Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  Janet handed him the cup of coffee and then poured one for herself, screwing the top on the Thermos as she gripped it between her knees.

  “Have you been watching to see if we’re being followed?” she asked, wedging the Thermos between the seats.

  He nodded. “Yeah, but it’s hard to tell. We’ve been lined up like this for so long. There are several cars and another Blazer, the rest in this string with us are trucks and buses.” He sipped the coffee. “When we get to the right kind of place I’m going to check it out.”

  Janet looked at him, the black orbs of her sunglasses hiding what he needed to see, and then she turned back to watch the road.

  The chance came ten hot miles later when the mountains jogged back southward and then again to the north and just in the kink of the bend a long suspension bridge spanned a gorge at the bottom of which was the unimpressive Río Plátanos and the glistening double rails of a railroad. On the other side of the gorge the highway rounded another bend, and just before it did, a dirt road cut off and meandered down into the gorge.

  Haydon looked in the mirror and memorized the colors and makes of the cars and noted the color of the other Blazer. The vehicles steamed into the bend, meeting a straggling of traffic heading for the capital. They crossed the bridge high above the river at the bottom of the gorge and started around the other side. The traffic straightened out like a serpent rounding a corner, and Haydon kept his eye on the dirt road, which they were approaching at an angle that would obscure his exit to the traffic that was following the vehicles directly behind him.

  “I’m going to turn off,” he said quickly, and whipped off the highway, catching Janet by surprise and throwing her over onto him, her coffee flying, as they hit the caliche in a cloud of dust that boiled up and then settled around them as he turned into a grove of scrub oaks just off the highway.

  “Dammit, Haydon,” she yelled. “You could’ve said something…”

  He hadn’t anticipated the telltale cloud of dust, which, if it didn’t settle quickly enough, would make the maneuver a foolish waste of time. The Blazer was facing the highway, and Haydon was out, the door open, watching the traffic. There had been two trucks and a bus behind him and all of them passed before the first two cars, wedged in between another bus and truck, then another car, the Blazer, a flatbed truck loaded with cinder blocks and another car. All of them went by, they had to. There was no way they could have anticipated the turnoff. Haydon had no way of knowing how far they would have to go if they wanted to turn around.

  He looked around at Janet, who had unbuttoned the top of her sundress and was fanning the coffee stain on the front of it. But she, too, was watching the traffic.

  “I don’t know,” he said, getting back behind the wheel. “Sorry,” he added, looking at her dress. “We’ll wait a while.”

  “Oh, great. This is a good place to wait,” she said, holding the front of her dress out with one hand and wiping the perspiration from around her mouth with the other.

  “You think you’d recognize any of those trucks or cars if you saw them again?” He wrapped his arms around the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. Another gathering of buses and trucks was already moving past in front of them.

  “I might,” she said.

  “If someone was following us they’ll wait up ahead.” He reached for the map on the seat. “At Sanarate maybe. El Rancho for sure.”

  “Do you think there is someone?”

  He tossed the map back on the seat and stretched his left leg out the open door. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we’ve reduced the odds some.”

  Looking to his left, he squinted in the glare out across the scrub brush where the mountain dropped down to the Río Plátanos. The traffic steamed and groaned on the highway, and when there was a break in the sound of diesel engines the cicadas whined and keened in the unrelenting heat.

  “How long we going to sit here?” Janet played with the height of her dress on her bare thighs, her expression hidden behind the lenses of her sunglasses, her face slightly flushed from the heat.

  “Not long,” he said, looking at his watch. “Fifteen minutes.”

  They stayed in the Blazer because it was the only shade, and even though Janet opened her door to let through a cross breeze, the air was hot and biting. Haydon wished for some of the ice he had had in his gin the night before. Janet fanned her legs until it was time to go.

