He turned away, his brow dry, his throat parched, the fingers of his right hand slick with the brightness of the boy's blood. He moved to a sink at the side of the room and ran water over his bloodied fingers. There were fat spots of blood on his tunic too, he noted, absentmindedly. He removed the gown slowly and dropped it in the wicker basket by the door thinking, suddenly, of Cruz and how he still persisted in operating in a black frock coat, its reveres and front encrusted with dried pus and blood like some obscene blazon honouring his trade.

A rare and untypical nausea made his gorge rise. The tongue was such a curious part of the body, a flickering pulsing muscle with its two senses – taste and touch -a kind of amphibian organ planted in the throat like an anemone anchored to its rock, unsure whether it should be inside or outside the body. When he cut it seemed to flinch – He stopped himself, angrily: why was he thinking like this? He felt his keening headache return and with it the memory of its cause, the brief intense argument he had had with Annaliese that morning. 'Work, work, work,' she had cried spitefully at him as he dressed for work. 'Why get married, why bother having me in your life?… Why indeed, he had shouted back, if this is meant to be wedded bliss. Stupid, purblind woman.

The porters wheeled away the still comatose Chinese boy and he and Pantaleon moved next door to change back into their clothes.

'What do you think?' Pantaleon asked. 'It seemed to go well.'

'We'll see how it heals. At least he's got some tongue left.'

'Cruz will go mad if it works,' Pantaleon smiled. 'Madder.'

'If it works we photograph the next one. Write it up.'

'The Carriscant glossectomy.'

Senora Diaz interrupted their self-satisfied chuckles to tell them that someone from the Governor's office was looking for Dr Cruz. Carriscant shrugged on his coat, straightened his necktie and walked up the corridor to his office, rubbing his hands together vigorously – the carbolic in the soap dried the skin and caused flaking at the knuckles. He opened his office door and a man in military uniform – khaki, leather-belted – rose to his feet from the chair in front of the desk and saluted. He was portly, running to fat, and his uniform was tight across his belly. He had a high forehead and thinning hair, and a neatly trimmed wide moustache that effectively divided his face in two.

'Dr Carriscant, thank you for seeing me,' he said. 'I'm Paton Bobby, Chief of Constabulary.'

Dr Carriscant stood beside Paton Bobby in the rice field looking down at the naked half-submerged body of what had been an eighteen-year-old Kansas militiaman.

'That is no fucking gu-gu,' Bobby said, a frown pulling his eyebrows together and cabling his forehead. 'In fact that is just about the whitest man I've ever seen.'

There was a peculiar bluish, icy tone to the body's general pallor, it was true. The fat on the buttocks seemed to shine through the skin like ice-cream wrapped in parchment, Carriscant thought, quite pleased with his simile.

'That's because we're standing in a solution of his blood,' Carriscant pointed out. The body lay in the centre of a dark brown stain, still spreading, stirred by the sloshing of the men's boots. Carriscant leaned over: there was a pestilential buzzing of insects and the solitary eye that was above the surface of the water was dark with flies feeding on its jelly.

'Has anybody moved it?'

'The farmer who found him, turned him over. Got a look,' Bobby said. 'That's how we knew we needed a doctor.'

'What about Dr Wieland?' Dr Wieland was acting medical superintendent to the US Governor. Carriscant had met him several times, a genial, superannuated alcoholic whose medical knowledge was about as far advanced as Cruz's.

'Dr Wieland is… unwell, today,' Bobby said, half concealing a smile. 'He suggested we consult Dr Cruz,' he shrugged. 'He wasn't there. But we are very happy with you. No disrespect.'

'None taken, Mr Bobby, none taken… May I look?'

Carriscant turned the body over gently with the toe of his boot; it rolled easily, buoyant on the brown water. The flies rose up with an irate hum. He fanned them away from his face.

There was a long inverted L-shape wound carved into the torso, and laced like a football. The long cut extended from the breastbone to the genitalia. The short arm of the wound ran at right angles across the left side of the chest two inches below the nipple. The wound had been effectively and tightly sewn together with string. The flies resettled and began to investigate.

'It's quite neat.'

'You can see why we thought a surgeon should look at it.'

'Who is he?'

'We think he's Private Ephraim Ward. Absent without leave for three days. I'll get one of his unit over to identify him. May we use your morgue?'

Carriscant was somewhat surprised at this request. 'Well, yes, I suppose so, but isn't this a government matter?'

'Sure as shit it is, Doc. But it's also a Paton Bobby matter. This fellow didn't prick his finger with a sewing needle.' Bobby grinned, after a fashion: only his mouth moved beneath the wide moustache, his eyes stayed watchful, alert. 'I get to say where this stiff goes.'

They waded back to the roadway. A few young American soldiers stood by the carriages that had brought them to the paddy field. They slouched in their loose baggy uniforms, the blue shirts over the khaki trousers dark with sweat. Sullen and nervous, they had their Krags held needlessly at the ready, as if insurgents were about to spring from the roadside ditch. Bobby ordered them to collect the body and offered Carriscant a small cigar from a pewter tin. Carriscant declined, stamped the mud off his boots and looked around him: the paddy field was near Paco, a village a mile or so south-east of Manila. Everywhere were the remains of old trenches and earthworks overgrown with grass and straggly milim bushes. This had been the American front line when the rebels attacked in 1899. Carriscant remembered the day well, standing on his azotea in the city, with a cup' of tea in his hand, listening to the mumbled boom of artillery, feeling the air shiver, setting the dust motes dancing to the distant percussion, the teaspoon rattling on the porcelain.

He turned to Bobby, who was blowing on the end of his cigar, puffing it orange.

'You do know where we are…'

'Yes,' Bobby said. 'I just wonder if it's significant.'

Private Ephraim Ward lay supine on the marble-topped examination table in the San Jeronimo morgue, free of flies at last, the blaze from the lamps above him enhancing his remarkable bloodless lucency. Carriscant had told Bobby that he was not prepared, nor really qualified, to perform an autopsy. Bobby demurred, politely, arguing that Carriscant was probably the most qualified person in the Philippine archipelago to do just that, but in the event he would be more than happy with an expert's investigation of the wound and perhaps some hazarded interpretation of what exactly had occurred.

Carriscant inspected the sutures. Sailmaker's twine, he Would guess, and sewn with a sailmaker's needle. Or a leatherworker's needle. Manila was full of people who could do a job such as this: anyone who had ever made a jute sack could have stitched up Ephraim Ward's belly. Carriscant began to snip his way up the length of the incision, turning right at the breastbone. Here he saw, as the lips of the wound yielded beneath his shears, a great clotting of blood. He fitted a pair of retractors and held the wound open, cleaning and scraping away the black muddy residue of the clot. He saw very soon that the heart had been torn, badly gashed.

He opened wide the wound at the abdomen revealing the vermiculate coils of the intestines and the other internal organs, strangely reduced, washed by their long immersion in the paddy field, isolated somewhat in the stomach cavity like mean portions of food in a too-large bowl. He completed a swift check: everything appeared to be there, if not exactly in order. So, Private Ward had been stabbed in the heart, between the sixth and seventh rib, and the entry wound had been temporarily disguised by this subsequent mutilation. It made no sense to him at all.