Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  “I told you that I’d gotten a call from Pitt to go pick up a body at the morgue, that I’d know which one. I told you that I’d already seen the body before I came and got you.” The Indian woman brought the beer, and Cage reached for it without thanking her or looking at what he was doing. “I thought it was her at first too, I really did. Guy threw the sheet back and…shit, I thought it was her. The girl was about the same size, close enough, and her face was beat to shit. I’ve noticed when they mess up the mouth it’s harder to tell, on first look like that, especially if there’s still swelling. But Lena had bigger tits, and that’s what I noticed.” He guzzled the beer, and sucked on the cigarette. “I looked at the hands. Lena had a small, whitish crescent scar behind the third knuckle of her right hand. It was just a little thing, and it’s surprising I even remembered it. But the hands were bloody, muddy. I took the right one over to the sink there in the morgue and washed it. The scar wasn’t there. Then I wondered if I’d remembered it wrong, and I took the left hand over to the sink and washed it. No scar.”

  Someone appeared at the open door, a woman, and said something in an Indian dialect. The two men at the table looked over at Lita, who got up from the hearth, picked up her rebozo and the radio, and walked out of the kitchen with the other woman, leaving the automatic behind.

  “Smaller tits, no scar, wrong woman,” Cage said. “I looked at her face, studied it. It was just too screwed up, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Lena. I photographed her, lots of photographs, because I had a hunch this girl could disappear on us.”

  “Pittner thought it was Lena?”

  “I think he suspected it was Lena. It was probably an informant tip: ‘Anglo in the morgue.’”

  “But he didn’t know.”

  Cage shook his head.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I couldn’t tell. We’d have to wait for fingerprints, dental record confirmations. That’s the sort of thing Macabeo does for them.”

  “Why’d you lie to him?”

  Cage looked at him. “Jesus, Haydon.” He shook his head and pulled on his cigarette. He took a drink of cold Gallo. He stared out the door into the courtyard. “I remember, after it got too crazy for me juggling screwing Janet and working for Pitt. I just cut it off. Janet went goofy about it. Almost blew the whole thing, showing up at my place at all kinds of hours. I don’t know why he didn’t find out. Finally I told her I’d kill her if she didn’t stop. Make it look like an accident or something. That cleared her head. But then a month later they separated. And then a month after that, she told him she wanted a divorce.

  “This last news had an interesting effect on Pitt. I was at my place one night, and Pitt called from somewhere and told me to stay put, he was coming over to see me. I could tell he’d been drinking. I thought. Oh shit he’s found out about me and Janet. I figured she had gone all weasely and told him—she could be lunatic sometimes—and she had gotten hateful and wanted to twist the knife and told him. I expected Pitt was wanting to have this mano a mano confrontation sort of thing with me. When he showed up, he was in terrible shape. I don’t even know how the hell he managed to make it. He had this bottle of his beloved bourbon with him, and he was in tears. Janet had told him that afternoon that she wanted a divorce.

  “He’d started drinking at the embassy, a very risky thing to do, and one which showed how bad he’d been knocked back by the news. It was during the rainy season then, and we sat under the loggia at my place and smoked his American cigarettes and drank his honest-to-God bourbon, sat there in the dark and watched the rain dribble off the eaves like ink. It was a screwy scene. The bad news and the whiskey had plunged Pitt into this self-absorbed grief, and he proceeded to bare his soul to me. Shit. I hate that sort of thing. He told me all these intimate things—about him and Janet—like a goddamned college kid. He told me a hell of a lot more than I wanted to hear, but it was kind of funny too, him deciding to spill all that tortured erotica to me. Hell, I’d discovered more about Janet’s buttons and juices in four months of adultery with her than Pitt had managed to uncover in eight years of marriage. But I got drunk with him and had a good time doing it. Did I have any qualms about deceiving him?” Cage pulled down the corners of his mouth and shook his head. “I’d been lying to Pitt long before I started banging his wife. Pitt’s the kind of man you have to lie to if you want to maintain any kind of integrity, any kind of self-respect.”

