Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  CHAPTER 45

  Cage stormed out of the house, and neither Haydon nor Janet moved to follow him. Outside the fountain splashed almost too softly to hear, and one could easily be distracted from it by the small snicking sounds of the parrot eating cashews just a few feet away. Haydon looked at the manila envelope dangling from his hand and let it drop on the floor. He felt too numb and tried to ignore the crawling nausea in his stomach.

  “I’m sorry…” Janet said. “I don’t…” She stopped, it seemed, at the futility of being able to say anything meaningful. She didn’t continue, but she reached up and turned off the lamp that Haydon had turned on between them, and they fell instantly into the softer topaz light of other lamps. Sighing, she laid her head back against her chair.

  “The whole house is swept regularly, isn’t it Janet,” Haydon said. “Not just that one bedroom, but the whole place.”

  She said nothing, but sat as if wrapped in a dark silence of old and familiar disappointments, failures that no longer could be avoided with redirected enthusiasms and spirited denials, but which, ultimately, had to be confronted as the empty disillusionments of what finally had become the story of her life.

  “I didn’t understand…,” Haydon mused thoughtfully, “the extent to which your lives had become interdependent, the three of you, until Cage’s remarks about Pittner just then. I realized Pittner wasn’t wiring the house. Cage wouldn’t have said those things…”

  “But not out of respect.”

  “No, just because it would have been bad business.”

  “Apparently Cage has been talking,” Janet said.

  “Some.”

  Again there was a long while when there was only the sound of the fountain and the parrot cracking cashews.

  “We’ve been unraveling for a long time,” she said. “Each of us in his own peculiar way. We’re just about at the end of it. It’s been going on too long, the three of us. It’s complex…hell, we don’t understand it either.”

  Haydon didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to listen to anything confessional; he didn’t want to know about it. He only wanted to concentrate on getting out of Guatemala with Lena Muller, if Lena Muller wanted to go.

  “How long have you known Pittner was in intelligence work?”

  “Years,” she said. “From the beginning, Pitt shared a lot with me. Not actual intelligence, just realities about his job, the eccentricities about how he had to live. I think he did that because it was getting hard for him, the double life. He didn’t want to make up half of what he was anymore. The house became a haven in that way. He made sure it was clean, still does.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the divorce didn’t really change anything that much. Between us, I mean. He was over here a lot.”

  “What about Cage and Pitt?”

  “They were great friends, close friends…and enemies…long before I came into the story.” She sat up in her chair. “I’ve got to have a drink. How about you?” Haydon nodded, and Janet stood and walked out of the room and into the kitchen. When she returned she had two glasses with ice and slices of lime in them. She went to the liquor caddy and mixed in gin and tonic. She walked over and handed one to Haydon and then went over to the parrot and stood by its perch and watched him, holding her drink.

  “What’s their relationship at this moment?” Haydon asked. “After all that’s passed between them—among you—where do they stand?”

  Janet continued looking at the bird, her back half turned from him. She sipped her drink and then reached out to the bird, which quickly leaned over and viciously nipped at her finger. Janet jerked back, her forefinger doubled up, blood already running down the back of her hand. She didn’t say anything, only tucked her finger into her fist, trying to cover the laceration with her thumb. She turned and walked into the kitchen, and Haydon heard her running the water. A drawer opened and closed and then Janet walked back into the room with a damp paper towel wrapped around her finger. She came back to her chair, put her drink on the table between them, and began unwrapping a bandage.

  “It was my fault,” she said calmly. “I’ve done it before. I had another parrot, the one before this one, that would let you pet it. I’d had the bird a long time, this one’s still young.” She concentrated on wrapping the adhesive around her finger. “They’re so pretty you want to touch them.”

  She finished with the bandage, and when she turned to pick up her drink again, Haydon noticed that she had tears in her eyes, a glistening trail on one cheek.

  “I don’t think they’ve seen each other in quite a while,” she said. “I know I haven’t seen them together in a long time.”

  “What’s quite a while?” Haydon didn’t think the tears had anything to do with the nip from the parrot.

  “Five months, I guess. Tonight was the first time I’d seen Cage in…that long, at least.”

  Haydon quickly calculated that that was about the time Lena was discharged from the Peace Corps and left Guatemala.

  “How much do you know about their working relationship?”

  “I don’t know anything about it at all,” Janet said. “I really don’t. I told you, I don’t know detail kinds of things. Only that they’re in the same business; they have some dealings with each other.”

  Haydon didn’t believe her, but it didn’t seem to matter. They were all lying. The best he could hope for was that at some point he would get a lucky break. His biggest concern was Pittner’s silence.

  “You seem to have a genuine affection for Lena,” Haydon said.

  “I do, yes.”

  “Why?”

  Janet raised her glass to her lips and drank the gin. “That’s a hell of a question.”

  “I don’t think it’s so unusual, certainly not as unusual as the relationship among the four of you. I thought you might find it a little awkward to have a close friend who was having simultaneous affairs with your ex-husband and your ex-lover.”

