingy with the details of his life: there weren't any details because there wasn't any Brian. There was only Klingo Bozzuto."

This shamelessly theatrical windup was received with measured silence. John carried the coffee to the rattan table and chairs in one corner and set it down for them. Only after they had their first grateful swallows did he say anything. And even then it was accompanied by a shrug.

"Maybe."

"Maybe! Where's the ‘maybe'?"

"Well, for one thing, weren't you the guy that was explaining to me a couple of days ago that it wasn't plastic surgery, that it couldn't be plastic surgery, because if it was plastic surgery the bone would never be that beat up?"

"Well, as I recall, I said it was reconstructive surgery, but reconstructive surgery is just another name for a more radical form of pl-"

"And, let's see, correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't you tell me that it was all the result of this humongous accident? ‘Devastating accident,’ I believe you said?"

"Well, yes, but that was just a first reaction. I hadn't given it any thought, I wasn't sure of myself, I was just making a guess."

"You could have fooled me,” John said. “You even told me what kind of accident: automobile, you said. You even gave me the speed: sixty miles an hour. I was real impressed. You also-"

Gideon finally gave in, laughing. “All right, I may have been a little premature in my conclusions,” he allowed.

"That's one way to put it,” John said, laughing too. He swallowed down the last of his coffee and poured them both some more. A few rays of pale gray light were filtering through the wooden blinds now, and in the trees the rowdy mynah birds were waking up and staking their daily territorial claims.

"I tell you the truth, Doc,” John said, “what you say adds up-but then, what you said about that accident added up too, only now you're telling me it never happened. I'm not saying you're wrong, but-well, think about it; it just doesn't make any sense. I mean, it's crazy. Brian was a nice guy, a good guy. Bozzuto was your typical Mob crud."

"Did you actually know him?"

"Well, no, but it stands to-"

"Wait, there's more, John. What kind of work did they get for Bozzuto in Chicago?"

"Huh? How would I know that?"

"Didn't you tell me they got him a job with the railroads?"

"Oh, yeah, with Amtrak, that's right."

"What kind of job, exactly? Do you know?” He asked the question quietly, but he could feel his heart thudding. Klingo Bozzuto's work experience with Amtrak was the crucial factor in the complex and unlikely scenario he had put together, the linchpin that made it all work.

Disappointingly, John shook his head. “What difference does it make?"

Gideon leaned earnestly forward. “Well, let's say they got him a job as a conductor or a steward-"

"Which I doubt. The guy was a CPA."

"Yes, but wouldn't they give him a whole new life that was different from the old one? Besides, he was a crook. I can't imagine they'd sic him on poor, unsuspecting Amtrak in some responsible position where he could mess with the books."

"Well, yeah, that's true. Okay, say they turned him into a conductor. So?"

"So what does a conductor do?"

John hunched his shoulders. “Punches tickets?"

"He punches tickets,” Gideon said triumphantly, “while he walks up and down the train!"

John frowned silently at him for a few seconds. “Am I missing something here?"

"John, what muscles would you use if you were walking up and down a moving train all day?"

John made an impatient sound. “How the hell would I-” He stopped. His eyes widened. He put down his cup so suddenly that coffee slopped over the rim. "Balance! You'd use your muscles of balance. You'd be standing on a moving, vibrating platform all day long, you'd always be using those muscles that keep you steady-"

"Bingo,” Gideon said with quiet satisfaction. “In particular the soleus muscles. And the soleus muscles attach to the fibulas. And if you used them hard enough and often enough, you might even develop a pair of fibulas that looked like Brian's."

"Whew,” John said wonderingly, starting to believe it now. “But…I mean, how could it be? What was it all about? Why would he…You think Therese knew? What about Nick? Why would…how could…” He shook his head again, this time with a little jerk, as if to clear the fuzz away and get himself going. “First things first. Let's make sure it's even possible. Let me call the Bureau and see about getting some up-to-date dope on Bozzuto.” He leaned across the table and reached for the telephone. “If it turns out he's alive and well in Chicago, then we've got a small problem with this theory of yours."

"Back to the drawing board,” Gideon agreed. “But I don't think it's going to turn out that way.” He looked at his watch. “John, it's only seven-fifty in Seattle. Are you going to get anybody in?"

"Absolutely. The Bureau never sleeps.” He punched in a set of numbers, then looked up while the connection was being made. “This is going to take a while. You think you could scout around and see if anybody's working in the kitchen yet? Maybe you could bring us back some breakfast."

"Will do,” Gideon said, making for the door.

"I don't want anything healthy,” John called after him. “I want something good. No fruit."

It took John another pot of coffee, three telephone calls, an hour and fifteen minutes, and three foot-long sugar-encrusted fried crullers to get the information he wanted. Gideon had stayed with him for a while, but after finishing the cheese, rolls, and grapefruit juice he'd brought for himself he went back to his own cottage to shave and shower. When he came out of the bathroom John was sitting in the main room, waiting for him, looking seedy and bedraggled in the fresh, clear light of a Tahitian morning, but with the happy look on his face of a man who had gotten somewhere.

"Wait'll you hear this,” he said.

Gideon waited.

"I finally got hold of the right guy at the U.S. Marshals Service, which took some doing-"

"What do they have to do with this?"

"They run the witness protection program, didn't you know that? Anyway, I finally got hold of the right guy and convinced him that I was on the up-and-up, which wasn't all that easy over the telephone-I had to have a deputy director in Quantico talk to him and vet me-and he told me all kinds of interesting things about our old friend Klingo Bozzuto."

Gideon settled into the chair opposite him. John was going to draw this out for all it was worth. Well, he had earned a little expansiveness. Besides, Gideon was willing to admit that he had it coming; through the years John had done more than his share of sitting politely and even attentively around while Gideon confounded and amazed him with startling feats of forensic prestidigitation. Turnabout was only fair.

"Such as?” he prompted.

"I will start at the beginning,” John said, rather portentously for him. He examined a few notes that were scrawled on the face of a Shangri-La postcard that he'd brought with him. “On June 17, 1983, one Bozzuto, Joseph Rodolfo, known to one and all as Klingo, officially ceased to exist. In his place was a completely new man with a brand-new work history, a brand-new personal life, a brand-new Social Security number-and a brand-new name. And the name they gave him was…” He grinned. “You'll never guess."

Gideon's chest had taken up its thumping again. “Brian Scott,” he said.

John waited a couple of seconds before answering. “Nope,” he said. “Vernon W. Culpepper."