Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  And he had to think straight. Lena Muller could no longer be the focus of Haydon’s reason for being there. In the States he would be plunged headlong into a homicide investigation, here he could only walk away from it. At least that would be the conventional wisdom. Report her death and go home. It seemed an outrageous option, but he knew it was the only real one. But there was Fossler’s disappearance. This was not so easily reconciled. There were options. He had no doubt that Cage had been right to walk away from Jim Fossler’s place. If there was anything Haydon could do for Fossler—and he didn’t have the remotest idea what it might be—he didn’t think it would be through the embassy with its slow-moving front-door policies and its unknown backdoor policies with their hidden agendas and unofficial status and deniable operations. Throughout the world U.S. ambassadors handled the CIA presence in their embassies in different ways; some tried to stay on top of CIA activities, tried to keep themselves at least halfway informed about the operations being conducted under the guise of the embassy’s aegis, while others simply turned their backs, covered their ears, and shut their eyes. Deniability as a form of moral triage. Haydon didn’t have the time to invest in trying to negotiate with the many faces of officialdom.

  But there were other ways to look for Fossler, and he himself had given Haydon a lead or two. If Haydon could believe Janet Pittner, and he doubted he could, she didn’t know anything about Jim Fossler. She was not going to be forthcoming, not just yet anyway. Cage had done his part. Baine was gone. And Lena was…gone. Of the names that Fossler had given him over the telephone that left only Dr. Aris Grajeda, who had already brought himself onstage again through the police report Haydon had read just a few hours earlier. Grajeda would be his next stop.

  Haydon got out of the shower and dressed in his other change of clothes. He left the clothes he’d worn the day before in his room with a note to the maid to have them cleaned that day and went down to breakfast in the long atrium dining room.

  The Residencial Reforma was usually comfortably full, and Haydon had never stayed there when he didn’t meet half a dozen Americans. With the embassy nearby, it was a popular place with people who had business there, from businessmen to student travelers. It was a quiet, comfortable place that was relatively inexpensive and had the kind of residential atmosphere—with its two parlors, American television channels, and friendly staff—that appealed to a more interesting kind of clientele than the Club Med trade.

  He ate alone at a small corner table next to two of the marble pillars. Since the dining room opened at seven o’clock, the people who had business in the city had already eaten and were gone and the people there now were less likely to be on a strict schedule. He saw a couple of men who were dead ringers for “American advisors,” of which there were scores circulating throughout Guatemala, a girl by herself who seemed to be a student, a young couple reading travel brochures on the Mayan pyramids, a middle-aged couple speaking German, and a young auburn-haired woman reading a French novel.

  By nine-fifty Haydon was walking south on the Avenida La Reforma to the Camino Real, where he knew he could get a rental car. By ten-thirty he had rented a Japanese sedan and had spent ten minutes with a new map of the city.

  There was no easy way to get to Mezquital. Even though it was not that far as the crow flies, it was on the other side of one of the major ravines that cut into the south side of the city and accommodated the Rio Guadrón. Haydon had to drive northward on Diagonal 12 and then switch back southward at the Trébol, picking up Petapa, the main avenue to the University of San Carlos.

  But where he was heading was far beyond San Carlos, the entrance to which he passed in only a few minutes. He continued along the increasingly industrialized thoroughfare past the Shell and Chevron storage facilities, past steelworks and a paraffin processing plant and a sack manufacturing company. There were few houses, all of them poor, and then even those became sparse, giving way to acres of weedy lots that surrounded the industries. He passed a glass factory on the left and then a tire manufacturing plant, on the right an industrial adhesives plant and a plastics manufactory, and then he crossed the railroad tracks. To his left even the industries gave way to broad parched spaces of scrub brush and weeds entangled with windblown trash, and then on the right a poor colonia sprang up like an afterthought. From there, nothing but the squatters’ shacks and, in the distance, the majestic purple slopes and cloudy crowns of volcanos Pacaya and Agua southwest of the city.

