Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  Haydon’s heart was hitting his chest like a fist as Borrayo slowly turned back to the youth. The boy wasn’t dying quickly, because Borrayo had shot him in the stomach. His eyes had stopped seeing, but he was making bleating noises, trying not to fall over in the dirt where there was death. Borrayo shot him in the face, which blew it away and knocked him backward as hard as if he had been hit by a cannonball. What was left of his head was in the shadows, the lower half of his body in the dim light that spilled out of the open back door of the van.

  Haydon saw how thin his ankles were, sticking out of his pants legs. He was wearing shoes without socks. Borrayo’s shot had blown him out of one of his shoes.

  Borrayo turned slowly to Haydon. “Okay?”

  The gunshots were still ringing in Haydon’s ears. What the hell was he going to say? That it wasn’t okay?

  “Now I have to go,” Borrayo said, returning his gun to its shoulder holster under his jacket. He reached for Baine, who was stunned and glassy-eyed, leaning sideways on the back of the van. His muscles had failed him out of fear, and he couldn’t hold himself up. His eyes walled in terror, and his swollen lips were peeled back in disbelief as Borrayo grabbed him, recuffed him, and rolled him back onto the ribbed floor of the van.

  “You had better get the hell out of here,” Borrayo said to Haydon, locking the back of the van.

  “What about the driver?” Haydon asked, surprising himself that he was even thinking that logically.

  “No problem,” Borrayo said. “He is my brother-in-law.” He slapped Haydon on the back. “Get out of here,” he said again.

  Haydon stood against the wall, hugging the darkness, as Borrayo got into the van, and his brother-in-law gunned the engine. The back wheels threw up gravel, and the van tore along the side of the building to the alley, then turned and disappeared.

  Haydon thought about John Baine in the back, aching from his beatings and horrified. In the quiet night he could hear the van’s engine revving through the deserted, distant streets. For the first time since he had arrived at this steep ridge above the ravines, he was aware of the heavy, oily stench of the smoldering dumps. He looked one last time at the young prisoner’s brain-spattered legs in the bloody weeds. In the dark, Haydon imagined he could hear the kid’s blood draining out of the place that had been his face and into the sand.

  CHAPTER 27

  He took several deep breaths of the foul night air and held them, trying to bring his heart rate under control. Colonia Santa Isabel was quiet, holding its own collective breath after Borrayo’s gunshots. Business was being conducted in the night streets, and no one wanted to know anything about it. Through the margin of brush that separated Haydon from the edge of the sharp banks of the ravine, he could see the lights of the Incense Bridge, wan and distant through the hazy space.

  With difficulty he turned away from the dead boy and eased to the corner of the building, the rough stone and chipped stucco wall plucking at the shoulder of his suit coat. From the shadows he surveyed the street, the occasional lamp providing uneven blotches of sallow light. Two blocks away, his car was now alone by the curb.

  He left the dark and ran across the street, keeping to the ragged margin where the first shanties teetered on the rim of the ravine and the paths started down into a maze of switchbacks. When he got to the other side and started toward the car, the first seventy-five meters were past a weedy stretch of land strewn with rubble and garbage and old car bodies with a backdrop of the city on the other side of the Rio La Barranca. Hurrying to reach the buildings where he could quickly duck into a number of darkened doorways if he needed to, he jogged across the dusty stretch, dust that made him think of the kid with the skinny ankles and no face. It made him think of the unconcerned ease with which Borrayo had dispatched the boy’s life, and it reminded him that if it hadn’t been for him it wouldn’t have happened at all, or at least it wouldn’t have happened because of him. Borrayo was too damned accommodating in matters of death.

