Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  He got to one knee and steadied himself and then stood, picked up the flight bag and the automatic and walked into the bathroom. He put the flight bag up under the tile vanity and laid the automatic on top of it. Taking off his shorts, he walked into the shower, which was simply a lower part of the room against a wall surrounded by curtains, pushed the curtain wide open so he could see Janet stretched across the bed on her stomach, and turned on the cold water. As he bathed under the gentle drizzle, he continued to keep his eyes on Janet, the water echoing off the tile walls of the bathroom as if he were in a small cavern. He washed his hair twice, soaped his body and rinsed until he was squeaky clean, and then turned off the water. As he reached for a towel, Janet stirred on the bed, rolled over on her back and pushed her hair out of her face. She stretched her long legs and her arms, lay still a moment, and then rolled over and looked at Haydon in the dark aqua light.

  “Reveille?” she asked, staring at him.

  “Yeah,” he said. He finished drying, put on his shorts and combed his hair. He picked up the flight bag and gun and walked back into the bedroom where Janet was stepping into a clean pair of panties she had gotten out of the dresser. While he dressed, she went into the bathroom and washed up and then came back in and took a fresh sundress out of her closet. Haydon returned the cushions to the sofa, refolded the sheets and tossed them in one of the chairs.

  “Do you want something to eat?” she asked, pulling her hair back. “I can make some eggs real quick, some toast.”

  “That’ll be fine,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’ll help you. But first, if you want to take anything to Cobán, get it now and put it in a bag.”

  “Now?”

  “Come on,” Haydon said.

  “Okay, okay.” Janet went back to her closet and got a canvas tote bag with big looped handles and went to her dresser. She got hand lotion and tissues and opened a couple of drawers and got whatever sorts of things women carried on outings, a scarf, some cosmetics.

  They went out, down the corridor to the kitchen, Haydon carrying the flight bag, which he set down near the kitchen table. Janet put her bag just inside the door to the dining room. While she started the coffee, Haydon went to the refrigerator and took out the eggs, looked in the crisper for peppers and tomatoes and onions and began cutting them up on a small chopping block. In a few minutes they had everything ready and sat down together to eat. Neither of them had said a word the entire time.

  After they had eaten a while and had had a couple of cups of coffee, Janet said, “You act like you’ve done this before.”

  Haydon nodded. “Every morning.”

  “No kidding?” She smiled.

  “No kidding.”

  Janet looked at him as she sipped her coffee. She started to say something, but Haydon interrupted her.

  “It’s almost six o’clock. If you’ve got a Thermos, we could take some coffee with us. Okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “But we’ve got to go outside a few minutes first.”

  Janet stiffened apprehensively.

  Haydon shook his head, chewing his last bite of toast. “It’s just some precautions I’ve taken. No big deal.” He took another sip of coffee. “Come on.”

  Pushing away from the table, he picked up the flight bag, and they walked through the dining room and living room and out onto the breezeway. Janet unlocked the gate that separated the breezeway from the front drive courtyard and then turned off the alarm system from the control box just inside the gate.

  “Go ahead and open the drive gates,” Haydon said. Janet pushed the right buttons, and the gates at both ends of the courtyard drive slid back on tracks attached to the base of high stone walls.

  Haydon stood with Janet inside the dark corridor of the breezeway, watching the street. “Just a few minutes,” he said. The street beyond the gates was shiny with the nighttime humidity, and the smell of the garbage fires weighed heavily on the still air. The streets were empty, at least as far as traffic was concerned, but Haydon knew that somewhere out there somewhere, perhaps on an adjacent street nearby, someone had seen the courtyard gates pull open.

  They heard the car before they saw it, and Haydon walked out to the courtyard just as the headlights hit the pillars at the gates and a taxi pulled slowly into the drive. Haydon waited as the driver got out and came around the back of the car.

  “Dolfo, perfect timing,” Haydon said, reaching out to shake the kid’s hand.

