Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  CHAPTER 43

  Haydon got an old airline flight bag from Janet and put Borrayo’s automatic and everything he had taken out of Borrayo’s car into it and zipped it closed. He didn’t take the time to look at any of it but followed Janet down the hallway past her own bedroom and around the corner to another bedroom, which, like hers, looked out onto the courtyard. The bedroom was large with a sitting area at one end and at the opposite end, the bathroom, also spacious, and also with windows looking out onto the courtyard.

  Janet told him she would get something started in the kitchen and left him alone. He closed the door and locked it and turned off the light that Janet had flipped on when she led him into the room. With the lights off, he walked to the open windows and looked out. He could hear the fountain, and across the courtyard a soft topaz light illuminated the living room and farther to the right a slightly brighter light issued from the kitchen where he could see Janet and her maid moving about and could catch snatches of their conversation, a phrase here, a word there. The rest of the house, at least that part which faced the courtyard, was dark.

  He turned away from the windows and walked over to the sitting area where there was a telephone to one side of an armchair. He dialed the number Pittner had given him. This time he wasn’t given the brush-off; no one even answered.

  He walked back to the bed and put the flight bag under it so that he could see just the edge of it from the bathroom door. He went to the bathroom and turned on the light and pulled the linen curtains over the windows. Returning to the bedroom, he took the Smith & Wesson out of his waistband and put it under the bed with the flight bag and began undressing in the half dark, shaking out his suit and shirt before he laid them out on the bed. He wished he had the clean change of clothes that was back at the Residencial Reforma.

  He showered with the bathroom door open, concentrating hard on the sensations immediately at hand—the echo of the water off the tile walls, the spiky cold streams hitting his bare skin, the faint smell of the mock-orange flowers coming through the open windows from the courtyard—anything to keep the images of the long, violent day out of his mind.

  Afterward he dried off with a towel, which he then wrapped around his waist, and started looking for a razor and shaving soap. He found them inside a little cabinet just to the right of the sink, laid out neatly on a white towel. There were three different kinds of cologne. Everything immaculate. Janet, he supposed, liked to be prepared for male companionship whenever it might happen her way. When he finished he combed his hair in front of the mirror and walked back into the bedroom.

  He dressed, once again thinking of the clean clothes back at his hotel. As he was sitting on the foot of the bed tying his shoes, there was a knock at the door.

  “Haydon,” Janet said. “I’ve got a drink for you.”

  He walked to the door and opened it, and she stood there with two glasses. She held one out.

  “Gin and tonic and lime,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said, and Janet stepped into the room.

  “No lights?”

  Haydon took his drink.

  Janet closed the door and walked over to the sitting area and sat down in an armchair, putting her drink on the coffee table in front of her. She had changed clothes; she smelled faintly of bath oil.

  “Earlier you cautioned me about listening devices,” she said. “Sweeping a house like this is an expensive proposition. But I can afford one room. This is it.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Haydon said.

  “Actually, it was Cage’s idea, back when we were trysting. He put me in touch with a guy. I’ve kept in touch with him.”

  “Why not your bedroom?”

  “Because it’s my bedroom.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Haydon asked, sipping gratefully from the tall glass of gin.

  “Because I want to see what’s in the flight bag,” she said.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he said, walking over to her.

  “I didn’t ask you if it was a good idea,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I think I’d be a fool to cooperate with you if you don’t cooperate with me.”

  Haydon sipped the gin again. He had never met a larger collection of mercenaries in his life. He stepped over and put his drink down beside Janet’s, went back to the bed, dragged out the flight bag and brought it around. Sitting down next to her in another armchair, he put the flight bag between his feet on the floor and unzipped it. Janet got up and closed the curtains and turned on a couple of lamps.

  Haydon took out the Uzi and set it on the floor to his right. He took out Borrayo’s gun, which he now noticed was also a Smith & Wesson 1006. It only proved how “plugged in” the Central American arms merchants were. The “new” FBI tests that recently had revolutionized thinking about the effectiveness of 9mm’s and had caused the Bureau to change over to 10mm’s had already made their impact in the hinterlands. The arms merchants had the new guns into the hands of the rabble in less than a year. This one was caked with the mud made from Borrayo’s own blood. Haydon made a mental note to clean it. He laid it next to the Uzi along with the box of ammunition.

  Then he pulled out the larger of the two notebooks, the packet of ID cards bound with rubber bands, the smaller notebook that had been with them in the glove compartment, and the two maps.

  Janet leaned over slowly as though she could not believe her eyes and picked up the packet of identity cards.

  “What in the hell are these,” she said softly, realizing what she must be looking at even as she said it.

  “There must be a couple of dozen there,” Haydon said.

  Janet removed the rubber band and counted. “Thirty-three,” she said, looking at the collection of cards as if she had come upon the chronicles of a lost civilization, which, in a sense, she had.

  “My God.” She was almost whispering. “Those bastards. Some of these are driver’s licenses, some of them are simple cédulas.”

