Twenty Blue Devils

'Fine.” John turned an accusing eye on him. “Hey, what was all that 'mon ami, mon ami' stuff? You're not taking any responsibility for this, are you? You're putting everything on my shoulders, aren't you?'

Gideon laughed. “You better believe it.'

They had arrived a few minutes earlier at the gleaming white headquarters of the Gendarmerie Nationale de Polynesie-Francaise, commandingly situated at the head of the avenue Bruat, Papeete's most beautiful, most Frenchified boulevard. A broad (by Tahitian standards) thoroughfare, it was lined with one-and two-story government offices and screened by leafy, arching trees that had already been mature when Gauguin had sipped absinthe in their shade before wearing out his welcome in the better French social circles of Papeete.

The gendarmerie itself was the largest of the buildings, a handsome, two-story structure conspicuously flying the French tricolor, surrounded by its own tropically landscaped grounds, and encircled by a wall of iron grillwork and white stone. Notwithstanding its corrugated tin roof, it made an imposing presence.

Inside as well as outside. The lobby was immaculate and austere, with nothing on the walls but a simple, marble plaque inscribed in gold:

Hommage aux gendarmes

Victims du devoir

'What's devoir?” John asked.

'Duty,” Gideon said as the clerk returned to the counter. John nodded approvingly at the plaque.

'The commandant can see you now,” the clerk told them.

He pressed a buzzer to let them through a gate in the counter, then motioned them to precede him through a door labeled Brigade des Recherches.

John's brow wrinkled. “Research? Who needs research?'

'It means investigations,” Gideon told him.

Once beyond public scrutiny, the gendarmerie was notably less grand. The upper floor was a warren of cramped offices, most of them shared, and a small, untidy common room—an expanded passageway, really—with a couple of chipped plastic tables and an enormous, illuminated Coke machine that took up half the space. They had to weave their way through four or five sprawling, blue-uniformed gendarmes taking a break at the tables, smoking, drinking coffee, and gossiping.

The decor was basic police station, with battered, shabby furniture and floors covered with linoleum that had been nothing much to begin with and that had now seen more than its allotted span of years. The dull-green walls were almost hidden by charts, posters, and curling scraps of paper stuck on with pushpins, and were scuffed and blackened where shoes or hands or oily heads or the backs of chairs had come into repeated contact with them.

Other than the posted messages in French, the only feature that would tell an observer that this was not a police station in New York or London was an abundance of fresh, fragrant flowers—jasmine, frangipani, gardenia— that lay on desks and file cabinets. While the smells of police stations in London and New York were frequently memorable, they were unlikely to include frangipani.

Like those of the other offices, the commandant's door was open, revealing a room only a little larger than the rest, about twelve feet by twelve, but comprising a small enclave of refinement. There were no posters, charts, or tacked-up notes. Two antique lengths of brown-and-red tapa cloth and a pair of richly carved, wooden canoe paddles hung on the unmarred, peach-colored walls. A bank of four tall windows looked down the tree-canopied length of avenue Bruat to the bustling harbor five blocks away. The heavy desk was oiled teak, with nothing on the sheet of glass that covered it but a single letter, a marble pen-holder, a small gold pendulum clock protected by a bell jar, and, in one corner, a mass of hibiscus and gardenia arranged on a banana-leaf base. In all, it was the office of a man of taste, serene and inviting.

Its occupant was a small, dapper man in his fifties who was going rapidly over the letter with his forefinger. He nodded to himself, signed with three or four elegant, looping strokes, placed the sheet in a tray on the credenza behind him, and removed his reading glasses to examine the two newcomers with eyes of a startlingly clear blue, penetrating and intelligent. His hair, thick and gray, was brushed softly back in a way that made the most of the distinguished-looking wings of white at his temples.

'I am Colonel Bertaud,” he said in French-accented English. “Sit.'

John and Gideon sat.

He extended a forefinger and leveled it at the clerk. “Go, Salvat.'

Salvat went.

'Your names?” His voice was surprisingly beautiful, as mellow and vibrant as a plucked guitar string, with a hint of irony in the inflection, or perhaps it was in his expression or even his posture.

They gave him their names.

'Now, then. What is this about a murder?'

'Well, of course we don't know that there's been one,” Gideon said, treading carefully. Bertaud was being pleasant enough, but there was something about him that suggested that kid gloves were a good idea.

John, being John, had no such compunctions. “It's about a man named Brian Scott, Colonel, an American —'

'Yes, I know who Brian Scott was, Mr. Lau. I am familiar with the investigation into his death. I am also familiar with the finding: not homicide, but an accidental death due to a fall.'

'Yeah, I know that. But who did the investigation? Some guy out on Raiatea, right? Let's face it—'

The skin around Colonel Bertaud's eyes twitched once. He rose from his desk, walked to the window, and stood looking down on the boulevard, his hands clasped behind him. He was shorter than he had appeared in his chair; no