The taxi pulled into the Residencial Reforma’s drive and stopped immediately. True to their word, the management had locked the gates. Haydon paid the taxi driver, who drove away, and then turned to the button on the pillar. He pushed it, identified himself and gave his room number to the night clerk and shoved open the gates when he heard the electronic click.
As he closed the gates behind him and walked across the front drive, the swooning mortal and the ministering angel glowed palely in the fountain of purple liriope. The old house was dark. He got his key from the night clerk, a young man who was reading some kind of textbook, and stepped down into the small front parlor. A couple of American men were slumped in their armchairs in front of the television as if they were back home in Dayton, the brilliant flashes from apocalyptic explosions in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film illuminating their bored, pale faces like death masks. On the other side of a low wall the dining atrium was mostly dark, a pastel greenish light falling down into the long room from the skylight above the mezzanine.
Haydon went slowly up the stairs, realizing how tired he was, the whumps of muted explosions and the spitting of automatic weapons dying out behind him as he rounded the curving stairs to the second floor. At the head of the stairs he paused a moment to look down into the dining room again, long runners of ivy hanging down from the marble bannister, the room itself circumscribed by marble pillars that held up the mezzanine where he was standing and separated the room from the surrounding hallway. El Reformador knew how to build an elegant home.
He went to his room and undressed, hung his clothes in the large closet and washed his face. After putting on his pajama pants, he took the manila folder of Guatemalan contacts and got into bed and started going through the papers. The first man he would call would be Efran Borrayo, an agent in a branch of the security forces that was known as the Department for Technical Investigations, DIT, a branch of the National Police with a reputation for death-squad involvement. Haydon knew of the division’s reputation, but Borrayo had played a key role in helping him and a Colombian homicide detective track down a man they twice had followed the length of Central America. Borrayo had been efficient and responsible. If he was around, Haydon could use his help again. He circled Borrayo’s name, put the folder on the writing desk beside the bed, and turned out the light.
He lay in bed exhausted, the only light in the room a wan sapphire coming in over his head from the two small rose windows that overlooked the front courtyard and the Avenida La Reforma. He had pulled back the long curtains and draped them over the metal levers that held the glass open in an effort to let in as much of the still night air as possible. Every tiny sound carried on the thin air, an occasional taxi on the boulevard, fireworks spattering like gunshots somewhere—Guatemalans loved fireworks and shot them off at the slightest excuse for celebrating, or simply because they felt good—someone yelling their lungs out from a car passing on the deserted boulevard. Crickets.
He went to sleep and then woke, not knowing if it was almost morning or if only a few moments had passed. Crickets. He resisted the temptation to hold up his wrist and try to see the dial of his watch in the pale light. He tried not to think of Fossler’s bloodied cell, or of Lena Muller, or even of Taylor Cage. Taylor Cage, sweating. Taylor Cage, remembering Lena. Taylor Cage, as pale as watery light.
He sat bolt upright fighting for breath, his mouth gulping for air like a fish’s, his body cool to the air, drenched in perspiration, looking at Cage, green as an American Buddha, standing at the foot of his bed.
“Just…relax,” Cage said, his voice low and calm. “Okay? It’s just me, okay?”
Haydon managed to nod.
“Get up and get some clothes on,” Cage demanded, having used up the full extent of his tenderness. “We’ve got to go.”
Haydon threw back the covers. “What time is it?” He didn’t know why it mattered.
“Almost two o’clock.”
Cage sat down on a bench in front of the dresser across from Haydon’s bed, while Haydon went across the large room to his closet and grabbed his trousers off the hanger, thinking instantly of the disarrayed shirt in Fossler’s closet.
“What’s going on?”
Cage was relaxed on the bench, watching Haydon without much interest.
“Well, it’s payback time.”
Haydon sat on a chair and pulled on his socks.
“While we were eating you asked me what I wanted from you for all this help I’m giving you,” Cage said, sounding as if he had lavished information on Haydon, done his job for him. “Well, this is it.”
“And what is ‘this’?”
