Body of Truth (58 page)

The second mailing arrived a few weeks later, again two articles from
La Prensa Libre
and
El Gráfico
, which recorded the accidental death of a free-lance American journalist. John Baine died from injuries he sustained when his car crashed while traveling “at a high rate of speed” on the northern shores of Lake
Atitlán
. Mr. Baine, the articles said, had lived in Guatemala only a few years and specialized in stories about “Indian crafts” and articles for tourist magazines. Both stories were brief, and identical in both papers.

In early July, when the short but potent winter was long-since gone and the sweltering heat had returned to Houston and settled in for the long term, Haydon received the printed program from a funeral mass for Dr. Aris Grajeda, who had just been buried, in the drizzly heart of the rainy season, in Guatemala City’s Cemetery of the Cypresses. The program was a cloying document of several pages that gave the order of the service, the hymns sung, the prayers offered. There was a picture of Jesus Christ praying in Gethsemane, eyes cast heavenward. There was a brief biography of Dr. Grajeda emphasizing his academic awards in college and his achievements in medical school, including a special grant awarded him by Johns Hopkins University Medical School to study tropical diseases upon his completion of his internship. After listing his academic achievements, it was simply stated that he practiced medicine in his native Guatemala City. His good friend Dr. Bindo Salviati gave a eulogy. Dr. Grajeda had died of complications following an appendicitis attack he suffered while vacationing among the Mayan pyramids in the Petén.

The six months that had passed between the time Haydon had left Guatemala with Lena Muller’s body and the announcement of Dr. Grajeda’s funeral made Haydon believe that the Kaibile assassin had in fact missed his mark that rainy night back in January. And what had happened to Dr. Grajeda in the meantime? Haydon had heard nothing in the interim and assumed Grajeda was dead. How had he lived in those six months? And how had he really died? It made Haydon feel odd that he already had grieved for the doctor and that many times over the past six months he had thought of him in the past tense while he was actually still living. Now he had to grieve for him all over again. And he felt guilty as well, for the earthshaking reaction that Dr. Grajeda had anticipated upon the publication of the microfilmed documents that Haydon had carried out of the rain forests of Alta Verapaz had not occurred. Dr. Grajeda must have waited tensely in the ensuing months for the thunderclap of media attention to the scandal that his papers exposed, only to realize after months and months that nothing was to come of it at all.

The grim fact was that Haydon himself had spent considerable time and expense to make sure the documents got to the most respected journalists and specialists interested in Central American affairs in every branch of the media. But the media was a mistress much in demand, and a mistress who demanded much of her suitors. Guatemala? There was the maelstrom of Eastern Europe, the upheaval in the Soviet Union, there were the firestorms of hatred in the Middle East. The sins of General Luis Azcona Contrera were washed away by the blood of other horrors in other places, places where the United States had invested far more money and had far more at risk. Besides, Guatemala had already been converted from its heathen ways. It was already a democracy.

Dr. Grajeda must have realized all of this with suicidal despair as he hid and sweated in the jungles of the Petén. It must have haunted him as he lay awake in the dark, cicada-ridden nights and remembered his brief time with Lena Muller and how, together, they had dreamed of assembling a truth so powerful that its revelation would bring forth a redemption of children.

About the Author

David L. Lindsey is the author of six highly acclaimed novels, including
A Cold Mind, In the Lake of the Moon
, and
Mercy
. He lives in Austin, Texas.