Aaron Elkins: Twenty blue devils

The idea had appealed to Gideon and since then, on those few occasions when his mind refused to turn itself off at bedtime he had been constructing cabinets of his own, stuffing whatever was niggling away at him into the drawers and shutting them away for the night. The technique had worked too, although he wasn't as good a cabinetmaker as Napoleon; once in a while one of the drawers would pop open on its own, so to speak, bringing him awake at four or five in the morning in what seemed to be mid-thought, as if his mind had jump-started on its own, with or without his permission. He would lie there in the darkness, galvanized and yet dopey with sleep at the same time, feeling like an unwelcome observer, holding his breath and afraid to move for fear the fragile chain of logic would turn to vapor and disappear if his mind found out he was watching it.

Usually, that was exactly what it did, but every now and then, if things went right, the chain would hold; where there had been nothing but half-formed questions before, he would see at least the outlines of answers; where there had been only confusion and ambiguity, patterns would emerge.

So it was on this night. At 4:38 A.M. by the glowing display on the clock-radio beside his bed, his eyelids flicked open on their own. His mind was already whirring along in high gear.

At 4:51 he jumped out of bed. “Oh, wow,” he whispered to himself.

Two minutes later, having slipped into shorts and polo shirt, he was banging at the door of John's cottage.

"What, what?” came from within, peevish and muffled.

"John, it's me. I need to talk to you."

A groan. “Jesus, Doc, it's the middle of the night."

"It's almost five,” Gideon said. It was nice to be waking John for a change, he thought. “Come on, let me in."

"Let yourself in, the damn door's open.” A light went on in the cottage. John was sitting up in bed in a worn T-shirt, squinting at the light but managing to glare at Gideon as well. “Almost five,” he snarled. “Really? I must have overslept."

"You're not in a very good mood."

"I wonder why."

"You're probably just a little out of sorts from those Boom-Booms."

"God,” John said, which Gideon took as assent.

"Listen, I need to ask you something."

John yawned and massaged his face. The stubble sounded like sandpaper. “Okay, okay, all right, sit down. What?"

Gideon pulled up a chair. “What do Klingons look like?"

John stopped rubbing his face and studied Gideon with one of his less readable expressions. “Well, I can certainly see why you couldn't wait till daylight with a question like that,” he said mildly. “How come you didn't wake me up hours ago?"

"Seriously, what do they look like?"

"What do you mean, what do they look like?"

"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?"