The three of them got out of the van, and the Indian girl, whom Cage still had not introduced, followed them into the morgue. There was only one attendant on duty, his feet propped on one of the two metal desks in the foyer, reading a sepia-toned comic book. When Cage pushed through the filthy glass doors, the man dropped his feet and looked as if he were going to bolt and run. Indeed, nothing had changed. The place was filthy, with overlooked spatters of blood turning a rusty black here and there on the floor or knee high along the unscrubbed walls. He did not want to be here, in these rooms where the sebaceous smell of death was inexpugnable, even by the candylike sweetness of the disinfectants they used in place of cleanliness and the ever-present charred odors of the smoldering garbage dumps that filled the Rio La Barranca just beyond the long avenues of tombs on the other side of the walls. A soughing breeze moved up through the ravines and drifted in through the open windows and, like the invisible hand of an impatient angel, moved the swinging doors that led to the holding rooms with a lonely, softly lilting rhythm: flap-flap…flap-flap…flap-flap. Haydon looked toward the doors behind which the bodies lay in the ripening heat, and where, even now, he could see a glimpse of a waxy, bare foot.
Haydon had been only half listening to Cage’s dialogue with the attendant, and now he realized that Cage was insisting on getting the papers known as Form 16 which was, in effect, the investigating judge’s report and all the accompanying police reports that come with the discovery of the body of an unknown person, officially known as “XX.”
Finally Cage pulled out a wad of bills, and the man looked at them with an expression that betrayed a crumbling resolve and turned to the filing cabinet. He rifled through some files and pulled out a manila folder. He and Cage exchanged commodities, and Cage handed the papers to the Indian girl.
“Come on, Haydon,” he said, and stalked to the swinging doors.
The room was small. Through poor planning, or more likely no planning, there were two small holding rooms instead of one large one, the second room accessible only by going through the first. Equally inexplicable was the fact that this first room was always filled with bodies before the second one, so that any additional corpses had to be bumped and maneuvered on gurneys through the crowded first room into the empty second one. It apparently never occurred to them to fill the one farthest back first. But only three bodies were in the first room now, not in body bags, but lying on gurneys and covered with thin sheets. The airtight plastic body bags would only have accelerated their deterioration in the stifling heat.
There were six feet showing. Cage paused, looked at them a moment and stepped to the last of the three gurneys and threw back the sheet. Her face was bloated and misshapen, and her blond hair was matted with blood and the debris of what appeared to be straw and twigs. Having seen Lena Muller only in photographs, Haydon did not believe he would have recognized her. She had already been autopsied, so there was the familiar Y-shaped incision, the upper branches of which traversed her chest just below her breasts, while the descending branch went straight down into her pubis. These incisions had been expertly done and neatly sewn. But there were other wounds too, ragged ones, wounds of deliberate cruelty and torture. Her handless forearms were crossed on her chest, and the hands themselves were stacked separately on her lower abdomen.
“Okay, Haydon. In Guatemala death is a hands-on kind of business. Let’s get her in a bag.”
The attendant was right behind them with a crackling plastic body bag, and they proceeded to wrestle her into it by putting a second gurney beside hers, opening the bag, and lifting her over into it. It wasn’t easy, and the feel of her dead, gravity-bound body stirred a visceral anger in Haydon that he hadn’t experienced in a long time and that surprised him by its intensity as it unexpectedly rushed up from his gorge like a sudden nausea.
They rolled her gurney out of the holding room through the swinging doors, which, when pushed open, allowed the soft swirl of the smoky breeze to stir the over-sweet smell of disinfectants that was so thick and heavy in the air that it seemed to Haydon it would leave a saccharine residue on his face, like soot. He waited with the Indian girl and the gurney while Cage backed the van up to the foyer, and the two of them put Lena into the back of the van and closed the doors. The worried and agitated attendant was glad to see them go. As the van approached the entrance of the compound, the little gatekeeper came out of his house, having seen their headlights, and pumped his way to the gates, unlatched them, and swung them open. He waved to Cage in a vague salute as they drove past, a model of discipline practiced in obscurity.
