Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  Grajeda drank some of his coffee. It was good coffee, not the café basura, the trashy coffee that had grasses and twigs ground up with inferior beans, the only coffee the poor could afford. In Guatemala, most of the good coffee was exported. Grajeda seemed to savor it, as if it were a special pleasure.

  “I met Lena in Huehuetenango,” he said. “Bindo and I were working there, as I told you, and she accompanied one of the Chuj women down from San Mateo. I treated the woman and gave her some medicine that required several hours for a reaction, which I needed to monitor. The woman stayed in the hospital. Lena slept on one of the old sofas in the foyer. I was impressed with how—I hope this is not offensive—but how unlike an American she was. She was simply very comfortable with being where she was and doing what she was doing. I asked her if she would like to have dinner with me at one of the cafés not far from the hospital. We became good friends immediately. Sometimes when I came up to Huehuetenango from the capital I would take an extra day and drive up to San Mateo to see her before going back. It’s about fifty-four kilometers from Huehue to San Mateo, but it’s all dirt roads, so it takes a while. Usually I would stay overnight. We did a lot of talking on those trips, and then she began to come see me when she came into the capital. So we became good friends.”

  Another sip of coffee, and then Dr. Grajeda finished it and set it on the table in front of him. He never looked at Joseph and Mary, but gave all of his attention to Haydon. Outside the traffic had worked itself to a significant pitch, diesel fumes rode the hot air up to the windows, and occasionally a blast of a car or truck horn was startlingly loud.

  “About six months ago,” Grajeda continued, stroking his beard thoughtfully with a small hand, “Lena very hesitatingly asked me if I had ever heard stories about people kidnapping children, small children, babies. I said, yes, unfortunately it was done from time to time, one heard stories. She said, no not an occasional kidnapping, but an organized situation, a group of people who stole babies and sold them to certain orphanages who are very lax in their adoption rules.

  “Now the fact is, in 1988 and 1989 a very professional organization of kidnappers was broken up here in Guatemala. Several human rights organizations kept getting reports of babies being stolen from the Indians in the highlands. During la violencia in the early eighties, there were as many as two hundred thousand war orphans in the highlands, and many of those simply disappeared. During those years, many people in the United States and Israel and Europe adopted little Guatemalan babies under very suspicious circumstances. It was a very simple thing to do, almost like buying a Guatemalan parrot, only easier, because this ‘animal’ didn’t have to be quarantined. As it turned out, it was discovered that some government officials colluded in these operations, generals in the army, even some women related to these generals. A very big scandal. When it was over, of course, nothing was done. It all melted out of the news, new scandals supplanted this one, people went on living their lives.”

  Grajeda had grown very sober and had lost his philosophical air. “After I left Johns Hopkins, I did my internship in a large hospital in Baltimore. It was my misfortune to be one of several doctors who formed a team that worked with a group of children who had been ‘circulated’ for almost a year by a ring of child molesters, you know, one of those kinds of organizations that kept in touch with each other on computer networks, and in whose homes were found boxes of despicable photographs and the names and numbers of people with whom they shared these things and these children.”

  Grajeda stopped and stared at the litter of newspapers on the little table before them. “Well,” he said, his eyes immobile as he remembered. “You see, I had to make adjustments in my understanding of the nature of man. I had already done that, in a more or less continuous way, throughout my college years in order to try to justify the political and moral system here in this country. You know, the nature of cruelty…the sort of things people wrestle with sometimes…”

  Suddenly he looked up at Haydon as if something had caught his attention and he remembered where he was and the story he was telling.

  “Excuse me,” he said. He seemed as if he were about to apologize for his rambling, but then he smiled to himself, straightened up in his chair and touched his steel-rimmed glasses, an infinitesimal adjustment on the bridge of his nose. “As you may be aware, the violence has grown dramatically within the last eight or ten months, sometimes reminding people of la violencia, causing everyone to fear that those times could easily return once again. Disappearances and assassinations are on the increase, to everyone’s dismay and trepidation, bad memories have come alive like nightmares that have stepped out of our dreams and taken on flesh and crawled into our beds with us in the dark.

  “Well, into all of this hidden horror Lena came with perhaps some bad memories of her own, and suddenly this story of stolen babies became more important to her than anything else in the world. She listened to the stories of the sobbing mothers; she talked to the fathers, who, even with their heritage of machismo, could not stem the tears for a stolen child. For the first time in her life Lena came face to face with something that moved her to greater compassion, to greater indignation, maybe even greater love, than that which she felt for her own misfortunes.

  “And then, of course, she did a very foolish thing. She investigated these rumors herself, came to Guatemala City, made inquiries, went to see people, asked questions. All of this, of course, violating one of the very first rules of the Peace Corps, that their people must stay clear of any kind of political or social turmoil. It was only after she had disturbed the nest and the wasps were buzzing about her head that she came to see me.”

