Body of Truth (39 page)

“You asked me a while ago if I knew where she is—you know, don’t you,” Haydon said.

“We have an idea,” Pittner looked up. “Listen,” he said. “The only way this is going to work is for you to cooperate with me. Otherwise, you’re out. That’s the way it’s got to be. I can’t have you out there on your own. It’d be stupid of me. I thought maybe it would work…but…”

Haydon understood Pittner’s position, and he knew Pittner could, and would, do what he said.

“Okay,” Haydon agreed. “But I want Fossler tied to this…as a package.”

Pittner studied Haydon and then nodded.

“It’s a package?” Haydon insisted.

“Yeah,” Pittner said, “Agreed.”

They sat there for another hour and a half. Haydon finished his Coke, but Pittner never touched another drop of bourbon. Haydon started with Borrayo’s departure from the alley in Colonia Santa Isabel. He told Pittner about Lita picking him up and taking him to Cage’s safe house (he avoided identifying Avenida Elena), about Cage’s plan to “use” Haydon to find Lena but not telling Haydon the details of his plan, of going home to find Janet waiting for him in the courtyard of the Residencial Reforma with the “message from Lena,” about being approached the next morning by a messenger from Dr. Grajeda (he didn’t reveal Salviati’s name or profession), about his trip to 18 calle and the meeting with Grajeda (and about the death of Cage’s man), and about his subsequent use of the luckless and moonstruck Phan.

By the time Haydon had finished his story he had captured Pittner’s full attention, though Pittner lounged with his chin in his hand, his elbow propped on the table as though he hadn’t an ounce of strength left. His eyes, which Haydon had come to realize were more indicative of his mood than his languid posture, were unblinking, entirely absorbed.

Pittner stirred himself and sat up in his chair. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Haydon, that’s a lot of work. And a lot of dumb luck,” he added. As had happened at dinner the night before, Pittner seemed suddenly to have grown disheveled without having done anything to cause it. Haydon only now noticed the dingy condition of his shirt, the front displaying its wrinkles despite the suit coat and tie, the flabby collar showing a lumpy rib underneath it where the tie did not lie flat. Was it put on in a hurry, or inattentively? Pittner’s eyes drifted away from Haydon and found another subject somewhere in the sunbaked courtyard beyond the windows.

“We didn’t know,” he said without moving his eyes from the courtyard, almost as if he were thinking out loud. “About the clandestine cells in Pavón. I’m not surprised by that; they move them all the time, have them everywhere. But it’s good to know. We like to know.” He sighed. “Cage,” he said, his head shaking almost imperceptibly. “Damn, he’s really pushing it. It’s like when you get gangrene in your leg or somewhere. How the hell do you get rid of it without destroying a part of your own body. He’s going to make this hard for us…he wants her…but, you know, it looks like it’s something we could cooperate on, doesn’t it. I mean, why are we in competition on this? I don’t see the sense in it.”

He was ticking down the list of options.

“Janet…Janet’s an interesting possibility. That note, it could have been from the G-2. You’re learning too much too fast, and they see a real threat. The letter, the bomb, whatever it takes. Grajeda. The guerrillas. There’s always one chronic problem with guerrillas—worldwide—and that’s cooperation. They usually have one thing in common: hatred for the existing power structure…sometimes justified. But they’re splintered…each little group is pissed off in a different way. Factionalism. Grajeda knows all this. He grew up on it. What he didn’t tell you was that his little agreement was a gamble at best. He can’t guarantee shit…maybe he can with this faction or that faction, but…it’s just a goddamn mess.”

“You think they’re going to use her as a bargaining chip,” Haydon said.

“They could, yeah. Azcona wants her; we want her. I don’t know. Instability, unpredictability. We can be sure of that, and that’s all.” Pittner paused. “Look,” he said, “I know I’m going to sound like Cage—which is not too surprising, I suppose—but I’m going to have to do some planning, check some things. Why don’t you go back to the Residencial Reforma and stay there. It’s…well, it’s a ‘known’ location. You’ll be safe from Azcona there. But it’s probably the only damn place you’ll be safe. Understand?”

