Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  The Political Section.

  “When was the last time you saw Jim Fossler?”

  “Monday morning, yesterday. Lena was supposed to be home Saturday night. By Sunday evening I got worried and called the hotel in Panajachel where she was supposed to be staying, and then all those other calls. Couldn’t turn up anything. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, then Monday morning I broke down and called Pitt at the embassy. He said he’d come over. But before he got here, Fossler came by again. I was really upset and spilled everything to him. I don’t think he knew how to read what I was telling him, whether there really was something to be worried about or whether I was just a dingy woman. I was pretty agitated. I guess he had a right to think that.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was going to talk to a few people and would get back to me if he came onto something.”

  “Did you tell Pitt that Fossler had come by?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he think?”

  Janet gave Haydon an exasperated look. “As far as I could tell, not much. Look,” she said, daubing the sweat on her glass with her napkin, watching what she was doing as she thought. “Pitt…is uncommunicative. I may be ‘harebrained’ as he says, but I’m not a shrew. If Pitt had been halfway human there wouldn’t have been any problem in the marriage that we couldn’t have dealt with. I mean, I’m as flexible as the next woman. I can put up with normal human quirks. I’m not looking for perfection. But I do demand human qualities in a mate. Pitt…well, hell, he was a goddamned sphinx! If I’m going to be married to someone I want to be able to talk to him. I can not talk to somebody by myself; I don’t need someone around for me not to talk to.”

  Janet stopped as if she had caught herself just before going off on a tirade of complaints that was all too familiar and had become boring and hateful even to her.

  “What about Lena,” Haydon asked, judiciously avoiding Janet’s private life. “Did she date very much?”

  “Actually, that was one area Lena was a little standoffish about. She wasn’t chatty about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we were living together, and when you’re close, when you know each other as well as we did, you talk about things like that, women do.”

  “But she wouldn’t.”

  “Just enough to let me know it wasn’t any of my business. She was like that, a very gracious person, really, but she set limits on familiarity. She drew lines and expected you to have enough sense not to cross them. But we were close and ,…well, I…that rather secretive side of her hurt me a little in the beginning. We were like sisters. Sisters share those sorts of things. Talk.” Janet had begun massaging her crossed leg just behind the knee, at the hemline. “But after a while I knew it had to do with her nature, not any lack of rapport between us. It wasn’t ‘us.’ It was her.”

  “But she did date a lot?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Did you meet any of the men she dated?”

  “A couple.”

  “Were they Americans?”

  “Yes. The two guys I met were people in her department at AID. I don’t think she dated either of them more than twice.”

  “Did she ever date any Guatemalan men?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think it’s unusual that she dated so little? She was a pretty woman.”

  Janet looked at him. “Was?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Janet didn’t take her eyes off him immediately, trying to read the slip of tongue. Then, “Well, being a man, I suppose you do think it’s unusual, but the fact is, men are not one of the major food groups. We can live healthy lives without you.”

  Haydon let it go. Men apparently were not a topic either Lena or Janet was fond of discussing. He drank the rest of his gin and put his glass on a rough wooden table in front of him.

  “You’ve been patient and helpful,” he said, standing.

  Janet’s face reflected surprise and more than a little disappointment. Either she expected a lengthier opportunity at verbal sparring, or she simply wanted the company. Despite her rather social reputation, Haydon found her to be a woman who skillfully disguised a loneliness that lay none too deeply beneath the surface.

  She uncrossed her legs, leaned forward and put her glass beside his, and stood also. Her face was sober, and she looked at him without speaking for a moment, her arms crossed beneath her breasts.

  “If you knew something…significant, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was talking rather bravely last night. I mean about going out on my own looking for Lena. Actually, I haven’t the guts to do it alone. Not in this unstable political climate. Americans never know. Sometimes simply being American gives you automatic carte blanche to do just about anything. Other times it’s the only reason needed to kill you on the spot. You never know when you’re at risk and when you aren’t. I’ve lived in this country a long time, but I’ve never seen it like this before. Nothing is what it used to be; I’m never sure anymore about what I’m getting into.” She shook her hair to loosen it again. “I’m not going to learn anything from Pitt, not until it’s all over.”

