Haydon looked at the tiny bubbles riding the ice cubes in his glass of Coke. Outside the midday sun was whitening the light that fell on the ravines of the Rio Negro, washing the dark green of the palms in a laser brightness.
“I understand about the politics,” Haydon said. “What I don’t understand is why Lena didn’t come to you about this.”
Pittner nodded. “She probably knew I couldn’t do anything about it.”
“Or wouldn’t.”
Pittner closed his eyes as though shrugging. “It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Vera Beatriz knew something was brewing. Her brother’s DIC had picked up on Lena, knew what she was doing. To tell you the truth, they were satisfied with threatening her in various ways, messing with her, because they didn’t think anyone would listen to her. Then she went to John Baine. Then she went home. That probably saved her life. But then she came back and Baine was onto her like a lamprey. He smelled ‘big story.’ And he was right.”
“You mean you knew she was looking into the kidnapping story before she left the first time?”
“Oh, sure,” Pittner said. “We knew.” He stood and went into the kitchen to refill his glass. Haydon listened to him putting in the ice and then the bourbon. It was a comfortable sound. When he came back the tall glass was fuller than the first time, and he was stirring the ice with his finger. He sat down again and pursed his lips, looking at Haydon with lazy, exhausted eyes that were prepared not to be disturbed by anything.
“But you recruited her anyway.”
Pittner nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
Haydon looked at him. Pittner was savoring a mouthful of bourbon, not yet cold from the ice, his eyes on the table in front of him. He had made a decision and was about to commit himself.
CHAPTER 37
Pittner studied Haydon, his rumpled suit and baggy eyes providing a misleading image of a man whose mind, in fact, was as ordered as his appearance was discomposed.
“I’m going to have you expelled from Guatemala,” Pittner said in such a tone and manner that if you didn’t know the meaning of the words you would miss the impact of the message. Inflection and content had no relationship at all. “Interfering in internal politics, pissing in the boots of the generals, consorting with the guerrillas…”
They were only a couple of chairs apart, and Haydon was looking into Pittner’s reddened eyes. He didn’t know if their rawness had to do more with the lack of sleep or with the whiskey, but as far as Pittner’s words were concerned, Haydon was pretty sure he was blowing smoke. The business about the guerrillas had to be a wild guess.
“…interfering with State Department policies…”
Haydon said nothing.
“…like ‘operational climate’…”
“What is it you want?” Haydon asked in the same tone.
“Everything you’ve got.”
“Regarding what?”
“Regarding everything you’ve done since you got here,” Pittner said without enthusiasm.
“Then you’d better start processing the papers,” Haydon said. “But when I get back to the States, I’m going to ask more questions than you’re going to be comfortable with me asking. As I told you before, I don’t believe in ‘larger considerations.’ I don’t give a damn about State Department policies versus Jim Fossler’s life or Lena Muller’s life. It’s been my experience over the years that the people who always want to talk about ‘larger considerations’ happen not to be the people whose lives are being disrupted so that those considerations can be realized. They make that kind of argument to justify why somebody else has lost their life or is going to lose their life—it’s always somebody else doing the dying. I don’t have any patience with that kind of brave language.”
Pittner sat patiently a moment after Haydon stopped, his lazy eyes resting on Haydon with an inscrutable calm. Haydon had been careful to keep his voice as monotonously even as Pittner’s. If Pittner’s stomach was as tangled as his, Haydon thought, it was an odd display of twentieth-century dueling. Grown men doing what grown men have to do in the age of dispassion. Pittner decided to make another run at it.
“Cage is jerking you around,” he said.
“And you’re not?”
“He’s just barely in control, if he is in control.”
“You work with him.”
“I have to.”
“So do I. No one else has been so accommodating.”
“Yeah, he’s accommodating,” Pittner said.
“Did you have someone following me this morning too?” Haydon asked bluntly.
Pittner nodded.
“What happened?”
“Apparently there was a surveillance traffic jam on 18 calle. Everybody spotted everybody else. Where’d you go?”