  “I tol’ you. Whatever you want,” Dolfo said, lighting a cigarette. He looked at Janet with an appraising eye. “Okay,” he said to Haydon. He came around and opened the door to the backseat of the taxi and pulled a blanket off two people who were lying bent over in the seat, a man and a woman. They sat up and got out of the taxi.

  Haydon looked at them, visually measuring their height, the woman’s hairstyle. “Good, very good,” he said. “What about the four-wheel-drive rental?”

  “It is a Blazer. I have it in a parking lot in Zona 1,” Dolfo said and gave Haydon the address. “The parking lot is behind walls, the other two people are waiting there.”

  “Okay,” Haydon said. “Put the man in the front seat with you and the woman in the back.”

  “Bueno.”

  “Give us a few minutes.” Haydon walked back to Janet. “We’ve got to turn everything off in the house, just like we were leaving.”

  “We’re not?”

  “Not yet.”

  They went inside and closed everything up just as they had six hours before when they went to bed. After Janet got her bag and the Thermos of coffee, they turned off the lights in the kitchen last of all and made their way slowly through the dark house back out to the breezeway and the drive.

  “Okay, Dolfo,” Haydon said walking back to the kid, who was leaning against the back fender of his taxi. “Try to make it all the way to the border.” He shook the young man’s hand again. “Don’t forget who you’re dealing with here.”

  “No problem,” Dolfo said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out in the drive.

  “¡Buena suerte!” Haydon said.

  The man and the woman were already seated in the car and Dolfo went around to the driver’s side. He started the car, flipped on the lights, and pulled around the curving drive and out into the street.

  “Close the gates,” Haydon said, and Janet reached up to the control box, and the gates slid silently into place. Haydon watched the taxi’s taillights disappear.

  “Okay, what in the hell is going on here?”

  “You and I have just headed for the El Salvador border, Valle Nuevo,” Haydon said. “It’s one hundred twenty-two kilometers, about an hour-and-a-half’s drive.”

  “You really think that’s going to work?”

  “Because of the dark, it can.”

  “Great. Now what?”

  “We wait twenty minutes.”

  “Then?”

  “Then you and I head for Panajachel.”

  “Not Cobán?”

  “Come on,” Haydon said, “let’s double-check everything.”

  By the time they got back to the breezeway it was time to go. They put the bags in the Land-Rover, and Janet got behind the wheel. She pushed the remote control on the gates once again, and they drove out, and the gates closed behind them.

  At Haydon’s instructions she stayed on the back streets all the way downtown. The streets were virtually empty, which made it easier for him to pick up a tail if one drifted in behind them. He saw nothing. If there had been someone watching the house they had gone to Valle Nuevo with Dolfo. No one would know about Panajachel but Pitt’s people, having learned it from Mirtha. They wouldn’t be watching the house. Knowing Janet’s Land-Rover, they would be waiting to pick her up along the Roosevelt highway or in Mixco, somewhere along the way before the possibility of various routes opened up. The nearer to the house, the safer. That was the reason for the second transfer.

  They reached the address Dolfo had given them just as the
sky began to lighten in the east, just as cars began to move in the narrow downtown streets. They pulled up to the gates of the walled parking lot, and a teenage girl wearing jeans and short-sleeved blouse appeared suddenly in Janet’s headlights. Unlocking a chain that held the gates together, she pushed open the two wings and stood aside. Janet pulled the Land-Rover into the caliche lot, and Haydon directed her to park beside a Chevrolet Blazer sitting alone to one side, well out of the way of the gate. A man and a woman got out of the truck.

  “Get your bag,” Haydon said, grabbing the flight bag. “And leave the keys in the ignition.”

  He got out and shook hands with the man, a ladino, more European in appearance than Indian. His eyes were wary as they darted between Janet and Haydon. The woman, also ladino, hung back by the rear of the Blazer. No one exchanged names.

  “Dolfo has made everything clear to you?” Haydon asked, using the kid’s name to reassure the man. “You have any questions?”

  The man shook his head. “I understand everything.”

  Haydon looked at the woman. Her hair was fine, and she was wearing an American dress.