  Haydon looked at her. She had changed on him again. He hadn’t expected her to turn off the bitchy business so quickly and so completely. She was looking at him squarely, her expression on the edge of showing fear.

  “As soon as I understand what’s happening here, I’ll let you know,” he said. “But I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. I’m not likely to come up with anything on my own.”

  “Look…” she said, reaching out to him the way she had the night before. “If I can help you…I mean, I do know my way around…Let me help you.”

  Haydon did not doubt her sincerity, nor did he reject her suggestion out of hand. Unlike Bennett Pittner, Haydon did not discount Janet’s assessments of what was happening around her. She had not become so jaded about life that she no longer recognized the macabre for what it was. In Guatemala, maintaining a sensitivity to madness was no small accomplishment. “I appreciate your offer,” he said. “I may need to take you up on it.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Haydon drove back toward the Camino Real hotel thinking about Janet’s offer to help him. In the right situation, she could, in fact, save him a lot of time. If something didn’t break soon, he would get back to her without a second thought.

  He parked outside the Camino Real, but rather than going inside to use their telephones, he walked a block away to a pay booth on the Reforma. If any hotel in the city was plugged into security forces listening posts, the Camino Real would be at the top of the list, since it was the overwhelming choice of most Americans staying in the city. He called the National Police and asked for the Department for Criminal Investigations, at which point he knew his call was being routed through military intelligence computers. It took a while before someone answered who confirmed they were the DIC, and Haydon asked for Efran Borrayo. He was put on hold. Like Fossler, he avoided the American embassy where he could have gotten the information within a few minutes.

  After a while a wheezy male voice asked if he was talking to the man who wanted to locate Captain Borrayo. Haydon said yes, and the man said the captain was now the director of Pavón prison and was not directly connected with the DIC. Haydon thanked him and hung up. Director of Pavón prison? It seemed a long way from the cloak-and-dagger business and a curious career change. But Haydon knew that Grajeda had been right: words meant very little in Guatemala. Haydon would have to go to Pavón to see for himself. He walked back to his car and drove away in the direction from which he had just come, straight down the length of the quiet, shady street that ran dead into 18 calle, which shot off at an angle out of the residential neighborhood and into a more commercial thoroughfare.

  In a few kilometers 18 calle became Carretera Roosevelt as it left the city and climbed into the hills east of the city where it became
Inter-American Highway, CA-1, a serpentine highway that headed southward on a circuitous course to El Salvador where it crossed the border at San Cristobal Frontera in the departamento of Jutiapa. Because of its border destination, this highway was known as the Salvador Road, and its shoulders and bar ditches were famous as a favorite dumping ground of the death squads. Victims of Guatemala’s growing political violence turned up along this roadway with grim regularity, like so much human road kill.

  Pavón was located twenty kilometers outside Guatemala City in a little municipality known as Fraijanes. As a prison farm it was sited in a sandy, semicleared pine forest, its perimeter clear-cut for security, though the forest picked up again not far beyond the guard towers. Pavón had become only recently a shadow of its former self, which was a blessing because its former self had been a hellhole. Originally the prison had been designed for four hundred inmates, but until late 1989 it had housed over two thousand men, with no separation according to offense. In Guatemala, where you were thrown into prison when you were arrested and were expected to work things out from there, that meant that traffic offenders were thrown into the same general population as sadists. Sixty percent of the inmates were awaiting trial and sentencing. There were not enough beds to accommodate two thousand men, not even enough shelter, so that those who were poor and could not afford to buy a dry corner or a shady eave were left out in the rain or crippling heat like animals. The state spent eleven cents per day per prisoner on food. There were only two things that could gain you improvement in your situation: either money, or the capacity to be meaner and cruder than the people who had what you wanted or could get you what you wanted. Life was cheap, drugs were expensive, prostitutes were easily obtainable, and male rape was routine.

