Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  “I was here about half an hour ago.” He looked around. “Shocked the shit out of me.” He wiped a thick hand across his forehead, smeared the sweat, and wiped his hand on the tail of the guayabera.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “When I got here, saw all this, I backed out, went down the street and made some telephone calls. On my way back, I heard a car coming down the street and ducked into a doorway.” He nodded toward the other side of the street. “Saw you get out of the cab and go in the passageway here. When I saw the light come on I walked across.”

  “Why didn’t you make your calls from here?”

  “I wanted them to be private.”

  “His telephone was tapped, even here?”

  Cage sighed. “This is a long story, Haydon. We need to get out of here. Come on. I’ve got a car around the corner.”

  Haydon was reluctant to leave. “You went through the place?”

  “Sure. There’s nothing. Cleaned out.” If he wasn’t lying, if he really had gone through the place, then Haydon could believe there was nothing to turn up. Cage knew how to go over a scene.

  Cage turned and Haydon picked up his bag and followed him. At the door he stopped, turned around for one last look at the room, snapped off the light, and closed the door behind him. They returned down the dim passageway to the wrought-iron gate, the closing of which echoed out across the cobblestones and off the stucco walls on either side of the narrow street. The night was a little cooler here, away from the stuffy confines of Fossler’s cramped compartment.

  As they walked side by side along the gritty sidewalk, Haydon next to the buildings, Cage on the street side, their footsteps were the only sounds on the deserted street. Cage seemed preoccupied, and Haydon tried to remember back ten years whether this was his manner or if present circumstances were affecting him. He couldn’t recall, one way or the other. Nor could he shake off the feeling that by walking away from Fossler’s room he was walking away from Fossler, turning his back on him as surely as if he had turned on his heel and walked away from his friend’s bleeding body. Haydon felt like he was leaving something behind in the stink of Fossler’s ghastly little cell.

  At the corner of the avenida. Cage hesitated but didn’t stop, barreling on across the intersection, following the street down a slight decline toward the Plaza Mayor. They passed some storefronts and then ducked into a tiny drive that led to a dark walled courtyard where a few cars were parked along the walls and ranchera music came from a radio inside a lighted doorway. Cage went to one of the cars, a large-sized Japanese model, and unlocked it. Haydon threw his bag into the backseat as Cage started the car, and they eased out of the courtyard, into the narrow passage, and then out into the street, the tires thrumming on the cobblestones as Cage picked up speed.

  “I get a different one of these about every ninety days,” Cage said, shifting the car. “Mexican used-car dealer out on the Mixco highway. I trade them in, he gives me a decent deal, a little profit for himself—plus a little to keep his mouth shut—and I have a new car every few months. Makes it harder for them to keep up with me.”

  “Where are we going?” Haydon asked, thinking of the shirt half torn from the hanger in Fossler’s closet. He thought of the bloody slobbers on the dirty enamel basin, the gore-soaked toilet tissue strewn crazily around the room. They were still in the tight streets of the old central city, but now there was traffic, a few people on the sidewalks, the traffic lights were working, a few sparsely populated cafés were open to the night.

  “I’m hungry,” Cage said. “We’ll get something to eat, where we can talk.”

  They were on one of the calles crossing the avenidas heading east, the streets getting busier, and then Cage turned onto 6a avenida, and the narrow street was awash with neon signs that hung out over the street, advertisements for Jordache jeans, Panasonic stereos, Chinese restaurants, Wrangler jeans, Sony radios, Pepsi, shoe stores, beauty shops, Toshiba, Fuji, 7-Up—the first world, one street of it anyway—and then Cage turned again, and the commercial volume was reduced by half and then with each block it was reduced by half again until they turned for the last time. They were on 9a avenida, a gloomy street with a slower pace, dimmer lights, fewer people, and more shadows.

  Martin Fierro’s was an Argentine steak house with a front entry that opened off the corner of the building at 9a avenida and calle 15, its windows right on the sidewalk, thrown open to the night. It had a low-timbered ceiling shrouded in a haze of smoke from the cook fires, and simple wooden chairs and tables with oilcloth covers. It was in Zona 1, in the kind of location that Cage made it his business to know intimately in all the cities of Latin America. It wasn’t the sort of place you went to accidentally.