  Ahead of him a barefooted woman was walking toward him leading a scrawny, long-legged pig on a thin rope. As Haydon approached, he put his arm out the window and raised his hand as he slowed the car and stopped.

  “Perdoname, señora. Buscando para un doctor, un guatemalteco, que vive aquí.”

  The woman pulled the pig up short and smiled. Her teeth were bad, but she had beautiful jet hair braided up in the traditional Indian style with a brilliant green cinta. She wore the Indian corte wraparound skirt, but her huipil had been discarded for a man’s baggy and transparent nylon shirt. She told Haydon she knew the doctor, a good man. She told him to go to the pirul tree and follow the path over the sandy embankment and down through the houses on the slope on the other side. Cross the railroad tracks. The clínica was to the left a little way.

  Haydon thanked her.

  “Se va bien,” she said, and turned away as Haydon put the car in gear.

  He drove the short distance to the pepper tree and pulled off the road into its thin, lacy shade. He locked the car and looked up at the embankment that rose immediately from the roadside. Two boys were watching him from a hedge of dry weeds, like urchin bandits waiting for the advantage. He beckoned to them, and they came scrambling down the slope, their matted hair and rags and waving arms awash in a small cloud of dust. He gave each of them some money to guard the car and started up the shallow rut of the path. There was a remote chance they wouldn’t strip the car before he returned. When he got to the top of the embankment the path branched out into a colonia of squatters’ shacks perched on the slope that fell toward the railroad tracks fifty meters below. He chose one of the widest trails, packed hard by legions of bare feet, and followed it in a switchback pattern down the embankment past cardboard and tin shacks and an occasional better one of lepa, a cheap, hand-hewn lumber widely used throughout the city by squatters or anyone wanting to throw up a fast shelter.

  He met a single file of women carrying plastic jugs of water on their heads and then on the switchback encountered two little boys squatting together as they defecated on the edge of the path, their dirty, sweaty faces and large dark eyes looking out from under an umbrella of weeds. Their gazes followed Haydon with open curiosity and without embarrassment, as though he had been a large interloping crane that it was their happy pleasure to observe in passing.

  At the railroad track at the bottom of the embankment, packs of children played along the rails that curved out of sight around a bend in both directions. He stopped a boy who had perched a runty and fly-pestered pup on a piece of wood that he was scooting along the hot, shiny rails and asked about the doctor. The little boy had no idea who he was talking about, but a girl, nine or ten years old, overheard his question and offered to take Haydon to him. She was well groomed and dressed in the bright woven clothes of one of Guatemala’s many Indian groups, and though Haydon knew too little of their traditional costumes to know which one, he could tell that she was a newcomer from the countryside. She had not yet acquired the haunted look that the slums would inevitably give her, and her native dress had not yet given way to the inescapable filth of her surroundings or to the odd piece of nylon or polyester that would necessarily replace the worn-out huipil and corte.

  Haydon followed her across the rails and into another maze of narrow trails and shanties, climbing gradually, the paths converging and veering off, the sounds of children crying and women’s conversation and evangelical radio preachers issuing from the cracks in the shanties, the odors of wood smoke and com tortilla
s, and of animal and human feces that dotted the edges of the paths and grew odoriferous in the increasing heat.

  She walked at a steady pace, glancing back occasionally to see if he was still with her, her little bare feet working the uneven surface of the paths with a sure grip. As she walked she swung a frayed string with a red button on the end of it, around and around, making pink circles in the air. She was a gregarious, carefree child on friendly terms with her surroundings. Occasionally she would pause and quickly peek into a doorway or over a rickety fence and say Buenas to whoever was there and be on her way again before Haydon could even catch up with her. She paused to scratch a mongrel who lay in a hole he had dug next to a wall and paused again to touch a naked baby gnawing on a corncob in a doorway. But she never forgot her task, and before Haydon knew it they had reached an area where an occasional cinder-block building began to mark the ragged margin where the permanent slums merged with the squatters’ hovels.