Cage was still not talking as he drove back along the way they had come, along the high wall until they reached the intersecting 20 calle, which dead-ended into the giant Roman-arch gatehouse of the Cementerio General on their right. But Cage turned left, and it was then that you could see that the cemetery was actually situated on a hill looking eastward. The street fell in a long, gradual slope, and Guatemala City lay spread out before them in a vast coppery glow.
Haydon rode down into the strangely lighted city in silence, trying not to be distracted by the pungent waft of formaldehyde that now filled the van. Guatemala has a way of bringing together disparate emotions in startling juxtaposition. You thought of things in ways you had never imagined them before, and sometimes you lived—and died—in ways you never had imagined. He wondered if Lena Muller had been surprised by the manner of her demise. He thought she might have been; he thought most people were. However, if she hadn’t been, if she had had plenty of time to think about what was going to happen to her, if in fact it had happened to her so slowly that she had had the cruel leisure to contemplate its process, he wondered if she had faced it honestly. Now he wanted nothing more than to discover who had decided that Lena Muller should die and that she should die like this.
CHAPTER 15
In the daytime, where 20 calle drops more steeply toward Avenida Bolivár and the underpass bends sharply to Calle de Castillo, the street is a moil of commerce, its sidewalks almost impassable because of the booths and stalls of vendors who sold every imaginable ware, item, trinket, necessity, and folly—nothing too insignificant to be offered for sale in the hope that one meager need would meet another meager need to the mutual benefit of both buyer and seller. The street was congested, too, by buses and trucks and hand-pulled wagons and carts and people spilling out into the halting, murderous traffic, their dark Guatemalan faces darkened even more by layers of diesel soot and the soil of labor. However, the noisy, energetic activity did not reflect a profitable commerce at work, rather it was only a kind of desperate busyness in the face of a staggering economy. Commodities were exchanged for increasingly worthless quetzals; hard work only slowed one’s irreversible slide toward the precipice. It was all done in a wild-eyed effort to forestall disaster, not for the sake of progress, which no one even bothered to talk about anymore.
But at half past two o’clock in the morning, 20 calle was silent. Exhaustion and fear had emptied it. Almost at the bottom of the long sloping street, and with Avenida Bolivár only a block or so away. Cage abruptly turned right into a darkened cramped lane, and Lena’s slick plastic body bag slid to the left side of the corrugated metal floor of the van. Two, then three doorways down. Cage slowed almost to a stop and turned left into a covered drive over which hung a black sign with gold lettering that read: CAPILLA DE SANTA CLARA, and below these words the gold figure of a monk in a cowl, head bowed. The drive into the mortuary’s courtyard had a slight upward slope, so that Cage had to gun the van, and again Lena’s body slid, this time toward the back of the van. Immediately they came out into a small cobblestone courtyard within a quadrangle formed by the walls of stone and stucco buildings.
Cage pulled well into the courtyard, cut the motor, and set the brake.
“Wait a second,” he said before Haydon could move to get out. They had had to roll down their windows during the short trip because the odor of formaldehyde had grown from faint to unbearabl
e, and now they sat in silence as Cage seemed to be listening for something. In a moment he opened his door, stepped out of the van into the dark courtyard, and immediately a deep rumble of growling issued from the walls around them. Though the dogs were hidden in the darkness, the sound instantly reminded Haydon of the otherworldly growls of the heads of Cerberus.
“They’re supposed to be chained,” Cage said softly through the window. He moved away from the van into the gray light of the courtyard, and Haydon saw his light-colored guayabera moving first in one direction and then in another around the walls. As he approached each dog, it growled a little louder, but none of them ever barked or left the darkness. He came back to the van. “Come on,” he said.