  Though the place was busy, they were able to grab a table from three men who were standing up to go. It was next to a window just inside the double front doors, but behind a railing that gave it some privacy. They sat down among the dirty dishes, and Haydon slipped his bag under the table, between the wall and his leg. Cage had said he ought to bring it; you should never leave anything in your car. The dishes were immediately cleared away by a young Indian girl with beautifully plaited hair who wore a traditional corte skirt and a Die Harder T-shirt through which her small breasts made little protrusions on either side of Bruce Willis’ posturing heroics. When she had gone, the waiter came and they ordered Gallos, Guatemala’s most popular beer. Cage also ordered churrasco, thin fillets of grilled beef. Haydon passed. The beer appeared immediately, its gold label sporting the bright red rooster trademark.

  The table was snug up to the window, which opened right onto the sidewalk and street. Haydon rested his elbow on the windowsill and surveyed the sidewalks where prostitutes sauntered up and down, in and out of the pools of feeble light that fell from the old cast-iron streetlamps. Haydon’s stomach was a mess of knots, but he was determined to let Cage do his lead-in. He tried to calm himself. He had to.

  Cage upended his Gallo and drank nearly half the bottle before lowering it.

  “What’s going on here?” Haydon said.

  Cage was still swallowing his last mouthful. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “How bad do you want to know what’s going on here?”

  “As of the minute I walked into Fossler’s room,” Haydon said, “everything changed. Before that I could have turned around and gone back home on the next flight without any problem. Now it would be a problem.”

  “Well, it’ll be a problem if you stay too,” Cage said. “It’s one of those kind of things where if you get in, you get in up to your nostrils.”

  “I can’t very well go home and tell Fossler’s wife what I walked away from.”

  “Hell, don’t tell her. You could report it to the consular office at the embassy and leave with a clean conscience.”

  “You could do that,” Haydon said. Suddenly he was angry instead of numb. Logic, every impulse of common sense in him said he ought to go to the embassy and spill everything. He knew how important it was to move quickly after a homicide. Christ, was he making that assumption so easily? On the other hand, his gut was telling him something else. He had better listen to Cage first. He had better hear him out before his common sense got him into trouble in a country where there was a distinct lack of common sense and where the games were played according to a dynamic that he only faintly understood. As much as he disliked it, he was going to have to listen to Cage—for a while at least.

  “I’m not going to let it go,” Haydon said.

  Cage shrugged. The perspiration was glistening on his forehead again as he reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. He lighted one and laid the pack and a red plastic Bic lighter on the table. The cigarette smoke hovered in the air, commingled with the haze of the cook fires, and then slowly drifted out the window into the darkness where it became part of the night breath, becoming one with the stench from the smoldering dumps and the shanty fires. Cage looked at Haydon.

  “I’ve changed jobs,” he said. “N
ot with the State Department, no perks, no advancement scale, no insurance policy, no hospitalization, no retirement program. I’m cut loose.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Almost two years ago.”

  “Your choice?”

  “Absolutely. Got the idea from the Israelis, all those ‘formers’ who used to be with Mossad, Shin Bet, Aman. Shit, they were stationed all over the goddamn world. When the time comes, when they get fed up, they quit. Then they go back to where they were stationed and use their contacts to make fortunes in the arms trade. Big fortunes. Our guys do it too, but the Israelis are better at it.”

  He used the thumb of the hand holding the cigarette to squeegee the perspiration from across his forehead. A sip of the Gallo, a drag on the cigarette.

  “But I’m not crazy to get myself blown away.” Cage shook his head. “No, I stay clear of the arms trade. I stay clear of drugs. They go hand in hand and the money’s…gigantic. But I can count a dozen men, big men, who should have been smart enough to quit when they could, smart enough to be smart, who aren’t around any longer to spend their money. No, I’m looking at longevity. I watched those Israeli assholes, Mike Harari with old Noriega down in Panama, Pesakh Ben Or here in Guatemala, David Katz in Mexico, Sa’ada in Honduras. Where are they now? Well, shit, we don’t know, do we, but there are rumors, and I don’t like what I hear.”