“When did you find out that the woman in the morgue wasn’t Lena?” Haydon asked, deliberately disrupting continuity.
Pittner looked away, out toward the ravine past the palms. “If I had seen her I would have known,” he said. “I didn’t go to the morgue.” Haydon studied Pittner’s profile and realized that he looked older from this angle, almost like another man. “For one reason or another our ID people were tied up and didn’t get by there as soon as we’d wanted…I found out last night.”
He turned back and sipped at the bourbon. He was giving something a good deal of thought. Haydon couldn’t have articulated what it was that he sensed had changed about Pittner, but something had changed even in the last few moments. He had lost his relish for doing what he did best.
“Everything has a life span, Haydon,” Pittner said, and then slowly sipped from his glass, relishing the sweet whiskey in the precise, savoring manner in which men who loved their drink too much seemed to do. “Human lives, relationships, arrangements, grudges, obligations. Things run their course.”
He set the glass down carefully in roughly the same place he had been putting it during their conversation. The sweat from the glass was making whitish rings on the polished surface of the wooden tabletop, but Pittner didn’t put a napkin or a coaster under it. If you had mentioned it to him he wouldn’t have known what you were talking about until you pointed it out. The finish on the furniture was a long way from anything that Bennett Pittner cared about.
“Years ago Cage and I were pretty close,” Pittner continued. “He always was a bastard, but back then he was a likeable bastard. He had an undeniable joie de vivre, kind of a wholehearted screw-it-all way of treating the world that you had to admire. Not many people have the guts to do that, you know, just take all you can get, unabashedly self-serving.” He thought a moment. “On the other hand, maybe it was only because I was young that I could tolerate him, that I thought that there was anything acceptable in him at all. But, of course, things changed. I changed, the business changed, the world changed. Everything changed except Cage. Actually, he changed too, only he didn’t believe it. He didn’t want to change, and he didn’t understand that it was impossible not to. Eventually he was just a caricature of himself, himself in broad strokes.”
Pittner stared at the glass of bourbon on the table.
“He and Janet had an affair,” he said. “Quite a wild fling. They think I don’t know anything about it. At least Janet thinks that; Cage probably doesn’t give a damn one way or the other. I suppose it was inevitable. They’re so much alike, their personalities. Spontaneous, headlong. But it was hard for me to handle it. It was like I was hyperventilating emotionally. I had to take long, deep breaths. I had to concentrate. It was hell.”
He cleared his throat. “About Lena,” he said. “I was sleeping with her.”
Haydon shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. It occurred to him that he was losing his ability to anticipate. He was beginning to feel like an old fighter whose aging arms were no longer allowing him to keep his guard up. He was taking too many blows to the head. Haydon remembered the crickets that filled the air with their pulsing chirruping when he had been here the night before.
Now it was the deeper rasping of cicadas.
“I’m not going to ‘confess,’” Pittner said reassuringly. “I’m just telling you how it was. Nothing you haven’t heard or seen before. Common stuff. That’s why I had the guys go to Janet’s and scoop up everything in her room and bring it to me. I’d never put anything in writing, but I didn’t know if Lena kept a diary or what. I’ve been going through it myself. I haven’t found anything.” He stopped and took some bourbon. “Maybe there isn’t anything.” The thought seemed disappointing to him.
It was hard to tell about Pittner. He was forthrightly laying out his affair, candidly admitting it was a common middle-aged-man-and-younger-woman story. He wasn’t going to pretend there was anything special about it simply because it had happened to him instead of one of the countless other middle-aged men they had seen it happen to during their years of snooping into people’s often transparent and superficial lives. But Haydon guessed that Pittner’s offhanded dismissal of his story gave the lie to the importance of it to him. After what Pittner had been through with Janet, it was understandable that he would have found Lena Muller a welcome refuge. The serious question was why Lena had done it. It was a depressing question, too, because the immediate implication was that she had not had the man for the sake of the man. Sadly, it was not believable that she would have. More than likely she had thought it would get her something. Pittner knew that.
