Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  Haydon nodded again.

  “Good.”

  Mateo appeared, pleased to have another guest. Salviati quickly ordered coffee to get rid of him.

  “I have come to you with a message from Dr. Grajeda. He would like to talk to you.”

  “I understand he’s ‘in the country.’”

  “Oh, yes. He was.”

  “No longer.”

  Salviati shook his head. “He would like to meet with you this morn-mg.

  “Fine.”

  “He is concerned about the meeting being…completely private. You must not be followed.”

  “I understand.”

  “I am going to give you an address here in the city, okay? I am going to speak it, and you must not write it down.”

  The address was in Zona 1, the center of the old city, 18 calle between 6a and 7a avenidas. Haydon knew the street. It was one of the better known in the collection of narrow streets just around the corner from one of the city’s largest markets.

  “I understand you are an American detective,” Salviati said. Mateo brought the coffee and poured a fresh cup for Haydon.

  “Yes,” Haydon said.

  “Then you know how to avoid being followed.”

  “I believe so,” Haydon said.

  Salviati sipped his coffee and relaxed his smile for the first time. “This is very dangerous for my friend, very dangerous. If the security agents find him they will kill him.”

  Haydon was surprised Salviati said this so openly, perhaps he thought it was needed to emphasize how delicately the meeting had to be handled.

  “At this address”—and he repeated the address he had already given Haydon—“is a shoe store. It is behind the booths that are along the sidewalk there. Go into the store and go to the back—you don’t have to talk to anyone, just go to the back of the store. There is a door there that will lead out into a courtyard with a stairway. Turn left and go up the stairs to the balcony. A man there will know your name and help you.”

  “That’s it?”

  Salviati nodded and sipped his coffee.

  “Are you the doctor who Grajeda sometimes helps in Huehuetenango?”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “Can you tell me what this meeting is about?”

  “He said you would know.”

  “Do you know?”

  “Mr. Haydon, I sometimes help Aris, he sometimes helps me. He is a very good doctor. But…he is political. I help him because I am very fond of him, but I am never more than an errand boy. I won’t refuse to do something for him if he asks me, but I am not a political person.”

  “It seems to me you take a lot of risk, considering you are not political.”

  Salviati shrugged, and this time the smile was his own, not part of the act. “It is almost impossible to be true to your heart in Guatemala without taking a risk.” He glanced around the room. “The risk, you know, only seems to be important when certain people take it. The indios are risking their lives every day in the countryside, just to maintain a little human dignity. Nobody seems to notice that. What is it to me to deliver a message? So small a thing.”

  “Dr. Grajeda told you that we talked?”

  “He did, yes.”

  “Just before I left him yesterday morning, in response to my question about how he supported his clinic, he mentioned his awkward relationship with his family. Do you know very much about that?”

  “Something.” Salviati hesitated. “I should tell you that Aris and I are boyhood friends. We grew up together. I am Italian, but a third-generation Italian here in Guatemala. My father and grandfather were doctors. I received my medical training in Britain and Aris went to the United States, to Johns Hopkins. Unlike many men who leave Guatemala for their educations and never come back, we vowed to return. So we, as you say, ‘go back a long way.’”

  “Then none of this…secrecy, the way things work here, is new to you.”

  Salviati closed his eyes wearily and shook his head. “It is a pity to say, but I have grown up with it.” Then he looked at Haydon. “But Aris and I were on the other side of the fence when we were young. Our families were not poor. We saw Guatemala through the hazy lens of the romantic photographer. Over time that changed.”

  “What changed it for you?”

  “I have asked myself that many times,” Salviati said. He looked at his watch. “It’s nine-thirty. Can you make it there in an hour? This has to be timed very closely. He has to know that you will be there when you say you will. If you need more time because you are not familiar with the city, if you are not sure where you can park—that is a very crowded area—then I can make it later.”

  “No, ten-thirty is all right.”