Haydon and Lita got out and followed Cage to a door in the side of the building directly across from the covered entrance through which they had just entered. The stone arch of the doorway was garlanded with bougainvilleas and furnished with a padlocked wrought-iron gate the exact size of the wooden door behind it, and which fitted flush with the stone facing. Cage reached through the bars and pushed a button set in the stone. At the distant ringing of the bell, one of the mongrels felt obligated to yowl, setting up a chain reaction of canine alerts in all the unseen courtyards up and down the narrow street outside.
A light came on in a small stairway window above their heads, and they waited for the next sign of life, the opening of the little window in the wooden door.
“¿Quién es?” An eye blinked at them through the opening.
“Macabeo, it’s Cage.”
“Cage. Ah. Momentito.” The little window snapped shut, keys and latches snicked and clicked on the other side of the heavy door, which soon swung open cautiously with the creaking sound effects of a B-grade horror film.
“¡Perro! ¡Callate!”
Macabeo rebuked the mongrel from behind the iron bars as he struggled with the padlock. The dog shut up as he was told, but the others nagged from the far-off courtyards, loath to forgo their birthright.
“Open the goddamned garage,” Cage said, impatient with Macabeo’s fumbling, and backed away from the bars. Immediately electric motors whirred behind an adjacent wall, and a corrugated metal garage door began peeling up from an alcove.
“I can’t tolerate that little shit,” Cage said to Haydon, not bothering to lower his voice. “To be a mortician is one thing. To be a mortician in Guatemala is another thing. To be a mortician in Guatemala with a thriving business in ‘discreet’ deaths, deaths with ‘connections’ is something else. Macabeo Micheo is nothing more than a well-paid maggot.”
Cage walked away, and Haydon started to follow him, but he suddenly felt Lita’s small hand on his arm.
“Espera,” she said. Wait.
Haydon looked at her. She was still holding the folder Cage had given her at the morgue, and Haydon suspected that she would hang onto it until the end of time, unless Cage told her otherwise. He was beginning to think that she was more than an efficient apprentice, one of Cage’s strangely loyal band of free agents he had heard so much about over the years. He was beginning to think that she was extraordinary in ways he was yet to discover. As he looked at her, he thought he saw her smile faintly, though it was difficult to tell in the gray gloam of the courtyard.
After Cage backed the van around into the slip revealed by the raised garage door, he came back across the courtyard to them, and they opened the wrought-iron grille and pushed open the heavy wooden door. They entered a dim little parlor that smelled of old furniture and from which a curving staircase rose almost from the middle of the room. Lita closed the door behind them, and Cage stopped and turned to Haydon.
“I’ve already looked at the papers we got on Lena’s case,” he said, keeping his voice down. “And I’m going to give them to you. But you’re going to find some surprises. The police report in there is written by the subcomisario in Huehuetenango.” Cage paused. “I mean, the way it’s set up now, she should be in the morgue in Huehue, right? In this report it says she was brought to Huehue morgue by some Indian women. It also says that a doctor—a Guatemalan doctor—brought her to Guatemala City.”
“What’s his name?”
“Uh, Gra…Grajeda, I think it was.”
Haydon said nothing.
“Thing is, that was Sunday night, after midnight, way in the morning. Whoever got her, got her as soon as she and Baine arrived up there.”
“Up there?”
“Well, the Indian women said they came from Yajaucú. That’s about fifty-eight, sixty kilometers east of Huehue. Close to the Quiché border. There’s a lot of shit going on here, Haydon. I’m not real comfortable with some of this.” He sighed. “Okay, now what we’ve got to do is go in there and look at her. Take note of the wounds, remember what they are because we’ve got to leave her here.”
Cage turned away and stepped into a small arched corridor that passed under the rising bend of the stone stairs. Haydon followed him through it into a musty, windowless little chamber that was Macabeo Micheo’s place of business.
The close quarters were poorly lighted except for two white tile autopsy tables that dwarfed everything else in the small space. Each table had a lavage trough that went around its edges, and above each table a long, gable-shaped fluorescent lighting fixture cast its glare onto the white tiles. To their left, glinting in the oblique light, were four shiny stainless-steel lockers that had been installed into the stone walls, looking peculiarly anachronistic, like cryonic tubes in a medieval keep.
