Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  “At the very beginning, when George hired Mr. Fossler, I met with him privately,” she said. “He’s a perceptive man, not that you need great perception to see what kind of man my husband is. It’s because of how he is that we’ve come to this. Everyone knows that but George. That’s why he has so much antipathy for you. You told him that right up front, in so many words. You’d…you’d think that after a young girl had gone through college, after she had spent two and a half years in the Peace Corps, with all the self-assurance that requires, you’d think that after all that she would be able to claim some independence. But you don’t gain independence from a man like him. When she came home, he was all over her again…I’m sorry. God.”

  George Muller was the wealthy founder of a petrochemical company, a man who knew what he wanted and what was required to get it, and whose forceful and unyielding personality had made him a fortune. He was greatly admired by other successful men, men who were like him and who saw something of themselves in Muller’s strong-willed triumphs. But George Muller’s insistence that his self-centered will should never be denied, neither in his professional nor his private life, had not been without a price, a price that must have caused him much dark pain in those secret moments that occur in all men’s lives when they confront the naked reality of their own culpability. His preoccupations with himself had withered his wife’s love and alienated his daughter forever.

  “Anyway, I resolved that if we ever again made contact with her I wouldn’t let him…ruin it. I went through all this with Mr. Fossler, a long, honest, detailed conversation. He seemed to be very understanding. I simply asked him to let me know first.”

  “And he called you last night.”

  “Yes. He said…he said that there might be a chance of persuading her to come home.”

  Might-be-a-chance. Haydon studied her. Desperate people could sustain themselves on such airy nourishment.

  “But, apparently, he’s concerned about something,” she said. Germaine Muller’s voice quavered slightly, and she leaned her head back against the window and took a deep breath before going on. “He said he thinks she’s in some kind of trouble. That she and that boy are in some kind of trouble.”

  In the entire time Haydon had known her, Germaine Muller had never said the words, John Baine. He was always “that boy” or “him” or “that young man.” Something primitive in her kept her from saying his name. George Muller, on the other hand, spoke it all too often, spitting it out like a curse word, “Baine…Baine…Baine.” He was bedeviled by “Baine.”

  “What are their circumstances?” Haydon asked. “You said they’re not living together?”

  “Lena is living with an American woman in Guatemala City, someone she met during one of her weekend leaves in the Peace Corps. Apparently they had become close friends.”

  “And Baine?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just on his own, I guess.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. He said Lena was fine, she’s safe, but something…Frankly, I was angry with him—Mr. Fossler—for being so vague, but he said he could be all wrong. He said he wanted to talk to you but wanted to clear it with me first.”

  “Why me?”

  “When I had that first conversation with him and I recounted everything that had happened during the investigation, how helpful you had been despite George, he said he knew you. He had good things to say about you, that he respected you. I guess when he ran into something unexpected…you had handled the investigation…”

  “You know that if he contacts me, I’ll be dealing with him in an official capacity,” Haydon said. “I’ll have to write a supplement to the investigation into Lena’s disappearance. This can’t be off the record.”

  “That’s what he said you’d say. That’s why he was asking me, wanting to know if I wanted to keep it unofficial. I understand that. I’d like to have your help.”

  Haydon looked at Germaine Muller’s tortured eyes. She was looking at him, too, wanting some kind of reaction. His blessing, maybe. Or guidance, or simply assurance that she was doing the right thing. He hated to think what the Mullers’ lives must have been like since their daughter’s disappearance. Westerners, at least those of Anglo and Germanic stock, weren’t given to dramatics in their grief, not the kind of wailing, flailing exorcism of sorrow one sometimes sees in other cultures. Their psychology demanded a gravity that concealed, rather than revealed. In their own way, George and Germaine Muller were still in the calamitous throes of their loss. It had been a mighty lamentation of silence.

  “Did Fossler say how Lena was feeling about being found?”

