Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  “Some of the boys in the DIT had gotten a bad reputation,” he said offhandedly as if what had gotten them the bad reputation had not been reprehensible, as if their flagrant violence had not received the condemnation of international human rights organizations. “A few of us were asked to move to other branches of the security forces so they could say they had ‘cleaned house.’ I was moved several times, and then they put me here.” He made a sour face. “I hate this shitty place,” he said, like a true bureaucrat, and waved his hand. “So,” he said, dragging on the cigarette, “what wonderful things have been happening to you?”

  They caught up on each other’s lives, talked about men Haydon remembered from before, rehashed the Colombian episode, and then Borrayo cursed the declining quetzal, inflation, the leftists, and talked about how the return of military rule (as if it weren’t already a fact) was the country’s only hope.

  “Listen,” Haydon said finally, mashing out his cigarette in the ashtray he had been holding in his lap, “I haven’t seen the place since the ‘reform.’ You want to take a walk?”

  Borrayo had been enjoying their little charla, but at the mention of a walk his enthusiasm faded. This was serious business, this taking a walk. No one in his right mind would rather have a conversation out in the hot sun than in the cool shade of a thick-walled building. But then, everyone knew that the hot sun did not have ears. If you wanted to walk in the sun, you had serious business and only the hot sun would do.

  “Of course,” Borrayo said, putting out what was left of his own cigarette and standing up from the edge of the desk. He ran his hands through his thick, gray waves and picked up his black-visored military-style hat. “These chusma, they like to see the cacique wear a hat, huh?”

  He grinned and pulled the hat down firmly, low over his eyes.

  CHAPTER 22

  They retraced Haydon’s steps down the pale green hallway, empty except for the flies floating like small propellered planes in the dead air heavy with the odor of industrial disinfectant. They passed the pathetically lonely rubber plant in the main entryway and turned right at the intersection and entered a short hallway at the end of which was a shady porch blocked by a chain-link fence and gate. They walked to the gate where guards and a few prisoners were hanging around chatting, most of the prisoners killing time as they waited for their turn at a pay telephone that was on a wall inside the chain-link fence. Each inmate had to reach an arm through a hole in the wire to put his centavo into the telephone and then hold the receiver against the wire, to which he pressed his ear and mouth to communicate. To the left of this porch was a short wing of half a dozen bungalows with an open-air corridor between them, celdas for conjugal visits, close enough to the popular porch for the sounds of intimacies to be shared with the loiterers. Beyond them was a long breezeway that led to the main prison yard with the various cellblocks beyond.

  Borrayo turned right, however, entering a narrow, sunless passage between the stucco buildings which quickly opened into a small courtyard from which a dirt road emerged to follow a stretch of pine trees that bordered the outside wire fences of the prison. The sparsely forested countryside picked up several hundred meters beyond the three separate cordons of razor wire. To their left the rear walls of the cell-blocks provided a huge slate for graffiti, the common obscenities of bored men, slogans of regional pride, and prejudicial hatreds.

  “See,” Borrayo said as each of them chose one of the two ruts of the dirt road. “Everything has changed. No guards follow us. I can go everywhere alone now. All is peace here. No problems.”

  Above them, in the tops of the pines, crows sent their caws across the coils of razor wire to echo in the shallow valley beyond.

  “Where do you keep the peligrosos now, Efran?” Haydon asked.

  “Ah, well, of course, the peligrosos are not in the general population.”

  Haydon reached down and picked up a pinecone and started snapping off the seeds as they walked. “You keep them chained in some pit?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Borrayo said, missing the facetious tone of Haydon’s question and thus the grim humor in his own reply. He put his hands into his pockets and looked out over the valley past the wire. “I would like to put them in the pit. If I had my way, I would hang them by their balls out in the sun. This damn government. They are always, you know, sucking up to you ‘Americans.’” He stopped and turned to Haydon indignantly. “I have to go take human rights courses at the United Nations building now. Can you believe such madness? I choke on it. It is embarrassing to me.”

  Haydon looked at Borrayo. “Do you still have access to anyone in intelligence?” he asked bluntly.