The first table was bare except for a plastic bottle of Shangrila mineral water. Lena was on the second table, her blanched skin almost shimmering in the white light, the lavage trough around her gurgling with circulating water that was being fed from a green lawn hose wired to the corner of the trough. The circulated water was sucking out through a drain at the foot of the table, and from there, probably out into the night gutters of the capital.
Macabeo and his assistant, a flat-faced and obviously simpleminded young Indian, stood at a kind of shambling attention at the head of the table, wearing rubber aprons and waiting expectantly.
“Buenas,” Macabeo said. He was not exactly fat, but he was puffy, with a kind of jelly-textured body and large doelike eyes that were plagued by a crusty discharge. His coloring was peculiar, with slightly darker pigmentation around his eyes and mouth, which he tended to hold in a tight approximation of prim sobriety.
Cage half turned to Haydon, once again not bothering to lower his voice.
“The thing that’s always given me the creeps about this guy,” he said, jerking his head toward Macabeo, “is that he always handles the bodies as though his fingers are…fluttering over the final details of some kind of fancy cake decorations. It’s an all too joyful mannerism for such appalling work, it seems to me.” He looked at the two men and then back to Haydon. “The other one, the moronic Indian, is Nestor. Anything that requires some muscle power is done by him. He’s the interesting one. That stupid face doesn’t prepare you for what he does. He works fast and neat. He’s a damned idiot savant about autopsies, has a precise, an uncanny knowledge of human anatomy.” He shook his head. “These weirdos,” he said, “get regular cash payments from the U.S. State Department. Through step-backs, of course. Untraceable.”
Haydon needed to remember every single word. Cage was a man who never explained himself, so Haydon could only guess why he had been asked on this macabre errand. Whatever the reason, Haydon got the sense that it was “out of channels,” that it was something that Cage normally would have done by himself, with Lita’s help, of course. That was probably the reason he had gone to so much trouble to play out the charade with the policemen. Somewhere along the line Cage expected it to make a difference that Haydon had seen all this, but as of right now Haydon couldn’t understand why, nor did he understand why his face needed to be hidden from the DIC agent who had stopped them earlier, yet these two morgue rats did not seem to be a concern.
Cage stood looking at Lena a
moment.
“Get out of the way,” he said to Macabeo and Nestor, and they quickly scuttled back from the table and stood rigidly against the stainless-steel lockers as Cage and Haydon moved up to the body.
Lena’s arms were again crossed on her chest, the nubs of her wrists already black with age. The severed hands themselves, apparently having been found near her body by the Indian women and having traveled all this way with her as “additional items,” were again stacked on her lower abdomen. Cage walked around the table on the other side of Haydon, while Lita waited, away from the table.
The smell of Macabeo’s chamber was so potent that Haydon could taste it, even, he thought, feel it on his face like an unctuous reek. He made a conscious effort to be analytic, to ignore his senses as he examined Lena’s cadaver. Aside from the autopsy incisions, which Haydon noticed had been sutured with businesslike, regularly spaced stitches, he noticed the other wound, the one that had been business before the business of autopsy, the ragged, irregular line crossing from one side of Lena’s abdomen to the other. It was a familiar wound, and seeing it he felt a wave of warmth wash over him like a jolt of fever that left his legs quivering and uncertain.
Her hands caught his attention again, dirt still caking the exposed ganglia, nails missing from half the fingers. There were wounds between her legs he wouldn’t look at. But he did force his eyes to go to her face again. Her head was propped on a wooden block, and her long blond hair, still dirty, was draped over the trough and hung stiffly over the end of the slab. The punishment she had suffered had done gruesome things to her face. Now, as she lay pale and motionless on the slippery tile, there was hardly a feature familiar to him, though as he studied the anonymity of her face he wanted to believe that there was something in the whole of her distortions that recalled to him the beautiful young woman he had seen in so many pictures since her disappearance in Houston three months earlier. He thought of Germaine Muller.
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