  Salviati reached across the table and offered his hand. Haydon shook it, and the doctor said, “I probably will not see you again. Thank you.” He stood quickly before Haydon could say anything else and walked out of the dining room.

  Haydon did not look around at the other diners. Salviati had come unobtrusively, visited briefly and quietly, and had left without any show of the goodbyes that often concluded a conversation with a meal. It would be up to Haydon to be equally inconspicuous.

  He signed for his meal and walked through the parlor to the concierge at the front desk.

  “Are there any automobile-tire stores near here?” he asked. The young man told him of several, gave him directions to them, at which Haydon nodded and then thanked him for the suggestions. He walked outside to the courtyard and looked at his car. He kicked the rear tire for the young man’s benefit and bent down at the rear bumper to survey the treads. He did not see Cage’s beeper anywhere inside the lip of the curving bumper. He went to the front of the car and did the same, his search hidden by a Jeep Wagoneer parked next to him. The beeper was not under the front bumper either, or in the wheel wells. Cage was no fool. He had probably had his people take it off while they were talking the night before. He knew better than to believe Haydon would allow the device to remain in place. Electronic surveillance could be expensive, and Cage wasn’t about to waste a transmitter. Standing and walking out from between the two cars, he turned one more time and looked at the tires. He shook his head and walked back into the hotel.

  Returning to his room, Haydon got the keys to his car, went back downstairs, left his room key with the concierge, and in a few moments was leaving through the Residencial’s open gates. He turned right on the Reforma and left at the first opportunity and headed away from downtown until he came to Diagonal 12 where he turned right and immediately right again and pulled up near one of the few American-style convenience stores, just off the street. He parked and went to the pay telephone outside the store.

  Janet was working on a caffeine high. No, she hadn’t heard anything, no, she hadn’t talked to Pitt. Haydon told her he would be out of touch for a couple of hours, and then he would call her again. If she heard from anyone, just sit on the message until he called her. To keep her in his camp, to keep her from getting impatient and doing something unpredictable, he told her he thought he had some information that would be significant and that would help them find Lena. She was immediately grateful, willing to help, willing to do anything. He had a couple of hours to think of something. He told her to try to relax, to stay close to the telephone. Then he went back to his car and headed downtown.

  CHAPTER 31

  Six avenida was the only avenue on which one could travel from the south of the city north, directly into the old narrow streets of downtown without having to make a jog over in one direction or another to accommodate a park or a railway station or a public building or a larger major avenue merging on an oblique approach or a church or one of the city’s many monuments. It ran straight as an arrow right down to the National Palace on the Parque Central.

  However, in its undeviating course northward, 6a avenida makes one major change in its appearance. At 18 calle, the avenue drops down in size from a boulevard with a median to a narrow, old-world-style street, crowded, sl
ow moving, and choked with the diesel exhausts of buses and cars, hemmed in by sidewalk vendors and pedestrians, and raucous with shouts and horns and gunning engines.

  Eighteen calle itself was something of a crossroads. Only a few blocks from the country’s central railroad station and its second largest produce market, it was known for its bazaar atmosphere. In one crowded section running for five or six blocks the street is divided by a median, with two lanes of traffic on one side going east and two lanes of traffic on the other side going west. Between 8a and 6a avenidas, the median was crowded with good-sized trees whose branches arched over the streets, providing a tunnel of welcome shade. The sidewalks were packed tightly with vendors’ booths, stalls made of contrived frames of thin poles over which large cloths were draped leaving only the fronts open from which the vendors displayed and sold their wares. The backs of the booths were turned to the street to ward off the noise and unctuous exhausts of the traffic, making the sidewalks between the front of the booths and the front of the stores a pinched corridor of twilight shade. When the sidewalks became impassable, pedestrians spilled out into the streets, walking along with the traffic behind the booths, adding to the congestion and confusion.