  Haydon picked up the smaller of the two notebooks and opened it to the first page. Borrayo was nothing if not efficient. It seemed that this was an accounting of the desaparecidos, the “disappeared”, who had fallen under his jurisdiction during the time (nearly three years) that he had been the overseer of the clandestine prisons, not only at Pavón, but at six other sites as they had shifted locations over the thirty-two-month period. Borrayo had recorded the full name (and sex) of the person kidnapped, place and date of disappearance, and site of incarceration. Unfortunately the site was in code. Each of the six “prisons” had had lines drawn through the code and a new code penciled in, indicating the location of the prison had moved. The site with the least relocations was four, the one with the most was eight. Haydon guessed that a “prison” referred to a group of several interrogators (torturers) who, even though they were moved around, stayed together, constituting a unit.

  When he realized what he had, Haydon quickly turned to the back of the book. The last week had yielded only three persons within Borrayo’s jurisdiction…three persons and one asterisk.

  As Haydon examined the notebook, he slowly began to realize that what he was looking at was in fact a rogue accounting. In the proper order of things, Borrayo apparently was supposed to turn the identity documents over to some other authority once he had collected them, but Borrayo’s cunning could not allow that. For whatever reason, he was hedging his bets against the system. He was keeping his own files, thinking that some day in some way he might be able to exploit them. Borrayo knew that information was often the route to advancement, or at least, in a worst-case situation, it might well be a means of saving one’s neck. Unfortunately, in this instance it hadn’t paid off.

  While he was examining the notebook, Haydon also kept an eye on Janet. She sat with her feet and legs together, leaning forward with the cards in her lap. She went through the stack methodically, picking them up one at a time, reading the name of each victim, reading the stark, bottom-line data available on each c
ard, and then looking at the photograph. She tended to dwell on the photographs. When she finished, she put the rubber band around the pile of cards and returned it to the coffee table. She reached for her glass, took several swallows and looked at Haydon.

  “What’s in the notebook?” Her voice was flat.

  He told her and made a mental note to himself that if the asterisk in the notebook represented Baine, then Borrayo must have kept his driver’s license out of the collection or Janet would have discovered it. That meant that Baine’s abduction was not even being registered within the clandestine system, further proof that General Azcona’s quarrel with John Baine and Lena Muller was strictly a personal affair. Baine, at least, didn’t even exist off the record. And Haydon saw no mention of Jim Fossler.

  “These are people they’ve abducted,” Janet said.

  Haydon nodded. “I don’t know what the time frame is here. Maybe a month or more. It’s difficult to estimate with the recent escalation in disappearances. I’d have to read the notebook and compare it with the photographs.”

  “And they’re in those goddamned hidden prisons,” she said.

  Haydon didn’t respond.

  “Alive,” she said. “Or half alive. Soon to be dead.” She jerked her head around to Haydon. “What are you going to do with this stuff?”

  “I’ve got to think about it,” he said.

  “Think about it? Christ, don’t think about it. Give it to the damn newspapers.”

  “You know better than that. Which newspaper do you think is going to stick its neck out?”

  “Maybe they’d surprise you,” she said. “Maybe…maybe someone would get some balls if they had solid evidence…like this.”

  “We’ve got to think about it,” Haydon repeated. “If there’s a way we can use this to help Lena we’d better make sure we’ve thought it through. We can’t afford to screw it up.”

  Janet slumped back in her chair, and Haydon picked up the other notebook. This seemed to be just that, a notebook. It wasn’t a calendar or an address book, though there were dates in it as well as addresses. It seemed quite a random collection of data that owed more to Borrayo’s own peculiar psychology than to any conventional organization like the methodical list of desaparecidos in the other book. A few pages were torn out here and there, things scratched out, an abundance of doodling—mostly numerals drawn to appear three dimensional, thick numerals with shaded sides, sometimes evidencing a considerable ability at draftsmanship. There were notations about firearms, certain kinds of bullets with a list of various powder-grain loads. He came across a list of wholesale prices of truck tires, almost half a page filled with tiny numbers of tire sizes and the discounted prices for them in volume. On one page there were three columns of girls’ names, one name after the other with no other notations at all except for a hodgepodge collection of the recurring three-dimensional numerals that surrounded the names. Addresses were scribbled on many pages and at every imaginable angle. And telephone numbers. Haydon couldn’t make any sense of the book at all. If there was anything there for them to use he wouldn’t be able to tease it out in time to help them.

  Haydon tossed the book back onto the coffee table and picked up his drink.

  There was a soft knock at the bedroom door. Janet looked at her watch. “That’s Mirtha. She’s been laying out something for us to eat before she goes home. You hungry?”

  “Very,” Haydon said. He bent and began putting the things back into the flight bag while Janet went to the door. He heard her talking to the maid, but it wasn’t about dinner. Janet’s voice changed, reflecting concern, the maid’s voice an urgent stage whisper, repeating something, Janet’s placating, telling her she was sorry, very sorry. She turned around.

  “Haydon, I’ll be back in a second,” she said and walked out of the room with the maid, talking.

