Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  He turned back to his left, trying to stay within fifty meters of the narrow angling lane that diverged from the main avenue and headed down a shallow slope into an ever-poorer neighborhood of crypts. Here the walls of warehoused dead became the rule of burial, with sections of crypts interspersed. Gradually the lane he was following inched out onto a promontory, the cypress and eucalyptus trees crowding out the graves until across the lane the cemetery fell off into the vast ravines of the Rio La Barranca. The lane itself became a rutted dirt road, the graves only on one side of it, and on the other, cypresses, and then the land fell away into the Gehenna of squatters’ shacks and slums, their smoke and stench wafting up toward the cemetery on the late afternoon breeze.

  Haydon came to the end of the road and to the end of the cemetery. A last cluster of tombs clung to the promontory, along with a mixture of cypresses and palms and eucalyptus, but on all sides the ravines dropped away into a smoky world of smoldering garbage, watched over, always, by the floating black cruciforms of zopilotes hanging in the opal sky.

  A burble of conversation rose and died, sending a chill over his flesh before he reminded himself that no one he needed to fear would carry on a conversation at all. He moved away from the road toward the voices, heard the chink of tools, and walked between the crypts into a narrow corridor to the back side of the charnel houses. There on the edge of the ravines, behind a crypt on the margin of the cliff, an elderly woman and a girl who must have been sixteen or so were sitting on the edge of a hole they were digging, a glass jug of water between them as they rested. As Haydon rounded the corner of the crypt, they both looked at him as if he were a ghost, their sweaty faces frozen in his direction. Their hole was a ragged thing, crudely dug, and, as Haydon instantly realized as he looked at their startled faces, an illegal grave. They were probably from the terraces of shacks below in the ravines. Someone had died and needed burying, and they needed only a small piece of earth.

  They looked at each other. The girl’s eyes were as large as they could get and still remain in her head, and Haydon thought that if she hadn’t been sitting with her legs dangling in the hole she would have bolted over the cliff. But the old woman regarded Haydon with benign resignation, the expression of a woman who had lived so long and seen so much that being kicked out of a grave in her closing years would not have surprised her.

  “No tenga pena,” Haydon said. Don’t worry about it. Reaching into his pocket, he took out his pack of cigarettes as he walked over to the two women. He took one out and lighted it, and squatting down near them, held out the pack to the old woman. “Go ahead,” he said. “Keep them.”

  Surprised, the girl didn’t know what to do, but the old woman snatched the cigarettes from Haydon’s extended hand and immediately shook one out for each of them, grasping the pack in her crooked and filthy fingers. She was too old to question opportunity.

  Haydon looked into the hole they had scrabbled in the rocky soil. “Who died?” he asked.

  “A child,” the old woman said. “She likes this view. She likes the zopilotes,” she said, raising the gnarled hand with the cigarette and, pointing her middle finger to the sky, scribing circles in the air where the vultures wheeled in the distance.

  “Did you find this spot yourself?” Haydon asked the girl, but she would not look at him. She only smoked and stared into the hole.

  “Yes, herself,” the old woman answered for her. “The poor girl is deaf,” she explained. “We were going to dig only at night, to avoid the caretakers.” She shrugged. “But it was taking too long; the child is smelling. So”—she looked at the hole in which their legs were hanging—“we finish it today. Tonight, we bring the child up in the dark.”

  Haydon nodded. Sweat was dripping from the girl’s nose, her head was bowed, still avoiding Haydon’s eyes.

  “Is she a friend?” Haydon asked.

  The old woman grinned. “No, no.” She put an arm around the girl’s shoulders. “She is my granddaughter,” she said proudly.

  Haydon tried to return the old woman’s smile, but he felt the muscles around his mouth resist. Still he did smile, and the old woman saw that he understood her pride.

  “You know the Roosevelt Hospital?” Haydon asked.

  “I know where it is, yes.”

  Still squatting, Haydon took out his pen and a piece of paper from his wallet and wrote down the name of Dr. Bindo Salviati. He reached out and gave it to the old woman. “Take the girl there and have the doctor look at her ears. Maybe he can help.”

