Body of Truth (12 page)

“No,” Pittner said. “But Janet wants to. That’s what we were talking about just before you came. But there have been some changes, with the book, I mean. It’s not at the National Police Headquarters anymore. In fact, there’s not just one book now. Some time back there were some administrative changes. Now each
departamento
keeps its own book in the police offices of the departmental seat of government. This way all those people don’t have to trek to the capital if they want to look for a missing person. Saves them those damned long bus rides. Saves them money. Saves them the time off from work. Their own departmental police headquarters is so much closer.”

“Oh, great, the beneficent Guatemalan democracy,” Janet said, looking at Pittner. “Always think of the poor campesino.” She shook her head and turned to Haydon. “He’s giving you the official government line. Think of it. Twenty-three departments. Twenty-three books of the dead. When these death-squad goons pick up people, more often than not they drag them off to some clandestine prison, take them far away from where they kidnapped them, to do their jobs on them. Hell, they find these people’s bodies hundreds of kilometers from where they were abducted. So if you’re looking for someone who was disappeared, it’s likely they were dragged off to another
departamento
. But which one, which direction? Now these poor people searching for missing family members, missing friends who have been disappeared, have their difficulties multiplied by twenty-two. Another grim triumph—through official decree—for the death squads.”

Pittner was looking at her, his face emotionless, letting her have her say. When she finished, he kept his eyes on her and sipped his bourbon. He turned to Haydon.

“Janet has problems with the way the Guatemalan government conducts itself.”

“Pardon
me?
” Janet said. “I have problems with reigns of terror,” she clarified. She looked at Haydon. “The thing about embassy people is they have to be diplomatic. Even when they know they’re dancing in shit they keep their eyes on the colored lights, never look down. What nice music, what nice lights, what a grand time. The State Department’s great for looking at rhinestones and seeing diamonds. It’s an unreal way to live. The ones who have scruples, it eats at them, this duplicity. But others”—she turned to Pittner—“they’ve sucked up so much they don’t even smell the shit anymore.”

“Anyway,” Pittner drawled, unfazed, “I’m going to get the consular people on it.”

Janet looked at Haydon and shook her head.

“Well, look,” Haydon said, standing, “I’d better go. I apologize again for just walking in here like this, but I wanted to get on with it.”

“What are you going to do now?” Janet asked, standing too. It was the first time her voice hadn’t been charged with strong feeling since he had entered the room.

“I’m not sure. I’ll think it over tonight.”

“I’ll get you a cab,” she said, stepping over to a secretary near the windows that overlooked the courtyard and picking up the telephone.

“Where are you staying?” Pittner asked, remaining seated. It was an innocent question, a natural one, but to Haydon it seemed particularly sinister. But it was stupid not to tell him. He could know within half an hour.

“Residencial Reforma.”

“Oh, close by,” Pittner said mildly. “It’s a good place.”

Janet spoke briefly on the telephone and hung up.

“Well, look,” she said, smoothing the front of her dress and setting down her glass, “why don’t you check back tomorrow. Maybe she’ll call in…or something. And if you find out anything, would you let me know? I’m…really…concerned about this.”

“I’ll be glad to.” He stepped over to Pittner, who still hadn’t gotten up, and shook hands, Pittner nodding once, closing his eyes as he did so, like a doll of a middle-aged man.

“See you,” Pittner said.

“I’ll walk out with you,” Janet said.

They went out the living room door to the breezeway and then out through the first wrought-iron gate and through the front courtyard, where they stopped to wait.

“The cab was close by, down at the Camino Real. It’ll only be a couple of minutes,” she said, folding her arms again. “Honestly, get back to me, okay?”

“Sure, I will,” Haydon said.

“Look,” she said hesitantly, “I don’t want to be an alarmist, but I really, really do think this is not good. Pitt disregards me. Fine. We had a shitty marriage. I wasn’t diplomatic material. Too blunt. But anyway, I don’t think I’m going to wait for his diplomatic shtick. I’m going to wade into this.”

She was right, the taxi was there immediately. She reached out and touched his arm with the flat of her hand.

“I couldn’t say everything in front of him,” she said. “Call me.”

The driver was impatient on the other side of the wrought-iron gate and beeped his horn.