  He came to the first building and the beginning of the sidewalk that climbed out of the caliche and hugged the buildings as it ran from block to block, at first two feet above the street and then growing closer as the grade grew shallower. He walked the last block to the car, past shuttered windows, past the uric doorway where he had stopped with his nameless driver, and through one of the pale blotches of light from a streetlamp. Haydon had first met Borrayo in the early eighties, during la violencia. One made assumptions about men’s behavior in such extraordinary times, assumptions that often excused extremes, or at least pretended to understand them. He had heard that those times had returned, but he had not been prepared for this: Lena Muller, Fossler, Baine, and now this nameless boy…

  He reached the corner, stepped down off the sidewalk and crossed the street to the opposite corner where his car was parked only a couple of meters from the first doorway. He was already reaching into his pocket for the keys, mentally unlocking the car door…

  “Hay-don.”

  He flinched and wheeled toward the voice in the same instant that he recognized it, though his mind hadn’t yet sorted out why it was out of context. With his last breath still caught in his diaphragm, he peered into the darkness where the corner of the opposite buildings blocked the weak light from the streetlamp. She came along the wall, dressed in an Indian huipil and cone, her hair braided on her head in the customary fashion. She was carrying a bundle in her arms, like a child wrapped in a rebozo.

  “Estoy Lita. ¡Anda listo!” she said, and she hurried past him, her sandaled feet slapping against the stones as she descended the steps into the street. They reached the car together, and in a moment he was turning the key in the ignition, flipping on the lights.

  “Hurry!” she said, unwrapping the rebozo.

  “What about Cage?”

  “No, no is here…no!”

  Christ! Haydon gunned the car into a U-turn, and the narrow streets of Santa Isabel flashed by in the headlights, the buildings on either side dividing to let them through, rushing past their windows like tunnel walls. She gave him directions in a halting mixture of English and Spanish, until they emerged from the narrow streets onto the major Avenida Elena and headed south on the commercial thoroughfare.

  “Veinte cuadras más, más o menos,” she said, and looked behind them one more time before she turned around, reasonably relaxed, one hand still inside her rebozo.

  “How did you get there?” Haydon asked. “Where’s Cage?” He was both relieved to see her and furious that Cage had been following him.

  “I come with Cage.”

  “We weren’t followed,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No. Radio,” she said, and outlined a box on the dash with her small hand.

  Cage had put a beeper on his car.

  “And he left you there alone?”

  She shook her head again and pulled a radio out of the rebozo. She clicked it once and, as if to demonstrate, radioed their position. But it was in code, Haydon recognized none of the coordinates. Hell no, she wasn’t alone; Cage had left her with a radio! Haydon wanted to ask her why he had left her, but decided to save the question for Cage himself. Lita continued to look straight ahead.

  Avenida Elena ran parallel to the Cementerio General, and several blocks east of it. They passed darkened furniture stores and cafés and the ubiquitous auto-parts houses that littered every Central American city of any size. The street grew narrower and began to climb slightly, and trees sprang up on either side, tall ones, cedars and cypresses, dark and somber against the stucco walls of the buildings.

  In the warm car Haydon could smell the cottony odors of Lita’s huipil. Though the Indians’ fabrics could be beautiful and brilliantly designed, they often were hot, being most commonly made of a tightly woven, thick cotton cloth intended for years of everyday use and meant to last through all seasons. In the rainy season nights their clothes kept them warm, but in the dry season they suffered the heavy material in stoic silence. There was n
o tradition of changing to lighter-weight garments to accommodate the seasons. Who had two complete sets of clothes? That was a notion for the wealthy.

  “Despacio,” Lita said, and Haydon slowed the car as they reached the top of a small rise. Following her single-word directions, Haydon turned left toward the central city and eased down a sloping side street. There were more trees, the lower few feet of their trunks painted white, a ghostly queue swallowed by the long throat of the narrow lane disappearing into a smoky darkness beyond their headlights. They drove past a car parked on the right side with two men in it, but Lita paid no attention though Haydon knew she had seen them, and then in a moment she raised her hand and pointed to their right, to a black door set in the high, uninterrupted wall behind the file of trees. Haydon pulled to the side and parked on the slope, turning his wheels to the curb and cutting the engine. He heard Lita signal a double-click on the radio in her rebozo, and then they got out of the car.