  Borrayo didn’t change his expression. He had played games too many years to let an unexpected question appear to have come to him unexpectedly.

  “Things have changed,” he said philosophically. “Access? Well, you have to have a good reason for wanting to ask questions about intelligence. One question, one wrong one…” Borrayo shook his head.

  Haydon could not expect Borrayo to do much without a full explanation, or something that sounded like a full explanation. No one ever gave the whole story on anything in Guatemala. You always held a little back, something in reserve that could give you an edge if you needed an edge in the event everything else had been leaked or discovered. Borrayo would have to hear Haydon’s story.

  They were walking again, approaching a little slope of the road and another sector of the prison, the small shacks and garden plots of the privileged prisoners. A few chickens pecked around outside the doorways and in between the neat rows of vegetables, and here and there a hibiscus burst into hopeful bloom.

  Haydon told Borrayo his story without mentioning names or the discovery of Lena Muller’s body and its removal from the Cementerio General. When it was necessary to mention anything that Cage was involved in, Haydon referred to him as “a friend”—perfectly acceptable discretion that Borrayo would understand.

  “What I need to know,” Haydon said, “is if any of them are alive—the girl or Baine or Jim Fossler.”

  They had come to a fork in the sloping road, the right branch of which went down to a soccer field, while the left one leveled off to a kind of compound about a block in length. On either side of an open area beaten bare of grass were rows of cement-block shops with hand-painted signs. SHOE HOSPITAL, PAVÓN. SHOP OF THE ARTISANS OF THE DIVINE MASTER—a metalworking shop that made lamp shades and rings that held pots for hanging plants. An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting room—BODYWORK AND PAINT OF THE SOUL. A laundry. A store. A shop where four men were making queer-looking teddy bears out of shaggy fuchsia and chartreuse material. All of these places were devoid of inmate customers, and most of the buildings surrounding the compound were simply empty.

  Borrayo stopped again at the edge of the road, looking down to the soccer field where a game was in progress.

  “We are in the last day of a three-day tournament,” he said, his hat pulled down low over his eyes. “Sector 2 is the best team. I think they will win the tournament.”

  Two teams were on the bare, rocky field, running back and forth after the checkered ball in the hot sun. A few men lounged in the shade of small trees, watching the ball sail from one end of the field to the other, the teams wheeling here and there after it like a herd of stampeding wildebeests, veering and shunting in mass simultaneity.

  “You are going to get your throat cut, my friend,” Borrayo said, moving over to a chilca tree dotted with yellow blossoms and stepping into its shade. Haydon joined him, both of them squinting toward the soccer field. Occasionally shouts from the players broke through the constant throb of cicadas that filled the hot afternoon. “Do you know what is going on here?”

  “I just need to know if they’re alive.”

  Borrayo turned and looked at Haydon.

  “You don’t know, huh?”

  “Not much.”

  Borrayo shook his head and pulled a yellow flower off the chilca. He plucked a pe
tal off with his lips and folded it with his tongue, thinking, returning his gaze toward the soccer field.

  “This is one you should look the other way, Haydon,” Borrayo said. “This is very dangerous.” His eyes squinted from under the black visor.

  “You know something about it, then?”

  “I’ve heard some things,” Borrayo said, spitting out the little yellow pellet he had made of the petal. He lipped another one off the flower. “I heard about a gringo…that the DIC picked up.”

  “Baine?”

  Borrayo shrugged and shook his head in ignorance. “A gringo.” His eyes were on the soccer players.

  “Where is he?”

  “In one of the secret prisons,” he said, his tongue working the yellow petal.

  That wasn’t great news for Baine. The clandestine prisons were used for interrogations, and where there were interrogations there was always torture.

  “Where was he picked up?”

  “Chichoque, Huehuetenango.”

  “What part of Huehuetenango is that?”

  “What part? In the southeast.”

  “How far from the Ixil Triangle?”

  Borrayo looked at Haydon. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “I heard Lena Muller used to work just across the border from the Ixil Triangle. I wondered if it was close by.”