  The old woman took the piece of paper and nodded. She couldn’t read, and she didn’t have money for doctors, but she was being polite. Haydon told her the name and had the old woman repeat it. Then he reached into his wallet again and took out some money.

  “This will cover the cost of your taxi to and from the hospital, and it will cover the cost of the doctor’s examination. Dr. Salviati is a friend. He’ll know what to do for her if anything can be done. Do you understand?”

  The old woman nodded again and looked at Haydon, her face suddenly sober.

  “Do this for the girl,” Haydon said.

  The old woman nodded, her eyes watering.

  “For me,” Haydon said. “If anyone comes asking you if you have seen me, tell them you haven’t seen anyone.”

  “I will do it,” the old woman said with resolve.

  “I hope it goes well with you,” Haydon said, standing.

  “Se va bien,” the old woman said, and Haydon walked away.

  CHAPTER 41

  He made his way back up the road away from the promontory, keeping away from the dirt track itself by cutting through the rows of crypts. At each alleyway he could see the dirt road fifty meters away and on the other side of it the fringe of eucalyptus trees. Through the breaks in the trees he could see the opal sky over the ravine of the Rio La Barranca. The light through the trees continued to change as the afternoon sun fell toward the horizon, and now it was low enough to be directly in your eyes if you looked westward across the ravine.

  When he was about halfway back to the main avenue he met two of the caretakers, one carrying a spade and the other a pair of pruning shears. They were carrying a large plastic water jug between them, each holding on to one of the handles, and were headed toward the promontory. Haydon called to them softly, barely above a normal voice, and they stopped and put down the water jug as he approached.

  “Do you know the Capilla de San Rafael just off the main avenue?” he asked. He had seen it, a small Gothic mausoleum, near where he had stood watching the funeral procession.

  One of the men nodded.

  Haydon reached into his suit coat and produced his wallet once again. “If you will clean up around it now, before you go home for the day, I would appreciate it.” He handed them more money than they could have made in two weeks. “Someone wants to be there tomorrow morning early, and I would like to have it clean for them.”

  “Con mucho gusto,” one of the men said, and without further comment they turned around and picked up the water jug, with opposite hands this time, and headed back toward the entrance to the cemetery.

  Haydon looked at his watch. There was a little more than an hour before the scheduled meeting. He turned his back to the sun and walked a few meters farther into the crypts, searching a little while for the proper nook to provide him cover as well as a good vantage point from which to see the road. He sat down on a marble bench in the shade. Reaching in his pocket for the cigarettes, he remembered he had given them away. But he was lucky, one had fallen out in his pocket. He took it out and lighted it.

  He had been sitting there less than a minute when someone stepped between him and the sun. There wasn’t even time to flinch.

  “Well, well, an American smoking a cigarette.”

  Haydon recognized Borrayo’s voice immediately. He looked up at the sun, Borrayo was no fool, and saw the Guatemalan’s silhouette against it. It took all of his willpower, but he continued to smoke. Borrayo came
a few steps closer.

  “You are early, my friend,” he said.

  “Sit down, Efran,” Haydon said. He squeezed his elbow to his side, making sure the gun stuck into his waistband was covered. “You might as well tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “I guess you are right,” Borrayo said, moving around so that he was opposite Haydon. He was holding the gun he had shot the kid with in Colonia Santa Isabel. It wasn’t pointed at Haydon, just in Borrayo’s hand, which was hanging down at his side. He moved around behind a stela that sat at the front of the neighboring tomb and sat down in its shade. He rested his forearms on his knees, his hands dangling free, the gun carelessly held in the right one.

  “This is my last cigarette,” Haydon said.

  “That’s okay,” Borrayo shook his head. He was not dressed in his prison director’s uniform but in an old suit and a shirt with an open collar. His wavy gray hair was well coiffed, his handsome face, as he looked at Haydon, wore an amused if rather tense smile. “This is an awkward moment, huh?”

  “I don’t know,” Haydon said. “That depends on your intentions, I don’t feel awkward.”