  The two Guatemalans had listened to this sordid story with stoic expressions, but Haydon had no way of knowing if they understood what they had heard, and if they had, what they might have thought about it. He wasn’t even sure what he thought about it himself. What was the point of it? Cage seemed to have dug this unflattering memory out of the very blackest corners of his mind. Or maybe it had lurked there, staring at him from the dark, and he talked about it to relieve the mounting anxiety of its presence, the same way you periodically would lance a boil that swelled but refused to heal. Of course, that implied a moral quality to his telling of the story, and Haydon seriously doubted that was the case at all.

  “He still doesn’t know it’s not Lena?” Haydon asked, choosing to ignore the narrative altogether. “Won’t he have gone down and looked for himself?”

  “No way,” Cage said, and he raised his chin and blew a single smoke ring.

  “Why did you take me to see her?”

  “Ah,” Cage rolled his head toward Haydon and pointed his index and middle finger at him, the cigarette smoldering between them. “When I realized she wasn’t dead, I began to see some…possibilities. I started running my traps again. What was the scuttlebutt about this missing American? That sort of thing takes time. I wasn’t sure what kind of options I ought to be prepared for. I knew you’d never met Lena, only seen photographs of her. I didn’t know, but I thought maybe the occasion might arise when it would be necessary for me to have a ‘witness’ to the fact that Lena was dead. It could buy time, if nothing else, while the tests for a positive ID were being run. It would keep Pitt’s dogs in the kennel another eighteen hours maybe, give me a head start. I wanted to find Lena before anybody else.”

  “What about that line you gave me about the Guatemalan security forces having dossiers on Lena?”

  “True. All of it. Everything I told you was the truth except that that wasn’t Lena’s body.”

  “Where did the police report come from?”

  “Just where it said it did. I had some people check on that.”

  “And the Indian women finding the body?”

  Cage nodded.

  Haydon stopped himself before he said it…what about Grajeda? How did his testimony hold up in light of all this?

  Cage looked at him and then allowed a slow smile. “The good doctor? Well, I had somebody go check with the good doctor, but the good doctor was ‘gone to the country.’ Where in the country? ‘No se.’ Nobody knew.”

  Haydon wondered how much of what Grajeda had told him was an outright lie and how much of it was truth.

  “And so you said you’d run your traps.”

  Cage nodded. “Yeah. Remember I told you last night that I was getting frozen out by my regular sources, that my inquiries about Lena were coming up craps? Well, this was different. All I wanted to know now was if an Anglo woman had been picked up by the security forces. I thought maybe they’d finally nailed her. That was a question that wouldn’t cost anybody any pain. But nothing came in. Nobody was holding out, it was just that it hadn’t happened. She hadn’t been picked up.”

  “What about Fossler?” Haydon asked. “Did you hear anything about him?”

  Cage shook his head.

  “You asked?”

  “Damn right I asked.”

  “I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t have something on that,” Haydon said. He was reminded of Grajeda’s remarks on the language of the lie, Guatemala’s persistent plague of deception. It was easy to understand the fatalism that gripped a people trapped in a socie
ty of lies.

  Cage flipped his cigarette butt out the open door and into the courtyard. He turned to the Guatemalans, and they slid the pack and lighter back down the table to him. He lighted another. The Indian woman finished pulling the pots away from the coals, finished the last of the dishes, dried her hands, and walked out of the room. There was only the four of them there.

  “But I did learn,” Cage said, blowing a chest full of smoke out into the air, “that John Baine had been picked up, in Masagua, Escuintla. But that’s all I learned. I don’t know where he’s being held. They said it was G-2 that got him, so he could be anywhere; they’ve got these clandestine prisons all over the country. One source said that General Azcona Contrera himself had ordered the arrest. Not good for Baine.”

  “What’s Azcona’s situation now?” Haydon asked. “I know his background with Ríos Montt and all that, and I assume he’s regained some of his old power since the elections?”