  “Not too far,” Borrayo said, watching Haydon with a frown, his tongue working the yellow petal. He was thinking over his indebtedness to Haydon. A man full of machismo had to be given room to maneuver. Borrayo’s own sense of honor demanded reciprocation for Haydon’s help, which Borrayo had benefitted from for four years.

  “Who is responsible for this, Efran? The military or the police? Who is worried about what this girl knows?”

  Borrayo spit out another yellow pellet. “The army. G-2 were the ones who got this Baine.”

  Haydon was looking at Borrayo’s profile obliquely. The prison director’s strong brow was beginning to glisten in the heat, and Haydon saw a single bead of sweat sliding out of the gray hair at his temple and down the side of his jaw. Haydon guessed it wasn’t only the afternoon heat that was wringing it out of him.

  “And did they pick up the girl too?”

  Borrayo took off his hat, pulled a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and wiped out the band of his hat. Next he wiped his forehead and put his hat on again. He turned to Haydon, and behind him one of the soccer teams burst into shouts and cheers.

  “I know nothing about what is happening here, nothing,” Borrayo said, his voice low even though they were isolated in the little spot of shade under the chilca tree. “But I will tell you that I have heard Victor Tablaya’s name. Tablaya is an Argentine advisor to G-2. He is a friend, a very close friend of General Luis Azcona Contrera.”

  Haydon knew the general’s name. A group of inmates slow-walked up the sloping road from the soccer field, leaning into the incline, not talking, passing a patch of hibiscus that grew in front of a little store that was dug into the side of the slope and which specialized in lukewarm, fruit-flavored drinks.

  Borrayo eyed the men from under his visor and took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He offered one to Haydon, who didn’t want it out in the heat like this, but took it anyway. Borrayo struck a match and lighted Haydon’s cigarette first and then his own.

  As the group of men passed, Borrayo and Haydon looked the other way as if they were waiting for someone, and then Borrayo turned and watched them until they were out of earshot.

  “Listen to me, Haydon,” he said, blowing his smoke out into the heat. “I’m not shitting you. I think this one is a very nasty woman, you know.”

  Haydon nodded. He did know, and he was beginning to think it could only get nastier. Borrayo had been in the business a long time, and he had a fine nose for trouble.

  Haydon looked at the Guatemalan, Borrayo had turned his head again, avoiding Haydon’s eyes. He simply glared out into the sun, out across the emptying soccer field.

  “He’s here, isn’t he, Efran.”

  Borrayo’s mind must have been stumbling over itself. Every man brought to every situation a secret index of possibilities. The way he behaved in each new circumstance depended as much on this concealed index as it did on the apparent elements. Borrayo was now reviewing his index, and Haydon knew that at the top of the Guatemalan’s secret list of possibilities was a concern for self-preservation. Whatever he told Haydon, even if it appeared to be a favor requiring some risk, it would be in Borrayo’s best interest. He was like Taylor Cage in that respect. The world they inhabited made pragmatists of them, simplified their lives by stripping away the crustaceous impediments of moral considerations. Life was reduced to only one major concern—survival. Everything else was secondary and was measured against this single criterion.

  “There are a lot of empty cellblocks now, aren’t there, Efran,” Haydon said. “Places where no one goes anymore. It’s handy, close in to the capital. Thick walls, entire wings of dark cellblocks.”

  Borrayo swallowed.

  Haydon was right. Pavón was two prisons, an official one and an unofficial one. Borrayo had not been hung out to dry in some backwater assignment as he had wanted Haydon to believe. Instead he had been entrusted with a position of major responsibilities, one with close connections with army intelligence. Borrayo had become a key figure in one of the security forces’ darkest secrets, the much-rumored—and angrily denied—network of clandestine prisons, the Latin gulag of the “disappeared.”

  Borrayo turned his sober face to Haydon.

  “The boy is un chivo expiatorio.”

  “A scapegoat.”

