Aaron Elkins - Twenty blue devils

"Just get the stuff, will you?” Gideon said, laughing. He unsnapped his dissecting kit. “Oh, and I'll need something to scrub the bones down as we go. A small scrub brush works fine-soft as you can get. Pick up a couple, will you? A couple of toothbrushes too."

John nodded, pocketed the list, and made for the door. As he was closing it behind him he stuck his head back in.

"What brand toothbrush? Personally, I recommend Oral-B."

"Oral-B,” said Gideon, “will do just fine."

True to Bertaud's promise, Mr. Boucher, the administrative director of the hospital, proved eager and able to help. At 5 P.M., when the laundry workers left for the day, a covered gurney was wheeled by two orderlies from the morgue to the hospital laundry. There, a huge, lidded, cast-iron vat, in which sheets had been boiled in the days before the hospital had gotten its new gas-powered washers, had been placed at Gideon's disposal, as had the two orderlies. By 5:30 the skeleton, now largely disarticulated, and with the smaller bones in several net bags, was soaking in meat tenderizer and water, its first of four warm baths. At 7:30 the vat was drained and the bones placed on the rimmed, metal-topped gurney, where Gideon gently scrubbed and teased away some more of the soft tissue and carefully snipped apart stubborn joints with scalpel and scissors.

In his mind he had already divided the work to be done on the skeleton into two mutually exclusive phases: first, the preparation of the bones for examination, which was tonight's job, a charnel-house business of bone-scraping, defleshing, simmering, and disjointing; and second, the examination itself, which would be tomorrow's. Phase one was dull, hard, nasty work, phase two was physically easy, mentally challenging, and engrossing; phase one was dirty, phase two was clean; phase one was unpleasant from start to finish, phase two was-well, pleasant might not be the right word, but satisfying in its own absorbing way, a return to order and meaning after the dissolution of the night before.

Over the years he had learned to get through the nasty phase without entirely focusing his attention, without being altogether “there.” He rubbed, scrubbed, and teased as needed, but everything was kept at a mental distance, as if seen through a veil. Observation and interpretation of the skeletal features were suspended until the examination itself. After all, it wasn't as if whatever it was wouldn't hold. Thus, it took something extraordinary to make him sit up and take notice.

Like the screw in the middle of Brian's skull, for example.

Even then, it was John who spotted it.

"What the hell is that?” he said suddenly.

Gideon surfaced with a start. He had been scrubbing away at the proximal end of a femur, having almost forgotten that John was there, watching over his shoulder with an understandable mixture of fascination and repugnance.

"What's what?” Gideon said grumpily. He'd liked it where he was, in his gauzy semitrance.

"That.” John pointed. “There's a screw in his head."

There certainly was, an ordinary-looking metal screw two inches above the nasal bones, its slotted head visible among the rags and tags of muscle and fascia still stuck to the front of the cranium. Gideon quickly cleared the overlying tissue away. (The frontalis muscle, with nothing much to do other than raising the eyebrows and wrinkling the forehead, was one of the thinnest in the body, and one of the few with no tough bony attachments to hack through.) What he found underneath was a substantial collection of hardware implanted in the skull: more screws, four thin strips of surgical steel, and ten or twelve snips of wiring, all of it having been used to hold a two-by-four-inch rectangular piece of frontal bone in place in the middle of the forehead, The reinserted segment of bone had been through a lot. There was a healed linear fracture running from top to bottom on its left side, a healed, smaller, diagonal fracture in the lower right comer, signs of chipping and splintering at several places around the margins. But the surgery had been beautifully performed, and with the exception of one small, round concavity in the upper right corner, the bones had long ago knitted together with no visible complications.

"I'll be damned,” Gideon said.

"What is it, Doc? What happened to him?"

"Well, I'm not positive. He's been operated on, that's clear. This big chunk of frontal bone was removed and then replaced-see the little depression in this corner? That's a burr hole; they had to drill that to make a place for the saw to get in. And these metal strips are compression plates to hold the edges of the bone together. And these wires-"

"Yeah, I see, but-I mean, I don't understand. Why would they take a piece out of his skull and then put it back? Did he have a brain operation?"

"No, I don't think so. For brain surgery you generally don't need to remove a huge chunk of bone like this, and even if you did, it'd be done neatly. You wouldn't have all this scarring, and you certainly wouldn't have these fractures. There's been some pretty serious retooling of the bone done here, John."

"Meaning what, plastic surgery?"

"Not the usual kind, no. This is heavy-duty stuff-reconstructive surgery-putting things back together after some kind of horrendous accident; automobile crash, most likely. It's the kind of thing that happens when you hit a windshield frame that's just stopped and you're still going sixty miles an hour. From the looks of it, Brian was lucky to get out of it alive. The whole front of his head must have been-” He shivered. “You mean you didn't know anything about this?"

"It's news to me. How long ago did it happen, can you tell?"

"Long time. Five years, ten years, more."

"Before I knew him,” John mused.

"But there must have been some pretty bad scarring, John."

"Of his face, you mean? Not that I ever noticed."

"Well, did he look…a little odd? When you have this much repair involved, especially of the bone itself, it's pretty hard to put things back together quite the way-"

"No, nothing, Doc. He was a good-looking guy. Believe me, he looked like anybody else. Better."

"Yes, but there had to be-” And suddenly he ran out of steam. He leaned back on the stool he was sitting on and stretched, then sagged, his shoulders drooping. “Man, it's been a long, hard day,” he said.

"Tell me about it."

"Look, why don't we save this for tomorrow, when we're fresh? For now, let me just concentrate on getting the bones ready."

"Suits me,” said John.

And back into the vat they went, this time to soak in a twenty percent solution of DesTop, the French counterpart of Liquid-Plumr, for another hour, after which, almost free of adherent tissue now except for the fibrous stuff around the joints, they were removed for yet another scrub-down and then returned to the vat, this time in a watery solution of an enzyme-loaded French detergent called Arid kept at a temperature just below a simmer.

"One more scrubbing, maybe,” Gideon said, unutterably weary of scraping and hacking at the greasy, stubborn remnants of what had once been ligaments and tendons-the very machinery of human motion-"and then they'll go back into the detergent for the rest of the night. Bleach in the morning, and that'll be it, I hope."

At eleven, tired, bored, and depressed, John called a taxi, went back to the hotel, and fell into bed.

At 1:30 A.M., tired, bored, and miserably grungy, Gideon left precise instructions with the orderlies, drove to the hotel, showered under scalding water so hard and for so long that he went through an entire bar of coconut-scented soap, and fell into bed.

In the morning, by prior agreement, the two met in the dining room at 7 A.M., when it opened. They were surprised to find their usual table taken, and three or four others as well, with large, jolly, Spanish-speaking people, all of whom seemed to know one another. The Chileans, it appeared, really did patronize the place. Apparently they had arrived by way of the midnight Lan-Chile flight from Santiago, and true to Dean's word, they were a lively, laughing bunch. Children merrily chased mynah birds, adults merrily flipped croissants at one another.