Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  “Okay, let’s go,” the woman said, and she and her companions began shoving aside the sacks of coffee so that Haydon and Janet could crawl out of their backbreaking sunken seat. As Janet stood to crawl out, the truck driver opened his door, and in the pale cabin light coming from behind him, Haydon raised his wrist and noted the time.

  They waited at the rear of the truck with the bodyguard while the woman and the other guerrillas held a conversation at the front. Here at the diminishing edge of the settlement, they stood on the very margins of the universe. Behind them lay the orange lights of the known world, in front of them lay that peculiar dense darkness that might have been the outermost reaches of space, or the innermost folds of the mind.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Janet said. Her voice did not seem to come from her. He wouldn’t have recognized it if he hadn’t known.

  “Maybe Lena will give you some reassurances,” Haydon said.

  “I doubt it. How in God’s name can you be reassured in a place like this?”

  She had a good point, but Haydon said nothing. It occurred to him then, standing at the back of the truck, which had come, literally, to the end of the road, that no one had ever once asked him how in the hell he expected to get Lena and her documents out of Guatemala.

  The driver stayed with the truck, a solitary assignment Haydon did not envy him, and the rest of them—two in front of Haydon and Janet and two behind—set off down a rutted dirt road that ran perpendicular to the parked truck, and which Haydon was sure had not seen a vehicle in years. There were a few shacks now and then on one side or the other, hovels tucked into the ubiquitous thickets of plantains. Soon there were not even hovels, and the two ruts gave way to a well-beaten path as the six of them traveled deeper into the black.

  The path stayed in fairly good condition, though several times it led into streams, which, even before they approached, could be heard gurgling and rushing over the smooth stones like a soft warning. The streams were not deep, reaching only to about mid-calf on Haydon’s legs, but having his lower legs and shoes thoroughly soaked by the crossing made for miserable walking from then on. The keening of the large Central American cicadas was nearly deafening, their throbbing tempo almost compelling one’s heart to beat to the same indolent pulse until one felt possessed, or oppressed, by the din. The jungle converged from every side so that they were continually brushing through it, its seeping, dripping, weeping dampness soaking them as thoroughly as if they had been in a downpour. More than a few times Haydon felt Janet grab at the tail of his coat for balance as she slipped in the slick, gummy mud that sometimes came to the surface through the spongy jungle floor. Finally he told her to hook her hand inside the back of his pants, which she did without saying a word.

  Again time was obliterated, his efforts to mark duration or distance by counting were ineffective because of the distractions of the terrain and his concern for Janet. Whatever the time, it seemed interminable. Twice during the ordeal the guerrillas stopped, squatted down on their heels and smoked cigarettes. They made no conversation with Haydon or Janet, but Haydon suspected that these three men and the woman did not have to stop to rest themselves but had done so in deference to them, knowing they were unprepared and ill equipped for so lengthy a trek in such arduous terrain. Though he could not see in the greenish darkness, Haydon could only imagine how Janet’s thin sandals, designed for walking on city streets, must be faring. But she said nothing.

  Haydon first knew they were approaching a community when he heard a dog barking, though he wasn’t sure it was a dog at first. None of the four guerrillas took any notice of it, and Haydon suspected that their approach had been known even before the dog sensed it. Technology had outstripped nature, even in the depths of the jungle.

  When they finally approached the small community, Haydon was surprised to see the permanence of some of the buildings. There must have been eight or nine buildings scattered on either side of a small stream across which a sturdy footbridge had been built. Three of the buildings were constructed of cinder block and cement and had corrugated tin roofs, the rest were made of wattles and mud and had thatched roofs. Fires reflected off the sides of the buildings, and smoke hovered in the still air like pungent cloud.