“Not a hell of a lot,” Cage said.
“Fine.” Okay. Haydon couldn’t expect him to say much in the hotel room.
When Haydon was dressed, they eased out into the small mezzanine and followed the curving stairs down into the parlor where, at last, the television was silenced. At the desk the young clerk conveniently had his head turned as they went outside to the front steps where a small Ford van with darkened windows was waiting, motor running.
“Get in,” Cage said as he walked around to the driver’s side.
When Haydon opened the door he was surprised to see a young Indian girl sitting in the one seat behind them. For a moment he looked into the familiar face of hundreds of years of Mayan history. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. She didn’t speak and neither did Haydon as he climbed in and sat down beside Cage, who was just closing the door and putting the van in gear.
Quickly they were out on the Reforma and headed north, breezing down the empty boulevard under the towering cypresses, their headlights burning into the haze of smoke and fog. Just before they reached the monument at the Plazuela Reina Barrios, Cage turned left and headed west, past the long Parque Centre America, and half a kilometer past that over the railroad tracks and into the western environs of Zona 8, a sector of narrow streets and poor buildings and hand-to-mouth lives. He continued into darker, bleaker streets until the van was slowed by cobblestones and then potholes, creeping along nearly at an idle. Haydon knew that the sound of the car motor was an ominous one for many of the people who lived behind the walls of these deserted little streets. Many of them would waken and listen with their eyes open, holding their breath in the darkness until the van passed. Cage turned into a lane without streetlamps and downshifted the van as the lane began to climb. His headlights jarred on the rough stone and caught the coiled tail of a cur just as the dog topped the crest of the street above them.
At the top of the hill, Cage pulled to the side of the street, and the girl got up, slid back the side door of the van, and got out. There was no paving on the street at all here, and Haydon could even smell the dust along with the stench from the dumps. The girl climbed up on the sidewalk and went down two or three doors from where they sat and knocked softly on a door. Haydon noticed she wore modern clothes, not Indian ones, and she wore them well. The stucco buildings outside his window were chipped and derelict, the paint that once had covered the walls now faded, only faintly visible. Cage lighted a cigarette, the tiny flame from the red plastic Bic was phosphorous white, then gone. Haydon could hear the girl talking, a pleasing voice in the darkness. He remembered her face. Then she was coming back, down the steps, into the van, the door sliding shut, and they were on the move again.
Cage continued to wind his way through the wretched streets, but in a different direction, each street seeming remarkably like all the others, proving the monotony of poverty. They stopped again, and again the girl got out, whispered at a doorway, came back, and they were gone again. Now the neighborhoods changed, and Haydon recognized some of the landmarks and then he knew where they were, 4a avenida. Zona 3, one of the older, wider streets in the city that had been laid out during the tenure of El Reformador, who had grander plans for the capital city than ultimately came to pass. The buildings along the way were not great homes with echoes of neoclassical architecture as El Reformador might hav
e imagined, like the grand homes around the cemeteries of Mexico City. Rufino Barrios’ dreams proved to be only dreams. Instead, on this southern lateral approach to the Cementerio General, the city’s oldest cemetery, there were mean, low-storied buildings of cement and stucco, with electrical wires draped across the way like torn, black spiders’ webs against the smoky night sky.
Then to their left the powder-blue stucco wall of the cemetery rose to six meters in height and ran nearly a kilometer’s distance to the far end of its façade, and behind it, a necropolis, a true city of the dead, with wooded avenues and streets and alleys, paths, humble hoyas, pretentious crypts, and pompous mausoleums. The city of the dead was more organized, cleaner, more beautiful, and kinder to its residents than was the city of the living. And everyone there was mercifully relieved of the constant dread of becoming what they already had become.
Haydon was not aware of the police car they had picked up until Cage swore and began pulling over and the cherry splashes appeared on the windshield and back of Cage’s head. Cage turned into the first side street, in front of a shuttered marmolería, its sign in the shape of a gravestone. The police car pulled around too, drove slowly past them, and then made a U-turn and parked on the other side of the street facing in the opposite direction. The police car’s doors opened, and three men got out. The one on the passenger side of the front seat wore civilian clothes.
