Twenty Blue Devils

'—and there he is in a box and all we have to do is pry the lid off. Well, they don't bury people that way anymore, not even here. The plain old hole in the ground went out with ‘Alas, poor Yorick.’ Those holes are lined with cement nowadays, or maybe cinder block, and they usually have a concrete cap on top. You need heavy equipment to get it off—a crane, a backhoe—'

John was shaking his head. “Not this grave, Doc. No concrete, no cinder block, not even a coffin. Not even a headstone. Brian was kind of a nut about Tahiti. He really fell in love with it, with the history. He always said he wanted to be buried in the old native cemetery, and he wanted his body treated the old native way. And that's just the way Therese handled it.'

'I doubt that,” Gideon murmured, mostly to himself.

'What do you mean, you doubt it? I'm telling you.'

'Well, the old Tahitian way was—you don't want to know.'

'Sure, I want to know. What do you mean?'

'Well, what they used to do here, and in the Marquesas and the Tuamotus too, was to puncture the skin to let out the fluids, take out the brain, use a hook to remove the viscera by way of the anus, then mummify—'

John looked horrified. “Pikes! No! That's disgusting! I only meant there's no coffin, no concrete. And he's buried in sand, not dirt, just a few feet down. Therese hired an old Tahitian priest to do the burial. Nick took me up there yesterday; I saw for myself. It'd be a snap, Doc. Twenty minutes’ work.'

Gideon shifted uneasily. “John, I'd like to help, you know that, but it just doesn't—'

John leaned earnestly across the table. “Look, I'd do it by myself, you know that, but what would I do with the body when I got it up?” He looked at the tabletop. “I need you. Brian needs you. I know you, Doc, you're like me; you can't just let something like this pass. It's not right.'

Gideon sighed deeply and drained his cooling coffee. Brian needs you. How was it that Doug Ubelaker, the anthropologist at the Smithsonian, put it? We are the final chance for the voice of the victim to be heard. The Hippocratic oath of the forensic anthropologist.

He sighed again, even deeper this time, and rose. “I saw a quincaillerie on the way over here. On rue La Garde.'

John looked at him, puzzled. “A...?'

'Hardware store,” Gideon said. “We can pick up a couple of shovels and whatever else we need.'

John let loose a sigh of his own, then grinned and flopped back in his chair. “Whoo, I tell you, you had me worried there for a while.'

'Sure, I'll just bet I did,” Gideon said with a faint smile. “Come on, let's go. We better get it over with before I return to my right mind.'

[Back to Table of Contents]

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