  She waited for him under the cypresses as he came around the car to the sidewalk, and together they approached the narrow door, which Haydon now saw was actually a wrought-iron gate with a solid metal panel cut to its exact size and welded to its bars for privacy. A small window grate was set in the center of the solid gate. Haydon noticed that fifteen meters to their left, and farther down the sloping sidewalk, heavy wooden doors allowed cars to enter behind the wall from the street. The light was too poor for him to see whether or not a garage lay on the other side. Just beyond these doors another car was parked at the curb, and Haydon made out two more dark silhouettes. Behind them, on the other side of the street were more trees, another endless wall, more gates and doorways. He sensed that the courtyards behind these walls were large and that there were gardens in which the cicadas, of which he now became aware, were hiding and humming in the dark heat. A lamp was mounted in the wall beside the narrow gate, and Lita pushed the small amber button underneath it.

  In the moment they had to wait, Haydon tried to see into the courtyard through the small grate, but it was too dark. He looked at Lita’s profile against the little splash of dull light on the stucco wall. She was all business, quiet, stern, with the slightest hint of a frown between her dark eyes as she bent her head, waiting. She was remote—perhaps her dress contributed to her sense of inscrutability—and absent was any hint of the reserved tenderness she had shown the night before outside Macabeo’s grisly mortuary. Haydon remembered her past. Perhaps that brief moment with her amid the groans of Macabeo’s resentful curs had been an anomaly. It was, after all, only a “sense” of her that he had had. He didn’t even know what it was, just a spark of communication, of unguarded sincerity that seemed like a flicker of revelative innocence in the context of the shadow world in which she lived.

  An electric latch clicked, and the gate sprung ajar. Lita pushed it open without looking around at Haydon, and they entered a courtyard of cobblestones. There were buildings on three sides of the courtyard, a couple of large jacarandas growing almost in the center of it, which must have provided a delicate shade in the daytime. Plantains grew in the corners and along part of the front wall, which was now behind them. This was a more humble courtyard than Haydon had seen at Janet’s or Bennett Pittner’s. But it seemed to be much used, with several tables under the jacaranda and a few odd chairs scattered around. The three surrounding buildings were of differing stories, but of relatively the same height because of the sloping grade of the hillside. It was a compound of residences, with windows thrown open, a dim light behind curtains here, a glow of a television there, the smells of cooking food, and a whiff of cigarette smoke. There was an occasional voice, but none above a murmur.

  Lita walked across the courtyard, veering to her right toward a lighted open doorway through which Haydon could see several men sitting in a large kitchen. One of the men was Cage. As they approached. Cage looked toward their footsteps, and Lita stepped through the doorway with Haydon following.

  “Damn,” Cage said to Haydon as they came in. “I thought for a little bit there that you were dead. Sit down.”

  Two Guatemalan men were at the large wooden table with Cage, and an Indian woman was behind them, cleaning up the dishes from the meal that the men had apparently just finished. There was a modern gas stove, but the Indian woman obviously had cooked the meal at the wide-mouthed fireplace where several pots still sat simmering at the edge of the coals. There was a wide, seat-high hearth that went the full length of the room and where Lita sat down away from the heat of the fire, completely ignored by Cage. Haydon saw that as she unwrapped the radio and laid it on the rebozo on the hearth, she also unwrapped a large automatic handgun.

  “You want something to eat?” Cage asked. Haydon shook his head. The Indian woman was already filling a plate of food for Lita, although they had not exchanged a word. Haydon sat down at the table at a right angle from Cage and across from the two Guatemalan men, who studied their beer bottles, avoiding Haydon’s eyes. They were drinking Gal-los, and Cage did not introduce them.

  Nor did Cage explain why he had been following Haydon.

  “When Lita heard the gunshots, she radioed that she thought you’d been shot,” Cage said. “The last shot, the third one, she said was the coup de grace. She heard the car leave…or van, was it a van…?” Haydon nodded. “…and she started in your direction. Then you came out from behind the damn building.” Cage looked at him. “Want a Gallo?”

  “Yeah,” Haydon said, sure he wanted a Gallo.