  Borrayo nodded again. “I think they are putting something together. When they have it, they will announce his arrest. I think it will be soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “A few days, maybe,” Borrayo shrugged. “They have to move fast. Covering up one gringo’s death and then arresting another one in secret is a very risky trick, even for the generals, even for the DIC.” So Borrayo knew Lena was dead too. “Everyone knows that ‘Americans’ believe their blood is más mejor than any stinking Guatemalan’s. These people, they do not want to step in that shit.”

  “Then the American embassy doesn’t know about his arrest?”

  “No.”

  “What about Jim Fossler?”

  “I know nothing about him.”

  “I need to talk to Baine,” Haydon said.

  Borrayo shook his head emphatically and looked down at his feet, blowing smoke at the hot ground. “They would kill me. I would have to have at least three men to cooperate in moving him to a cell where you could not be seen. I am not sure I can find three men who can be trusted with a modest bribe.”

  Still looking down, he grimaced and held his mouth in a tight, teeth-clenching manner that indicated they were facing a dicey situation.

  “This is a crazy place,” he said. “Certain people, they have orejas here, like a job. ‘You go to Pavón for a year, live in Sector 4, and I will pay you well for everything you hear and see.’” He shrugged. “It is like a job in a bad place. You are not in prison; you have a job in a bad place, with hardships, but you are being paid very well. Stay a year and you will go home with a lot of money.” Borrayo pulled down the sides of his mouth. “It’s not like the old days when a quetzal here and there would buy you information.” He dragged on the cigarette and flipped it out into the burning sand. “Los ricos,” he said, “and the generals, they run everything behind the scenes.”

  Borrayo was sweating, literally and figuratively. The loudspeaker came on, and from the tops of telephone poles all over the prison grounds an announcement was made that inmate so-and-so was being released that afternoon.

  “I have to sign those goddamned papers,” Borrayo said. Again he took off his hat and wiped his forehead and the hatband with his handkerchief before putting it back on and jerking the visor down over his eyes once more.

  They left the spars
e shade of the chilca and started back the way they had come, avoiding the main yards of the prison grounds. It was in the hottest part of the afternoon, but the pine trees were now on their left and were throwing a veil of shadows across the sandy road. They walked in the rutted road between the border of pines and the backs of the cellblocks in silence, the loudest sounds being the crunching of their footsteps on the road and the crows calling from the tops of the pines.

  “What would it take for me to talk to him tonight?” Haydon asked.

  Borrayo shook his head but said nothing for fifteen or twenty meters. Then, head down, hands in his pockets, he said, “I will try to get you some information. Be at your hotel at nine o’clock.”

  He did not ask where Haydon was staying, and Haydon had not told him.

  CHAPTER 23

  Haydon walked back across the barren prison yard to the front entrance where he retrieved his passport and shield and was let out through the huge chain-link gate. He labored up the slope to the little store where both of the black-and-white pigs had stretched out in the shade of his car, their heads up under it, just behind the front left tire, blocking the driver’s-side door. Haydon kicked them awake, eliciting startled grunts, causing one of them to bang his head against the oil pan, but eventually getting them from under the door and out into the hot sun where they shook their heads, flapping their oversized ears to shake the dirt out of them.

  He started the car and drove away from the bleak collection of buildings, down the road that took him past the women’s unit to the highway and on his way back into the city. He had no idea whether Borrayo would help him or not, but if Borrayo had done nothing else, he at least had alerted Haydon to a very important name. General Luis Azcona was one of Guatemala’s military hard-liners. He had been an ardent supporter of former general and dictator Efrain Rios Montt, who had seized power in a coup in March of 1982. Rios Montt was a born-again evangelical whose eye-for-an-eye brand of justice led to one of the worst periods of human rights abuses in the country’s history. During his brief term of leadership—before he, too, was toppled by a coup—Guatemalans died and disappeared by the thousands. Azcona had been Montt’s most aggressive general, his “sword of righteousness,” always unsheathed and always bloody. He had played a key role in a period of brutal repression, a time that was remembered by the people who survived it as la violencia. Both Rios Montt and Luis Azcona had been ardent supporters in the election campaign of the recently elected president. They were once again in favor.