Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  When the two men reached the back of the church, the man in the shadows of the narthex stepped out to talk to them. They held a discussion at the front door, a conversation that attracted the attention of the man in the back pew on the opposite side of the church. He looked toward them, then quickly turned his eyes back to the front. The conversation at the front doors was animated, the man from the shadows punching a forefinger into the chest of the man who had been on the opposite side of the nave. The man who had run his fingers past Haydon’s face looked nervously outside to the bright sunlight, hoping to avoid being included in the chastisement. Their voices rose, a local curse word once, twice, and then the three men hurried from the narthex, their heads disappearing down behind the top row of stone steps outside the door of the church.

  Haydon looked at the Indian woman. She did not move, but she had picked up on her competitor across the way. However, the man across the nave got up as soon as the other men were out of sight and hurried toward the altar. He left out of the transept aisle on the opposite side of the church, and after a few moments Haydon heard a door slam hollowly in the distance.

  The Indian woman did not move for a moment, but then she permitted herself a look around. She seemed hesitant as to what to do. Then to Haydon’s surprise, she again bowed her head slightly and waited. Haydon looked at his watch again. Another seven minutes had passed. He had fifteen minutes to get to the shoe store. He wanted to give himself some extra time.

  Fixing his eyes on the Indian woman, he opened the door of the confessional. At the click of the latch, she ducked her head as if in more fervent prayer, and he had no doubt that her eyes were straining at the top of their sockets as she tried to see the door of the confessional. He opened it and came out. He looked at her. She was stone. He closed the confessional door and walked to the rear of the church, around the pews and then came back up the center aisle until he was at the row behind the Indian woman. He entered it and sidestepped over until he was looking at the back of her head. Taking the automatic from his waistband, he leaned forward and put the barrel of it up beside the woman’s shawl-covered head while his other hand steadied her shoulder.

  “¡Señora, ten cuidado!” He pressed the barrel to her temple. “¿Sabe que es este?” She nodded. Keeping his gun to her temple, he reached around her and carefully moved back the folds of the shawl to reveal the radio. “Con permiso,” he said, and he slowly pulled the radio out of the shawl. In Spanish he told her to stand up and go with him. They moved to the aisle, and then together they walked the considerable distance to the choir where they turned to their left and entered the transept aisle. In another five or ten meters they approached a door. Through the windows at the side of it, Haydon could see that it opened out into a courtyard with shrubbery and a small fountain and a wrought-iron gate that let out into 18 calle.

  Haydon turned the woman around and looked at her. She was older than Lita, but still young, her oval Indian face looking up at him impassively, her dark eyes wide but not excited. He asked her if she had a watch. She nodded, and he reached down and pulled back the sleeve of her blouse. It was a black plastic Swatch. Cage. In Spanish he told her that he had come to the church by prearrangement. He said that he had people watching the exits and that after he was gone he wanted her to wait ten minutes before she left. He told her that she would be safe if she did what he said, implying that the alternative would be risky. Again she nodded.

  Haydon took her by the arm and walked her to a bench against the corridor wall, facing the windows that looked out into the courtyard. He asked her where the people were who were working with her. She said there was a man in a car. Haydon asked her to describe it, which she did. She said he was around the corner on the side of the mercado, on the opposite side of the church from the courtyard gate. Who else? A man wearing a Batman T-shirt. He was carrying a leather jacket over his arm to hide his radio. Who else? That was all. Haydon reached down and picked up her wrist and moved her sleeve back with the barrel of the automatic. Ten minutes, he said. The girl nodded for the last time.

  Haydon pushed open the door and walked out into the courtyard. That had taken four minutes. Eleven minutes remained. As he crossed the courtyard, he tucked the automatic into his waistband and hung the radio onto his belt by its metal clip, covering both of them with his suit coat.

  He lingered a moment at the wrought-iron gate, watching the crowded sidewalk, first in one direction and then in the other. The traffic on this side of the median came from his left, and Haydon monitored its tempo, waiting until the traffic light a block away released a slug of cars and buses and trucks. Then he flung open the gate, burst out of the courtyard and across the sidewalk through surprised pedestrians and past vendors, and out into the street, just clearing the front of the first truck. He was out of the way even before the driver could use his horn. His heart pounding, he stood on the median only a moment before the traffic in the west-bound lanes jammed to a stop. Haydon moved quickly, cutting between the bumpers of the cars, swallowing mouthfuls of oily, acrid exhaust fumes, barely missing being hit by a motorcycle barreling between the booths and the traffic, before he ducked under the canvas side of a booth selling leather goods and plunged into the crowd streaming along in the dingy twilight of the sidewalk.

  Quickly he headed toward the address Salviati had given him, saw it, approached it, passed it, and went into the store next to it. It was an appliance store, mostly televisions, five or six of them turned to the same channel, three clerks watching “The Price Is Right.” One of them started toward him, but Haydon waved him off, moved behind a bank of sets still in their cardboard cartons and glued his eyes to the sidewalk. He was breathing as if he’d run a marathon. The three clerks looked at each other and then one of them, the biggest of them, who moved with his arms slightly out from his sides, started toward him with a frown. “¡Qué pasó?” he said, and the other two followed. Haydon pulled out the radio, clicked it on for the static, and let them get a glimpse of the automatic stuck into his belt. He reached into his pocket and brought out his shield and held it out to them. They were not close enough to read it, but they knew what it was and they knew what it meant. They all stopped at the same time, and Haydon fixed his eyes on the sidewalk again.