Haydon nodded.

Pittner stood. He seemed a little stiff, but only for a moment. “I’ll take you back there,” he said. “Stay there. Wait for me. I’m going to need you. If anything happens I ought to know about, call me.” He gave Haydon a number. “That number will get straight to me. Come on, we’d better get going.”

CHAPTER 38

H
e lay on the bed in his room and stared at the repoussé on the light fixture in the center of the high ceiling. After Pittner had dropped him off at the hotel he had gone straight to the dining room and forced himself to eat a large fruit salad. He hadn’t wanted it, but he ate it because he knew he would regret it later if he didn’t. Haydon was not one of those people who ate compulsively when they were stressed. In fact, it was just the opposite for him. All food lost its appeal, and he could skip two or three meals without any interest. However, several days of this would do strange things to his nerves, and he had learned he could stave off tension headaches with a steady diet of fruits.

So now he lay in the midafternoon heat, the heavy blue curtains once again pulled away from the windows and draped over the metal levers that held open the glass panes. His shoes and coat off, his tie loosened, Haydon surrendered to the scenes of the car bombing that he had been trying to avoid. Again and again he remembered that millisecond following the blast and before the obscuring debris and fire when he could see Phan and the girl sitting in the car like black manikins, still a millisecond away from realizing what had happened to them. Then, in the awful seconds afterward, the storm of fire and debris and cutting glass, the explosion flinging people, again, before they understood that they were victims. Those were the moments, dead moments in the psyche, when shock set in, nature’s primitive defense against the too-horrible-to-live-with moments that were to follow. He thought of the mother and the wife and the sister-in-law and wondered how they would discover what had happened to their Phan. And he wondered who the girl was, and how her family or friends would learn of her obliteration.

Beginning with Jim Fossler’s bloodied room, he reviewed the careless death he had witnessed within the last thirty-six hours. It was made all the more incredible when he reminded himself that it would make no difference whatsoever. In the past twenty years of Guatemala’s history well over one hundred and fifty thousand people had been “disappeared” and assassinated and not one arrest and conviction had resulted. In a country of fewer than nine million people, the rate of assassination alone was roughly one thousand per year. In the United States, that rate would accumulate to over thirty thousand assassinations annually—for which no one ever would be arrested, year after year. This was a fact that could only be described as surreal. There were other descriptions for it, of course, all of them abominable and none of them mattering in the least, because there was no political will in Guatemala to stop the killing. It was a country whose last twenty years had been marked by a political depravity seldom matched in modern times.

Outside the traffic bolted in jerks and starts under the boulevard’s towering cypresses and kept up a steady rumble that reverberated off the stucco walls of the room, and always, even in the stillness of the heat that seemed to squeeze the oxygen out of the air, he could smell the acrid effluent of gasoline engines.

Haydon turned over on his side. He thought of Nina and of the sanity that framed her life. He wanted to be with her, to hold her in the still of the afternoon, to put his arms around her sane, reassuring body and pull her to him and feel her breathing steadily, reliably and smell her familiar fragrance that to his mind was as sweet as sachet. The temptation to turn over, pick up the telephone, and call her was almost irresistible; but he didn’t do it. At this point, he simply didn’t trust himself. The morning’s horrors were on him like a dark pall, and he didn’t want them to touch her.

Instead, he concentrated on the sounds outside. Could he hear anything besides the traffic? In the momentary lulls he could hear birds in the shrubs of the courtyard, and occasionally the conversational voices of people walking to their cars, and now and then the chink of flatware or dishes echoing up from the dining room. Footsteps on the marble steps, heels on the terrazzo floors…stopping outside his room. Haydon opened his eyes…he had closed them? He turned over on his back and looked at the door, his right arm reaching out toward the secretary beside the bed for the automatic.

There was a soft knock, a pause, another knock.

“Haydon. It’s Janet.” She sounded as if her face was pressed next to the door.

“Okay, just a second.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, bent over and stuck the gun between the mattresses. He stood and walked to the door and opened it.

Janet was standing there, her expression a mixture of expectant concern and conviction.