“DIC,” Cage said. The man in civilian clothes and one of the officers stayed at the car, leaning on the fender, while the other officer began walking across the street toward them.
“Lita,” Cage snapped. “¡Ven aquá…tu camisa! Haydon, put her on your lap, facing this way.” The girl scrambled into the front seat with them, crawled onto Haydon’s lap, frantically working at the buttons as Cage rolled down his darkened window halfway, opened the van door, and got out. The girl jerked open her blouse; she wore no bra.
Cage met the officer in the middle of the street, before he could get too close to the van, just as the officer’s flashlight came up to shoulder height. Cage’s body momentarily blocked the beam of light. The officer stopped.
“Muevese,” he said, tilting his head warily and using the beam of the flashlight to motion Cage aside. “¿Qué pasa?”
The girl put her left arm around Haydon’s neck, and he could smell the faint musky fragrance of her unperfumed skin and feel her breathing hard from her efforts. When Cage moved aside, the officer’s flashlight beam caught Haydon’s profile and the girl’s laughing face and bare breasts just as she crossed her free arm to hide herself.
Cage laughed nervously, and the officer swore and grinned. There was a brief conversation in the middle of the street. Cage’s voice lowering as Haydon heard him explain to the officer that “my boss” had been wanting “this little thing” for a long time. So Cage had arranged it, you know, everyone gets something out of it.
Haydon strained to hear, the girl’s breasts still inches from his face, her body breathing with his, a wild combination of fear and eroticism.
“The two mans with the car no coming,” she whispered to Haydon with a heavy accent. His face was close enough to hers that he felt her breath on his mouth and looked into the dark almond slant of her Mayan eyes as she fixed her attention on the charade in the street behind him. “La mordida,” she whispered again, referring to the inevitable bribe that Cage was proffering and which would be expected and accepted. Close enough to her eyes to see the moisture in them, Haydon was struck by the steely composure with which she was playing this out. Though he could feel the heavy breathing in her chest, he could tell it was only from the exertion of urgency, not from fear. The girl’s face was as placid as a wooden altar angel’s, though when the beam of the policeman’s flashlight had hit her she had quickly laughed as lustily as a prostitute. Now her face was resolute again, waiting for her next cue. She was one of those people, truly rare individuals, who embraced a deadly serenity in a crisis.
Cage’s voice was ingratiating, and the officer hissed and laughed again in macho admiration for what the man in the van was getting himself into. It was coming to a close. The girl quickly pulled Haydon’s free hand to a breast, and almost at the same moment the bribed officer couldn’t resist flashing the beam of his light one more time into the van, catching the side of the girl’s smiling face as she turned away from the bright beam and pushed Haydon’s hand away as if in coy protest and “accidentally” allowing the policeman to get a good look at her naked breasts.
It was over in a minute, and Cage was walking back to the van, opening the door, getting in, and rolling up the darkened window as the girl scrambled out of Haydon’s lap and into the backseat.
“Holy shit,” Cage said. From behind the darkened glass they watched the police car until it pulled away, went to the intersection, turned out onto 4a avenida, and disappeared. “I don’t like that one damn bit.” He was angry. He lighted a cigarette and sucked on it a couple of times, thinking. The girl was sitting behind them, buttoning her blouse, tucking it into the waist of her skirt, her head down so that her coarse black hair obscured her face.
“‘The DIC wants to talk to you,’ the son of a bitch said.” Cage pulled hard on the cigarette. “DIC. Shit. Those micos, the bigger the dog they have with them, the more they want you to pay them not to let him bite you. I don’t like that one bit. I don’t know when the last time was I got stopped. That whole thing smelled. I wish I could have gotten a look at the agent.
“Lita”—Cage raised his chin and looked at the girl in the rearview mirror—“did you see the guy?” She was straightening her blouse, her face in that moment still turned away from them. She only shook her head. “Well, I don’t like it,” Cage said again. Then he put the van in gear and made a U-turn.