  “Damn right he has. He’s the head of military intelligence again. The G-2 is his baby now.”

  Baine knew this, of course, which was a large part of the reason he was so horrified at his situation. The very beast he had been trying to bell had woken up and snatched him.

  “You knew that it was Borrayo that I met tonight,” Haydon said. “What do you know about him?”

  Cage shrugged. “Commandante at Pavón.” He wasn’t going to go for that kind of an open-ended opportunity.

  “Do you know who else I met there?”

  Cage shook his head slowly, his eyes on Haydon. He seemed like a tired giant sitting at the table with the two small Guatemalans. At this late hour his short, thick hair seemed more grizzled, the bridge of his sunburnt nose sharper, his glaucous eyes paler, his face heavier. He had always operated on very little sleep, and now the collection of years had begun to take their toll, and his addiction to adrenaline had begun to betray him. But none of this passage of time had tempered him. He was a long way from slowing down, or letting down his guard.

  “I talked to Baine,” Haydon said. “They’ve got him in Pavón.”

  Cage’s eyes went flat with surprise. It was the only way his pride would let him react to being caught off guard, the cold lizard-stare of silence.

  “To be honest,” Haydon said, “I stumbled onto him. I had met Borrayo when I was on a case down here four or five years back. I thought he was still with the DIC. I was only checking in with him, to see if maybe he could bring me up to speed on a few things…”

  Haydon told Cage about his visit to Pavón and about the conversation and events that had occurred on the upper rim of the ravine overlooking El Incienso just an hour before. He didn’t hold anything back, and when he was through, Cage had finished his cigarette and was grinding it out in a clay ashtray on the table. He started shaking his head.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, his eyes staying on the ashtray and the wisp of smoke that curled up from the dying cigarette. “That damned Azcona. Using Pavón as a clandestine prison…it makes sense. You can’t keep up with them, those prisons. Course Pavón’s a real prison, but mostly the clandestine things are just cellars or warehouses or private homes somewhere. They’re always moving them. Guys like Azcona…he’s a full-time freak, a functioning lunatic.” Cage snorted. “And little Vera—Vera Beatriz Azcona de Sandoval—trades in babies. Jesus, what a family, huh?” He looked at Haydon. “What about Baine?”

  Haydon finished his Gallo. “He was beaten badly. I think he’s been seriously hurt.”

  Cage thought about that. “Borrayo. I wonder why he did that, brought Baine to you.”

  “I don’t know. That bothers me a little.”

  “Yeah, it should. Consider his situation.” Cage got up from the table.

  ran a hand through his thick hair, and stepped to the door, staring out into the courtyard. His frame filled the doorway, his posture—arms folded, barrel chest thrust out, feet slightly apart—made him a challenging figure. “His situation is that he’s subordinate to Azcona, being directly in charge of the clandestine prison. He sucks up to Tablaya, who drags his prey in and out of there like some kind of grisly vampire. Borrayo covers for all kinds of shit, and he knows if the clandestine part of the prison is ever discovered it’s his ass. But he’d never pass the buck on Azcona because Azcona would have him killed—eventually. So if it ever happened, he’d take the heat for that. It’s a thankless position. Borrayo doesn’t like it.”

  Cage turned around and walked back to the end of the table. He paused in thought, and his eyes found the automatic lying alone on the long hearth. He walked over to it and picked it up. He flipped the release and ejected the long clip, checked the action, put the clip in his trouser pocket and put the empty handgun on the table. A burst of static came from a handset that had been sitting out of sight in an empty chair by one of the Guatemalans. The Guatemalan picked it up and answered it, but not in Spanish, rather in one of the Indian dialects.

  Cage waited while there was a brief exchange, though he paid no attention to it. He was thinking. The two Guatemalans had a few words between them, and then one of them got up and walked out of the kitchen, past Cage and out into the courtyard. Cage paid no attention.