  Borrayo laughed softly, appreciating Haydon’s own brand of machismo. “Well, you ought to feel a little nervous, then. Guatemala can be a dangerous country for Americans…who travel alone.”

  “Not if you have friends,” Haydon said. “Someone you can trust.” His head was close to the stone, and he could feel the radiated heat. He could also smell the odors of old tombs.

  Borrayo nodded, grinning. “You have these kinds of friends, huh?”

  “I used to think so.”

  “Nothing ever stays the same, Haydon. It is a sad fact of life.”

  Haydon could not imagine how Borrayo knew to come here or why he had come. His casual handling of the gun didn’t bode well for the meeting. Borrayo looked at his watch.

  “It is not too long before we have to be very quiet,” Borrayo said. “The fact is, I believe this Lena Muller is going to give you a collection of documents. I think General Azcona would love to have these documents. I would like to make him a gift of them.” He shrugged. It was that simple.

  “That’s all.”

  “Of course.”

  “You need that gun to take the documents?”

  Borrayo grinned. “I think it will make it easier.”

  “How did you know she was coming here?” Haydon dropped what remained of his cigarette and ground it out with his foot.

  “When I was listening to your conversation with Baine,” Borrayo said. “He mentioned this ‘Janet.’ After we got back to Pavón, I asked him a few questions about her. I had a couple of boys watch her house. I knew if her friend tried to get in touch with her it would have to be by messenger.” He paused and looked around, then back to Haydon. “The child was a good idea. The boys missed her the first time. But the second time they knew something was fishy so they followed her when she left the house.”

  Haydon couldn’t believe it. His heart began to pound though he knew they would not have harmed the little girl, because she couldn’t have told them anything.

  “A woman was waiting for her in a car a few blocks away. We questioned her, and she told us what was in the note.”

  When Borrayo “questioned” someone, the prospect of what might have happened at the interrogation was enough to make you weak in the knees.

  “And you don’t think the woman went straight to Lena Muller afterwards.”

  Borrayo shook his head. “I don’t think so.” And then he read Haydon’s thoughts. “No, no, the woman was not harmed,” Borrayo said. “She was hired for the job. It was only a job for her. She probably disappeared, knowing she would be in trouble for telling.”

  “Don’t you imagine she was supposed to report back, to tell Muller the message had been delivered?”

  “Perhaps. But I’m willing to bet she was afraid to go back.”

  “Then Muller would be suspicious if she didn’t return.” Haydon shook his head. “Nothing’s going to happen here now.”

  Borrayo shrugged. “Do you think I would be here if I didn’t believe she would come?”

  Something wasn’t making sense here. If Borrayo had actually “questioned” the woman, if she hadn’t returned to Muller, or rather to the guerrillas who must have arranged it, then Haydon was right. The guerrillas weren’t going to let Lena go anywhere. But Borrayo had shown up nevertheless. Haydon looked at the Guatemalan, who was watching him closely, watching to see if Haydon was going to come up with the right answer. It must have shown on his face. Borrayo slowly raised the automatic.

  “Don’t misunderstand what is happening here,” Borrayo said. “We have to talk, and I am afraid you are not going to like the questions.” Borrayo stood and slowly stepped over to Haydon. He released the safety on the automatic and pointed it at Haydon’s face, just out of Haydon’s reach. “Take the gun from your waist,” he said. “Use your left hand.”

  Haydon’s stomach rolled. He knew he could be dead in an instant.

  “We are going to go to the back of the cemetery,” Borrayo said, taking the gun. “General Azcona wants to have a short visit with you.”

  Haydon did not believe this. Azcona had nothing to say to Haydon. He only wanted him dead, the car bomb had not been an invitation to discuss anything. Borrayo wanted the gunshot to be a surprise, and he wanted Haydon close to the ravines so he could shove his body over the edge.

  “Just turn around and go back the way you came,” Borrayo said.