  Janet, slumped back in her chair, crossed her legs. “I would have bet my last dollar you would have to say that sooner or later,” she said. “It’s just too damn tempting.” She daubed the bottom of her sweaty glass on her knee, making a dark splotch on her dress. “It rather conjures up images of dissolution, doesn’t it.”

  She sat in silence a moment, and Haydon waited, his nostrils picking up the pungent fetor of the burned garbage with which the atmosphere seemed especially laden this evening.

  “I kept looking for something that would make sense,” she said. “In ‘relationships,’ I mean. And when I found it I was surprised that it was something…something more like friendship. It doesn’t necessarily revolve around sex at all. It’s less explosive than that, but somehow has more depth.” She shook her head slowly. “I find that it doesn’t matter to me—not when it comes right down to it—so much how it is between them and Lena. I can tell you this, though, whatever is going on…Pitt and Cage are kidding themselves. Men always go into these things like they’re sleepwalking, with their eyes closed, their minds misreading dream and reality, and all their glands pumping overtime. They think they’re awake, they act like they’re awake, but their brains are asleep. I can promise you, Lena’s the only one who knows what in the hell’s going on here.”

  Haydon hesitated only a moment.

  “You knew Pitt was having an affair with Lena?”

  “I was reasonably sure.”

  “Did you have any idea what that was costing him?”

  She looked over at Haydon. “Costing him?”

  “It was a dangerous thing for him to do.”

  “Dangerous, you mean for his career?”

  “Yes.”

  Janet smiled sourly and turned away again. She looked at the parrot, its round red eye, unblinking. “Pitt never runs that kind of a risk.”

  “He did this time.”

  “He told you this?”

  “We talked about it.”

  Janet stared through the topaz light at the picture ove
r the fireplace, the purple volcanoes looming over a lush landscape that Guatemala used to enjoy when it deserved to be called the Land of Eternal Spring.

  “What did he say about her?”

  Haydon hesitated.

  “Did he say he loved her?”

  “I’m not sure it was that. I can’t say, really.”

  “Maybe it was a glandular thing,” she said sarcastically. “Lena has that kind of effect on nearly every man who meets her. I’ve known a lot of pretty, even beautiful women who don’t get that kind of reaction from men. It’s something more than being physically attractive. It’s like they think she’s always in heat.”

  Haydon drank his lime and gin. Janet had mixed it so stout he could smell its resinous scent when he drank. His eye caught the manila envelope he had dropped on the floor. He felt queasy. He would have to go through the motions of reporting it to the Consular Section at the embassy, though they probably already knew. And he would send word to Pittner’s office, though they probably already knew also. Still, he had to go through the motions. The motions would be very important when it came out in the newspapers.

  “When we get to Cobán,” she said, changing the subject, “how will we make contact with her?”

  “We’ll go to the place that was selling the candles,” Haydon said. “They’ll find us.”

  She looked at him. “You seem sure of that.”

  “You can count on it,” he said. He looked at his watch. “We need to leave early in the morning, before daylight.”

  “It’s only a three-hour trip, maybe three and a half.”

  “Yeah, I know. But we need to start before daylight.”

  She looked at him a moment and then nodded. “Okay.”

  “You’ve got an alarm, I guess.”

  Janet nodded again.

  “I’d like to set it for five o’clock. We ought to go to bed now. It’s almost eleven. That gives us five hours’ sleep.”

  “Fine. I’ll lock up, set the security system, and wake you at five.”

  Haydon leaned forward in his chair. “I think this is my last shot at this, Janet. I’d like to do this in a particular way.”

  “A particular way?”

  “Yeah, come on. I’ll help you lock up.”

  Haydon finished his drink and set the empty glass on the table. He followed Janet around the house, locking the front gates and setting the security system, and then the gates to the breezeway and inner courtyard and their security systems, which were connected to the house’s windows and doors. It took a few minutes, but not long, and then they turned off the lights, leaving one on in the breezeway and front courtyard. Haydon picked up the flight bag and his empty glass as they turned out the lights in the living room and walked into the kitchen.

  “I’m going to make another drink,” Janet said. “You want one?”

  “Yeah, that would be good.” There wasn’t going to be any sleep for a little while, he knew that.

  Janet filled the glasses with ice from the refrigerator while Haydon cut more slices from the lime on the counter. He watched her while she filled the glasses from another collection of liquor bottles in the pantry. He put the lime slices in their glasses, and then they turned off the light in the kitchen and walked down the corridor to the first bedroom, which was Janet’s.

  “There’s an alarm beside your bed, too,” Janet said pausing at her doorway. “You might as well set it.”

  “I think we’d both better sleep in here,” Haydon said. He had been in Janet’s presence when she had received the message from Lena through Mirtha. If this was a setup there was nothing he could do about it, but if it wasn’t, he wasn’t about to let it get away from him.

  “You’re going to sleep in here?”

  Haydon pushed open the door to her room, which, he saw, was much like his just around the corner. There was a sitting room to one side, with a fireplace and a couple of armchairs and sofas in front of it. The windows that looked out onto the courtyard were the ones through which he had seen her naked after her shower.