  It seemed like an hour, but it was only six minutes. No one passed on the sidewalk wearing a Batman T-shirt. No one passed who looked like they were looking for someone. Haydon turned to the three clerks behind him, and six eyes stared back at him. They wanted nothing to do with him; they only wanted him to go away.

  “Cinco minutos más,” he said, gulping air.

  The big man lifted his chin in a half nod, and then all of them pretended to be once again interested in “The Price Is Right,” and Haydon turned his attention back to the street.

  CHAPTER 32

  He walked out of the appliance store with an all-or-nothing feeling, and in fifteen seconds he had entered the gloomy Monaco shoe store next door. The store was a bargain-basement establishment, with crudely made wooden tables piled with tangled heaps of shoes and sandals of every imaginable kind. The place had a high ceiling and no lights so that its only illumination was a pale reflected glow from the shady sidewalk outside. It smelled old and unused, but a few weary-looking people stood around here and there in its dusky, cheerless environs, raking through the tables of footwear.

  There was a center aisle through the tables, and Haydon could see the door at the far end. He started toward it, leisurely, looking casually at the people about him. All of them ignored him, the few customers, the one or two employees, who were only distinguishable from the customers because they didn’t look as tired. Haydon was invisible to all of them. He got to the back door, which was really only a grillwork gate, and pushed it open, letting himself out into a closed courtyard filled mostly with banana trees and damp beds of flowers and sago palms and a few old vine-strangled mimosas. A tiled path disappeared into the jungle of vegetation, and at the head of the path, just off the cemen
t to his left, were three poles stuck into the earth, each with a bar across its top and a huge green parrot atop the bar. A rusty, horizontal disk jutted out from each bar and was littered with chunks of darkening fruit and a few nuts. The birds blinked at him, as bright and anomalous as emeralds. Immediately to his left, an exterior wooden stairway ascended to a balcony that encircled the courtyard on the second floor.

  Suddenly he heard what he thought was the leather sole of a shoe on the gritty cement behind him. He turned as casually as he could manage and saw another set of stairs going up to the balcony on the opposite side of the courtyard. Under the stairs two Guatemalan men were turning to look at him, both of them wide-eyed and panting, frozen. One of the men, the older one, was standing up straight, just out from under the sloping angle of the ascending stairs, putting something into the waistband of his trousers, under his leather jacket. The other man, heavier, younger, was bent over, looking around at Haydon from under the stairs through the open risers. His legs were spread apart, and between his feet a third man lay facedown, blood from his head crawling out from under the lowest tread. Haydon could just see the black and and yellow Batman emblem across the back of the dying man’s white T-shirt.

  “Subes la escalera,” the man wearing the jacket said, pointing to the stairs behind Haydon. He had trouble controlling his voice, which was tight with adrenaline. Haydon looked at him and nodded, looked once more at the man bleeding on the gritty cement, confirmed to himself that it was indeed a Batman T-shirt, and turned around and started up the wooden stairs. Behind him one of the parrots screeched, and Haydon flinched. Then he heard them dragging the body across the gritty cement on the other side of the courtyard.

  The stairway long ago had given up its last coat of paint to the alternating seasons of sun and rain, and now Haydon’s hand moved along a rail of wood that was split and gray. His gut told him he ought to have the automatic in his hand, but for some reason he didn’t, as if something else told him that if he didn’t give in, if he didn’t commit to violence himself, there was still some hope of averting more of it.

  When he reached the top of the stairs he stopped. The wooden balcony completely encircled the well of the courtyard. He resisted the impulse to look down to see where they had dragged the body, as if the drag marks in the grit could be seen from where he stood. He could go in either direction, either way he could walk completely around the balcony to where he had begun. Turning left, he started along the section over the doorway through which he had just entered.

  Before he had taken a dozen steps, a man stepped out of a doorway ten meters in front of him. He was wearing dress pants and a white shirt without a tie, its long sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He held an Uzi in his right hand, which hung straight down by his side. Haydon heard another door open behind him, just at the head of the stairs, and he looked around to see a woman, also with an Uzi.

  “You have a gun,” the man said in heavily accented English. “Will you please to take it out of your belt and put it on the floor. And also the radio.” He raised his Uzi at Haydon in anticipation.

  Haydon moved slowly and did as he was told. He heard the woman walking up behind him as he crouched and put the gun on the floor, unhooked the radio and laid it beside it. As soon as he straightened up, she retrieved the gun and the radio.

  “This way, please,” the man said. He moved toward Haydon and opened a door that was about equal distance between the two of them on Haydon’s right. He pushed the door open and then stepped back to let Haydon enter first.

  Haydon walked into a single long room the length of the shoe store beneath it. At the far end were tall windows thrown open to the noise and polluted air of 18 calle. Haydon could see the tops of the trees in the median, and just a little to his right was the Santuario de la Sagrada Madre.

