Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  By the time Haydon had finished his story he had captured Pittner’s full attention, though Pittner lounged with his chin in his hand, his elbow propped on the table as though he hadn’t an ounce of strength left. His eyes, which Haydon had come to realize were more indicative of his mood than his languid posture, were unblinking, entirely absorbed.

  Pittner stirred himself and sat up in his chair. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Haydon, that’s a lot of work. And a lot of dumb luck,” he added. As had happened at dinner the night before, Pittner seemed suddenly to have grown disheveled without having done anything to cause it. Haydon only now noticed the dingy condition of his shirt, the front displaying its wrinkles despite the suit coat and tie, the flabby collar showing a lumpy rib underneath it where the tie did not lie flat. Was it put on in a hurry, or inattentively? Pittner’s eyes drifted away from Haydon and found another subject somewhere in the sunbaked courtyard beyond the windows.

  “We didn’t know,” he said without moving his eyes from the courtyard, almost as if he were thinking out loud. “About the clandestine cells in Pavón. I’m not surprised by that; they move them all the time, have them everywhere. But it’s good to know. We like to know.” He sighed. “Cage,” he said, his head shaking almost imperceptibly. “Damn, he’s really pushing it. It’s like when you get gangrene in your leg or somewhere. How the hell do you get rid of it without destroying a part of your own body. He’s going to make this hard for us…he wants her…but, you know, it looks like it’s something we could cooperate on, doesn’t it. I mean, why are we in competition on this? I don’t see the sense in it.”

  He was ticking down the list of options.

  “Janet…Janet’s an interesting possibility. That note, it could have been from the G-2. You’re learning too much too fast, and they see a real threat. The letter, the bomb, whatever it takes. Grajeda. The guerrillas. There’s always one chronic problem with guerrillas—worldwide—and that’s cooperation. They usually have one thing in common: hatred for the existing power structure…sometimes justified. But they’re splintered…each little group is pissed off in a different way. Factionalism. Grajeda knows all this. He grew up on it. What he didn’t tell you was that his little agreement was a gamble at best. He can’t guarantee shit…maybe he can with this faction or that faction, but…it’s just a goddamn mess.”

  “You think they’re going to use her as a bargaining chip,” Haydon said.

  “They could, yeah. Azcona wants her; we want her. I don’t know. Instability, unpredictability. We can be sure of that, and that’s all.” Pittner paused. “Look,” he said, “I know I’m going to sound like Cage—which is not too surprising, I suppose—but I’m going to have to do some planning, check some things. Why don’t you go back to the Residencial Reforma and stay there. It’s…well, it’s a ‘known’ location. You’ll be safe from Azcona there. But it’s probably the only damn place you’ll be safe. Understand?”

  Haydon nodded.

  Pittner stood. He seemed a little stiff, but only for a moment. “I’ll take you back there,” he said. “Stay there. Wait for me. I’m going to need you. If anything happens I ought to know about, call me.” He gave Haydon a number. “That number will get straight to me. Come on, we’d better get going.”

  CHAPTER 38

  He lay on the bed in his room and stared at the repoussé on the light fixture in the center of the high ceiling. After Pittner had dropped him off at the hotel he had gone straight to the dining room and forced himself to eat a large fruit salad. He hadn’t wanted it, but he ate it because he knew he would regret it later if he didn’t. Haydon was not one of those people who ate compulsively when they were stressed. In fact, it was just the opposite for him. All food lost its appeal, and he could skip two or three meals without any interest. However, several days of this would do strange things to his nerves, and he had learned he could stave off tension headaches with a steady diet of fruits.

  So now he lay in the midafternoon heat, the heavy blue curtains once again pulled away from the windows and draped over the metal levers that held open the glass panes. His shoes and coat off, his tie loosened, Haydon surrendered to the scenes of the car bombing that he had been trying to avoid. Again and again he remembered that millisecond following the blast and before the obscuring debris and fire when he could see Phan and the girl sitting in the car like black manikins, still a millisecond away from realizing what had happened to them. Then, in the awful seconds afterward, the storm of fire and debris and cutting glass, the explosion flinging people, again, before they understood that they were victims. Those were the moments, dead moments in the psyche, when shock set in, nature’s primitive defense against the too-horrible-to-live-with moments that were to follow. He thought of the mother and the wife and the sister-in-law and wondered how they would discover what had happened to their Phan. And he wondered who the girl was, and how her family or friends would learn of her obliteration.

  Beginning with Jim Fossler’s bloodied room, he reviewed the careless death he had witnessed within the last thirty-six hours. It was made all the more incredible when he reminded himself that it would make no difference whatsoever. In the past twenty years of Guatemala’s history well over one hundred and fifty thousand people had been “disappeared” and assassinated and not one arrest and conviction had resulted. In a country of fewer than nine million people, the rate of assassination alone was roughly one thousand per year. In the United States, that rate would accumulate to over thirty thousand assassinations annually—for which no one ever would be arrested, year after year. This was a fact that could only be described as surreal. There were other descriptions for it, of course, all of them abominable and none of them mattering in the least, because there was no political will in Guatemala to stop the killing. It was a country whose last twenty years had been marked by a political depravity seldom matched in modern times.