“Why didn’t you call me?” She was wearing another sundress, sleeveless, powder blue with a long skirt. She smelled of something soft, a light and lingering fragrance, as though she had just stepped out of the shower. Janet was one of those women who seemed always fresh and clean.

“I was going to…”

He put his finger up to his lips. “Let me get this…” and he stepped over to the writing desk and got the room key and went back to and out the door, pulling it closed behind him. “Let’s go out here,” he said. They were only a few steps from a short corridor that led through an arched wrought-iron grille anchored to the stucco walls and out onto a veranda that overlooked the courtyard in front of the hotel. No one was there, and they went to one of the several sets of wicker furniture and sat down at a table with a tile top.

“I didn’t call you because it didn’t work out like I’d hoped,” he began explaining. “There simply wasn’t anything to tell you. There was nothing to say. I…”

“I’ve just had another visit from that child,” Janet interrupted, reaching into a small, natural-leather clutch bag. She handed the note to Haydon without saying anything more, her eyes fixed on him. Haydon took it and unfolded the paper.

Janet…Get Haydon & meet me at the Cementerio General at 5:30 pm…follow the main avenue as far as it goes…turn right…follow the lane all the way to the back of the cemetery…wait. I’ll find you…Important to trust only Haydon.

As with the first note there was no signature. Haydon looked at Janet. “Her handwriting?”

“Without a doubt.”

Without a doubt. Haydon tried to think it through even as he spoke. “I’ve…I have reason to believe that she wouldn’t contact you this way,” Haydon said.

“You have reason to believe?”

“I do.”

Janet nodded, only barely checking her anger.

“Someone’s helping her,” Haydon said. He hesitated and then went on. “They’re helping her get out of the country.”

Janet frowned.

“Helping her avoid the security forces. She…she and Baine have collected some incriminating evidence, documentation, about Azcona’s involvement in a child-kidnapping operation. They wanted to go public with it, publish it. That’s what brought all this down on them. Azcona found out. He wants the files; he wants them dead.”

Janet was flabbergasted. “
General
Azcona?”

Haydon nodded. “Lena’s been working on this a long time. You didn’t know anything about it?”

Janet swallowed and shook her head, for once, speechless.

“I was contacted by the people helping her,” Haydon went on. “At some point they want to turn her over to me, but they’re holding her in strict security conditions. They claim she couldn’t possibly have gotten the first note out without their knowledge. They’re supposed to contact me again, let me know when she’ll be moved.” He looked at the piece of paper he was holding, “But this isn’t the way they would do it.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked about the first note. They disavowed it.”

“So that’s where you went this morning, to see these people.”

“Yes.”

Janet’s eyes searched Haydon’s face. “She’s all right?”

“They didn’t mention anything otherwise.”

“She has ‘documents,’ they say?”

Haydon nodded.

“With her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are they going to see that the documents get published, these people?”

“I don’t know.”

Janet was pensive, turning her face away toward the boulevard, sitting on the edge of her cushioned chair, knees together, looking oddly prim and un-Janetlike. She was obviously discomfited, and as Haydon looked at her he felt the same way. He was uneasy with the fact that both notes expressed the demand that Janet trust only him. If Lena had indeed written the notes, where did she acquire this conviction that her trust should be vested solely in Haydon? If she hadn’t written the notes, who had and why? The same people who wired the bomb to the ignition switch of his car? If someone was trying to lure him into a trap, why? He had nothing unless he had Lena, and all factions of this fiasco should know that.

“These people,” Janet said. “You know you can trust them? Could you be wrong? Could they be wrong?”

Haydon slumped back in his chair and noticed that he had walked out of his room without his shoes. He thought of Grajeda. It was true, he believed him…he trusted him, but of course, he wanted to trust him. Grajeda was probably the only person in this whole mess with whom Haydon felt any real kinship. He felt immediately that he could understand Grajeda, the others he had to puzzle out. But could he trust him? Yes. The more important question was could Grajeda trust those in whom he had placed his trust? If Haydon believed Pittner’s information, he doubted it.

“Well?”

Haydon looked at her. “Yes. I can trust my source, but I’m not sure he can trust his.”