  They came into an actual street, a narrow, unpaved one so gouged with holes that it was impassable by vehicle. The child automatically sought the thin ribbon of shade next to the cinder-block buildings, which she followed for three or four minutes before she suddenly turned in to a doorway, and Haydon found himself at the entrance of a dark room redolent of alcohol.

  “El doctor,” she announced proudly from the dark, and Haydon made out her figure across the room, standing in front of a glass cabinet next to the figure of Aris Grajeda half turned from the shelves where he had been working.

  “Dr. Grajeda?” Haydon asked, and then understanding Grajeda’s silence, he quickly added, “I’m Stuart Haydon.”

  “Yes,” the Guatemalan said. He squared his shoulders to Haydon and put his arm around the child, who snuggled up to him. He was little more than a dim silhouette, but Haydon could see that he was several inches shorter than himself, the typical Guatemalan stature. His shoulders were neither broad nor narrow, but well proportioned, his weight neither light nor heavy. He waited calmly beside the child, who seemed to regard him with a comfortable intimacy. Haydon had the sense that the doctor was quickly but coolheadedly appraising him.

  “Have you got a few minutes to talk to me?”

  “An American?”

  “Yes, I am. I’d like to ask you some questions about Lena Muller.”

  “Who?” Grajeda was taking no chances.

  “The American woman you autopsied in Huehuetenango and brought back to the capital.”

  Grajeda looked at Haydon in silence, but because of the dim light in the room, Haydon could not see his expression.

  “Are you attached to the American embassy?” Grajeda asked. His voice was rather soft and patient, even polite. He spoke excellent English and pronounced his words precisely. As he turned just right to the weak light coming in from the window just behind him, the surfaces of his eyeglasses threw two discal reflections from the shadows.

  “No,” Haydon said. “I’m not from the embassy.” He explained briefly who he was and why he was there, and even took out his shield and handed it across to Grajeda, who examined it, holding it up to the light coming through the window behind him.

  “Fossler is a friend?” he asked, handing back the shield.

  Haydon nodded, wondering if he should tell him about Fossler’s room.

  “Then he did come by and talk to you yesterday morning?” Haydon asked.

  “I like Fossler,” Grajeda’s voice lightened as he remembered his conversation with the American. “Why didn’t he come with you?”

  “I’m afraid that something might have happened to him,” Haydon said. “He was supposed to have met me at the airport last night, but he wasn’t there. I went to the address he gave me, to his room, and the place had been ransacked. There was blood everywhere, but Fossler was gone.”

  Grajeda listened to this without reaction, and there was a lengthy pause before he asked, “You didn’t talk to him after he talked to me?”

  “No.”

  Grajeda nodded and quietly stroked the child’s hair.

  Haydon’s eyes were adjusting to the dim light now. They were standing in a kind of office. There was a desk by a window behind Grajeda and another doorway leading into another room where there was at least one table with a sheet over it. There were a few chairs lined along the wall to Haydon’s left, and handwritten signs everywhere encouraging people not to defecate or urinate on the dirt floors of their houses—the Spanish was earthy: “shit” and “piss”—not to handle food after shitting or pissing until they had washed; not to walk without sandals (this admonition was accompanied by a huge, fierce drawing of a hookworm); not to have sexual intercourse without condoms, which el doctor would provide without charge; not to drink water until they had boiled it or put pills in it, which el doctor would give them without charge. All of these cautionary encouragements were accompanied by simple drawings with the condemned behavior crossed out.

  “I talked to Jim Fossler on Sunday afternoon,” Haydon said. “He told me then that you were a friend of Lena’s, that you had worked with her in the western highlands.”

  Grajeda’s face changed at this last remark. Though he was clearly a ladino—of European and Indian blood, rather than pure Indian—the doctor had retained the Mayan eyes of his ancestors, slightly Asian in their oblique relationship to his rather round face. His complexion was dusky and he had the coarse black hair of the Indian as well. He wore a neatly clipped moustache and goatee, and both his beard and his hair were prematurely streaked with gray.