Haydon looked at her. “Okay, tomorrow,” he said, and she took away her hand and stood with her arms folded, watching him, as he walked out the gate and got into the car.

CHAPTER 13

O
n the way back to the hotel, Haydon stared out the window, the smoky haze and damp night air mingling in a ghostly way to make the avenidas sinister to the imagination. Bennett Pittner was everything an intelligence officer ought to be. He was bland, unexciting, and in a social setting he virtually would be invisible. Even his manner, which Haydon did not at all attribute solely to American bourbon, betrayed a man whose habit it was to assess everything thoroughly as it came to him. He did not find it necessary to act as quickly as he thought. Knowledge, not action, was power. Taylor Cage seemed to have learned that well enough from his former superior.

Janet Pittner was her ex-husband’s emotional opposite, and Haydon guessed she was often underestimated because of it. He guessed, too, that they were the kind of couple who couldn’t live with, or without, each other. Haydon’s arrival seemed to have interrupted an already heated discussion about what action should be taken about Lena’s disappearance, and from what Janet had just now said to Haydon at the gate, Pittner hadn’t made too much progress with her. It was the story of their relationship.

The taxi pulled into the Residencial Reforma’s drive and stopped immediately. True to their word, the management had locked the gates. Haydon paid the taxi driver, who drove away, and then turned to the button on the pillar. He pushed it, identified himself and gave his room number to the night clerk and shoved open the gates when he heard the electronic click.

As he closed the gates behind him and walked across the front drive, the swooning mortal and the ministering angel glowed palely in the fountain of purple liriope. The old house was dark. He got his key from the night clerk, a young man who was reading some kind of textbook, and stepped down into the small front parlor. A couple of American men were slumped in their armchairs in front of the television as if they were back home in Dayton, the brilliant flashes from apocalyptic explosions in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film illuminating their bored, pale faces like death masks. On the other side of a low wall the dining atrium was mostly dark, a pastel greenish light falling down into the long room from the skylight above the mezzanine.

Haydon went slowly up the stairs, realizing how tired he was, the whumps of muted explosions and the spitting of automatic weapons dying out behind him as he rounded the curving stairs to the second floor. At the head of the stairs he paused a moment to look down into the dining room again, long runners of ivy hanging down from the marble bannister, the room itself circumscribed by marble pillars that held up the mezzanine where he was standing and separated the room from the surrounding hallway. El Reformador knew how to build an elegant home.

He went to his room and undressed, hung his clothes in the large closet and washed his face. After putting on his pajama pants, he took the manila folder of Guatemalan contacts and got into bed and started going through the papers. The first man he would call would be Efran Borrayo, an agent in a branch of the security forces that was known as the Department for Technical Investigations, DIT, a branch of the National Police with a reputation for death-squad involvement. Haydon knew of the division’s reputation, but Borrayo had played a key role in helping him and a Colombian homicide detective track down a man they twice had followed the length of Central America. Borrayo had been efficient and responsible. If he was around, Haydon could use his help again. He circled Borrayo’s name, put the folder on the writing desk beside the bed, and turned out the light.

He lay in bed exhausted, the only light in the room a wan sapphire coming in over his head from the two small rose windows that overlooked the front courtyard and the Avenida La Reforma. He had pulled back the long curtains and draped them over the metal levers that held the glass open in an effort to let in as much of the still night air as possible. Every tiny sound carried on the thin air, an occasional taxi on the boulevard, fireworks spattering like gunshots somewhere—Guatemalans loved fireworks and shot them off at the slightest excuse for celebrating, or simply because they felt good—someone yelling their lungs out from a car passing on the deserted boulevard. Crickets.

He went to sleep and then woke, not knowing if it was almost morning or if only a few moments had passed. Crickets. He resisted the temptation to hold up his wrist and try to see the dial of his watch in the pale light. He tried not to think of Fossler’s bloodied cell, or of Lena Muller, or even of Taylor Cage. Taylor Cage, sweating. Taylor Cage, remembering Lena. Taylor Cage, as pale as watery light.

He sat bolt upright fighting for breath, his mouth gulping for air like a fish’s, his body cool to the air, drenched in perspiration, looking at Cage, green as an American Buddha, standing at the foot of his bed.