  There was no fanfare about their arrival. Outpost guards materialized out of the jungle perimeters and spoke casually to the guerrillas who were accompanying them, and the small troop of them entered the compound in a loose assemblage and crossed over the bridge to the only cinder-block house on the far side of the stream. The women and children who were milling around the compound’s bare, hard earth as they arrived, quietly melted into the shadows or the doorways of their own houses where they watched the newcomers’ arrival from the protection of familiar corners, out of sight.

  As they approached the squatty house, Haydon saw from its screen-less open windows that it had at least two rooms. The window at the front of the house was dimly lighted, and shadows of the persons inside crawled like dark giants across the walls. The window at the rear of the house was ablaze with light, a brilliant yellow glow that seemed to shimmer all of itself and which cast a golden splash on the bare jungle earth outside the window.

  Haydon was curious about the light but had no time to speculate. They were taken straight to the front door, around which several boys and men with machetes sat on their heels and on chunks of logs, talking and smoking, their conversation falling into a lull as the group approached.

  “Come on in,” the woman said, and their escorts fell back as Haydon and Janet followed the woman into the room, which had a dirt floor with no threshold to separate it from the outside. It was a fairly large room, with three or four kerosene lanterns hanging from the exposed rafters, their greenish glow accompanied by a soft hiss issuing from their pressurized chambers. Haydon quickly checked his watch. The walk through the jungle had taken them a little over two hours.

  There were three men and two women dressed in dirty military fatigues sitting on primitive benches around the walls and in two or three creaky chairs scattered around. In the far right corner a simple table sat at an angle. There was a man in a chair behind it. Papers and a handgun and several clips were scattered on the table, as well as a tin plate from which the man had been eating. Because of the poor light, Haydon could not clearly see the man getting up from behind the table to greet them until he was reaching out his own hand to shake the one extended to him.

  “Mr. Haydon,” the man said, and Haydon stiffened, caught off guard just as their hands met.

  “Dr. Grajeda,” Haydon said. “This…this is where they’ve brought you?”

  “This is where we came, yes,” Dr. Grajeda said, smiling kindly, his moustache and goatee as neatly trimmed in the jungle as in the city. Haydon did not miss the slight difference in the way Dr. Grajeda framed his response, nor did he miss the use of the plural subject. “The forest can be a nasty place,” he said, gesturing to Haydon’s condition. “Especially if you’re wearing a suit.” He smiled wanly, tired; it was an effort. “Sorry.” He turned to Janet. “My apologies to you as well, Mrs. Pittner.”

  Janet was not having any of his Guatemalan politeness and showed no curiosity that Grajeda knew her name.

  “I just want to get off my feet,” she said, and hobbled over to one of the benches where she sat down by a woman who was leaning on her rifle, her fatigue cap cocked back on her head. She looked down at Janet’s feet, and Haydon followed her eyes. He was astonished to see that Janet was barefooted and that her muddy feet were cut and bleeding. The chic little sandals probably had been lost almost from the beginning.

  The girl looked at Janet, who had lifted one foot and was massaging it, laid down her rifle on the bench, and called softly in an Indian dialect to a boy just outside the doorway who quickly disappeared. The woman tapped Janet’s leg and got down on one knee in front of her, motioning for Janet to let her see her foot. Janet reflexively pulled back.

  “She’s going to clean your feet
and put some medicine on them,” Dr. Grajeda said. “There are a lot of parasites on the jungle floor, you can’t stay like that. Let her do what she wants to do. I teach them to take very good care of their feet out here. She knows what she’s doing.”

  Grajeda turned, taking Haydon by the arm, and the two of them walked over to the far side of the room where a rickety chair had been vacated at one end of a bench. They sat down together.

  “You’ll be going back tonight,” Grajeda said. “But before you return we have a lot to talk over.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. Grajeda couldn’t have been in the jungle for more than a day, a day and a half, but his fatigues, the sleeves rolled up just above his elbows, needed washing, and Grajeda himself looked as if he hadn’t slept since Haydon had spoken to him in the empty room above the shoe store. He and Haydon lighted their cigarettes, and Grajeda gestured with his. “Not so great in the city, but in the jungle, they’re just about as welcome as a good meal.”