  “Okay,” Haydon said. “The keys are in the Rover.”

  “Hey,” Janet said suddenly. “What in the hell are you doing?”

  The man looked startled, glancing at Haydon and then at Janet.

  “He’s taking the Rover to Panajachel,” Haydon said.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Janet was incredulous. “I’ll never see it again, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It’s the only chance we have of going where we’re going alone,” Haydon said. “This is it, and it’s still a gamble. These people stand to make a lot of money if this works. I’ve arranged that. But in order to collect they’ve got to get the Rover back to you. They’re running some risk too. I’ll explain it to you, but we’ve got to get on the road. It’s getting light.”

  Janet glared at him a second and then held up her hands as if relinquishing everything, the canvas bag hanging from her shoulders.

  Haydon reached out and shook the man’s hand. “¡Buena suerte!” he said.

  The woman came from behind the Blazer, and the two couples crawled into their separate vehicles. Haydon got behind the wheel of the Blazer, which was new and smelled new. He didn’t even start the motor, but waited for the other couple to back the Land-Rover around and drive out of the parking lot.

  “It’s about the same distance to Panajachel as it is to the El Salvador border,” Haydon said quietly. “With luck we’ve got until eight o’clock or eight-thirty—somewhere in that range—before this little routine is discovered.”

  “This is goddamned extreme,” Janet said. “I’ve got personal stuff scattered around in the Rover, for God’s sake. You don’t know how extreme this is. You don’t just give your goddamned car away to people like this.”

  “After what I’ve been through, it doesn’t seem extreme at all,” Haydon said. He was staring at the crumbling stucco wall at the front bumper. A slogan, fading and partly obscured and just now coming into sight with the charcoal light, was scrawled in paint across the stucco and patches of exposed bricks: UN PUEBLO CON HAMBRE ES UN PUEBLO SIN PAZ. A country that is hungry is a country without peace. “Not extreme at all,” he said.

  He unzipped the flight bag and took out one of the maps he had gotten out of Borrayo’s glove compartment. He laid it on top of the bag, which was sitting between him and Janet, and started the car. As he flipped on the lights and backed around, the teenage girl came out of the little darkened ticket office at the entrance of the lot and once again pulled open the gates. Haydon reached out and gave her several dollars, American, and steered the Blazer out into the almost empty predawn streets.

  The city was not yet awake, but it was stirring as Haydon went a few streets over and turned left, which was north, on 7a avenida, which ran straight through the city without diversion on the north/south axis. Within moments they were entering the east side of the Parque Central, its broad spaces and islands of trees and fountains empty and forlorn in the graying dawn. To their right the Catedral Metropolitana sat like a brooding mountain against the growing light, its baroque-style towers and domes silent in the morning gloom. Its west-oriented façade would remain in the shadows until noon, after which it would offer to the postmeridian sun a glaring white face behind which the cavernous interior would provide a refuge of echoing and shadowy coolness from the swelling afternoon heat.

  On the other side of the plaza, to their left, the Palacio Nacional glowered biliously, a three-story farrago of classic and colonial architectural motifs of light green stone whose beautiful and hidden inner courtyards and gardens were its only grace. Its soul was more accurately reflected in its exterior, a dishonest design for a mendacious government. The sight of it angered and frustrated and frightened hundreds of thousands, even millions of the people it was supposedly there to serve.

  Janet sat curiously silent as Haydon pushed the Blazer through the long narrow street, a seamless corridor of stucco buildings that often reflected nothing of their business, the Hospital San Sebastian on the right, Hospital Santa Cleotilde on the left, farther on, the Association of Christian Mothers. Then abruptly, they arrived at the intersection of Calle Martí which would eventually become the Central American Highway Number 9, known to everyone as the Atlantic Highway.