“Just…relax,” Cage said, his voice low and calm. “Okay? It’s just me, okay?”

Haydon managed to nod.

“Get up and get some clothes on,” Cage demanded, having used up the full extent of his tenderness. “We’ve got to go.”

Haydon threw back the covers. “What time is it?” He didn’t know why it mattered.

“Almost two o’clock.”

Cage sat down on a bench in front of the dresser across from Haydon’s bed, while Haydon went across the large room to his closet and grabbed his trousers off the hanger, thinking instantly of the disarrayed shirt in Fossler’s closet.

“What’s going on?”

Cage was relaxed on the bench, watching Haydon without much interest.

“Well, it’s payback time.”

Haydon sat on a chair and pulled on his socks.

“While we were eating you asked me what I wanted from you for all this help I’m giving you,” Cage said, sounding as if he had lavished information on Haydon, done his job for him. “Well, this is it.”

“And what is ‘this’?”

“Not a hell of a lot,” Cage said.

“Fine.” Okay. Haydon couldn’t expect him to say much in the hotel room.

When Haydon was dressed, they eased out into the small mezzanine and followed the curving stairs down into the parlor where, at last, the television was silenced. At the desk the young clerk conveniently had his head turned as they went outside to the front steps where a small Ford van with darkened windows was waiting, motor running.

“Get in,” Cage said as he walked around to the driver’s side.

When Haydon opened the door he was surprised to see a young Indian girl sitting in the one seat behind them. For a moment he looked into the familiar face of hundreds of years of Mayan history. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. She didn’t speak and neither did Haydon as he climbed in and sat down beside Cage, who was just closing the door and putting the van in gear.

Quickly they were out on the Reforma and headed north, breezing down the empty boulevard under the towering cypresses, their headlights burning into the haze of smoke and fog. Just before they reached the monument at the Plazuela Reina Barrios, Cage turned left and headed west, past the long Parque Centre America, and half a kilometer past that over the railroad tracks and into the western environs of Zona 8, a sector of narrow streets and poor buildings and hand-to-mouth lives. He continued into darker, bleaker streets until the van was slowed by cobblestones and then potholes, creeping along nearly at an idle. Haydon knew that the sound of the car motor was an ominous one for many of the people who lived behind the walls of these deserted little streets. Many of them would waken and listen with their eyes open, holding their breath in the darkness until the van passed. Cage turned into a lane without streetlamps and downshifted the van as the lane began to climb. His headlights jarred on the rough stone and caught the coiled tail of a cur just as the dog topped the crest of the street above them.

At the top of the hill, Cage pulled to the side of the street, and the girl got up, slid back the side door of the van, and got out. There was no paving on the street at all here, and Haydon could even smell the dust along with the stench from the dumps. The girl climbed up on the sidewalk and went down two or three doors from where they sat and knocked softly on a door. Haydon noticed she wore modern clothes, not Indian ones, and she wore them well. The stucco buildings outside his window were chipped and derelict, the paint that once had covered the walls now faded, only faintly visible. Cage lighted a cigarette, the tiny flame from the red plastic Bic was phosphorous white, then gone. Haydon could hear the girl talking, a pleasing voice in the darkness. He remembered her face. Then she was coming back, down the steps, into the van, the door sliding shut, and they were on the move again.

Cage continued to wind his way through the wretched streets, but in a different direction, each street seeming remarkably like all the others, proving the monotony of poverty. They stopped again, and again the girl got out, whispered at a doorway, came back, and they were gone again. Now the neighborhoods changed, and Haydon recognized some of the landmarks and then he knew where they were, 4a avenida. Zona 3, one of the older, wider streets in the city that had been laid out during the tenure of El Reformador, who had grander plans for the capital city than ultimately came to pass. The buildings along the way were not great homes with echoes of neoclassical architecture as El Reformador might have imagined, like the grand homes around the cemeteries of Mexico City. Rufino Barrios’ dreams proved to be only dreams. Instead, on this southern lateral approach to the Cementerio General, the city’s oldest cemetery, there were mean, low-storied buildings of cement and stucco, with electrical wires draped across the way like torn, black spiders’ webs against the smoky night sky.