  Germaine turned around in her seat and looked out the window again, but it was too foggy for her to see anything. She looked through the windshield to the wet, leaf-strewn lane where the girl had disappeared into the mists.

  “I asked him that,” she said. “He said she was upset. He said that she had cried. But…” She looked down at her purse, saw her hands gripping the wadded tissues. Slowly opening her fingers, she turned over her hands and regarded her rings, the diamond cluster, the emerald, the costly black pearl, with a detachment that reduced their value to smoke. “He said—and I was struck by his sensitivity to this—he said he wasn’t sure how to ‘understand’ it.”

  Haydon watched her, sensing her discomposure more than actually seeing it. It was as if he were witnessing an emotional implosion.

  “You haven’t the remotest…inkling…,” she said hoarsely, stopping to swallow as she raised her gaze to the window again, her empty eyes on the gray beyond the glass. “You haven’t the remotest inkling of the desolation I felt when he said that.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Colpa non perdonata dal genere umano, il quale non odia mai tanto chi fa male, nè il male stesso, quanto chi lo nomina.”

  Haydon flipped through his Italian dictionary and studied the verb forms once again. They made no sense within the context of the Italian sentence, at least as far as he could tell. Without completely understanding the entry, he made a stab at the translation anyway. “Mankind does not forgive fault, or hate so much one who is evil, nor evil itself, as much as one who names it.” His rendering was literal enough, he thought, but it was not graceful, and he wasn’t sure how far he could go in improving the style without distorting the meaning. He studied the sentence a few more moments and then turned to De Piero’s translation: “Men do not so much hate an evildoer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.”

  He laid down his pen in the center of his well-worn copy of Giacomo Leopardi’s Pensieri, its broken spine allowing the book to lie as flat as unbound sheets, sat back in his chair, and stretched out his legs to rest his feet on the thick cross-brace of the old refectory table. The subdued light of the winter afternoon suffused the library and Haydon’s clutter of Italian dictionaries, papers, and notebooks with a tenuous, hoary sheen. A copy of Leopardi’s Operette morali, still in its cellophane wrapper from Blackstone’s from whom he ordered most of his books, lay to one side. Forgetting his inept translation for the moment, he let his attention drift to the recording playing in the background, to the serene, seraphic voices of an a cappella requiem mass by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Normally he couldn’t work with music playing, a personal quirk that he often regretted, but these masses were so extraordinarily ethereal that they offered no resistance at all to concentration.

  His eyes wandered to the slightly frosted glass panels of the French doors through which he could see the bare terrace and the dead winter-scape beyond, across the lawn and down to the two greenhouses visible through the naked branches of the trees. It was a desolate setting, and to him winter was a desolate season that he scarcely could tolerate, brief though it was along the Texas coast. He hated the effects of winter’s killing touch that stripped the trees and burned the summer vines, turning their graceful rambles to a bare and brittle unloveliness. Normally this was not a scene he
had to contemplate very often, but this year had been exceptional. Just before Christmas a series of numbing northers had driven deep into the South and well into Mexico, hurling sleet and snow across the subtropical landscape with a stunning viciousness that was not seen but once or twice in several decades.

  The freezing nights that followed had devastated Haydon’s tropical gardens. The sluggish sap in the lime trees that clustered in a loose orchard down near the greenhouses—where the bromeliads, at least, were safe—swelled as it froze in the plummeting temperatures, bursting the bark in long, serrated wounds that exposed the tender core of the trees. The towering and lacy-leafed flamboyanas at the far end of the terrace near the sun-room, two trees that Haydon had grown from seeds he had brought back from the Yucatán more than fifteen years before, had met the same fate, as had the lank jacarandas, visible now just outside the French doors, below the terrace stairs. The storm had filled the terra-cotta pots of bougainvillea with tiny white kernels of sleet that had lain with the woody stalks of the old vines in a cold and destructive embrace and had left the wild trumpet vines along the high rock walls stunned and dying without their blossoms. Near the bathhouse, the skeletons of the ebony and persimmon trees stood brittle and glazed in pale ice. Though only spring could confirm the lasting effect of the damage, the ever-varied, evergreenness of the subtropical plants, which served as the rich foil for their own gaudy efflorescence, was already reduced to the umber and bister sameness of winter.

