Haydon gaped at the girl, who had swung the pickax, and at the old woman, who stood right behind her, her arm out as she reached to touch the girl’s back. None of them said anything for a moment, and then Haydon’s mind caught hold, and he scrambled across the mound of earth and rolled Borrayo over on his back. He pulled his own handgun out of Borrayo’s waistband and retrieved Borrayo’s automatic out of the mud of blood. He reached into the Guatemalan’s suit coat and removed his wallet. It was fat with money, which he took out and held in his hand as he checked Borrayo’s identification. There was nothing there Haydon could use. Standing, he flung the wallet as hard as he could down into the brush of the ravine, the papers flying out of it and scattering in the smoky dusk.
Haydon then grabbed Borrayo’s arms and started dragging him the few meters to the edge of the cliff. The old woman and girl started to help, but Haydon waved them away. Somehow the thought of the two women dragging the gore-spattered body would transform the bizarre incident into a criminal complicity. As it stood now, it was an event of surrealism in a time and place that existed apart from a rational reality. In the space of time that bracketed Borrayo’s death, there were no more corollaries. Haydon could accept that brief suspension of reality. It was one of those inexplicable things, it happened. But a conspiracy between himself and these destitute women crossed over into rationality. It allowed a flicker of light into the abyss, and right now Haydon did not want to accept the burden of trying to understand what the light revealed. It was better to leave the abyss in darkness.
Did that make sense? Sense? Could he ever employ the concept of “sense” in this context? He didn’t know, didn’t want to know, and then he was rolling Borrayo over the edge, and the bullish body of the Guatemalan who had committed so many cruelties fell like a millstone, crashing into the darkening underbrush high above the Rio La Barranca.
Haydon turned and stepped over to the girl and looked at her, seeing for the first time that she had a face in transition. She was at once child and woman, and one had only to imagine a world for her and her face would assume the features to inhabit it. She was a changeling of necessity. Haydon wanted to embrace her, could almost feel the girl’s thin, bony shoulders, but he didn’t. He turned to the old woman and gave her the money from Borrayo’s wallet.
“Tell the girl that I have no words strong enough or beautiful enough to thank her…and tell…” Haydon couldn’t begin to express what he was feeling, the sense of rebirth at having been so astonishingly delivered from a certain death, the appalling bleakness he felt that the girl had done such a horrible thing on his behalf. And he didn’t dare speculate why the girl (and the old woman) had done it.
“I understand,” the old woman said, interrupting Haydon’s mute and futile search for words. Her ancient face was turning gold from the light filtered through the cypresses. She looked at her granddaughter and then at the grave and her fistful of folded money. “It could not be helped.”
CHAPTER 42
Haydon left the old woman and the girl once again and headed back toward the main avenue. This time, sure that Lena was not going to show for the meeting, he simply walked up the rutted road, not bothering to weave his way among the tombs for cover. His legs were rubbery, and he remembered how he had not wanted them to buckle before Borrayo shot him, but now it seemed an unavoidable embarrassment. He weaved off the side of the road and into the first row of tombs and dropped down in the shade of one of the stones. The muscles in his legs were as feeble as if he had been bedridden through a long illness. And he was drenched in a cold sweat. Suddenly he was vomiting, sitting on the flat surface stone of a grave, his head bent over the dried grass between his legs. For the second time that day he gave in to the revolt of his nerves, coughing up the fear that had curdled in his stomach.
When he finished, he moved away to another stone, to its shady side where he leaned his back against its cool face. He sat very still and thought of the peculiar sight of the arc of the head of the pickax as it rose and fell behind Borrayo. He thought of the expression on Borrayo’s face, a grimace of pain that must have been so excruciating that it instantly became the center of Borrayo’s existence, overriding even the surprise he must surely have felt for an infinitesimal flash. And then he fell on his own gun and shot himself as he had shot so many others, his own death his last execution. It was a queer kind of justice, though Haydon had to admit that by Guatemalan standards it was a symmetrical event.
Haydon’s own salvation was another matter. The fact that he was sitting there in the shade of someone else’s tombstone, alive enough to cough up his guts into the dried grass, made no kind of sense at all.
After a few minutes he managed to get to his feet. He leaned against the stone a moment and then went back to the dirt drive and started walking again. He was just about to the point where Borrayo had intercepted him when he saw Janet’s Land-Rover emerge from around the only bend the lane made after it left the main avenue.
When she got to him, he could see her worried face through the windshield even before she stopped. He walked to the passenger door and got in.
“What’s the matter?” she asked immediately. “You all right?”
“Do you think you were followed?” Haydon leaned his head back against the seat. His legs were suddenly incapacitated, and the muscles in his arms actually quivered.
“I’ve been driving, doing all kinds of crap, went into parking garages, private drives, the produce market downtown, everything. If anyone was following me they probably ran out of gas.” She frowned at Haydon. “No one’s here, are they?”
“No,” he said. “And they won’t be. Turn around, there, between those two tombs.”
“I’ll just go down to the end…”
“No. Here. Just do it.”