“I came to my senses a little late,” Pittner said. “I had night sweats over it. I don’t know what she was after, but I’m reasonably sure she never got it. Even when I was wild after her, I never allowed a compromising circumstance. Never in my office. Never drunk with her. Never ‘talked.’ She never drew me out; I don’t even remember her ever having tried.”
He reached for the glass, picked it up from its puddle of condensation, drank, and returned it to the puddle.
“I asked myself about that later,” Pittner mused, more to himself than to Haydon. “What the hell kind of a man would have an affair with a woman like her and never once be induced to abandon himself to his emotions, never once go crazy, step right up to the edge with her and jump. God. I watched my back every second, thinking: honey trap, honey trap, honey trap. I was so damned guarded about the whole affair that I’m surprised I ever managed to make it with her. But I did, and I kept on, night after night.”
He was silent a moment. “I don’t know why she did it. I’m honest enough with myself to be suspicious. But you know what haunts me? What if, goddamn it, what if…she just liked me? I’ve been in this miserable business so long I don’t even know if I’d recognize an honest emotion if I encountered it. Lena Muller may have been a colossal mistake,” he said, shaking his head at the whole mad affair, “but I’ll be damned if I understand, even yet, just exactly what kind of a mistake she was.”
He stopped and looked out the windows to Haydon’s right, out to the courtyard. There was a dead fountain in its center, a common sign of dereliction in Guatemala, but unlike many others which had been converted to flower beds or wells for trees, Pittner’s fountain was simply empty. The rainy seasons put water in it, and then the dry seasons caused the water to stagnate and then evaporate and eventually disappear, leaving behind blackened and scaling algae. The joints in the stones in the courtyard were punctuated with tufts of dried grass.
“This surprise you, Haydon?”
Haydon nodded. “Yes, it does.”
“But…?”
Haydon hesitated. “There were rumors about her…with a number of men.”
“Ah.” Pittner understood, his eyes lingering on the sunbaked courtyard. “You’ve covered a lot of ground. Well, I was aware of the rumors,” he said, sighing. “I had them checked out. It was for personal reasons, mostly, but I justified it professionally, too, since I was running her. As best we could determine it was mostly rumor. She had a lot of guys panting after her. Some of them had overactive imaginations, locker-room wishful thinking. She had had a few relationships, but nothing that you would consider promiscuous.”
Something wasn’t meshing here, but Haydon left it alone. Janet said Lena was fairly discreet, didn’t date much, didn’t talk about it at all. Baine, hammered to shit and hurting, testified to a girl of a different nature. He even claimed to have experienced her body-for-hire techniques firsthand. Either Baine was rashly quoting trashy gossip for credible rumor with a grain of truth to consider, or he was seriously deluding himself about what he actually had experienced. And Dr. Grajeda had found her an elusive siren. A young woman, he hinted, who had a troubled soul. And then he had traded a year of his life for her. Lena Muller seemed to have inspired strong and conflicting emotions.
“Do you know where she is?” Pittner asked.
Haydon shook his head.
Pittner didn’t believe him, but he didn’t ask him again. He wasn’t finished talking, wasn’t finished coming straight from the gut, as though it were some kind of emotional self-flagellation; every time he mentioned her name or called up a mental image of her, it cut to the quick. But he would rather bleed than not think of her at all.
“She didn’t know, of course, at first, that she was in danger,” Pittner said. “I discovered it just about the time our affair began. Everything at once. That’s the way it is, more often than not. I got everything I could on her, what the DIC knew, what the G-2 knew. After a while every breath I took was Lena Muller. I smelled her in my dreams.”
He picked up the sweaty drink again and held it to his temple, ran the cold glass across his forehead, closing his eyes momentarily. Then he set it on the table once more where the growing puddle was spreading with every passing minute.