  In front of the tall windows, isolated in the empty room were an old sofa, a low table, and several kinds of chairs. Against one wall was a kitchen stove, another table with wooden chairs, and “cabinets” made of stacked wooden boxes. Three beds, mattresses lying on the wooden floor, were against another wall.

  Dr. Aris Grajeda stood up from one of the chairs around the low table and sofa and approached from across the room. He was wearing a double-breasted suit without a tie, the coat hanging open. The suit was in need of cleaning and pressing.

  “I understand you handled this very resourcefully,” he said. “I am sorry I had to ask you to do it this way. Please, come over and sit down.”

  Haydon said nothing. He followed Grajeda over to where he had been sitting alone. The room smelled strongly of the deep resinous fragrance of coffee beans, as if the walls themselves had soaked up the oil from the harvested pods, and of the burlap sacks in which they had been stored. The bare wooden floor was worn shiny in places from decades of warehousemen’s feet.

  “I call them José and María,” Grajeda said of the man and woman who had brought Haydon into the room and who now stood out of sight behind him. The doctor smiled at the obviously fictitious names. “They are not betrothed, however, and they are not particularly religious, though José used to be a Jesuit. Please, let’s sit down and talk. Would you want a cafecito, Mr. Haydon?”

  “I would, yes,” Haydon said.

  Grajeda went to the kitchen stove himself and took two coffee cups from the wooden boxes and poured coffee from a pot that sat on the stove.

  “I don’t think you were risking your life to come here to see us, Mr. Haydon,” Grajeda said, as he picked up the cups and started back to Haydon. “But I can assure you that the rest of us have risked our lives to come here to see you.” He held one of the cups out to Haydon. The cups were large, mismatched, each of them chipped and crazed. Haydon took the one being offered him and set it on the low wooden table.

  Grajeda sat down in one of the straight-backed chairs opposite Haydon. He crossed his legs and balanced his cup on his knee, holding it with one hand while he stroked his beard once or twice with the other. He regarded Haydon a moment with an expression that portrayed ambivalence. His Indian eyes were almost oriental behind the flat lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses, his moustache and goatee cleanly trimmed, his black hair, streaked with strands of premature gray, was combed and looked rather elegant. He was actually a very handsome man.

  “I apologize for lying to you yesterday morning,” Grajeda said without preamble. “Surely you must understand that I had to be careful.”

  “I’m beginning to understand more all the time,” Haydon said.

  A flicker of uncertainty passed quickly over Grajeda’s face. That was fine with Haydon. He was glad to have someone other than himself experience the slippery textures of ambiguity.

  “I am guessing that you know that Lena Muller is not dead,” Dr. Grajeda said.

  “I’d very much like to know why you’re making that assumption,” Haydon said. “I seem to have met an inordinate number of people here who want to be clever with me.”

  “Who were the people following you?” Grajeda asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Grajeda looked at Haydon as if he expected Haydon to start quizzing him. He seemed to want to know what Haydon was thinking without having to ask him. Haydon waited. He was in no position to gain anything by asking questions. Grajeda called the meeting, Grajeda could do the talking.

  “Lena is in hiding,” the doctor said. “And so am I, as of yesterday.” Now he sipped his coffee for the first time. “I met Lena almost two years ago when she first began working with the Chuj in northern Huehuetenango. Dr. Salviati and I—you met Dr. Salviati.” Grajeda smiled. “He is an old friend, a very good man with a personal philosophy that does not require him to think radically. I admire that. His approach to life, his philosophical attitude is already complete, and now all he has to do is live it, which he does, I should say, with integrity.” Grajeda raised his shoulders, “Well, I am less mature intellectually. I can never settle whether I should strive to be a good Christian, loving my enemies and praying fo
r those who persecute me; or whether I should be a good capitalist—there are several young doctors who want Bindo and me to start a new hospital, in Zona 15 of course—there’s very good money to be made from first-class health care for the wealthy ladinos here in Guatemala; or whether I should be a good revolutionary—the opportunities for fulfillment there are limitless, this is the third world after all, and the masses suffer greatly, democracy is a sham, government is corrupt; or…Well, you see what I mean. Up to this point, however, I have managed to be nothing more than a doctor doing some things that I believe are good, but which my government believes are unpatriotic and counterproductive to their own goals.” Dr. Grajeda smiled and tilted his head. “We have a genuine disagreement, this government and I, about my work.”

  Haydon was sitting with his back to the door of the long room, facing the windows. Though Grajeda tried to appear relaxed, he seemed to Haydon to be ill at ease, almost as if he were a guest here. Haydon did not have the impression that he slept on these beds or cooked on this stove or read the newspapers that were scattered on the table before them. Grajeda did not seem comfortable with the circumstances in the room or with the kind of life they implied—and which Haydon was still trying to assess—and neither did Haydon have the impression that he was part of this room’s regular business. Haydon wondered how much Grajeda’s hosts were telling him and if he knew what had happened just a few minutes earlier to the man in the Batman T-shirt. And he wondered, too, how Cage was going to feel about it.