“What the hell’s going on…I don’t think…”
“Just back around,” Haydon said, and Janet threw the Land-Rover in reverse and backed in between the tombs and cut the engine.
“You tell me what the hell’s going on.”
They were facing the sunset, which hit the Land-Rover’s windshield at just the right angle to create a screen of the dust and bugs plastered to the glass. He told her the whole story, how he had gotten there and what had happened. She listened, her face drawn at the craziness of it. When he finished, she leaned forward, resting her head on the steering wheel.
“Surely…you don’t think…he did anything to the little girl, do you?”
“I don’t, I really don’t. Not because he wouldn’t, but because he couldn’t gain anything by it.”
Janet sat there, staring at the dust on the dash through the steering wheel.
“You haven’t heard from anyone else?” Haydon asked.
“No, nothing.” She raised her head and looked at him. “You don’t think this is the end of it, do you? She’ll get in touch again, won’t she?”
“I think she will.” Haydon was so shaken, so tired he didn’t even know what he could do to relax.
“This is too much,” she said. “When this is over I’m leaving this goddamned country. Nobody wants to live like this. I don’t have to. I don’t need it.” She was silent a moment and then she said, “This girl killed him with a pickax?”
Haydon had closed his eyes, and when he opened them the sun was striking the dusty windshield at such an angle that the glass was completely opaque with gold. He flinched and lowered his eyes. Janet had been driving with her skirt hiked up on her thighs because of the heat, and he looked at her long, bare legs.
He looked up at her, and she was staring straight into the gold, a gleaming molten ribbon of it running down her profile, outlining her forehead and nose and lips and chin…and on the other side of her, through the window and farther up the lane, he saw the glint from the front bumper of a car stopped just behind the white painted trunk of a cypress up on the main avenue.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
Janet reached for the ignition, and s
uddenly Haydon stared at the keys. “Wait a minute,” he said.
“What? You don’t want to go?”
“Borrayo must’ve driven here. He wouldn’t have walked in. Not very far, anyway.”
“Okay.”
“Up there, at the head of this lane,” he said. “Someone’s parked behind the cypresses.”
Janet looked around. They were probably watching them with binoculars, and it was all right if they saw that she knew they were there.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Haydon said, “but I want to find Borrayo’s transportation, and I’d rather do it without anyone seeing me. Let’s just pull out and drive straight toward them. I’m guessing they don’t want us to see who they are…”
“What if they’re Azcona’s—”
“Borrayo was Azcona’s. I doubt if Borrayo wanted anyone with him. Just drive up there; they’ll leave.”
Janet pulled out on the lane, and immediately the parked car made a U-turn from behind the cypresses and disappeared. Haydon was secretly relieved. He had gotten to the point where he didn’t know if his judgments were valid anymore or not.
“When you get to the avenue, start back toward the entrance,” he said. “I’m going to look for the car, probably a Cherokee or something like that, or a van, parked alone. He probably dropped it off somewhere. Go slow and watch the lanes to your left. I’ll cover the ones to the right.”
In a moment they were back to the main avenue, and at the far end the deep portico with its high Roman arch was crowded with people leaving the cemetery before the official closing time, caretakers and tourists and visiting families and lovers who found the wooded lanes and isolated shady benches the perfect seclusion. Everyone, all of them, beginning a leisurely and general migration toward the cemetery’s cool portico.
“There.” Janet quickly took her foot off the accelerator but let the Rover idle along. She leaned her head back against the seat to allow Haydon to look across in front of her, and indeed, a red Cherokee was parked alone halfway down the lane.
“Go past,” Haydon said. “Make a U-turn and come back, pull off just enough for me to open the door and get out using the cypresses for cover. After I’m out, turn and go into the lanes on the other side of the avenue. Just drive around or stop or whatever you want to do. Give me ten minutes. Then come back and pick me up down there,” he said, pointing two lanes down from Borrayo’s Cherokee.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” Janet said. And she did. She did exactly as Haydon had asked, the U-turn, coming back and pulling over as Haydon jumped out, and then crossing to the opposite lane, she kept driving.
Haydon ran along behind the tombs and in a few moments was coming up to the driver’s door of the Cherokee. It was locked, of course. He picked up a piece of granite near one of the crypts and bashed in the side window, the sound dying quickly among the rows and rows of tombs. He reached in and unlocked the car. There was a radio and a small notebook on the front seat, which he immediately grabbed. Under the front seat he found a box of cartridges for the gun Borrayo had carried, which he slipped into his coat pocket along with the notebook. The Cherokee was trashy. Copies of the two dailies. La Prensa Libre and El Gráfico, littered the floor, along with empty Gallo beer bottles that clinked under the paper as Haydon hurriedly felt his way around in the grit. He found a Tupperware container with tortillas in it and a grease-stained grocery sack with the remnants of pan dulce.
In the rear seat Haydon lifted another copy of El Gráfico and uncovered an Uzi. It was well oiled with a full clip. He took it. Now that the Cherokee had been broken into, it would be irresponsible to leave the Uzi there, but it made him uncomfortable to have it.