  But on Easter in 1989, the prison exploded. The wretched conditions had reached the point that some men thought that madness was the only sane response in an effort to change things once and for all. As it was, risking their lives wasn’t risking all that much. The riot lasted a week, ultimately requiring the army to quell it. Fourteen men died, but the federal government grudgingly gave in to prison reforms, not so much out of a latent compassion for the miserable conditions of the prisoners as out of a desire to avoid that kind of negative publicity again. It was a messy kind of thing to have to deal with questions about it at ribbon cuttings.

  Haydon guided his car up the sandy road off the main highway, past the little clutch of buildings known as El Centro de Orientación Femenino where women prisoners were housed, to a bare dirt parking area adjacent to a collection of cinder-block buildings outside the tall chain-link fence that surrounded the prison. He parked the car in front of a store that catered to the prison guards, some of whom were drinking fruit drinks in a concrete-floored breezeway between buildings, their straight-backed wooden chairs cocked back against the stucco wall. Two rangy black-and-white pigs rooted around in the rocks in front of the breezeway and fought over the orange and papaya peels the guards tossed out into the sun. The stench of manure wafted from the breezeway where the wandering pigs had left a few dollops of their droppings which the men hadn’t bothered to kick away into the dirt.

  Haydon locked the car, nodded to the men in the shadows, and started down the slight decline toward the gates. The heat from the sun in the nearly cloudless sky was radiating off the hard, pinkish clay under Haydon’s feet as if it were a griddle. The twelve-foot chain-link fence that formed the prison’s outer perimeter was attached to cement posts and undulated in the heat waves as though it were melting in a sea of hot gases.

  As Haydon approached the guardhouse on the other side of the battered pipe and chain-link gate, the odd strains of evangelical hymns replaced the sawing drone of cicadas. The ubiquitous presence of evangelicalism with its cheerless little Protestant buildings that had sprung up all over Guatemala in the last fifteen years, its un-Latinlike hymns that evoked images of prancing television preachers with coiffed hair and silk suits and million-dollar smiles, its spawning of Bible-toting Indians quoting Bible Belt proof texts, was a reality in Guatemala that Haydon could not get used to. It seemed to him to be another jarring intrusion into a largely Indian culture that was taking to a more trendy version of the ways of God with men as readily as it took to polyester clothes and plastic water jugs. It gave him the creeps. At least the polyester and plastic made their lives more tolerable on a moment-to-moment basis, even if a little trashier and culture destructive. But there was something jarringly discordant about the intrusion of Protestant evangelicalism, and something sad too. Whether it was better for the poor, desperate Indians in the long run, only the long run would tell. In the meantime, it was an ugly transition, and Haydon would have felt a lot better about it if he could have believed that God was a better God in a business suit than he was in a cassock.

  “Buenas,” Haydon said, stopping at the gate.

  A corporal, senior in age and rank and shortest in stature of the six soldiers lounging under the portico, stepped up to the chain-link gate. He said nothing, but smiled and nodded, waiting for Haydon to explain himself.

  “I’m here to see Director Borrayo,” Haydon said. He pulled out his passport and shield and handed it through a hole in the wire. The corporal looked at the passport, his eyes moving over it appropriately though Haydon would have bet a hundred dollars that he didn’t know what he was “reading.” The shield was something else. The corporal knew this was “policiá,” though he probably didn’t know Houston from Istanbul. Still, it was a “security force” identification and demanded a fearful respect. He nodded with a businesslike seriousness.

  “Momentito, por favor,” he said, forming a tiny space of time between his thumb and forefinger. He walked to a small cubicle in the portico and picked up a telephone. Haydon looked at the other guards. A couple of them ignored him, one studied him with unblinking effrontery, and two others averted their eyes when he looked at them. All of them were armed. All of them probably were illiterate.

