Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  When the aircraft finally pulled into its slip and the engines were cut and its wheels blocked in place, there was no buzz of conversation, no scurrying to unload the overhead compartments, no jostling for position in the aisles. The scarcity of passengers and their disinterest in deplaning was indicative of the attitude of most people arriving in Guatemala. On the other hand, Haydon knew that all departing flights were always packed and hectic and lively. It was a country people much preferred to leave.

  Haydon took his soft leather weekender bag from the overhead compartment and walked down the empty aisle to the door, past the smiling stewardesses—they were paid to smile and would be leaving the next morning anyway—and out into the sloping enclosed ramp that led to the terminal. He followed the few people in front of him down several turns of the long corridors until they came to a small desk in an alcove where they obtained temporary visas and paid an entry fee. Having done that, he walked to the customs booths a short distance away where his passport and visa were stamped before he was allowed to go on into the bottom floor of the terminal where all passengers retrieved their luggage in one cavernous reception area that resembled nothing so much as a circus without a ringmaster.

  This effect was enhanced by the curious fact that all arrivals were observed by an enthusiastic crowd who viewed the entire process from a balcony, or veranda, on the second floor above. This mezzanine was on the same floor as the gates to the departing planes, duty-free shops, shops selling native handicrafts and woven textiles, a post office, telephone and telegraph offices, a bank, a drugstore, and slot machines. Even with all these diversions, the main form of amusement for departing passengers awaiting their flights with friends and relatives, and for the people who had come to welcome new arrivals, was to lean on the balcony rails and watch the incoming passengers file into the baggage claim arena and wait for their luggage to be off-loaded. And then when they got their bags, there was the pleasure of watching them often their suitcases on long inspection tables for the customs officers and everyone else who was curious about what they were bringing in. While all this was happening, there were shouts back and forth from the balcony to the bottom floor as friends and families spotted each other or tried to get each other’s attention.

  It was a congenial chaos, a noisy, cacophonous scene, and one which disguised another, more sinister side. The balcony and the crowds that gathered there provided a perfect cover for the intelligence agents of the security forces who closely monitored, and often photographed and followed, new arrivals who were of special interest to them. It was easy to do. In 1983 when the Israelis installed the Aurora airport’s radar system, they simultaneously “advised” the Guatemalan security forces in the use of computerized intelligence management systems. The Guatemalans had proved to be quick studies.

  Haydon went straight to the customs-check tables, and while the agent was going through his bag, he turned and scanned the scattering of people standing behind the railings of the balcony on the second floor. A few were waving and smiling at the passengers getting their bags, some leaning over and shouting a word or two, their voices echoing off the tile and marble floors, some simply staring down, bored. But Haydon did not see Fossler, nor did he see anyone else who seemed to take any interest in him.

  The customs officer zipped his bag shut and sent him on with a nod and a sideward jerk of his head. Grabbing the bag, Haydon walked out through one set of swinging doors, out into the long porte cochere where porters and taxi drivers were gathered in idle knots, gossiping and smoking away the slow evening. Immediately the warm, diesel-heavy air of urban Central America reset his psychic barometer. Everything he had ever learned or experienced about this beautiful and brutal country came back to him as if the years between had never existed. It was not an altogether comfortable feeling. Again Haydon scanned the faces, the isolated figure, for Fossler. Still he didn’t see him. Thinking Fossler might be double-parked in the shadows just outside the lighted drive, Haydon walked to one end and then to the other and peered out into the darkness. No Fossler.

  Knowing that in Guatemala nothing ever happened when it was supposed to, that schedules were considered to be only suggestions, not literal commitments, Haydon walked over to a concrete ledge near one of the car rental agencies and sat down, waving off overtures from cabdrivers. He would wait half an hour; he didn’t want this to turn into a Laurel and Hardy routine of missed connections. But the half hour dragged by without Fossler’s appearance, and Haydon signaled one of the taxis and headed into the city.

  CHAPTER 8

  The night was hot and the taxi windows were wide open as the driver clipped along the isolated airport boulevard lined with spindly, newly planted palms. Guatemala City’s distinctive night air was already thick with the familiar smoky stench that settled over the urban landscape after the daytime breezes died down. Nearly encircled by mountains, the city sat on a shallow plateau that was severely eroded on all sides by deep ravines. As the army’s thirty-year counterinsurgency war continued in vast areas of the countryside, preying on the rural population and disrupting an already backward economy, and as poverty became as perilous as the unchecked violence, the peasants fled to the capital city in the mistaken hope that life there would offer some refuge from fear and hunger. It didn’t.

  The city’s population swelled to over two million, overwhelming municipal services and turning many of the barrancas, ravines, that surrounded the city into disease-ridden slums. Hundreds of thousands of squatters’ shanties sprang up along their rims and spilled down their steep slopes together with the tons of garbage that the city dumped there and with what the slum dwellers themselves created. The poor scavenged along with the vultures for garbage to eat. In the rainy season, floods roared down the ravines and wiped out swaths of shanties, which were painfully rebuilt with a tenacity that only the despairing understand. In the dry season, the only moisture in the barrancas was runnels of raw sewage that drained down from the overcrowded city above. But regardless of the time of year, every evening the miasma from the perpetually smoldering dumps and shanty fires seeped up over the rims of the ravines and settled across the city like a bad dream. Wet or dry, every night the great populace of the dispossessed sent up a veil of bitter incense to cover the city, a constant reminder of misery’s children.