  The rest of the trip to El Rancho was like what had gone before. They gulped hot, diesel-laden air, crept up the steep rising grades and hurtled down the falling ones. They saw a wreck that had occurred conveniently at a caliche pullover where the highway bottomed out in a ravine and began another ascent. A small green Japanese car had apparently pulled out in front of a flatbed truck carrying a load of clay pots headed into the capital. Everyone was sitting beside the road, doing nothing, looking exhausted and forlorn. Haydon could not imagine what they were waiting for.

  Though the highway had taken them on an up-and-down course, they actually had been falling steadily in elevation ever since they had left the capital, crossing over a low, nameless range of mountains into the arid Motagua River valley that cut across the country from east to west, accommodating Guatemala’s longest river.

  At El Rancho, a dusty junction in the bottom of the valley, a film of sulfuric yellow dust coated everything including the stiff shocks of hair of the children who wandered along the caliche shoulders and lingered in the shade of the small food stands set up by locals hoping to take advantage of thirsty or hungry travelers slowing for the intersection. El Rancho itself was a couple of kilometers farther on, invisible beyond the undulating heat waves and dwarfed by a gigantic electric power station that rose stark and ominous like the ogre’s castle on the outskirts of the junction.

  Haydon turned left at the intersection and crossed over the Motagua River to the north bank and doubled back west. As Janet had predicted.

  most of the traffic was left behind at El Rancho. The terrain began to change. It was still desert, but this was true desert as opposed to what they had just been through, which simply had been a poor countryside burned up by the verano sun. Here the highway began to climb gently through a more picturesque setting, vegetation designed by nature for its environment, prickly pear and rangy cereus cacti, and thickets of thorny acacias. And, unlike the country south of the river, wildlife was visible here, orioles flashed like orange sparks in the dull reddish brush, and more than once Haydon saw brief flights of snub-nosed lime-green parrots, as exotic a thing as anyone would hope to see in the desert. And then there were the zopilotes, soaring, drifting, waiting, black crucifixes dangling like unimaginative mobiles from a glaucous sky.

  The quickness with which the landscape changed in Guatemala was something that struck Haydon as marvelous the first time he visited there, and on subsequent trips it never failed to remind him of a theme park where every kind of terrain in “Guatemala” was represented in a short trip on a miniature train, here the desert, around this corner the cloud-crowned western highlands, here the northern jungles of the Petén, and now the volcanoes of the central highlands and the banana plantations of the east coast, and here the ever-rainy tropical cloud forests.

  From an elevation of about fifteen hundred feet at El Rancho, the small two-lane highway rose steadily to three thousand feet and then to four thousand. The bare, pockmarked mountains of the desert gave way to hills with thicker vegetation, stands of pine suddenly appeared, and within ten miles the temperature dropped twenty degrees. Pockets of wispy fog began to appear here and there in the draws of converging hills, their vaporous tails sometimes reaching into the stands of pines. The air softened, and the moist fragrance of conifers wafted through the windows of the Blazer.

  Then the road climbed sharply and they came to a village way station where they were supposed to stop, pay a fee, and have their car sprayed with an insecticide before progressing any farther up into the lush vegetation. The station, a cluste
r of half a dozen stucco buildings that looked distinctly European in style, sat off the highway on a thin isthmus of a ridge where the road turned and began a steep climb. The central building was vaguely triangular in shape, its two diverging sides forming two “streets” fifty meters in length before the hamlet ended where the ridge fell away abruptly into the valley on the other side. Haydon pulled off the turn in the highway and stopped the Blazer in front of the building. An Indian man and woman stood in the dooryard and looked at them silently, apparently unwilling to administer the insecticide and reluctant, or unconcerned, about coming out to collect the fee.

  But one checkpoint’s laziness was another checkpoint’s offense. Haydon knew he had to have the receipt for passing the station, so he got out of the Blazer and went up to the doorway and paid. They gave him a receipt, and he went back to the truck, where Janet was buying candy from two little girls who were displaying their sticky, homemade confection on a dirty board.

  Haydon got back in, Janet paid the girls, and Haydon slowly maneuvered the Blazer through a scattering of speckled chickens that were pecking all over the road as if it were a barnyard. That was the checkpoint.