  The corporal quickly came out of the cubicle, and one of the guards who had been close enough to overhear his conversation, jumped up from where he was sitting beside the evangelical broadcast and preceded him to the gate, unhooking the chain that ran through the gate from the fence post to which it was secured.

  “Pase adelante,” the corporal said. He handed Haydon’s passport and shield to the surly-eyed man who sat at a small table with a book before him, and who laboriously recorded the numbers off of Haydon’s passport and shield, both of which he then put into a cardboard cigar box for safekeeping until Haydon’s return. He hammered a rubber stamp onto an ink pad and pressed it into the back of Haydon’s hand, and then Haydon turned around and raised his arms to allow another guard to conduct a perfunctory frisking.

  “Pase adelante,” the corporal repeated, and Haydon walked out into the sun again and headed across the compound yard to the administration building.

  Pavón looked almost deserted compared to the days when it was jammed with overcrowding. Haydon had interviewed the Colombian here, and the conditions had been so vile that even the guards were ashamed of it. Now the population had been so drastically reduced—that Haydon could tell even before entering behind the walls—that the teeming bazaar atmosphere was gone. There was no buzz of voices drifting out to the bare front yard. The place did not bristle with armed guards.

  He stepped up onto the tile courtyard in front of the administration building, walked past the flagpole, and entered the one-story structure. The place was silent. There was no furniture in the foyer, only one clay pot with a single scrawny rubber plant with a few yellowing leaves. A receptionist’s office to his left was empty, and a couple of minimum-security inmates were walking around pushing rag mops up and down the short halls that led to half a dozen offices. There were few signs, and he saw no one who appeared to be a member of the administrative staff.

  But Haydon knew where he was going. He turned down a hallway to his right and followed the pale institutional green tile walls
past doors thrown open to empty offices. There was no air-conditioning to speak of in Guatemala, and certainly not here where the screenless windows allowed flies to wander the shady corridors as though it were an abandoned building. At the end of the hall there was a door on the left, half-closed.

  “I hear you, Stuart Haydon,” a voice said as Haydon approached. “Pase adelante, mi amigo.”

  Haydon walked in as Efran Borrayo uncrossed his legs from where they had been propped on the sill of the open window and stood up, taking a cigarette out of his mouth with his left hand and grinning broadly as he offered his right hand to shake.

  “I appreciate your taking this time out of your busy schedule to see me, Director,” Haydon said with mock formality.

  The Guatemalan laughed. “No kidding, huh?” His laugh was slow and deep. He was a hefty man in his early fifties whose swarthy, handsome face, wavy gray hair, and easygoing manner belied a shrewd and vicious nature. “This place looks like something in the States, huh? Hell, it’s no fun anymore. No shit going on here now. It’s like the Boy Scouts.”

  “How long have you been here?” Haydon asked.

  Borrayo pulled a long face. “Too damned long. Over a year.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Hell, no. Would you like it?” He shook his head. “Reform.” He said the word like it was a venereal disease. “When that shit Cerezo was elected in 1986 he had to throw some little favors to some políticos and to the ‘Americans,’ huh.”

  Like many Latin Americans, Borrayo had a love-hate relationship with the United States. He simultaneously resented and envied the gringos, and one of his pet peeves was that they routinely referred to themselves as “Americans” as though they were the only “Americans” in the western hemisphere, as though the Latin Americans were not real “Americans.”

  Haydon nodded in commiseration, and Borrayo gestured for him to sit in the only chair in the room besides his own. It was directly in front of Borrayo’s desk, on the edge of which the Guatemalan sat down facing Haydon, one foot on the floor. Haydon took a pack of Pall Malls out of his pocket. He had brought them along for just this purpose. Sharing your American-made cigarettes was a good thing to do with a man from whom you wanted a favor. He offered one to Borrayo, who eagerly took it. Haydon took one also and lighted them both. Borrayo blew the smoke into the still air of the bare room.