  Once inside the room he turned, locked the door, and flipped off the lights. A bluish green glow came from the landscaping lights among the ferns and palms outside in the courtyard.

  “Come on! I’ve got to shower, for Christ’s sake,” she said.

  “There’ll be enough light from the courtyard.”

  “What is this?”

  “This is being careful,” he said. He could tell she wasn’t sure if there were any intentions in this other than being careful. That was her problem.

  She made her way over to her bed and set her glass on the table beside it. There was easily enough light in the room to see how to get around, though it was muted and bluish, with pockets of shadows. Janet started undressing beside her bed. It wasn’t much of a process. Her dress fell to the floor, and she peeled off her panties and that was it. She started into the bathroom.

  “Leave the door open,” Haydon said.

  “I’m going to pee, for God’s sake,” she said.

  “Fine, just leave it open.”

  She stood still in the bathroom doorway, and he knew that it was finally dawning on her what he was doing.

  “You want to put a gag on me?” she said. “You want to handcuff me in the shower?”

  “If you’ll just leave the door open,” he said, turning away from her and going over to the sofa. He picked up the cushions and took them over to the bedroom door and threw them down beside the flight bag. Putting his drink on the floor beside the cushions, he took the automatic from his waistband and laid it near the gin. As he began taking off his shoes, he could hear the fountain outside the open windows, and Janet going to the bathroom.

  It was hot in the room, and the occasional waft of breeze that came through the windows from the courtyard was dense with a pungent smokiness. He stripped down to his shorts and folded his clothes beside him on the floor. Rearranging the cushions, he finally got them so that he thought he could sleep on them and leaned back in the bluish light, sipping his drink and listening to the splashing of the water in the shower.

  After a while the water stopped, and he saw Janet’s dark form step out into the pastel light, and he watched her dry off. She put the wet towel over a hook near the shower and then moved to the vanity where she disappeared except for her buttocks and the back of her shoulders as she combed her hair.

  When she finished she walked back into the bedroom naked, pausing briefly when she saw him on the cushions in front of the door. Then she turned and walked back into the bathroom. He heard a cabinet door open and close, and when she returned she was carrying a couple of folded sheets. “Here, you can do something with these,” she said, tossing the sheets to him, and then got onto her bed, put some pillows against the headboard, and picked up her drink.

  Haydon spread the sheets out across the cushions and on the floor and then tried to settle in. It was silent for a while as they stared across the blue haze at each other. Janet’s hair was wet and stringy, hanging over her naked shoulders above her breasts.

  “You have a wife?” she asked finally. She had one leg cocked over to the side.

  “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “No.”

  Pause.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Nina.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Eighteen years.”

  Pause.

  “What does she…?”

  “She’s an architect.”

  Janet sipped her drink. “Eighteen years is a long time,” she said.

  “It seems like months.”

  Janet’s naked body was a pale jade. He thought of the moon-shaped slices of lime he had put in her glass, jade and lime green; her hair and nipples and the small spot of hair between her legs were too dark to reflect color at all. He regretted being across the room from the windows. There was no breath of air against the wall. Occasionally a soft waft would move the curtains beside Janet’s be
d, but what little sigh of air had caused it died just inside the windows. His side of the room was darker and hotter. He took a sip of gin and ate a chunk of ice.

  “Is she light or dark?” Janet asked.

  “What?”

  “Your wife. Is she blond or brunette, light or dark skinned?”

  “Dark hair, olive skin.”

  “You like that?”

  “Very much.”

  “Is she Anglo?”

  “Mostly Italian. You haven’t set the alarm,” he said.

  “Oh, sorry.” She set her drink on the table and reached for the clock. It was a windup one, not electric. She sat on the side of the bed and held the face of the clock to the glow coming from the courtyard. “Okay,” she said, and put it back on the table, got her drink and got back on the sheets.

  Haydon stood and walked over to the bed and picked up the clock. He, too, turned the face to the light and checked the setting.

  “You don’t trust me?” Janet asked.

  “I’m only double-checking,” he said and took the clock back to the cushions with him and set it on the floor.

  Nothing was said for a long while, and only the sound of the fountain and the occasional sound of ice in their glasses ruffled the silence. After a while Janet put her glass on the floor beside her bed and lay down, stretching out on the sheets. She said nothing. Haydon waited, sucking on the last piece of ice. It wasn’t long before he heard the steady, measured breathing of her sleep.

  CHAPTER 46

  When the alarm rang at five o’clock, Haydon slapped his hand down on it and grabbed for the automatic as he sat up and peered into the greenish dark toward Janet’s bed. She was there, still, unresponsive, her long naked body stretched out at an angle across the bed. He felt as if he had dozed only a few minutes. His arms and legs were heavy as lead, and his shoulders and neck felt as if they were fixed in cement.

  He leaned back against the pillows. Nothing had changed. The heat had sucked all of the air out of the large bedroom, and the curtains hung limp and dampish. Haydon could taste the smoky night in his mouth and feel the thickness in his head from the two big glasses of gin. He felt a hundred years old.