  Haydon always had seen a kind of egalitarian irony in the pervasive stench of these smoldering nights that discomfited the wealthy as well as the poor. Behind Guatemala’s dismal record of human suffering was a small and very wealthy minority that controlled the fortunes of the country through an unflinching exploitation of the poor. Though these wealthy few might build their lavish homes in guarded enclaves and envelop themselves in the trappings of abundance in an effort to put the privations of the filthy masses out of their sight, and even though they might turn a blind eye to the ugliness of the poor who surrounded them in an effort to put their suffering out of mind, they would never, ever, succeed in getting them out of their nostrils. The offensive odors of misfortune did not defer to the priviledged.

  They passed under the arches of the ancient stone aqueducts that still ran parallel to Bulevar Liberación and turned right, following the boulevard past the circle of the Clock of Flowers, past the Monument to the Indian, to the huge oval of Parque Independencia with its tall stone Obelisk commemorating Guatemala’s independence from Spain. The taxi driver swung his car halfway around the circle and then shot off northward on Avenida La Reforma, one of the broadest and most attractive avenues in Central America, with towering cypresses that shaded both sides of the avenue. To Haydon’s right was Zona 10 where the several-block area between 13 and 16 calles was known as Zona Viva, a sector of elegant shopping and dining and expensive hotels. They passed the ever-popular Camino Real hotel where Americans stayed who didn’t want to leave the U.S. behind when they crossed the border, and a few blocks farther down was the American embassy. This section of the city was as good as the city got, and even then there wasn’t much of i
t.

  Looking through the dirty windshield of the taxi at the avenue, whose reputation for elegance outstripped its reality, Haydon felt the first twinges of eeriness that was the city’s gift to any arriving traveler who knew anything about the country’s history. The low-powered street-lamps gave a macabre glow to the smoke that hung among the towering cypresses of the boulevard like an infernal breath. Haydon could not avoid thinking of what the smog consisted of, for he had seen more than a few bodies dumped in the garbage of the ravines, most of them mutilated and swollen like sausages from the tropical heat. And often they smoldered like everything else in the dumps, adding their oily effluvia to the filthy air for the rest of the city to breathe. Here death was literally in the air, and everyone could taste it.

  It was no surprise to Haydon that the taxi driver sped right through the city’s nicest sectors on his way to the address of Fossler’s hotel. Even with the exchange rate in his favor, Fossler was going third-class, which in Latin America could make for pretty bare accommodations. Posada Cofino was in Zona 1, the heart of the old central city where the streets were tight and narrow and poorly lighted, some of them only a block or two long. They were five or six blocks from the Plaza Mayor, where the National Palace and the Metropolitan Cathedral dominated the north and east boundaries respectively, when the driver pulled into a short street with a cobblestone surface and crept past six doorways before he found the posada, identifiable only by its name on a ceramic plaque set into the stone wall beside a grated stairwell. One weak light bulb burned inside the gate at the foot of the stairs.

  Haydon got out and paid the driver, who put his car in reverse and backed out of the narrow street with his tires thrumming on the cobblestones and his motor whining all the way to the intersection of the avenida where they had turned in. Haydon stood on the sidewalk a moment and looked in either direction of the small dead-end street that was little more than a long courtyard. There was a stationer’s across from him, a drugstore on the corner where they had come in, and a barbershop across from that, just down the sidewalk from Haydon. The rest of the doorways had no identifications that he could see, probably private residences or rooming houses or small business offices.

  He turned to the gate in the wall behind him, expecting to find a button to press or a speaker box, but there was nothing. Nor was the gate locked. He pushed it open and saw that beside the stairwell there was a narrow passageway that led back to a courtyard. He was looking for room number 4, but no sign gave him a clue as to whether it could be found back in the courtyard, from which issued the vague, tinny transmission of a radio. Hoping to avoid having to climb the stairs, he walked down the short corridor that smelled of dank stone to the small courtyard that opened to his left, its center filled with plantains and a few scrubby palms that had grown high enough to obscure most of the opposite side. The sound of the radio was clearer here, coming from across palms. There was one door on each side of the enclosure. He stepped to the door closest to him, in the wall to his right, and saw a number 1 on the stone lintel. He turned back to the door on the other side of the passageway where he had entered and looked above the door. It was number 4.

  Before knocking, he surveyed the courtyard once again. Mixed with the odor of musty stone was that of grilled onions and peppers and com tortillas. Beside each door that opened onto the courtyard was a single window, and though numbers 1 and 4 were dark, 3 and 2, partially hidden by the vegetation, were lighted. Haydon eased along the wall a little way near number 3, and though the window was open to the night heat, he heard no sounds coming from the inside. Across the way, however, the radio voice, now identifiable as that of an evangelical minister, was coming from the other open and lighted window, and Haydon could hear, too, the clinking of dishes and someone coughing.