  Haydon stood, stepped over to the lights and turned them off again, then went to the bathroom, turned on the light there and shut the door partway. He went to the windows, pulled back the curtains again and looked toward the kitchen windows where he saw Janet and the maid talking, the maid gesturing, Janet nodding, shaking her head, assuring. After a moment the two women passed through the darkened dining room and into the topaz light of the living room, still talking, Janet’s arm around the maid. They disappeared out into the breezeway, and after a moment Janet came back in alone and Haydon watched her return quickly through the house until she was at the bedroom door again.

  She pushed open the door and came into the shadowy room where Haydon was waiting. Pausing, she closed the door behind her with one arm.

  “What’s the matter?” Haydon asked.

  “Mirtha’s husband drives a taxi,” Janet said, her voice wooden. She came forward and stood in front of Haydon and folded her arms. “They live in Colonia La Reformita, Zona 12. Every evening at this time he comes and picks her up. Today, when he went by their house to check with the kids as he does routinely every afternoon to make sure they’ve gotten home from school all right, there were men at his house. Three men and a woman…a gringa. They were inside.” Janet swallowed. “It was obviously Lena. She knew who he was, who Mirtha was, their routine. She wanted him to tell his wife to give me a message when he picked her up tonight. They made him repeat it several times. She just did that.”

  Haydon supposed the fate of the little girl and her mother had been a painful lesson to the guerrillas. This was a good solution, a smart one. This time the message would be delivered by someone who would not raise the suspicion of any stakeout.

  “She wants us to meet her tomorrow night—‘where I wanted to buy the amber candles’ was what she said. She said this was the last chance. Be careful. She said, ‘There is a queez-ling.’ That’s the way Mirtha pronounced it, queez-ling.” Janet was puzzled.

  Haydon was stumped for a moment, too, but only for a moment. “Quisling,” he said. “A traitor.”

  “A traitor?”

  “What about ‘where I wanted to buy the amber candles’?”

  “That’s Cobán, a town up in Alta Verapaz. I remember that. Lena and I went there for a weekend one time and she found some huge amber candles there. They were for the altar of the church, I mean, that’s what they were made for, altar candles. But she saw them, fell in love with them, wanted to buy them.” She shrugged. “But the little store, the woman there had just made them for the priest and they were only hanging there until the priest came for them. Lena went on and on about them, they were huge…amber candles.”

  Haydon knew what was happening. “Why didn’t she just say ‘Cobán’?” he asked, wondering if Janet was going to see what Lena was getting at. “And why didn’t she simply say ‘traitor’ instead of ‘Quisling,’ a word she must have had to teach Mirtha’s husband to say?”

  Janet simply stared at him and shook her head. Even in the night shadows he could see the puzzlement in her face.

  “She didn’t want the messenger to understand the message,” he said. “Others besides Borrayo knew we were going to be at the cemetery. Maybe they also found out by other means than that used by Borrayo.”

  Janet’s face did not change expression, she simply began shaking her head. “I don’t believe that…”

  “You can’t blame her for being tempted,” Haydon said. “Maybe she didn’t even have a choice. She has a family to worry about. She obviously was frightened by Lena’s visit to her house, her husband finding these people waiting there with their children when he came in. Who knows what kind of pressures were put on her to inform on you.”

  Janet turned away from him and walked to the windows and looked out to the courtyard. “I feel like a fool,” she said. “Like a child. All this going on around me, and I blithely blundered on.”

  Haydon wasn’t going to tell her who he thought Mirtha was informing for. He wasn’t going to tell her that in his estimation Bennett Pittner had known everything that had gone on in Janet’s house ever since he had moved out, and probably long before, too, wh
ich in all likelihood is how he knew about Janet’s affair with Cage in the first place.

  “What are we going to do?” she said. Janet sounded like a woman who had just had the wind knocked out of her. Perhaps she understood far more than Haydon believed, far more than Haydon could even know.

  “If it worked,” Haydon said, walking over to the bed and sitting down near her, “then we have a head start.”

  “To Cobán.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But we’ll be followed.”

  “That’s right. But if we can lose them this time, if we do it right, we could make this last chance work.”

  “You know some magic tricks?” she asked.

  “No magic,” he said. “Just tricks.”

  CHAPTER 44

  They drove to the nearby Zona Viva where the best restaurants in the city were scattered among high-dollar hotels and expensive shops and exclusive boutiques. They went to a Chinese restaurant, one wing of which was a huge renovated junk nestled into a stand of coconut palms and illuminated by emerald landscaping lights. The parking lot was full.

  Haydon asked to be seated in the dining room with the largest windows, but at a table well away from them. They ordered drinks and appetizers, and while Janet watched the parking lot and the only entrance to the restaurant, Haydon went to the small anteroom outside the rest rooms. He took a notepad from the shelves underneath the telephones, wrote DESCOMPUESTO on a sheet of paper and wedged it into the frame of the telephone next to the one he was going to use.

  He made several calls to Belize City before he reached the party he was seeking. He made inquiries, checked data, received confirmations, double-checked data, and hung up. His next series of calls were local. Again he had to make several calls before he reached the party he wanted. This conversation was briefer than the one to Belize City, but it required some explication. When he was satisfied, he hung up and looked at his watch. The calls had taken seventeen minutes in all. He made one more, but no one answered. He wouldn’t call Pittner again. He took the sign off the neighboring telephone and walked back into the dining room.