  Finally he looked up at Haydon. “I’ve got a proposal.”

  Haydon waited.

  “You might find it a little dicey.” Cage did not grin at this. “The only thing I want to do at this point is to find Lena, as fast as possible.” He stuck out his foot and kicked his chair around and sat down. “You may be my best bet for doing that.” He picked up his red plastic lighter and tapped the table with it. “I don’t know why Borrayo brought Baine to you, but you can bet your white ass he did it for Borrayo, not you. He’s got something going, and it’s something significant, or he wouldn’t have shot the kid. Efran doesn’t do that for nothing anymore. He hasn’t been in the killing business for a few years. But I’d wager a significant sum that he’s already got his worms out looking for Lena. He knows how to do that sort of thing; he used to be the best at it.”

  Cage stopped talking, his thoughts running ahead of him. He tapped the red lighter on the tabletop, end over end, end over end, turning it and tapping it. Haydon looked at the remaining Guatemalan, who met his eyes with a look as impenetrable as if he had been sightless.

  Cage slapped the lighter down hard. He said something in dialect to the Guatemalan, who immediately got up and left the room.

  “He’s going to tell them to let you go,” Cage said, referring to the guards out on the street. “I’ve got to work things out on this before we can go into it. I’ll get in touch with you tomorrow. You won’t have any trouble getting back to your hotel. But don’t ever come here again. All of these people will be gone after tonight. Only the Indian woman who made the meal lives here. It wouldn’t do to attract attention to her.”

  Cage stood up, but Haydon didn’t move; he was holding back a roiling anger. He knew he had no choice but to play the game by the rules on the ground, but he was chaffing at the necessity of leaving everything up to someone else. He didn’t have any leverage, and he was feeling the emotional equivalent of weightlessness. This could be the last time Haydon would see Cage, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Christ, what a futile situation.

  Cage was reading his thoughts. “You’d better take what you can get, Haydon. That’s always a smart choice down here. It can get out of hand real quick.”

  He reached out and picked up the automatic and put it in front of Haydon. He took the clip out of his pocket and laid it beside the gun.

  “They’ve put a box of cartridges under the front seat of your car,” he said.

  Haydon stood, picked up the gun, picked up the clip and jammed it home. He put the gun in the waistband of his trousers. It was a hell of a deal. He knew how Fossler must have felt. He wondered if Fossler had had any warning before whatever had happened in the bloody room had happened.

  CHAPTER 29

  Haydon was grateful for the gun—which he
had noticed was the latest Smith & Wesson 10mm—even though it was illegal for him to have it. But he had already seen enough to know that breaking Guatemala’s gun control law—such as it was—was the least of his worries if he found himself in a situation where he had to use it. On the other hand he wondered what he would have done with it if he had had it when Borrayo shot the kid a few hours earlier. He might have made a terrible mistake. So maybe he had been lucky. But he had the queasy feeling that he still was going to have plenty of chances to make mistakes.

  When he stepped out of the kitchen and into the courtyard he was on his own. The two Guatemalans were nowhere around. He crossed the cobblestones alone, and when he pushed open the wrought-iron gate and stepped outside, the men he had seen in the two cars at either end of the sloping street were gone. Considering that Cage had always been obsessively secretive about his security, Haydon was surprised that Lita had been told to bring him to this house. It wasn’t a location he was likely to forget.

  Getting in the car, he checked quickly with his hand to see if the 10mm cartridges were in fact under the seat. They were. He started the car and drove away, continuing down the hill until the street began to wind into the tighter streets of the central city. It took him a few minutes to find 7a avenida, and when he did he turned south, heading back to Zona 10 but avoiding the Avenida La Reforma. At 2a calle he passed under the Tower of the Reformer, a steel reproduction of the Eiffel Tower that spanned the avenue and was dedicated to Rufino Barrios. Another dictatorial folly of which Latin America had an abundance, and which said something about the odd, childlike gestures of whimsy in which “men of destiny” often indulged themselves.