extended from the breastbone to the genitalia. The short arm of the wound ran at right angles across the left side of the chest two inches below the nipple. The wound had been effectively and tightly sewn together with string. The flies resettled and began to investigate.
'It's quite neat.'
'You can see why we thought a surgeon should look at it.'
'Who is he?'
'We think he's Private Ephraim Ward. Absent without leave for three days. I'll get one of his unit over to identify him. May we use your morgue?'
Carriscant was somewhat surprised at this request. 'Well, yes, I suppose so, but isn't this a government matter?'
'Sure as shit it is, Doc. But it's also a Paton Bobby matter. This fellow didn't prick his finger with a sewing needle.' Bobby grinned, after a fashion: only his mouth moved beneath the wide moustache, his eyes stayed watchful, alert. 'I get to say where this stiff goes.'
They waded back to the roadway. A few young American soldiers stood by the carriages that had brought them to the paddy field. They slouched in their loose baggy uniforms, the blue shirts over the khaki trousers dark with sweat. Sullen and nervous, they had their Krags held needlessly at the ready, as if insurgents were about to spring from the roadside ditch. Bobby ordered them to collect the body and offered Carriscant a small cigar from a pewter tin. Carriscant declined, stamped the mud off his boots and looked around him: the paddy field was near Paco, a village a mile or so south-east of Manila. Everywhere were the remains of old trenches and earthworks overgrown with grass and straggly milim bushes. This had been the American front line when the rebels attacked in 1899. Carriscant remembered the day well, standing on his azotea in the city, with a cup' of tea in his hand, listening to the mumbled boom of artillery, feeling the air shiver, setting the dust motes dancing to the distant percussion, the teaspoon rattling on the porcelain.
He turned to Bobby, who was blowing on the end of his cigar, puffing it orange.
'You do know where we are…'
'Yes,' Bobby said. 'I just wonder if it's significant.'
Private Ephraim Ward lay supine on the marble-topped examination table in the San Jeronimo morgue, free of flies at last, the blaze from the lamps above him enhancing his remarkable bloodless lucency. Carriscant had told Bobby that he was not prepared, nor really qualified, to perform an autopsy. Bobby demurred, politely, arguing that Carriscant was probably the most qualified person in the Philippine archipelago to do just that, but in the event he would be more than happy with an expert's investigation of the wound and perhaps some hazarded interpretation of what exactly had occurred.
Carriscant inspected the sutures. Sailmaker's twine, he Would guess, and sewn with a sailmaker's needle. Or a leatherworker's needle. Manila was full of people who could do a job such as this: anyone who had ever made a jute sack could have stitched up Ephraim Ward's belly. Carriscant began to snip his way up the length of the incision, turning right at the breastbone. Here he saw, as the lips of the wound yielded beneath his shears, a great clotting of blood. He fitted a pair of retractors and held the wound open, cleaning and scraping away the black muddy residue of the clot. He saw very soon that the heart had been torn, badly gashed.
He opened wide the wound at the abdomen revealing the vermiculate coils of the intestines and the other internal organs, strangely reduced, washed by their long immersion in the paddy field, isolated somewhat in the stomach cavity like mean portions of food in a too-large bowl. He completed a swift check: everything appeared to be there, if not exactly in order. So, Private Ward had been stabbed in the heart, between the sixth and seventh rib, and the entry wound had been temporarily disguised by this subsequent mutilation. It made no sense to him at all.
Bobby called round later that afternoon to hear his conclusions, Carriscant sat behind his desk as he relayed them, while Bobby paced thoughtfully to and fro, smoking another small ill-lit cheroot, occasionally setting a big haunch down on the desk corner and letting the freed boot swing as he listened.
'You're not Spanish, are you?' Bobby said suddenly.
'No. Well, my mother is half Spanish, my father was British.'
'So, you have British nationality.'
'Yes… Why do you ask?'
'It makes it easier, when I report to the Governor. Especially if we're going to work together.'
Carriscant did not respond to this, though he was curious about what manner of collaboration Bobby was talking about; but, as collaboration was being mooted, he decided to enter into the spirit of the arrangement.
'There was one thing,' Carriscant began, slowly, 'it was impossible to be sure, but I had the impression that the organs in the gut – the intestines, liver, kidneys, stomach – had been… I don't know, had been displaced or manipulated.'
'I don't follow.'
'Have you ever opened a dead body?'
'I came here from the Boxer rebellion,' Bobby said. 'I've seen a lot of dead and mangled men.'
'Not the same thing. When you open the abdominal lining and reveal the organs below you wouldn't believe how… ' Carriscant stopped and searched for a word. 'How neatly it all fits together. How astonishing the design, how compact.' He stood up and clapped his hands on his chest, his side, his belly, pushing his fingers into his stomach. 'They call it a 'trunk' and the word is apt. Everything is packed in, held. It can move but it's secure. Everything in its place, working. And the jobs being done… I won't go on, but there was something about Ward's organs, even though the blood and the fluids were gone. It didn't look -'
'Someone been poking around, sort of thing?'
'Possibly.'
'Where does that get us?'
'You're the sleuth. I'm just a surgeon.'
Bobby had to leave to make his report to the Governor. His own hunch, he told Carriscant, was that Ward had been killed by a man in his own unit, a fight had got out of hand, a blow had been struck. Filipino insurgents often mutilated their victims, he said, the guilty party in this case probably wanted it to seem as if a rebel had done the deed.
'They don't usually mutilate in that fashion,' Carriscant said.
'Sure,' Bobby said. 'Then you go and cut your buddy's pecker off and stick it in his mouth. Kinda hard. Simpler to make some, you know, L-shape or something.'
'Why sew it up, then?'
'I don't know, Carriscant, I don't know,' Bobby said, a rasp of irritation in his voice. 'Yet… I'll try and find out, but we got so many crackers in this army I don't count on being successful.'
'Crackers?'
'Southern boys. They all seem to be from Mississippi, or Texas, or Kansas. Patriots all. Stick together.'
Carriscant smiled. He could see the quality of robust intelligence behind Bobby's vulgar confidence, sense the energies that stirred beneath the corpulent ease.
'I got to go see Governor Taft. Been a big help, Carriscant.'
Carriscant showed Pantaleon the body in the morgue. They had postponed their fistula operation designated for that afternoon.
'An American?' Pantaleon said dispassionately, walking round the head. He took hold of it and moved it to and fro as if to obtain a better angle on the man's slack features. 'At least they can't make any reprisals, now.'
'They think another American did it.' Carriscant told him about Bobby's theory, but Pantaleon seemed uninterested. The dead American soldier seemed to have preoccupied him and he began to tell Carriscant a rambling story he had heard from an uncle about a company of American soldiers who had been pursuing General Elpidio in Batangas. One of the soldiers had fallen into a pit, the base of which had been lined with bamboo spears. In retribution every inhabitant of the nearest two villages – men, women and children-had been shot and their bodies burned.
'I think about two hundred people paid with their lives for that one man's life… ' He shrugged. 'It seems very unfair. I mean -'
'I would rather you didn't talk about it,' Carriscant said abruptly; he stood very still, stiffly, like someone who has just put his back out and is terrified to move.