  Haydon parked in a side street not far from the railroad station and began his complicated journey toward the address that Dr. Bindo Salviati had given him. He had nearly three-quarters of an hour to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He did not consider the extra precaution excessive. Aside from Cage’s surveillance, it was a certainty that Pittner had put a tail on him too. There was the incident of the Jeep Cherokee, courtesy of the Guatemalan security forces; that is, Azcona. And finally there was Borrayo, the lynx of perpetual scheming. It seemed ludicrous to believe that all of those people were interested enough in what Haydon was doing to put a tail on him, but, on the other hand, it would have been naïve to think otherwise.

  From the side street where he had parked, he walked back to 18 calle not far from the railroad station, turned right and began a slow meander up the street. Eighteen calle was the major shopping section for much of Guatemala City’s population who subsisted just above the poverty line. Soldiers and housemaids came here to buy domestic-made products and clothes and shoes made in Taiwan of plastics and synthetic fibers. Of such a distinctive quality were the products sold here, that it was common to say of someone who was wearing cheap or tacky clothes that he had made his purchases in an “18 calle boutique.”

  Haydon stopped at every other booth, examined the products, talked to the vendors. He turned in the opposite direction and looked into the store windows, which were glazed with dirt and soot, most containing wares that seemed never to have moved from their shelves to be replaced with newer stock. Back and forth, back and forth, from booths to windows, he moved slowly up the slightly rising street, down the gloomy corridors of commerce with their smells of human sweat mingled with cheap perfume, cooking food, wafts of wood smoke and old garments, whiffs of souring fruit rinds and peels that had been tossed into the gutters to rot in the dry-season heat, and an occasional deposit of feces left behind by dogs or children. In the course of this rambling walk he was careful to note precisely the landmarks and the address where he was supposed to meet Dr. Grajeda. He found it and passed it by, continuing his leisurely movement up the street.

  Every time Haydon turned from one side of the sidewalk to the other he scanned the crowds, hoping to notice a face he had noticed before, or a shirt or a dress or the back of any of these. He took particular notice of women. He remembered what Fossler had said about his tail, and he had seen enough of Lita to know that Cage employed an uncanny collection of surveillants. Evasion seemed a hopeless task. The culture was unfamiliar, which meant he could take nothing for granted, dismiss nothing as being unemployable by a surveillance team. He might be able to evade one tail, or one team, but he had to be very good to get away from the several he believed to be following him. For starters, he had to make them identify themselves. He had to narrow the playing field, eliminate as much of the crowd as possible and move into a setting that would make them more conspicuous, easier for him to identify.

  He began looking for a church. It was an old standby he used for smoking out a tail who would not be satisfied with simply knowing that he had entered a church and waiting on the street for him to return. If the tail wanted to know who he was meeting there, then he had to follow Haydon inside. Haydon didn’t have far to go. Above the trees in the median, he saw a bell tower to his left, on the other side of the street. He quickened his pace and headed straight for it. Crossing the street, he cut between the cars in the stalled traffic, stepped under the trees on the median, which itself was no wider than a sidewalk, and then crossed the other side of the street right in front of a line of buses that had just started up from a stop a block away. This in itself would delay a single tail, even eliminate him if Haydon got into the church fast enough. But some of them would be following him in a team, one on each side of the street in anticipation of his using the traffic as a shield. Eventually they would get together again, so it was important that he get to the church before the one he had left behind had caught up with the one who had picked him up when he crossed over. The few moments alone in the church were crucial. To give himself an edge, Haydon crossed the street just before he was parallel to the church.

  The Santuario de la Sagrada Madre was large, but not of cathedral size, and was made of huge slabs and blocks of cut limestone, its gray surfaces mottled and stained from decades of rainy seasons and dry seasons, and pitted and sooty from the acidic toxins of the modern gasoline and diesel engine. The broad sidewalk in front of the church was scattered with the cloth-covered booths of vendors and with old women who had spread their shawls on the cracked cement to sell their candles and flowers under the hot sun, at the bottom of the tier of steps that ascended to the church doors. Haydon hurried through this crowd of pedestrians and vendors, past the old women, and up the steps and into the cool shade of the narthex, which lay just inside the heavy wooden doors thrown open to the city.