  Haydon did as he was told, and they started back through the tombs and crypts. He was stunned. He felt light-headed and nauseated and disbelieving. He thought of the man who had raped Borrayo’s niece and how Borrayo had embraced him as he fired point-blank again and again into his stomach until he went over the edge of the ravine in Santa Isabel. He thought of the young prisoner Borrayo had shot on the edge of the ravine in Santa Isabel, of how the blast had knocked him out of one of his shoes. When they got to the end of the promontory, in just a few moments, Haydon would be able to see the cliffs of Santa Isabel across the wide, deep scars of the ravine.

  As they rounded a corner and began walking down the long fiat façade of one of the multicrypt walls, Haydon felt as though he were wading through a surf, his legs became leaden, his muscles threatening to fail. He could hardly walk, and he was afraid his knees would buckle, something he very much wanted to avoid. Even if Borrayo actually killed him, he did not want his legs to buckle. He did not want Borrayo to see that. Even as this occurred to him, he thought how stupid such a prideful idea was at a moment like this. It was utterly lunatic.

  They passed along a wall of vaults, dozens of meters of stone draped in dead flowers, reaching more than twice as high as Haydon’s head, the falling sun dividing the wall into two distinct colors, its lower half blue with shadow, its upper half brassy in the changing light. It occurred to Haydon that he could think of nothing to do. He never dreamed it would be like this, and he felt as inept and helpless as an invalid. He couldn’t even think of anything to say, and Borrayo’s silence seemed insidious, as if he now had dropped all pretense that there was going to be any conversation at the end of the walk.

  They came to the end of the wall of crypts and entered an alley of tombs. There was dead grass growing in tufts everywhere along the stone walls of the tombs, and he saw a lizard, a large scaly one, with his belly flattened on the cool stone in a doorway. Here the land dropped slightly toward the promontory, and the late-afternoon smoke from the slums and garbage dumps in the ravines was beginning to seep up through the lowest cypresses. It was not until the last moment that Haydon realized that he had led them right back to the grave where he had left the old woman and the girl. Suddenly his heart caught like a faltering engine at the absurd possibility that the old woman could save him. They were several tombs away, twenty meters. No, the old woman couldn’t save him, but when they rounded the corner there would be a moment when Borrayo would be surprised that they
had walked up on them…a split second when his eyes would have to go to them.

  reflexively, unavoidably. Haydon began to imagine his movements, began to imagine how in that millisecond he would dive for the cliff and anything that happened to him from there would be preferable to the damage that Borrayo’s gun could do at close range.

  Ten meters, and Haydon could smell the eucalyptus blended with the stench of burning garbage, and it was almost more than he could do to keep from bolting before it was time. They rounded the last crypt, and Haydon stood in front of the empty grave. The old woman and the girl were gone. He stopped and turned around.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to kill me,” he heard himself say. It was an entirely unremarkable statement, and having said it he began to feel extraordinarily strange, as if the molecules in his body were beginning to separate. At this same moment his head filled with a whirring sound, and Borrayo shrugged and started to protest—the Judas words that preceded the end. No, no, no, Haydon had it all wrong, Borrayo said, holding the gun straight out in Haydon’s face. The General, he was going to come and talk to him. The General had questions. Haydon could not imagine why Borrayo was stalling. Haydon was suddenly sure that his legs were not going to buckle, and he judged the distance between himself and Borrayo, and between himself and the cliff. Borrayo was saying that Haydon would find that the General was a fair man…and Haydon observed the alignment of the barrel of the gun along Borrayo’s arm…and he took in his breath as if he were about to go under water.

  As Borrayo demurred in the moments before he pulled the trigger, with his back a couple of meters from the tomb behind him, Haydon saw the arc of something dull move forward above Borrayo’s head.

  The rusty point of the pickax struck Borrayo precisely and quite fortuitously in the hollow between his shoulder and his neck, just above the clavicle. The location of the lucky blow made it instantly paralyzing, but beyond that, the force of the swing augmented by the heaviness of the head of the pickax was devastating, and Borrayo staggered, bending backward with the weight of the blow. But Borrayo’s own weight threw him off balance, and he fell awkwardly toward the slope of the recently excavated earth, landing on his own gun, which went off with a muffled whump, blowing out the side of his neck.