  Outside the traffic bolted in jerks and starts under the boulevard’s towering cypresses and kept up a steady rumble that reverberated off the stucco walls of the room, and always, even in the stillness of the heat that seemed to squeeze the oxygen out of the air, he could smell the acrid effluent of gasoline engines.

  Haydon turned over on his side. He thought of Nina and of the sanity that framed her life. He wanted to be with her, to hold her in the still of the afternoon, to put his arms around her sane, reassuring body and pull her to him and feel her breathing steadily, reliably and smell her familiar fragrance that to his mind was as sweet as sachet. The temptation to turn over, pick up the telephone, and call her was almost irresistible; but he didn’t do it. At this point, he simply didn’t trust himself. The morning’s horrors were on him like a dark pall, and he didn’t want them to touch her.

  Instead, he concentrated on the sounds outside. Could he hear anything besides the traffic? In the momentary lulls he could hear birds in the shrubs of the courtyard, and occasionally the conversational voices of people walking to their cars, and now and then the chink of flatware or dishes echoing up from the dining room. Footsteps on the marble steps, heels on the terrazzo floors…stopping outside his room. Haydon opened his eyes…he had closed them? He turned over on his back and looked at the door, his right arm reaching out toward the secretary beside the bed for the automatic.

  There was a soft knock, a pause, another knock.

  “Haydon. It’s Janet.” She sounded as if her face was pressed next to the door.

  “Okay, just a second.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, bent over and stuck the gun between the mattresses. He stood and walked to the door and opened it.

  Janet was standing there, her expression a mixture of expectant concern and conviction.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” She was wearing another sundress, sleeveless, powder blue with a long skirt. She smelled of something soft, a light and lingering fragrance, as though she had just stepped out of the shower. Janet was one of those women who seemed always fresh and clean.

  “I
was going to…”

  He put his finger up to his lips. “Let me get this…” and he stepped over to the writing desk and got the room key and went back to and out the door, pulling it closed behind him. “Let’s go out here,” he said. They were only a few steps from a short corridor that led through an arched wrought-iron grille anchored to the stucco walls and out onto a veranda that overlooked the courtyard in front of the hotel. No one was there, and they went to one of the several sets of wicker furniture and sat down at a table with a tile top.

  “I didn’t call you because it didn’t work out like I’d hoped,” he began explaining. “There simply wasn’t anything to tell you. There was nothing to say. I…”

  “I’ve just had another visit from that child,” Janet interrupted, reaching into a small, natural-leather clutch bag. She handed the note to Haydon without saying anything more, her eyes fixed on him. Haydon took it and unfolded the paper.

  Janet…Get Haydon & meet me at the Cementerio General at 5:30 pm…follow the main avenue as far as it goes…turn right…follow the lane all the way to the back of the cemetery…wait. I’ll find you…Important to trust only Haydon.

  As with the first note there was no signature. Haydon looked at Janet. “Her handwriting?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  Without a doubt. Haydon tried to think it through even as he spoke. “I’ve…I have reason to believe that she wouldn’t contact you this way,” Haydon said.

  “You have reason to believe?”

  “I do.”

  Janet nodded, only barely checking her anger.

  “Someone’s helping her,” Haydon said. He hesitated and then went on. “They’re helping her get out of the country.”

  Janet frowned.

  “Helping her avoid the security forces. She…she and Baine have collected some incriminating evidence, documentation, about Azcona’s involvement in a child-kidnapping operation. They wanted to go public with it, publish it. That’s what brought all this down on them. Azcona found out. He wants the files; he wants them dead.”

  Janet was flabbergasted. “General Azcona?”

  Haydon nodded. “Lena’s been working on this a long time. You didn’t know anything about it?”

  Janet swallowed and shook her head, for once, speechless.

  “I was contacted by the people helping her,” Haydon went on. “At some point they want to turn her over to me, but they’re holding her in strict security conditions. They claim she couldn’t possibly have gotten the first note out without their knowledge. They’re supposed to contact me again, let me know when she’ll be moved.” He looked at the piece of paper he was holding, “But this isn’t the way they would do it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked about the first note. They disavowed it.”

  “So that’s where you went this morning, to see these people.”

  “Yes.”

  Janet’s eyes searched Haydon’s face. “She’s all right?”

  “They didn’t mention anything otherwise.”

  “She has ‘documents,’ they say?”

  Haydon nodded.

  “With her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are they going to see that the documents get published, these people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Janet was pensive, turning her face away toward the boulevard, sitting on the edge of her cushioned chair, knees together, looking oddly prim and un-Janetlike. She was obviously discomfited, and as Haydon looked at her he felt the same way. He was uneasy with the fact that both notes expressed the demand that Janet trust only him. If Lena had indeed written the notes, where did she acquire this conviction that her trust should be vested solely in Haydon? If she hadn’t written the notes, who had and why? The same people who wired the bomb to the ignition switch of his car? If someone was trying to lure him into a trap, why? He had nothing unless he had Lena, and all factions of this fiasco should know that.

