“No, nothing on him,” answered Muir. “No fingerprint matches in the States at all. We’re sending agents to his old hometown to see if we can backtrack, but so far we’ve got a total blank. My guess is that he never returned home, or even to the States at all.”

“The . . . victim?”

“We’ve put St. Louis on full priority. They’re pulling the files on every unresolved missing-in-action and deserter case and looking for a match. Once they get into the files it should be a fairly quick process. He’s got to be Caucasian, early twenties as of 1971, five foot nine inches, brown hair. That narrows down the search already. From there we go to the fillings in his dental records. Three fillings or less, which in itself is kind of unusual. There can’t be more than a handful of people matching those indicators, so we should have an answer very soon. Perhaps within days.”

Professor Muir’s eyes lit up. “An odd thing here—one of my colleagues was looking at the skull the other day and he swears that these don’t look like American fillings. Something about the materials and the way the drilling seems to have been done. It could be just another indication that the victim was from a pretty backward rural area, in the same manner as his worn teeth indicate a rougher diet. But it also could mean that he isn’t even an American. Fancy that.”

“Maybe Deville killed an eastern European adviser,” said Condley. “If there was such a thing. Think of the irony in that. A turncoat actually killing a commie in order to get out of Viet Nam.”

“That would surprise me as well,” said Muir. “What good would it have done him? If he killed one of their advisers he would have been in deep trouble with them, so how could he have gotten out of, say, Ha Noi with their help? The only place they could have sent him was to another communist country, and I can’t imagine him being welcomed there if he’d just killed an eastern-bloc soldier. And he couldn’t have gotten out of the country from one of our airports in Sai Gon or Da Nang with the passport of an eastern European soldier who wasn’t even supposed to be in Viet Nam in the first place.”

The old waiter shuffled up, carrying a tray of food, so emaciated and expressionless that it seemed he might keel over and die with every step. Condley winked at Muir when Vo approached, and the two remained silent as he slowly placed Condley’s breakfast on the table. Then Condley dug hungrily into his omelette.

“So you think you’ve got Pepper in the mountains,” he said through a mouthful of food.