  CHAPTER 47

  As the sun rose directly into their faces, the rather derelict boulevard was bathed in a reddish light. At first scorched palms grew out of the otherwise bare dirt median and then nothing at all, and the hard-packed earth was scattered with trash and bits of debris that blew across the asphalt. They made good time in the sparse traffic that was strung out along the commercial strip as it made its way to the outskirts of the city past the ubiquitous auto-parts stores and laundries and Wimpy’s Hamburguesas and billboards advertising Pepsi and pantyhose. The commerce thinned out and soon they were crossing the gorge of the Rio Las Vacas on the long Belice Bridge, the shanties visible far down in the smoky ravines on either side.

  On the other side of the bridge the highway began to climb steadily into the hills. The city gave way to industries, sawmills, brickworks, factories, and food-processing plants, set back off the highway in the colonias which themselves grew increasingly sparse and poor as the city melted away to a bare and desperate countryside burned by the verano sun and sheared of its forests by the hordes of immigrants who attached themselves to the edges of the city like rust and who needed the wood for their voracious little cook fires and for warmth in the rainy season.

  The highway climbed and twisted into increasingly dry and parched hills, dropped into barren gorges and crossed long narrow bridges that spanned others, pushing deeper into a desert region that seemed entirely as if it belonged on another continent. Because CA-9 was the route to Guatemala’s main port, Santo Tomas de Castilla outside of Puerto Barrios on the Gulf of Honduras, the highway was always thick with trucks and buses carrying produce and product and laborers. This morning as always the heat built early and the pace of the traffic kept abreast of the rapidly rising temperatures. All the buses and trucks seemed to be driven by sociopaths who flogged their often decrepit machines as though they were hell bound. They passed on downhill curves and uphill ones, honking and sweating and swearing, their faces sometimes blanching at the horrors of their own rashness as they forced mad passage between the traffic they were overtaking and the traffic that was approaching, often causing it to swerve onto precipitous caliche shoulders to avoid head-on collisions. But the drivers never slowed, barreling on in the heat, the canvas over their cargo flapping in the hot, tortured air like the capes on the bony backs of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, men in reckless control of their destinies.

  Soon locked in a hopeless conga line of overloaded buses and crippled trucks belching black acrid smoke as they labored on the climbing switchbacks, Haydon and Janet rolled down their windows. Janet gamely twisted her hair into a tight coil and pinned it up
off her neck, hiked her skirt up high on her long thighs, put on her sunglasses and stared out to the embattled highway. Even though the hot wind coming off the dark stony hills beat against their faces as it whipped in through the open windows, Janet was unperturbed. She knew ahead of time what the trip would be like. But Haydon could tell she was still furious about the Land-Rover.

  They continued in the heat through mountains with slate gray rocks that yielded nothing but cactus and scrub brush and occasionally a patch of withering com on the steep slopes. Small whitewashed or dun-colored stucco houses sat isolated on far slopes or at the bottom of gorges, baking in the sun.

  Haydon looked at his watch. “If this kind of traffic keeps up there’s no way we’ll make it in three hours.”

  Janet shook her head. “It won’t. When we get to El Rancho we’ll turn off north to Cobán. Most of this traffic, not all of it but most of it, will keep on going to the coast.”

  They came to another long climb, and the stream of traffic slowed to a crawl.

  “Here, take the wheel,” he said to Janet. “I’ve got to get this coat off.” She reached over and held the wheel steady while he wrestled off his suit coat and threw it over into the backseat. He rolled back his cuffs and then took the wheel again. “Thanks,” he said. “One more favor. Would you mind pouring me a cup of coffee?” His mouth felt oily from the constant blast of diesel smoke, and his eyes were burning from the hot wind and bright light as he squinted into the sun. He hadn’t brought his sunglasses.

  The traffic crept absurdly up the steep grades, picked up speed on the crests, and then plunged wildly into the downhill stretches, brakes screaming on the curves but not for long as each driver coped with as much speed as he dared in order to gain some momentum for the next long climb. Occasionally the cliffs beside the highway were recruited as political billboards on which the competing parties painted their initials and party logos, some of them very precisely rendered—a stylized brilliant orange sun, a blue flower, a white fist gripping a rose, a red rooster.