  “These people,” Janet said. “You know you can trust them? Could you be wrong? Could they be wrong?”

  Haydon slumped back in his chair and noticed that he had walked out of his room without his shoes. He thought of Grajeda. It was true, he believed him…he trusted him, but of course, he wanted to trust him. Grajeda was probably the only person in this whole mess with whom Haydon felt any real kinship. He felt immediately that he could understand Grajeda, the others he had to puzzle out. But could he trust him? Yes. The more important question was could Grajeda trust those in whom he had placed his trust? If Haydon believed Pittner’s information, he doubted it.

  “Well?”

  Haydon looked at her. “Yes. I can trust my source, but I’m not sure he can trust his.”

  “Oh, Christ. Then—no—, the answer’s no.” She snatched the letter from Haydon’s hands. “Goddamn it, I trust my source,” she snapped, holding up the paper. “That child. This handwriting. Lena.”

  Haydon looked out from the balcony over the courtyard to the cypresses, taller than the surrounding villas, but challenged here and there by some of the more modern glass buildings that had sprung up along the boulevard like odd pieces of colored quartz that had fallen from the sky and were sticking upright out of the earth. A smudgy haze hung among the trees, discoloring the cobalt sky in the distance.

  “You familiar with the cemetery?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “You know what she’s talking about, all the way to the end of the main avenue…”

  “Yes.”

  Haydon looked at his watch. It was now two-fifteen. The note said to be at the cemetery at five-thirty. That was a good time, whether Lena had calculated it or not. The traffic on the way there would be at its worst, the best time to evade surveillants. Haydon was ticking off what he had to do…call Pittner…but he felt Janet’s withering stare.

  “You are going to go, aren’t you?” she demanded abruptly. And then without waiting for an answer, “I’m going, by God.”

  Haydon had to hand it to Janet, as far as Lena was concerned she had been the only one with a straightforward desire to help her. It seemed that everyone else had ulterior motives: Lena, yes, but also…Janet had never expressed any interest in anything but helping Lena to safety. For all her craziness, she had the cleanest vision and the cleanest intentions: Lena was in trouble and needed Janet’s help. That was it. Nothing to agonize over, nothing to calculate. She just wanted to do it.

  Haydon nodded. “Yeah, I think we ought to go, but if you believe the note,” he said, “then you ought to believe all of the note. You need to trust me and do it the way I think it ought to be done. You might not like it, but you need to do it.”

  Janet was listening. She looked cool in the shade of the balcony; she looked clean and far removed from the gritty realities of Guatemala. There was something about her that reminded Haydon of those crisp British colonists of another era for whom India and Africa were adventures that properly belonged to them. She had grown up in Guatemala, but she had not grown up Guatemalan. Despite her worldly knowledge of the country, there was no wisdom in it; she could assess the country and its people accurately, but without understanding; she could explain its history, but not its heart. There was a difference.

  “I’m waiting,” she said.

  Haydon rubbed his face. The sun had moved well past the meridian, and the shade on the balcony had retreated to the edge of their feet and the stone balustrade had already gathered enough heat to begin throwing it off. The stultifying heat of Guatemala’s verano had begun in earnest its daily worst.

  “I want you to go alone,” he said. “At the time designated in the note.” He looked at his watch. “I’m going to go a couple of hours early.”

  “A couple of hours?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  Her eyes searched his face again, and Haydon could almost see her mind working, catching up with him, anticipating him.

  “Have you heard the news today…the car bombing?�
�

  She nodded expectantly.

  “That was my car.” He explained briefly, cursorily, enough for her to understand the degree of complexity…and the seriousness of what she would be getting involved in. He wanted the gravity of the situation to dampen her enthusiasm and to sharpen her sixth sense. When he stopped, her eyes had lost their dancing impatience and her petulance had subsided. The more explanation she received, the more relaxed she became, as if the heart of her anger had been founded in what she believed was the patronizing attitude of Haydon and all the others who were keeping her in the dark.

  “Assume your home is wired and any conversation there is being monitored,” Haydon said. “Assume the same of the Land-Rover, Now that you’ve come here to meet me, you can also assume you’re being followed. They want Lena; they want the documents. They think I’m going to lead them to her. That’s what this is all about.”

  “I’m not sure I can do this,” she said suddenly. She looked down at her hands in her lap where she was folding and unfolding the piece of paper. “It’s…, I’m not afraid,” she said. “I’m really not. But I’m not sure I can avoid being followed. I’d never forgive myself for doing that, for leading them to her…I just…”

  “You don’t have to go,” Haydon said. “If you don’t show, I don’t believe they’ll be surprised.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, then she jerked her head up. “Do you need me to do it?”

  “You don’t have to do it.”

  “I mean, will the goddamn thing go better if I help, or not?”

  Haydon looked at her. “If you don’t lose your nerve, it would be best if you came along. It could make it easier for me. But if you’re not sure of that, if you’re not sure of yourself and you get rattled and lose your head, it could end disastrously.”