  The snow itself had not remained long—two days, a trace of it on the third day, a ragged, dusty blue line of it next to the footing of the stone wall that surrounded the garden and the lawn—but Haydon was plunged into an unshakable gloom by the sudden plunder. To get his mind off the dreary setting, which was made even more somber on this January afternoon by the damp, lowering sky, he had taken out his dictionaries and his two collections of Leopardi, a questionable choice since the Italian poet-scholar himself had a cold eye and was given to sober moods that colored all his writings.

  Haydon had turned to this kind of diversion before, and although he wasn’t very good at it, he stuck with it, battling verb forms, wrestling with the baffling rules of grammar and grappling with a system of sentence structure that seemed to fold back over itself. The lines accumulated, the stanzas multiplied, and the paragraphs became pages as he unlaced the finely woven garment of Leopardi’s eloquent language and listened to the clear, contrapuntal voices of Palestrina’s Messa per i defunti.

  This was what he had been doing when Germaine Muller had called, and this was what he had come back to when he had left her sitting alone in her car on the foggy lane in the woods of the Rice campus. But it wasn’t any good now. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t even complete a sentence without his thoughts wandering back to the sad image of an alienated woman refusing consolation as she slumped against his car door, and to the unexpected news that Fossler had found and talked to Lena Muller.

  “How are you doing over there?”

  Haydon started. The library was quiet; Palestrina’s Lacrimosa had ended, and he hadn’t even been aware of it. He turned around and looked at her. Nina was sitting behind him on a small leather sofa, her feet shoved up under one of the cushions as she rested her back against the padded arm. Wearing a black vee-neck sweater of ribbed cotton with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows and a pair of black pleated pants, she had been reading an article in Progressive Architecture. Her reading glasses had slipped slightly down on her nose, and she was looking at him over the rims, just over the tops of them so that it seemed as if her pupils were hidden exactly behind the thin border of the tortoiseshell frames. The magazine was propped against her raised thighs, and she was holding it open with one hand while the other hand had gathered up her long chestnut hair, holding it up off the nape of her neck.

  “Not bad,” he said. He looked at her, olive skin and dark eyes and common sense. He relished moments like this when, by some oddity of perception, he unexpectedly saw her anew, as if for the first time again. Everything about her was fresh and surprising, her dusky coloring, her manner of becalmed curiosity, and her air of self-understanding that projected an emotional stability that was a rare and fine treasure. Even her sexuality, which stemmed from a harmony of all the other attributes together, was an orchestration of qualities of which he had never tired.

  “Not bad,” she said, raising her eyebrows and pushing up her glasses as if she were considering what to do with such a feeble response. He knew that she had caught him with his mind wandering and was curious about what was preoccupying him.

  For the most part, Nina could live with Haydon’s protean frames of mind. That was the great thing about her and the bad thing about him. If she had been the kind of woman who needed to know what he was thinking every moment, needed to be included in his every waking thought, needed to have an explanation for every queer mood of his nature, or felt slighted by his sometimes introverted temperament, the marriage would never have lasted. Additionally, if Haydon had had to make any fundamental changes in his personality to save the marriage, he couldn’t have done it, though it would not have been for his lack of desire or willingness to do so. It was only that the peculiarities of his character were not susceptible to radical change. He could have willed himself to make the effort; he could not have willed himself to succeed. But neither was Haydon given to self-deception. To his credit, he held no illusions about himself and gratefully acknowledged the good fortune that had come to him in marrying her.