  From here on the land dropped again, back to four thousand feet, and they entered lush and cool pine forests cleared out here and there for granjas, small single-family farms with meager plots of com or chick-peas, some with cinder-block houses with red tile roofs that glistened in the moisture-laden atmosphere, some with wattle-and-mud houses with rusty corrugated tin roofs, but each of the homesteads, the houses and their plots of corn and peas, was invariably partially hidden within a stand of limp and glistening banana trees.

  They now were well into the departamento of Baja Verapaz, the Lower True Peace, and the forests grew thicker, the highway climbed even higher, and suddenly, around a bend in the winding road, the Sierra de Chuacús threw up their muscular shoulders against a roiling, titanic bank of thick white clouds with depths of gray that churned and struggled against the summits but did not cross as the Chuacús grudgingly held back the life-giving rain from the parched Motagua desert valley below.

  The light began to change, affected by the huge plumes of clouds that diffused the sun above them rather than blocking it out. They drove through a luminous land without a sun, without a sky, lighted only by a glowing canopy of tumbling clouds.

  They climbed again to five thousand feet and crossed the invisible border into the misty regions of la selva nublado, the cloud forest, that exotic high-mountain tropical land of ferns and bromeliads and orchids, where the famous and mythical national bird, the quetzal, resided in sequestered and timorous resplendence as though it knew full well that it had retreated to its last refuge and was living through the waning days of its existence.

  The pine forests were behind them now, and the light in this primeval region was brooding and embraced by a dense fog that rose and fell over black-green jungle-draped mountains like the breath of gods. This was the land of the chipichipi, the fine drizzle that fell unceasingly, touching everything lightly, intimately, penetratingly. There was no “dry season” in this region, though in January and February the drizzle was less heavy than during the rest of the year. It was not a land for people predisposed to melancholy or dark moods.

  By the time they approached the Biotopo del Quetzal, almost three thousand acres of cloud forest set aside as a reserve and administered by the University of San Carlos, it was late morning and they were still an hour away from Cobán. They stopped at a small inn not far from the entrance to the reserve. It sat on the cliff side of the roadway overlooking a vast valley whose panoramic sweep could only be guessed at because it was veiled in floating clouds of mist and fog. Across the roadway a green wall of jungle-covered mountain rose up and disappeared into a gray eternity. They had fresh, strong coffee from overlarge cups and a small plate of fried plantains prepared by an Indian woman and her young daughter. Outside they stretched their legs a few minutes on the damp caliche shoulder, the huge silence of the cloud forest cushioning the sounds around them. Before they got back into the Blazer, Janet pulled a sweater from her bag, and Haydon put on his suit coat against the slight, but welcome, chill.

  In a few kilometers they went through a village of scattered dwellings known as Pasmolon and shortly thereafter passed into the departamento of Alta Verapaz, the Upper True Peace.

  CHAPTER 48

  Coban was a cloudy and mist-laden little town situated on the Cahabón River and surrounded by mountainous countryside veined with clear streams and pockets of meadows and small valleys that were kept lush and verdant by the constant gentle drizzle. In the late nineteenth century, President Barrios granted thousands of acres of this rich mountain country to German immigrants who were willing to plant the land in coffee. The coffee plantations flourished as did the German community until its members dominated the economy of the region, shipping their coffee harvests by rail and boat down through the Polochic River valley and thence to Puerto Barrios for export. The wealthy Germans reigned supreme in the high mountain valleys of Alta Verapaz, which in its richness and beauty was so much like their homeland, until the 1930s. Their open support of the Nazis back home, however, brought about their ruin when Guatemala entered the war on the side of the Allies, and the wealthy Germans who had retained their German citizenship were booted out of the country and their well-run and productive coffee fincas were appropriated by the Guatemalan government. Today the German influence remained only in subtleties, in the occasional German surname or the Nordic architecture of an old home or in the blue-eyed Indian with unusually fair skin.