  CHAPTER 51

  “As you probably have guessed,” Grajeda began with a sigh, one leg crossed over the other, and his forearms crossed on his knee as he leaned forward toward Haydon, “that business above the shoe store in Guatemala City was a bit of a ruse. The part about me, I mean. I’m a little more involved in this guerrilla business than I led you to believe. I can’t really apologize for having deceived you though, because I would do it again. Caution before kindness. It has to be that way.”

  He looked over to Janet, who was leaning back against the wall with her eyes closed while the Indian woman washed her feet with soapy water that the little boy had brought in a pan.

  He turned back to Haydon and lowered his voice. “I don’t know whether she’s a blessing or a curse,” he said wearily. “My God, everything diverges. Nothing ever comes to an end.”

  “I suppose her value depends on what’s going to happen here,” Haydon said.

  Grajeda nodded. “The documents are here, Lena’s and mine both.”

  He smoked and regarded Haydon soberly. “But that is a moot point now. It seems we’ve become the focus of attention.”

  “Here? They know this location?”

  “No, no. Not this precise location. This region of Alta Verapaz is not an area of conflict. We have this place here as a kind of stopover, a clearing house. Our people come here on their way to other places, other business. The army knows about it, but only in a general way. You know: ‘They say there are guerrillas in the Polochic valley.’ For instance, they know you have been on the highway to the town above here, Calvario, but that town itself is an unpopular place for the military. Nothing much comes out of here, so they don’t worry about us. If they had unlimited resources, then maybe, or if the generals weren’t so busy running their mahogany smuggling businesses up in the Petén, then maybe. But this place is no threat…and they’re not sure where it is, and it’s not worth a large campaign to locate it. So…”

  Grajeda smoked. “The point is, they know you’re here.”

  “But we didn’t see a single soldier all the way from Cobán—except one, above in Calvario.”

  “The fellow in town is ours,” Grajeda shook his head. “But that’s not the way it will be. In this instance ‘Azcona’s men’ are not soldiers. They are the G-2, military intelligence. They will be men in street clothes like yourself, driving unmarked cars. These will be the death-squad men. You won’t see any soldiers.”

  Haydon pulled on the cigarette. Grajeda was right, it was as welcome as a meal.

  “They know what you’re coming in here to get,” Grajeda said. One of the hanging lanterns was reflecting in a single lens of his spectacles. He looked like a handsome and exotic Mephistopheles, the devil with a golden eye patch. “And they know that you’re coming out with it. They’re just waiting for the return trip. This waiting is Pittner’s doing. Azcona would have sent in helicopter gunships, he would have had columns of troops up and down the Polochic valley, torturing local farmers for information, burning milpas, rounding up the men and calling them guerrillas so he could ‘question’ them. The CIA is desperately trying to keep him under control. They have a lot invested in this brutal man. It takes a long time and a lot of money to cultivate someone the way they have cultivated General Luis Azcona. He’s ‘their’ man. Pittner has had his hands full, and he had been successful up to now.”

  They both smoked a moment. To Haydon’s left, on the other side of the room, pieces of burlap had been sewn together to create a curtain over the doorway between the two rooms. Beneath the burlap he could see the bright margin from the curiously illuminated room.

  “I understand Cage did some work in Cobán,” Grajeda said. His eyes were settled on a place on the dirt floor, thoughtful and heavy with exhaustion. “He is our real problem. He could do something crazy.”

  Haydon suddenly detected something in Grajeda’s mood that conflicted with what he had believed was going to be happening here in this moldy jungle compound. His stomach twisted inside as he sensed a change in the agenda.

  “What do you mean, our ‘real’ problem?” Haydon asked. “It seems to me all of the problems are real.”

  Grajeda nodded thoughtfully, his manner grimly concessionary. “Tell me,” he said, raising his face to Haydon. “How is it that you planned to get the documents out of Guatemala?”