  Cage looked out the window, thinking, maybe wondering if he ought to be saying what he was saying. Whatever he was going to come out with, Haydon could be sure it was calculated. Though Cage appeared to be an impulsive man, it was a credit to how well he could think on his feet that, even so, he never acted recklessly. If it wasn’t to Cage’s advantage to tell him, Haydon wouldn’t hear it. Related to this, and of equal risk, was the probability that Cage could very easily be setting him up. If Cage didn’t have something to gain by Haydon’s presence, he never would have shown himself back at Fossler’s room.

  Cage held up an index finger as if to make and hold a point. “I more or less sell information,” he said. “Marketing my skills, as it were. I’ve been in Latin America my entire career, most of it in Central America. United States intelligence has piss-poor connections, I mean in human intelligence. Electronics, satellites, that’s something else. But you can’t do much good with just that, not in preemptive situations. You’ve got to have people on the ground. This is where the U.S. is screwed. The DEA, the CIA, they rely 95-98 percent on paid informants in the G-2, the Guatemalan military intelligence. Which is up to its ass in the drug trade, in death-squad operations, in the arms trade, in coup plots, you name it. And here we are paying some of them to please let us know about all this shit, please. The U.S. intelligence community is so completely locked out they’ve got to rely on crumbs from the G-2 officers who are simply lying to us and laughing at us while they take our money. Or they’ve got me.

  “As for getting help from the army, shit, these generals, they take our ‘foreign aid,’ which is only State Department bribery, and then instead of the expected diplomatic reciprocation, which the generals in Honduras and El Salvador at least pretend to extend, these bastards just laugh in our faces and tell us to go screw ourselves. The U.S. hasn’t accomplished anything here with its ‘foreign aid.’ I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve got this thing about ‘democracy’…” Cage stopped and shook his head. “Hell.”

  He smoked his cigarette a moment as if he were trying to calm himself. An Indian kid carrying a greasy-looking wooden tray with tiny bins from which he was selling colored plastic combs and colored plastic Bic lighters and colored plastic watchbands stopped at their window and looked at Cage. He said nothing. You saw what he had, either you wanted something or you didn’t. Cage reached into his pocket and pulled out some quetzals and bought another red plastic Bic lighter and laid it on the table beside the one he already had, and the kid moved on.

  “I sell information now,” Cage said, picking up his story, “to the highest bidder. Not always to the U.S. This is a very dicey thing, but it pays like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve got informants all over this crumby country…some at very significant levels. I’ve already put more money in a Swiss account than I could’ve put there in five lifetimes working for the government and saving every dime they paid me.” He paused, his eyes on Haydon. “The point is, I’m independent here. That has ramifications for you. One: what few rules I used to abide by working for State don’t apply to me anymore. Two: there’s certain shit I don’t want to get mixed up in because it could threaten my business, and I have no intention of putting that in jeopardy. And three: I’m going to do you a favor and then you’re on your own and I don’t want to see you the hell again. And keep this in mind: as good as you are, Haydon, and I credit you that, I hope you realize you’re way out on the end of a rope here, and if you don’t watch your ass you’ll end up in the garbage of one of these ravines with your throat cut and your balls in your mouth.”

  Cage pulled down the sides of his mouth and gave Haydon a deadpan expression.

  “What’s the favor?” Haydon asked.

  Cage shook his head and looked at Haydon as if he was a fool. And Haydon felt like one. He didn’t like it, and it scared him, but there was no way he couldn’t look into this. It was just bizarre to consider it. If something in fact had happened to Fossler, then, realistically, there probably wasn’t much he could do about it except report him to the embassy as missing. But even then, he at least had to get in touch with Lena Muller.

  “Information. I’ll give you what I can.”

  “And what do you want from me?”

  “We’ll get to that,” Cage said, putting out his cigarette.

  “I need to talk to Lena Muller.”