  He had done this enough to know where the confessionals usually were situated and before his eyes could even become adjusted to the dim interior (another advantage to this simple maneuver) he hurried to the right side of the church and followed its wall toward the front. He found one of two booths, one on each of the side aisles, and approached it quickly. Two more strokes of luck: the priest was not hearing confessions and the confessional door was latticework. In an instant he was inside, the door closed, peering through the lattice. He quickly surveyed the nave. Two women, that was all, both of them in the back half of the church, no one at the front.

  For a moment no one came in and the only sound Haydon could hear was the muffled echo of traffic outside and his own labored breathing against the wooden latticework. The building smelled of wax candles and stone and old wooden pews. A door closed far off in one of the transepts, echoing deep and hollow in the high environs of the church. An old woman came in, but he had seen her outside below the steps. She made a painful entrance carrying a load of candles in her shawl, which she proceeded to spread out to one side of the doors in the narthex. To sell her candles here was forbidden, but she knew it would be a while before a priest would discover her, and in the meantime she was out of the sun and close to the people who wanted her wares.

  Then a man ran up into the entrance from the steps and stopped abruptly. He was Guatemalan, and he had a decision to make. He moved into the shadows to make it. The thing about churches was that they had several entrances. The front doors, of course, and then depending on their construction usually another two, one in either direction, in the aisle that crossed in front of the altar, and then often others that led into hallways on either side of the nave and which wound around and exited in courtyards or out onto the sidewalks at the rear of the church. The important thing was that there were always multiple exits.

  If the tails were in teams, one or several of them would be diverted im
mediately to try to find these exits from the outside of the church, while the person who followed Haydon would wait in the narthex. At some point one of them would have to make a decision to either search the environs of the church, or to give it up, or to keep one man in the narthex while the others spread out onto the sidewalks.

  An Indian woman carrying a child in a rebozo came into the church. She was not old. She was not Lita. She stopped and bought a candle from the old woman who had just arrived with her wares and then went to one of the banks of candles at the back of the church, not far from Haydon, where she lighted the candle she had just purchased. Then she moved to the pews toward the back of the nave and sat down. She knelt as if to pray, but her head was not bowed as much as those of the women already there.

  Another man entered. He was also Guatemalan. Ignoring the old woman, he did not see the man waiting in the shadows of the narthex as he went to the far side of the nave and sat down in the last row of pews. He did not pretend to pray but simply sat and stared at the front of the church, his eyes scanning, waiting to adjust to the dark.

  Haydon looked at his watch. He could get to the shoe store in less than a minute from the front of the church. He had thirty-five minutes for this to settle out. The only thing he was afraid of was that the man in the shadows of the front door would not be satisfied with Haydon’s disappearance and would decide to look for him. A confessional was a lousy place for serious hiding. But he did not think they would do that. If they wanted to kill him, they would do it. But since they only wanted to discover who he was meeting, a search to discovery would be counterproductive. He bet himself they wouldn’t, and then settled back in the confessional to see who would win the wager.

  He had been waiting thirteen minutes without anyone moving when he heard footsteps coming down the side aisles from the direction of the altar. The footsteps were overlapping, two people, one walking along each side of the nave next to the walls. He could see the one on the opposite side from him, Guatemalan, wearing a suit without a tie, shirt open at the collar, his coat unbuttoned. He was moving relatively quickly since there was nothing much to see. The footsteps of the man on Haydon’s side of the church grew louder as he lagged slightly behind his partner, who, when he passed the confessional on the opposite side ignored it completely. The man on Haydon’s side, however, could not resist running his hand along the surface of the latticework, an idle, adolescent gesture, his fingers making a soft thrumming noise, passing within an inch of Haydon’s face.