Moving faster, he went back to the front seat and tried the glove compartment. It was locked. He got out and picked up the piece of granite again, crawled back in, and hammered on the lock until it popped open. Inside, bound with rubber bands, was a thick packet of identity cards of Guatemalans, men and women of every age who were, Haydon guessed, the occupants of obscure cells somewhere in Guatemala’s gulag of clandestine prisons. Clearly Borrayo did not keep such evidence in his car at all times. He was, no doubt, about to make a delivery. Along with these cards was another notebook, smaller than the first one. Haydon pocketed all the ID cards and the notebook. There was nothing else in the compartment that was of immediately discernible value. He started to back out of the car and then at the last moment reached back into the glove compartment and picked up a couple of maps of Guatemala that lay on the bottom.
He scrambled out of the Cherokee and closed the door. The sun had dropped behind the horizon now, and the day was quickly reaching the hour when all colors were drained of intensity, softened and became pastels, just before everything gave way to shades of blue and slate and charcoal.
Running back toward the avenue, he was grateful for the painted trunks of the cypresses in the dying light. When he was within fifty meters of the avenue he turned right and worked his way through the tombs, one, two lanes west. Darkness was falling faster than he wanted, and then suddenly, to his left, he saw the taillights of Janet’s Land-Rover. She was turning and coming back, driving slowly.
He stepped out quickly from the margin of cypresses until he heard the Rover speed up and he knew she had seen him, and then he stepped back so that he could not be seen from any distance except from directly across the way. Janet pulled the Rover to the side and stopped close to the trees as before, the door was flung open, and Haydon jumped inside with the Uzi.
“Damn, I was getting scared,” she said, downshifting and turning back toward the entrance yet again. “They’re closing the gates down there.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Christ, was that in there?” she asked, nodding at the Uzi.
“And other stuff,” Haydon said. His pockets were loaded.
“Anything important? Anything we can use?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
The dusk was thick beneath the cypresses, and Janet had to turn on the lights, her beams picking up the people filing out through the portico, the guards milling around, watching people leave. There was one other car ahead of them, a family, the small, busy heads of the children showing up like shadow games in the headlights. They crept through the portico in a tight cluster with the Guatemalans on foot, and for a few tense moments Haydon half expected the doors of the Land-Rover to be jerked open by gunmen. When they finally emerged out onto 5a avenida Haydon relaxed his hand on the Uzi.
“What now?” Janet asked.
Haydon was slumped against the door. He felt as if his body were five times its weight. He didn’t think his system was capable of producing another single drop of adrenaline.
“I need a drink and a bath,” he said. “I need to sit still for a few hours.”
“What about Lena? What about the meeting?” Janet was frowning, leaning forward over the steering wheel.
“There’s nothing more we can do until she contacts you again,” Haydon said wearily. “There’s simply nothing more you can do.”
“Christ.” Janet was flying down 20 calle.
“I don’t want to go back to the Residencial Reforma,” Haydon said. “I’d like to use one of your spare bedrooms. Just for tonight.”
“Sure, of course,” Janet said, surprised. “Fine with me. It would be better anyway, if someone comes from Lena.”
“Your security system works?” he asked.
“Of course…”
“You haven’t heard from Pitt?” He was holding the Uzi across his lap. “Or Cage?”
Janet shook her head. “No. I haven’t heard from either of them.”
“Did you see anyone back there, when you were waiting for me?”
“Anyone watching me? No. I looked for a car that might have been the one we saw, but I only saw three or four cars and none of them looked to me like they could have been surveillance.”
“What does surveillance look like?”
“Okay, I don’t know what ‘surveillance’ looks like, but I know I didn’t see anybody I thought was watching me.”
“Okay.” Haydon’s weariness was so great that he suddenly felt as if he had been drugged. He was absolutely sapped of strength. He couldn’t get his mind off Borrayo, couldn’t get his mind off the memory of himself standing on the edge of the ravine looking into the Guatemalan’s handsome soulless eyes and knowing his intentions. There had been only a breath—less than that—between sitting in the car with Janet and lying in the brush of the ravine where Borrayo was now.
And he was furious with Pittner. Where the hell had he been? Before Haydon had left the Residencial Reforma he had called the number Pittner had assured him would ring on his desk. Someone else answered, and when Haydon had asked for him he was told Pittner was not there but that he could leave a message. That was hardly the kind of management he would have expected from a Chief of Station. Haydon hadn’t had any choice. Either he was going to take advantage of the opportunity or he wasn’t. Pittner’s being conveniently out of the office made Haydon suspicious. Pittner had told Haydon not to leave the Residencial until Pittner got back to him. He had told Haydon that the hotel was a “known” location and would always be safe. Now it seemed that Pittner’s advice was a thinly disguised effort to keep him bound to one spot, out of trouble and out of the way. Haydon was a long way from having gotten a fix on Bennett Pittner.
And Cage, curiously, hadn’t been heard from in almost twenty-four hours.
Body of Truth Page 34