  Cage took a drink of his Gallo. “You’re a little late, my friend. She disappeared three days ago.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The churrasco came, with melodramatic timing, just as Cage uttered his bombshell. While he waded into his grilled meat, liberally doused with spoons of spicy chirmol, Cage filled Haydon in on what had happened since Jim Fossler had talked to Lena Muller on Friday. After returning to Janet Pittner’s, Lena had packed a small bag and told Janet that she was taking an overnight trip to Panajachel, a small town on the northern shore of Lake Atitlán, a popular vacation and tourist spot, with John Baine. She said she would be back Saturday night. When she hadn’t returned by Sunday afternoon, Janet Pittner called the hotel in Panajachel where Lena had said they would be staying, and the concierge told her that no one by that name had ever checked in. This precipitated a series of frantic telephone calls by Janet Pittner to other hotels in the resort area and then to everyone she could think of who might know where Lena was. No luck. Monday morning, this morning, she called Cage. All day Cage ran his own traps, also without luck, and then a few hours earlier, going through Lena’s room. Cage found a scrap of paper with Fossler’s address at the Posada Cofino. He went there, found the bloody room, and then Haydon arrived.

  Cage finished his churrasco and pushed away his plate, and they ordered another beer each. Haydon couldn’t believe what he had walked into. If this wasn’t satisfactorily resolved the results would reverberate way beyond the infighting of Guatemalan politics. Three American citizens disappeared within thirty-six hours. If they turned up dead, Guatemala was going to find itself in a firestorm of American media hype. One of the reasons why the Guatemalan army and the right-wing death squads had gotten away with their massacres and assassinations as long as they had was because Guatemala itself had always avoided major international attention. But a rash of deaths of U.S. citizens could change all that.

  “Fossler told me he thought Lena was in some kind of trouble, that Baine was involved too,” Haydon said as Cage lighted another cigarette. “What about that?”

  Cage nodded. “Yeah, I got some of that from Janet. She had noticed something was going on too, Lena acting spooky, secretive, all that. Janet didn’t know what the hell was going on, didn’t even
attach much significance to it until Lena disappeared. Then, of course…” he shrugged.

  “But she didn’t know anything?”

  Cage shook his head.

  “What about Baine?”

  “Baine. There’s a little shit for you. Free-lance journalist. Been in Central America five or six years. ‘Investigative’ journalist, you know. Always wanting to ‘expose’ some terrible something, traipsing around Central America with a camera and tape recorder. Occasionally he’d come up with something for the wire services or hire out as a guide-in-the-know to salaried journalists with the big papers. These people usually are based in places with higher political profiles—El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama—and pop in and out of Guatemala when the grapevine hints that something hot is stirring. Baine’s a quick contact for them because he stays here and hears things and can bring them up to speed. But he never gets the ‘big’ story.”

  Cage wasn’t impressed. No one in Cage’s business would be. Men like Baine were their natural enemies.

  “Do you know what he’d been working on? Did he have any particular interests? Military? Political squabbles? Anyone he wanted to do a job on?”

  “All of the above. The guy was a scattershot, just ran around with his head in his butt looking for trouble.”

  Cage was holding out. Haydon realized they had been talking about Baine in the past tense. He looked at Cage.

  “The kid was insignificant,” Cage said. “If he had caught on fire…et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Did Lena have a job here?”

  She worked with USAID, up in the highlands, Huehuetenango. She spent about half the time up there, the same area where she was stationed in the Peace Corps. She gathered crop production data for an agricultural program.”

  “How well did you know her?”

  “Pretty well, and not too well,” Cage said and looked out the window as if uninterested in the question. Haydon looked out too, in the opposite direction, and watched a man in a suit approach from down the block, saw him pass through the soft play of light from a streetlamp and, just at the edge of it, slow and stop. He was speaking to someone, just the flat of his back in the light. He moved a little more into the dark until Haydon wasn’t sure if he was still there or not. Then slowly, as if they were engaged in a graceful sarabande, she came into the light, changing positions with him as though in a tandem turn of dance. She was smiling, tilting her head this way and that in beguiling conversation. But it wasn’t to be. Haydon saw only the arm of the man’s suit go briefly into the light with her, and then she turned and walked away in the opposite direction, looking back once at him in case he changed his mind. But the man had disappeared into the dark.