CHAPTER 14
They were back on 4a avenida. They came to the grand neoclassical entrance to the Cementerio General on their left, looming dark and massive and deserted in the night, and passed by. At the end of the long powder-blue wall on the northern end of the cemetery, the height of the wall dropped to three meters, and the color changed to a smog-coated gray as they pulled off the pavement and onto a caliche strip in front of another set of gates. They had arrived at the Morgue Organismo Judicial. Looking up through the van’s dirty windshield, Haydon saw a bare bulb under a dented reflective pan hanging from a goosenecked pipe on the span above the gates. The small bulb threw an improvised glow on the caliche. Just inside the gate’s bars an equally jaundiced glow issued through the small window of the gatehouse and out through its open door. Everything in Guatemala City was poorly lighted, the bulbs were too weak, the power source overtaxed, the haze ever present.
Cage pulled the emergency brake on the van, left it idling, and got out. He walked around the front of the truck, approached the gates, and called through the bars to the gatehouse. There were shadows of movement inside the small building, and a frail, crooked-backed man who swung his arms in an alternating pumping motion made his way out to the gate and listened to Cage through the bars. The old man nodded deeply and then clacked the latch and swung open the gates as Cage came back to the van.
“Jesus, I’ve never known people who liked formalities so much,” was all Cage said. As they drove through, Haydon heard a preacher of the evangelical El Verbo church railing on the radio in the hot little gatehouse.
The large rectangular compound of the morgue was empty except for a lone car parked under a eucalyptus tree in the median that ran the length of the courtyard to the far end where a two-storied building five or six rooms in width was wedged into the back corner of the compound against one of the high walls. The design of the building was spare, looking as though it had been built in the 1950s: a gap in the left side of the bottom floor was a foyer, now dimly lighted, to its right a long white wall with a single row of tiny windows just above head height all the way to the end of the building. Above that, the second floor was a single row of much larger windows where the offices were located, and a flat roof.
That was all.
“You been here before?” Cage asked.
“Three years ago.”
“Well, there’s a new morgue under construction over here,” Cage said, jerking his head to his left. Another low-slung building, same design. But the unfinished building was dark except for an empty and vacant foyer and two of the head-high windows from which issued a leprous fluorescent glow that quickly dissipated in the night.
“The new morgue will have refrigeration,” Cage said, pulling up to the front of the old morgue. “But they’re behind schedule on it. They tried to finish out the refrigerated lockers at least, so they could keep the bodies longer.” He stopped the van and turned off the motor and leaned on the steering wheel. “Last month they thought they were ready and started putting bodies over there, half a dozen of them or so. They were so proud of those goddamned lockers that they let the autopsies pile up—you know, sort of to demonstrate there was no rush. ‘Oh, we’ll get to them in a few days’ kind of attitude. ‘Our new refrigerated lockers will keep them forever. No problem. Let’s smoke a cigarette. Let’s have a cafecito.’ Well, days passed and then they finally went over to get the bodies to start in on the backlogged autopsies. But, holy shit, a surprise! They found they had had a Freon leak and the refrigeration had shut down. All eight of the bodies had gotten so hot closed up in those stainless-steel locker drawers that they’d swelled up and exploded in there. Big mess.” Cage stomped on the emergency brake. “Come on.”
Haydon remembered every detail of the morgue. It wasn’t a place you were likely to forget. It was, of course, like so many other buildings in Central America, of cinder-block construction. And stucco. Though the law provided that unidentified bodies could be held up to several weeks, pending identification, in actual practice the lack of refrigeration necessitated that bodies be autopsied as soon as possible and buried within twenty-four hours. Naturally, sometimes schedules could not be kept and bodies lay in the holding rooms until they began to smell. This happened so often, in fact, that there was a permanent smell of death about the place. In the rainy season it smelled so strongly of mildew and death you could actually detect the reek of the building before you got to it.
Body of Truth Page 10
