Haydon did not notice the tail until he had left the few miles of flat, straight departmental highway and entered the larger Central American highway that quickly climbed and wound its way into the hills southeast of the city. It was a Jeep Cherokee with darkened windows, a favored security forces vehicle, one that had become so notorious that to use it in surveillance was itself a message. It was not likely that the tail was trying to be invisible. Intimidation was the first step in “civilian control.” If the individual for whom the message was intended didn’t take the hint, the message was reinforced, a sterner tone was employed. But the security forces were short on patience.
A few cars were between Haydon and the Cherokee as the highway grew increasingly crooked. Watching in his side mirror, Haydon saw the Cherokee continually pull out into the approaching lane as if it were about to pass, a maneuver which would not have been out of the ordinary since Guatemalans were outrageous drivers, impatient and foolhardy, and head-on collisions were common on the mountainous highways. But the Cherokee was not going to pass; it simply wanted to be sure that Haydon was aware of its existence.
Road repairs had closed one of the serpentine curves to a single lane, though the work crew was nowhere in sight nor was there a flagman to help the drivers decide which of the directions of traffic would have access to the single lane at any given time. This question of right-of-way was decided by the gutsiest drivers, and just as Haydon was nearing the single lane a truck claimed the right-of-way for the oncoming flow of traffic. The car ahead of Haydon yielded, and Haydon and all the cars behind him had to pull to the outside edge of the cliff just as they were approaching the long descent into the city, which was visible to his right. Just below him was a new housing development, the Refuge of the Beautiful View. And it was a beautiful view, or had been in former times. From here the city would be more beautiful at night, when the smoke and smog were transformed by darkness and their heavy, choking effluents hung low over the city and did not reach this high on the mountain road. But in the daytime you would have to stay in your walled garden to avoid this sight of a smothering city, and you would have to view the western volcanoes over the tops of your brilliant bougainvilleas climbing atop your walls. Nowadays only one’s eyes and the tops of the volcanoes were capable of rising above the city’s burgeoning decay.
Finally there was a break in the oncoming traffic and the driver ahead of Haydon gunned his engine and reclaimed the highway and Haydon and the others pulled back onto the pavement and joined the impatient traffic’s headlong plunge into the valley. The Cherokee stayed with Haydon all the way into the city, always one or two cars behind him.
But when Haydon turned onto Avenida La Reforma at the Parque Independencia, the Cherokee roared up in the lane next to him and stayed beside him on the boulevard, as close as it could get without scraping him, slowing when he slowed, accelerating when he accelerated, its darkened windows making him feel oddly vulnerable. The intimidation infuriated him, but he held himself in check, looking now and then at the darkened windows as if he did not know that he was supposed to stare straight ahead as he had seen people do before, not daring to meet the beast face to face lest it be provoked to do something even worse than bullying.
Perhaps it was his adolescent refusal to be cowed, or perhaps it was the plan all along, but when they were well past the Camino Real hotel and approaching a traffic intersection where an opening in the median allowed cars to cross from the other side of the boulevard, the Cherokee suddenly swerved into Haydon’s lane, cutting in front of him, raking its rear bumper across his front fender and driving him into the curb as he slammed on his brakes to avoid being bashed, and causing the two lanes of traffic to screech to a halt just as the intersecting traffic got the green light. The Cherokee sped through, narrowly missing the intersecting traffic that came only from its left, and disappeared down the boulevard out of sight.
Haydon’s car had skidded halfway out into the intersection, partially blocking the merging traffic, his right front wheel up on the curb. It took him a moment to start his car again, to back it off the curb and out of the way of the merging traffic and back into his own lane where the other cars were also trying to straighten themselves after a near miss at a multicar collision. His heart pounding, Haydon glanced around at the motorists to his left side and behind him. Everyone was staring straight ahead, as though nothing had happened. They knew what they had seen, too, and they wanted nothing to do with the incident, not even to acknowledge having seen it.
The entrance to the Residencial Reforma was just beyond the light, and Haydon pulled into the courtyard and parked to one side, under a huge cypress. He got out and checked the fender, which was in worse condition than he had thought but not so bad that he couldn’t continue to drive the car. He wouldn’t bother to exchange the car for another one. Between this incident and the kids in Mezquital, he was going to have to pay a hefty fine when he turned it in to the rental agency. When he put the key in the door to lock the car, his hand was shaking.
He got his key from the concierge and walked through the front parlor and up the marble stairs. At the top he looked over the balcony and saw several people in the dining room, a couple of businessmen with loosened ties drinking beer, the young woman he had seen at breakfast having a fruit plate, a middle-aged couple. He turned away to his room on his right and let himself in. The windows overlooking the boulevard were still open as he had left them, and his room already had been cleaned. The sun was low enough that it was beginning to disappear behind the tall cypresses on the boulevard and came through the windows with the mellow tint of late afternoon. A slight breeze moved the curtains, and the sound of traffic on the boulevard was a steady muffled roar.