  The central plaza of Cobán was small and triangular with its base facing east and anchored by the lichen-stained stone Catedral de Santo Domingo where a sixteenth-century wood carving of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child presided over the main altar. The other two sides of the plaza were fronted by the arcaded palace headquarters of the departmental government and the local army headquarters. Near the apex of the triangle, which pointed west, was the office of Guatel, the national telephone company.

  It was here that Haydon wanted to go first, parking the Blazer at the curb of the cement sidewalk in front of the tiny La Providencia Hotel.

  “Now what?” Janet asked. They had not talked much in the last hour since they had left the small inn near the Biotopo. The countryside had been beautiful, the weather cool, and the impending meeting with Lena very much on their minds.

  “I’ve got to make a telephone call,” Haydon said, cutting the engine and opening the door.

  “I’ll just wait here,” Janet said.

  Haydon looked at her, and she rolled her head and got out of the truck. Haydon got the flight bag out of the backseat, stuffed his 10mm into his waistband, and locked the doors. He gave three Indian boys a few quetzals to “watch” the Blazer, and they started across the apex of the plaza, up the slight incline to the Guatel office. The quietness of this small and isolated departmental capital was welcome after the madness of Guatemala City, but Haydon did not like the feeling of knowing he was being watched. In some ways it was even more eerie than knowing you were being tailed.

  The Guatel office was a large gloomy room with the familiar apathetic air of a governmental business. On the far side of the room behind a rail with swinging gates was a row of half a dozen wooden telephone booths, one or two of them occupied. In the middle of the room, with their backs to the railing, were two rows of wooden chairs. To his left was a wooden cage of the sort seen in old banks and post offices, behind which several women and a man worked in silence. The man was doing paperwork and the women were operating the antiquated telephone system.

  Janet went over to the chairs and sat down, while Haydon walked to one of the grilled windows and gave the woman the number he wanted to call in Belize. She scribbled the number on a piece of paper, and then he went back and sat down beside Janet, who seemed preoccupied, staring out the open door to the gray street.

  “Where was the place where she wanted to buy
the candles?” he asked.

  Janet made a vague gesture with her right arm. “Down that way, a little shop that sells coffee and cardamom and ‘artifacts.’ It’s up some stairs, on the second floor. It’s got a turquoise wainscoting on the outside, if I remember right.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last year.”

  The telephone in one of the open telephone booths began ringing, and Haydon looked at the woman behind the cage, who tilted her head toward the ringing telephone and nodded at him. He got up and went through one of the swinging gates and went into the booth and closed the door, keeping his eye on Janet through the glass. The call was brief. Things were confirmed. Clarified. He hung up and went back through the gate to the grilled windows again, where the woman told him how long his call had been and what it cost. He paid; the woman gave him a receipt, and he and Janet walked back out onto the street.

  “Let’s buy some cardamom,” he said. The street came off the north-em angle of the plaza and headed down a slope toward the western end of town, fading away into the mist six or eight blocks in the distance. Cinder-block buildings formed a continuous face on both sides of the narrow street, none more than two stories, most of them only one. The long floppy leaves of plantains hung over head-high walls, and the façades of the buildings were a variety of familiar Central American colors—salmon and turquoise and blue and dun and ocher—sometimes the whole building had been painted and sometimes only a now-faded wainscoting.

  Plastic prefabricated signs with lights inside them and announcing Pepsi and Coke battled for supremacy as they hung out in front of business establishments whose names appeared below or above the familiar colorful logo in small black letters: PEPSI: El Convite Café; COCA-COLA: Cafetería Rosita; COCA-COLA: Hotel La Providencia; COCA-COLA: Farmacia Cristiana; PEPSI: Restaurante El Sombrero Tejano. But Coca-Cola, which easily received first prize for the greatest contribution to the municipal tackiness, hit an advertising bonanza with the Hotel Cobán Imperial. This establishment, which sat on a corner, its façade running in two directions, devoted its entire color scheme to Coca-Cola red and white with blistering effect. Only the constant blanket of color-muting fog kept the building from igniting.