  “I am afraid Mr. Fossler has made a mistake,” he said with a respectful smile.

  “How’s that?”

  “I never knew this woman Muller. He said the same thing to me, that I knew her. I told him I didn’t. Who told him that I knew her?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “I’m sorry if both of you have come to see me believing that this is the situation, that I knew her.”

  “I don’t know who told him,” Haydon said, “but since I didn’t get a chance to see him after he spoke to you, I don’t know anything about your conversation.”

  Grajeda thought about this. “Well then, I suppose we should talk,” he said. He looked down at the girl and then reached up on top of the cabinet and got down a crumpled paper bag that was clearly his lunch sack. Untwisting the top of the bag, he reached in and pulled out an orange and gave it to the little girl. He thanked her for her kindness in bringing this gringo to him, and told her to run along, his tone good-natured as if he were used to dealing with children. Turning back to the glass cabinet, he closed its doors, locked them, and put the key in the pocket of the short white laboratory coat he was wearing.

  “¡Siéntese!” he said, and offered Haydon one of the rickety chairs against the plaster wall. He moved around behind his desk and sat down, the light coming in over his right shoulder from the screenless window. The day was heating up quickly, but a slight coolness remained within the thick walls. Haydon could hear chickens somewhere outside, and snatches of women’s conversations as they passed by the open door of the clinic. Grajeda smiled again, a soft, almost bashful smile, the smile of Buddha.

  “I didn’t bring her back from Huehuetenango,” he said with a huge sigh. “It was a tragedy. Fossler knew she was dead. I told him yesterday morning when he was out here.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Dr. Aris Grajeda was in his early thirties. His thick Indian hair formed a rather low hairline on his forehead, and though it was neatly combed and barbered, a heavy wave of it hung in a romantic coil above his eyes. He had dark eyes that were at once compassionate and unflinching, and a straight nose with the pronounced nostrils of a Mayan. His mouth, however, was European, finely sculpted with a dimple in the center of his upper lip. His steel-rimmed glasses gave him the look of a man on the far edge of his youth. He sat in front of Haydon with his elbows on his desk, his hands clasped together as he leaned forward, and as he talked he sometimes stroked his handsome goatee in the manner of a thoughtful man. T
he sleeves of his lab coat were too long, and he had folded them back once to reveal the white cuff of a wrinkled shirt. His hands seemed to be the hands of a pianist, with long fingers and cleanly manicured nails.

  “I was in Huehuetenango helping a surgeon friend of mine who works in the main hospital there,” he said. “The one on 6a calle, if you are familiar with it, on the road to Guatemala City. He had lined up a number of surgeries, and I went up to assist him. On some of these things, you like to have doctors you know assisting. The man’s an Italian, an ophthalmologist. He helps me here in Mezquital and at the Roosevelt Hospital, and I go up there. We are still cleaning up the human debris left behind by the measles epidemic.” He regarded Haydon through his wire-framed lenses. “You know of the epidemic?”

  Haydon nodded.

  “You know how bad it was?”

  “I read about it.”

  Grajeda sat back in his chair, took a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, popped out the point, and made a couple of doodling marks on a notepad.

  “In the next departamento over, in Quiché, more than a thousand children died in one month of the epidemic,” he said. “Just in one departamento. One thousand. Can you imagine one thousand little bodies lined up side by side in a road? Or one thousand tiny caskets? Rubella.” He shrugged. “Just measles, that’s all it was. A lot of charitable organizations from Europe and the United States had given money to the Cerezo government for the purchase of vaccine and to inoculate children through the Accelerated Immunization Project. A little vaccine was obtained, not nearly enough, and most of it went bad anyway. It wasn’t properly refrigerated. It was in a warehouse here in the city. It never even reached the countryside. Not only that, two million dollars of the money disappeared. The Health Ministry blamed USAID; USAID blamed the Health Ministry. There is an investigation, of course. One thousand children. Just rubella, that’s all it was. Very, very sad.”