  Haydon saw no reason not to explain. As Grajeda himself had said a few moments earlier, it was a moot point now. It wasn’t going to happen.

  “First of all,” Haydon said, smoking the last of his cigarette and grinding it out under his shoe, “I’d hoped to get to Cobán alone. It seems absurd now, but at the time I thought it was possible. I planned for it.” He stopped.

  Dr. Grajeda was nodding, waiting for the rest of it. Even though Haydon knew in his heart that the whole intrigue was fouled, he was hesitant to part with the last piece of information that he had kept only to himself. But it was over.

  “I have friends in Belize.” He looked at his watch. “They should already have flown in to the Cobán airstrip. They’ll wait there for me until daylight.”

  Dr. Grajeda nodded thoughtfully. “I hope they have very good equipment on their plane. Cobán’s rain and fog require good equipment.”

  “They live in Belize. They’re used to flying into Guatemala,” Haydon said.

  “And you will be flying out to…?”

  “Belize.”

  Dr. Grajeda nodded again but did not respond immediately. He sat in his chair, his shoulders slumped, his whole demeanor that of exhaustion and dashed hopes. Janet was looking at the two men from across the room. The woman who had cleaned Janet’s feet had finished and was now the only person in the room besides the two of them and Dr. Grajeda. She was sitting alone near the doorway, her rifle lying across her lap. Janet’s feet had been bandaged, and she wore a new pair of sturdy Indian sandals and an expression of dazed resignation. She still kept her filthy and soggy sweater wrapped tightly around her, holding it in place with her folded arms.

  “Then it’s all over?” Haydon asked.

  “You will be stopped twice, at least,” Dr. Grajeda said, rousing himself from wandering thoughts, straightening up in his chair with a sigh. “By Cage’s people and by army intelligence directed by Pittner. Azcona will never show his face in this operation. He is probably making himself very visible somewhere far away. The searches will be thorough. You couldn’t sneak a toothbrush out.” Dr. Grajeda shook his head. “It was a good try.”

  “What about Lena?” Haydon asked. “Is she going to leave with me?”

  “Yes, my friend. After all of this, she is going with you.”

  “I actually thought she might stay.”

  “No one is staying. Once you leave, once Azcona learns he has not recovered the documents, he will throw a tantrum. What Pittner has managed to keep him from doing up to now, Pittner will no longer be able to prevent. Azcona is going to come. The people in this compound will leave when you leave tonight, but we will go north, in
to the Petén. Azcona will find only these few empty buildings on which to vent his fury.” He looked at Haydon. “Our little piece of the truth will have to wait to be assembled at some finer day in the future. We did our best.”

  He stood up and dropped his own cigarette, which had long ago died in his fingers, onto the dirt floor. He turned to Janet.

  “Mrs. Pittner,” he said. “If you want to talk to Lena…” He turned sideways and held his arm out toward the covered doorway.

  Janet, surprised, looked at him with anticipation. She stood, a little stiffly, and she and Haydon followed Dr. Grajeda, who threw aside the burlap curtain. Within four steps they had entered the brilliantly lighted room.

  Lena’s body lay on two lepa boards that had been placed across the seats of two wooden chairs set facing each other, and which themselves had been placed on cinder blocks, raising her body to just a little above waist high, the backs of the chairs forming bierlike brackets at her feet and head. Her hair had been combed out, clean and shiny, unlike the twig-tangled hair of that other Lena whom Haydon had seen so long ago in the morgue of the Cementerio General. She was wrapped in a white, gauzelike material, the kind the guerrillas must have bought by the dozens of yards for bandages, and which was pulled up under her chin as though she were wrapped tightly against the everlasting chill of death. White wads of the same material had been wedged into her nostrils and ears to keep out the insects. The room glittered with candles placed on every available surface, in every nook, on every small ledge, on sticks that had been wedged into the countless cracks of the cinder-block walls. The room was heavy with the odor of melting wax.