  Nina, on the other hand, would have been equally willing to make a change to save their marriage if it had ever been necessary, but where Haydon would have failed, she would have succeeded. She was a survivor, a woman of strength and resilience, who did not have a personality in conflict with itself. She did not find it necessary to steel herself against invisible threats, nor did she create dreadful fictions that compelled her to do battle with Hydra-headed “what ifs”—apprehensions that Haydon lived with as though they were psychic siblings. She perceived life through a clear and finely ground lens, not through the cloudy-green refractions of an old bottle. If she had needed to change to save their marriage, she would have been good for the sacrifice, and she would never have looked back with second thoughts.

  It was not that neither of them hadn’t made sacrifices. No two people could remain together for eighteen years without experiencing disappointments in the other, without discontents and the painful renunciation of selfish ends, both significant and incidental. But none of their sacrifices had been beyond their ability to make, or more importantly, greater than their regard for each other. The true good fortune of their marriage had been that by virtue of the incalculable odds of serendipity, they had chanced upon that famed, but all too rare, felicitous paradox: the true compatibility of opposites. That, and the fact that they never had forgotten all that was good and exceptional about their beginning.

  Still turned in his chair, Haydon crossed his long legs, rested one arm on the chair back, and with the forefinger and thumb of his other hand, lightly touched his moustache, unconsciously checking the preciseness of its trim.

  “I don’t understand fa,” he said.

  She nodded slowly, her eyes still on him. They looked at each other a moment, and then they both smiled at the same time.

  “I know what we need,” Nina said. “How would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “Perfect.”

  “What kind?” She put down her magazine and took off her glasses, which she laid beside the lamp on the mahogany table behind the sofa.

  “Something dark.”

  “Colombian Supremo?”

  “Okay, that.”

  “Strong.”

  Haydon nodded. “Grind an extra spoon of beans.”

  “That’ll make it too strong,” she said. But he knew she would do it.

  “And some Lindt’s too, okay?”

  “You’re self-indulgent,” she said. “Too self-indulgent. It ought to bother your conscienc
e.”

  “It does,” he said.

  She looked at him. “It probably does,” she said, shaking her head. She stood and ran her fingers through her hair as she leaned back in a twisting stretch, then relaxed and straightened her sweater, her loose, thick hair falling back around her face. With the wan winter light of late afternoon turning the rich hues of the library into muted colors, it seemed to Haydon that he was looking at an Italian baroque canvas in which Nina’s modern face and form had been set in anachronistic, but perfect, consonance with the seventeenth-century painting.

  “Be back in a little bit,” she said.

  Haydon watched her walk out of the library and listened to her footsteps as she crossed the marble hall to the dining room and into the kitchen. Within moments he heard her talking and then heard the liquid, Colombian lilt of Ramona’s voice. It had been a little over two years now since she had come to live with them as a favor to her uncle, a homicide detective Haydon knew in Bogota. A long-legged girl with an easy smile and the eyes of a woman twice her age, Ramona had been a freshman at Rice University then, and though the arrangement was supposed to have been only for one year while she got used to her new surroundings, Nina and Gabriela, and even Haydon, had grown so fond of her that they invited her to stay on. Listening to snatches of their conversation, a polyglot of English and Spanish in which they interchanged the words of the two languages with a careless freedom that Haydon never had achieved, he heard them discussing psychology and grade-point averages and prerequisites. Ramona was in the midst of midterm exams, and Nina, who was especially fond of the girl and treated her like a younger sister, was wanting to know how she was doing.

  Suddenly aware of a chill on his feet, Haydon wiggled his toes in his well-worn suede oxfords. He hated having cold feet, and in the old house with its limestone and marble floors it was something he constantly fought during the brief few months that constituted winter. The old shoes were favorites because they were just sloppy enough to allow him two pairs of socks. He got up from the refectory table and walked over to the fireplace, took several logs from the copper-lined bin beside the bookcases and stacked them on the grate. Taking a match off the limestone mantel, he lighted the gas jet under the grate and watched the blue flames from the jet lick up the rough sides of the logs from the bottom, watched the logs begin to burn until he smelled the first sweet wafts of the oak fire.