Twenty Blue Devils

'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