  He went back around to Fossler’s door, but the silence of the small courtyard made him hesitate to knock. If Fossler wasn’t in, he didn’t want to draw attention to his own presence. Fossler’s room was dark, and Haydon doubted he was there. He reached down and tried the doorknob. It turned, and there was a soft click, a sound that made Haydon sweat. If Fossler had left, he would have locked the door. Haydon remembered Fossler saying that Lena and Baine knew where he was staying, and he remembered, too, that Fossler said he had moved several times. It seemed incredible to Haydon at this moment that he hadn’t asked Fossler why he had done that.

  He was holding the door knob, keeping the tension against the spring to keep it from clicking again as it moved back in place. He desperately missed his Beretta. Slowly rotating his wrist, he eased back the tension on the knob until the handle was in place. He stepped back against the wall and carefully, with outstretched arm pushed the door open into the room, while behind him, through the plantains, a chorus of tinny evangelical voices sang “Know, My Soul, Thy Full Salvation.”

  “Fossler,” he said, not loud, but loud enough. “Fossler.”

  As the door drifted open, Haydon saw in the glow of a powder-blue light that came from another window that fronted the street that the room was exactly that, one room. He stepped across the doorway and looked into the room from the opposite angle. The door was open all the way, flat against the inside wall so that no one could have been hiding behind it. Haydon stepped into the doorway and surveyed the room as best he could in the half-light, the foot of the single bed facing him and above it the window, to the right a partition that was supposed to hide a toilet and shower, and then to the right of that a table and two chairs and a closet without a door. Something was hanging in the closet. Haydon picked up his bag and stepped inside and closed the door. He put one knee on the unmade bed and reached up over the headboard and pulled closed the simple curtain. The window that looked out onto the courtyard was closed. The room was hot and smelled of mildew. Haydon moved cautiously to the table, sliding his feet on the floor to avoid tripping, and flipped on the light.

  The bulb must have been forty watts or less, but the jaundiced glow was bright enough to freeze Haydon to the spot. The room had been trashed. The bed covers were shoved up to the head of the bed in a dingy wad, one chair was turned over and the table askew. The shower curtain was ripped from most of its hooks, and for some reason the toilet tissue had been pulled from its roll and was strewn about the room in coiled, wormy strands that ended up in a pile at Haydon’s feet. Even in the bad light he could clearly distinguish the deep rubiginous stains soaked into the soiled gob of paper. Instinctively his eyes went straight to the sink, the filthy, chipped enamel draped with slobbers of bloodied water, and above it, the mirror tracked with blood spatters that climbed right up the wall. He wheeled around to the closet where a shirt was half torn from a hanger, and on the window curtains beside the closet was a bloody smear, an imprint of grasping fingers. Haydon swallowed. Blood was everywhere, splashed, dribbled, spattered, smeared, cast off, and flung, but—Haydon grasped at a thin reason to hope—none pooled. All of this had been shed in some kind of wild frenzy, but whoever had lost it had not stayed here long enough to make a puddle.

  Suddenly Haydon heard the doorknob behind him click, and he spun around to watch the wooden door drift gracefully open just as slowly as it had drifted open for him. But the doorway was empty, and then a cat shot out of the passageway and into the plantains, and Taylor Cage stepped into the yellow haze, stuffing a huge handgun into the waistband of his trousers.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Hello, Haydon,” Cage said. He hesitated a moment, almost as if he were giving Haydon the time to look him over, size him up, gather his nerves. He was about Haydon’s height, but much more bulky, his familiar barrel chest now accompanied by some additional poundage, though he still carried himself in a solid, surefooted manner that indicated he was action-ready. His fair-to-pinkish skin was weather cured with a recent sunburn that was almost finished peeling on the humped bridge of his straight nose, his glaucous eyes were unchanged. He was wearing his kinky gray hair a little shorter now, but it was just as thick as it had been a decade earlie
r.

  Keeping his eyes on Haydon, he came through the door and stopped just inside and pulled a pack of cigarettes from the chest pocket of his guayabera, which he wore with the tail out as was the fashion, and lighted one without offering any to Haydon.

  “You knew I was here, didn’t you?” he said, blowing the smoke away from them. He was perspiring, his forehead loaded with beads and a rivulet at his right temple.

  “‘Here’ outside, or ‘here’ in Guatemala?”

  Cage looked at Haydon. “Christ, you haven’t changed any, have you. Okay, let’s see, let’s try ‘here’ in Guatemala first.”

  “Yes.”

  “The street?”

  “Of course not.”

  Cage turned slightly so that his back wasn’t to the doorway but against the wall. He looked outside into the courtyard and then turned back. The handgun stuck in his waistband was clearly visible through the thin material of the guayabera.

  “I don’t know where your friend is,” he said.

  “Do you know what happened?” Haydon was having a hard time controlling the adrenaline. He didn’t even want to think about what might have gone on here.

  “No.”

  “You were here earlier?”

  Cage pulled on his cigarette and nodded. Haydon had noticed that he was smoking a Guatemalan brand. Cage was a firm believer of when-in-Rome, even when Rome had pretty nasty cigarettes.