He took off his suit coat and tie and hung them in the closet where he noticed that his other clothes had been cleaned and returned. He unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt sleeves and folded them back and stepped into the bathroom and washed his face with soap and cold water. Painfully aware now of being tired, he dried his face and avoided looking at himself in the mirror. Coming out of the bathroom, he went to the edge of the bed and sat down. He untied his shoes and set them aside and lay back on the blue spread, looking up at the light on the high ceiling. He was exhausted. Lack of sleep and uncertainty and disappointment and tension had sapped his energy.
Laying the back of his wrist on his forehead, he thought of Taylor Cage taking him to see Lena’s body. No explanation. He thought of what Borrayo had said about John Baine, that he was going to be used as a scapegoat. Haydon could understand that, one gringo kills another, a neat package of a crime. Only one thing bothered Haydon. If Baine knew anything significant about whatever it was Lena had gotten into, and if whatever she had gotten into did in fact involve General Luis Azcona, wasn’t Azcona afraid that Baine would talk. Once they announced his arrest they could hardly deny him access to the embassy’s Consular Section. Once they made the arrest public they would have to present at least the appearance of the due process of justice, in the course of which Baine would have an opportunity to talk to embassy officials and tell his story. Was Azcona really going to allow this?
And Jim Fossler. Haydon was going to quit kidding himself about Fossler. There was no reason he should be alive. He was a victim of bad timing, and he had been as expendable as a stray dog and probably had gotten little more consideration than that. What a country that these things could happen in absolute silence and Haydon could lie here in the changing light of late afternoon and think about them as if he had been remembering a movie.
He wasn’t even aware of losing his train of thought as sleep overtook him. When the telephone rang and he woke in the bruised shades of dusk, he didn’t remember anything that might have been a dream. He rolled over and picked up the telephone.
“This is Haydon.”
“Mr. Haydon, this is Bennett Pittner. I was wondering if you had plans for dinner this evening.”
“No,” Haydon said. “I don’t.”
&n
bsp; “Good, I’d like you to have dinner with me if that’s convenient. I’ll pick you up.”
“That would be fine,” Haydon said, trying to clear his mind and focus his eyes, looking across the room to the purple wall, at the mirror above the old dresser in which the cypresses of the boulevard behind him were reflected black against a lavender sky.
“Would half an hour give you enough time?”
“I’ll be ready,” Haydon said, and put down the receiver.
CHAPTER 24
To Haydon’s surprise they had dinner at Pittner’s home, an older house that was not large but, like Janet’s, of a common quadrangle design and built of stone and stucco with the living quarters situated around a patio. Still in Zona 10, the house was in Colonia Berlin on a street where the houses sat a good way back from their walled entries and were secluded by the surrounding dense semitropical foliage. The house was sited on a bit of a promontory above a deep ravine that fed into the Rio Negro. Across on the other side were the colonias of Vista Hermosa where the real estate was more expensive and some of Guatemala City’s wealthiest residents had built beautiful and well-guarded homes.
The house was comfortable and unpretentious, all tile and stone and mortar and timber and smelling faintly of the wood smoke of former fires in its fireplace. The table in the dining room was already set for them when they arrived, and as soon as Pittner made drinks for them they sat down. An Indian man and woman served them silently and efficiently, while Pittner made small talk about how much he enjoyed Guatemala, about how he had lived in this home ever since he had divorced Janet, a reference he made as if Haydon knew the entire story. He was wearing a dark gray tropical suit with a faint windowpane pattern in reddish brown and a white shirt with a collar that wanted to curl up at its points as if he had forgotten to put in the stays. His longish ginger hair was neatly combed, and Haydon noticed for the first time that he had a mole just to the right side of his nose. He lounged quite comfortably as he talked, and as the Indian couple served them as silently as ghosts. When everything was on the table, and with no signal from Pittner, they disappeared and were not seen again for the rest of the evening.
Pittner picked up his knife and fork and began eating, continuing to talk, asking Haydon about his own work, general questions to which Haydon gave general answers and which got them through the meal, each getting up once during the course to refresh his drink from a liquor table a step or two away. Even though Haydon sensed that Pittner was one of those men who preferred not to discuss serious business over a meal and that all was being held in abeyance until they had gotten the business of eating over, he found himself growing increasingly comfortable with Bennett Pittner. Haydon remembered Janet’s description of Pittner’s boorishness and was reminded once again of the inevitably tinted optics of the mind’s eyes.
Finally, when they both had finished, Pittner pushed back his plate and got up and refilled his glass once more with bourbon, not offering to refill Haydon’s, assuming Haydon would help himself if he wanted more. He came back to the table and turned his chair slightly to allow him to comfortably cross his legs. The dining room was in the end room of one of the U-shaped wings of the house. One wall of tall open windows looked out over the ravines and the Rio Negro, on the other side of which the lights of the houses in the Vista Hermosa glittered in the haze of the night fires that had made its nocturnal seepage out of the ravines and over the city. Another wall faced onto the courtyard from which the large open windows let in a loud thrumming of crickets.