“When she returned from Houston, the G-2 started watching her the moment she landed at the airport,” he continued. “And we picked up their hit at the same time. That’s why I recruited her. It was an excuse to keep close tabs on her. I don’t know what I thought was going to be the upshot of all this. Actually I didn’t give it any thought. That’s how strung out on her I’d gotten. I was mainlining this girl.
“Keeping tabs on her turned out to be more than I’d bargained for. I had to do it by the book, I turned her over to one of the case officers, and before long she was bringing in her stuff. I told you the other night how it went. She was sharp, didn’t take her long to learn to do it the right way.” He shook his head. “But she didn’t know enough. In no time at all the guy handling her picked up her affair with Cage. That hit me like an actual blow to the head and had the same effect. Sobering.”
Haydon thought of his conversations with Cage. He had never hinted at this. For all his crass references to Janet and Pittner, even his perfunctory disregard for Lita, he had never said anything disrespectful about Lena. In fact, he had professed only admiration. Again, Haydon should have seen it coming.
“I told you earlier, I came to my senses a little late,” Pittner continued. “I’d made the classic mistake. It could’ve been the end of my career. Still could be. You got here just as all of this was coming down. The point is, it’s a mess. Different agendas, a multitude of subtexts.”
Pittner turned in his chair, one elbow on the table as he crossed his legs.
“Unless you can make it a little clearer to me what in the hell it is you want,” he said, his head bent a little, not looking at Haydon, “I’ll get you booted out. Right now you’re gasoline on the fire; I’m not going to sit here and watch you blow it all to hell.”
“Fair enough,” Haydon said. “I want to talk to Lena. I owe it to her mother. If she wants to go home, I’ll arrange it. Otherwise, it’s none of my business. But before I leave I want to find out what happened to Jim Fossler. He was a personal friend.”
Haydon winced at his own use of the past tense.
“This country’s full of personal friends who’ve disappeared,” Pittner said wearily. “Jesus Christ.” He was still sitting with his head bent, his eyes unfocused, his thoughts hidden behind a veil of alcohol and a learned suspicion that had shaped hi
s life. “Regardless of my personal involvement with Lena,” he said finally, “what I’ve got here is an agent in trouble. That’s the way I’ve got to look at it. Now that’s different from an officer in trouble. She’s hired help. Technically. But I’ve known more than a few officers who have stuck their necks out for their agents. Despite what the rule book says, a certain amount of emotional investment is inevitable when you’re working human intelligence. That’s the definition. The point is, I’m obligated to get her out of trouble, for good reasons other than the personal ones. If it turns out that she wrecks my career when this is all over”—he shook his head—“well, hell, I won’t be surprised.”
“You asked me a while ago if I knew where she is—you know, don’t you,” Haydon said.
“We have an idea,” Pittner looked up. “Listen,” he said. “The only way this is going to work is for you to cooperate with me. Otherwise, you’re out. That’s the way it’s got to be. I can’t have you out there on your own. It’d be stupid of me. I thought maybe it would work…but…”
Haydon understood Pittner’s position, and he knew Pittner could, and would, do what he said.
“Okay,” Haydon agreed. “But I want Fossler tied to this…as a package.”
Pittner studied Haydon and then nodded.
“It’s a package?” Haydon insisted.
“Yeah,” Pittner said, “Agreed.”
They sat there for another hour and a half. Haydon finished his Coke, but Pittner never touched another drop of bourbon. Haydon started with Borrayo’s departure from the alley in Colonia Santa Isabel. He told Pittner about Lita picking him up and taking him to Cage’s safe house (he avoided identifying Avenida Elena), about Cage’s plan to “use” Haydon to find Lena but not telling Haydon the details of his plan, of going home to find Janet waiting for him in the courtyard of the Residencial Reforma with the “message from Lena,” about being approached the next morning by a messenger from Dr. Grajeda (he didn’t reveal Salviati’s name or profession), about his trip to 18 calle and the meeting with Grajeda (and about the death of Cage’s man), and about his subsequent use of the luckless and moonstruck Phan.
Body of Truth Page 30