  Cage asked the Indian woman to bring a beer to Haydon. “What was going on?” Cage asked.

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you were following me.”

  “Depends on how much you understand your situation here,” Cage said, sipping from his own amber bottle. “If you don’t understand, then you might have been surprised.” He had pushed his chair away from the table and had stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. He wasn’t all that goggle-eyed about the violence that had just taken place. His attitude was more that of one wanting to know how Haydon had found the company at the cocktail party he had just attended.

  The Indian woman set Haydon’s beer on the table in front of him, and he quickly took a long deep drink of it.

  “Well, I am surprised,” Haydon said. “You want to explain some of this to me?”

  “Like what?”

  “For a man who didn’t want to get involved in my business here, putting a beeper on my car is a curious thing to do.”

  “I thought you might stumble onto something.”

  “If I did, do you think you’d know it?”

  “It’s the way I make my living, knowing shit like what you’re doing. Knowing and getting involved are different sides of the coin.”

  “If I’d been shot back there in that alley, what would you have learned?”

  “That you didn’t know Borrayo as well as you thought you did. That Lena had been in some really deep shit.”

  Haydon didn’t say anything. It was useless to try to unravel the ways in which Cage might have learned that Haydon knew Borrayo, or even that Cage knew it was Borrayo whom Haydon had gone to meet in Santa Isabel. Haydon wasn’t going to kid himself. He couldn’t operate here alone, and if there was even a remote chance of finding Fossler, he was going to have to cast his lot with either Pittner or Cage. Those were his two options, though Pittner really wasn’t an option at all. He was sitting in front of the only man who could help him. But he had a hunch about Cage.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Haydon said, and he took another long drink of the cold Gallo. “I think you’re full of shit. Lita was in radio contact with you tonight, and you were telling her how to handle it. If you were only interested in information you would have been better off letting me go after the shooting. I would have driven off to stir up more trouble with the beeper firmly in place and still unknown to me. I wouldn’t have known you were following me, either. But she didn’t stay hidden. She stepped out, gave everything away, and then brought
me here. And now I’m sitting here and you’re waiting, these two guys are waiting, the four guys outside on the street are waiting. I’ve duly noted all this. You’re showing me you’ve got all this capability, all these people. Why don’t you just spit it out? I’m not the only one who wants something here, am I?”

  When Haydon finished, he was looking squarely at Cage, but out of the corner of his eye he could see the two Guatemalans looking at him. Cage had the beginnings of a smirk on his face, and Haydon could tell that he was still formulating a response. As he looked Cage in the eye, he thought he saw the smirk change to an expression of satisfaction, as though Haydon had reacted as Cage thought he would or, perhaps, hoped he would. And then even that expression faded, and Cage grew sober. He abandoned his slouch and sat up in his chair, he put his forearms on the table and rotated his Gallo between his open hands, thinking. The Indian woman at the fireplace put a small root knot on the coals, and the smoldering chunk of wood filled the room with an aromatic waft that was pleasant even in the hot, still night. Now the two Guatemalans had locked their eyes firmly on Cage.

  Cage looked at Haydon. “Lena’s not dead,” he said.

  CHAPTER 28

  There was nothing to say. Haydon simply sat there waiting for Cage to continue. He was aware of Lita watching him. The only sounds in the room were the root knot crackling in the fire and the soft kitchen sounds of the Indian woman as she moved about her business, careful to be quiet, invisible and silent. The two Guatemalan men were stone. There was a fleeting moment when Haydon wasn’t sure what Cage was going to do, then Cage went on to play his part. It was what most men did in life, always. Behind Haydon, through the open window and the open door, the cicadas continued to complain of the heat of the dry season.

  “Otro cerveza,” Cage said, and drained the last of his bottle and set it aside. He turned a little aside in his chair once again, and crossed his legs, and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his guayabera pocket. He took one, offered one to Haydon, but Haydon shook his head. Cage lighted his cigarette with his red plastic lighter and without looking at the two Guatemalans slid both the pack and the lighter down the table to them. It was the first time he had acknowledged their presence since Haydon had gotten there.