“I took the trouble of inquiring about you,” Pittner said, knitting his brow as if he were a school principal about to have a heart-to-heart talk with a recalcitrant student. He didn’t seem to fear that Haydon would resent being checked on. “I don’t think you’re the kind of man I need to beat around the bush with. I understand that several years ago you met a man, an older man, who used to be my superior. Karl Heidrich.”
Haydon remembered the name immediately, even though he had talked to the man less than half an hour. And he remembered the face as if it had been that afternoon. Like Pittner, Heidrich was also a ginger-haired man. He had been in his middle fifties and had a raw complexion that looked as if it had had too much of the sun.
“I didn’t really know him, only met him,” Haydon said.
“Los tecos, wasn’t it?” Pittner said.
“Yes, out of Guadalajara. Heidrich cleared up a few things for me.”
“That’s what I understand. You lost a partner on that case too. Ed Mooney.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Heidrich’s retired now,” Pittner said. “Lives in Virginia. Worked most of his life in Latin America and then went to live out the rest of it in Virginia. I’ve often wondered if he felt kind of out of place—in Virginia, I mean.”
Haydon said nothing, looking at Pittner, waiting to see how he was going to handle this. By bringing up Heidrich he was letting Haydon know that he was aware that Haydon knew that he was with the CIA.
“But even before that, you spent some time with another man I used to work with. Taylor Cage.”
“I spent three days with him.”
Pittner nodded. “In his field report. Cage treated you quite well. Which is a compliment. Cage doesn’t treat many people well.”
“That was ten years ago,” Haydon said.
“But you’ve seen him more recently, haven’t you?”
“Well, if he works for you, you should know.”
“Oh, he doesn’t work for me anymore.” Pittner shook his head as he sipped the bourbon. “No. A few years ago he went independent on us.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Pittner looked at Haydon, holding a mouthful of bourbon a moment before swallowing it. He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, fine. It changed things, naturally. Some things are a bit more awkward, others…much easier.” He shrugged and turned in his chair a little more toward Haydon and crossed his legs the other way, twisting his body slightly, an awkward posture with which he seemed quite comfortable, almost like a lounging adolescent.
“It’s because of the way you handled yourself in both of these instances that I’ve asked you here to talk to you,” Pittner said. “You seem to be a discreet man, understand the way State does things.”
“I know the way they do things,” Haydon said. “I’m not sure I understand it.”
Pittner tilted his head in a languid shrugging acknowledgment of the point. “Whatever,” he said. “Anyway, this thing about Lena Muller, well, it’s involved…You seem to have a…knack for stumbling onto State Department things.”
“There seem to be so many of them,” Haydon said.
Pittner bounced his eyebrows and ran his tongue around in his jaw. “Yeah, well.” He thought a moment. “The fact is, we were running Lena Muller.”
Haydon stiffened inside.
“Ever since she returned to Guatemala three months ago,” Pittner said, pursing his mouth. “Janet didn’t know it, of course. I’d gotten Lena the job with USAID. I hadn’t planned to run her from the beginning, it was just that after she went to work with AID they put her on a job that took her right back to where she had been stationed in the Peace Corps. In a very conflictive area.
“It was nothing major. The whole thing was informal. You know how it starts. After she’d gotten acclimated to her job, I just dropped in one day to take her to lunch, see how things were going. She was grateful that I’d helped and all that. Over the next few weeks I took her to lunch several times, talked about the job up there. By the way, did she ever hear any gossip about the so-called ‘assassinations’ of Indians by the army personnel up there? Oh, yeah, she did. She knew some of the widows. She told me stories. After I saw she was sympathetic to the Indians, it wasn’t hard to ease her into it. Then I introduced her to the guy who would become her case officer. I didn’t run her myself. She was very good. Very observant, sensitive to innuendo and nuance. Impressions.”
Pittner paused, thought a moment, and s
traightened up in his chair, leaning on the table, facing Haydon. He looked tired, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes hinted at pain not too far removed from the surface.
“She was made to order,” he continued. “It wasn’t anything dangerous. I mean she wasn’t anything special, just another set of eyes and ears. More of the same. Shit, all this stuff is always more of the same.” He sipped the bourbon. “For months her schedule was two weeks in the field and one back here. Easy enough. She was always in the boonies, so she would bring in military things: what battalion was where, what village they’d raided and screwed up and blamed on the guerrillas. Or what villages the guerrillas had screwed up and blamed on the army.
The milgroup here watches the troops, so she wasn’t giving us anything we weren’t already monitoring electronically. We knew where they were, but we didn’t always know what they were doing. Up there near the Ixil and north, there’s a lot going on. Aside from their regular messing with the civilian population, there are significant numbers of military personnel into poppies now. You can never get enough information about that sort of activity. And that’s not just DEA jurisdiction now. State is into it…in a slightly different way.
Body of Truth Page 18