  CHAPTER 33

  As it had been in Cage’s safe house, there were unexplained comings and goings behind Haydon, whisperings at the door where he had been brought in, the sound of feet—heavy ones, light ones, quick ones—crossing the rough wooden floor of the warehouse, someone at the coffeepot on the stove, the rattle of latches on doors, the occasional muffled clack of firearms being handled. Grajeda paid no attention to these movements and sounds, and Haydon could not decide whether the doctor’s concentration was such that it shut them out or whether he was simply so naïve about clandestine matters that he was not aware of their possible importance.

  Haydon himself, however, tried to attend auditory detail. How many people were involved here? How many of them were women? Had the two men who killed Cage’s man come upstairs and told the others? How temporary was this place, and how great a risk were these people taking by having Haydon come here? This last question had been answered partly by the death of the man in the Batman T-shirt.

  “Actually, Lena was very circumspect about how she parceled out the information to me about her discoveries,” Grajeda said. He was sitting now turned almost sideways in his chair, his legs crossed, one arm draped languidly over the back of the chair with its hand dangling at the wrist, his other hand resting on his thigh. He looked rather like a young philosophy professor relaxing with his graduate students, or perhaps a poet, chatting in a café about Yeats or Garcia Lorca. He did not look like a man in hiding, or a man fully aware of the precariousness of his situation.

  “I did not know that afternoon when Lena came to see me that she already had gone far beyond such simple inquiries,” Grajeda continued, “and neither of us knew that by coming to my clinic she had inextricably involved me in her very dangerous campaign to ‘do something’ about what she recently had discovered.

  “Of course I was already on the security forces’ computers,” Grajeda clarified. “It wasn’t as though Lena had shined a spotlight on me. I have been very outspoken about the corruption in the government’s public health programs. I have been an ‘activist’ in that regard, a ‘provocateur.’ I have ‘Marxist’ ideas about the responsibilities of a government to its people.” The doctor smiled and raised the hand that had been resting on his thigh and held up two fingers toward Haydon as if he were blessing him. “You see, here in Centr
al America, ‘communist’ is still a potent word. After four decades of having the United States pound into us the incomparable evils of ‘communism,’ of giving us foreign aid only if we say we will fight communism with it, of giving us military matériel only if we say we will fight communism with it…well, we know what a communist is now. We have had to learn in order to get along with Uncle Sam. It doesn’t matter that the Great Red Threat is now in shambles, and its fearsome communist ideology is a routed ghost. Your legacy to us is that we still know a communist when we see one, and if we don’t see one then we will invent one. Thank God for this wonderful democracy you have given us.”

  Grajeda’s smile softened, and his hand dropped once again to his thigh. He looked away thoughtfully toward the tall windows where, just out of sight, Guatemala labored in the dust and heat of the verano. Grajeda kept his own counsel for a few moments and then turned to Haydon.

  “In the nearly four decades that you have shared your kindness with your little brown Guatemalan brothers,” he said softly, “you have not befriended the wisest of us and taught us how to build schools to educate our people; you have not embraced the kindest of us and taught us how to build hospitals to heal our sick.” He shook his head. “Instead, you have schemed with the worst of us and taught us how to be suspicious and how to hate. You have very strange ideas of what it means to ‘befriend’ a people. I really don’t think you understand what it means, or if you do understand, then you have been very perverse in your intentions. After four decades of your ‘help’ we have become numb with our own misery: we assassinate or ‘disappear’ more than one thousand of our fellow Guatemalan’s annually; eighty-five percent of us live in poverty; eighty-two percent of our children under five years old are malnourished; eighty percent of us have no access to medicines; seventy percent of us are illiterate…”

  Dr. Grajeda stopped abruptly. He looked at Haydon calmly and seemed suddenly, profoundly sad. “I apologize. I sincerely apologize. Blame is a very thin garment. The person who uses it to keep warm could easily freeze to death. The fact is, Lena had discovered that a woman named Vera Beatriz—”

  “—Azcona de Sandoval…” Haydon said.

  Dr. Grajeda looked at Haydon in shock.

  “I assume,” Haydon said, “that General Azcona is after Lena because she wanted to expose his sister’s involvement in illegally procuring children for adoption, a process which is itself of dubious legal character here in Guatemala. I assume she enlisted John Baine’s help in this, probably thinking that the best medicine for this kind of situation was to shed the bright light of the press on it, and that is why he’s disappeared. I assume that Jim Fossler found out about much or all of this and has been killed in the cross fire. I assume that you were helping her more than you’re leading me to believe; and I assume you need me to do something for you, which is why you’ve had me come here. I also assume you know where Lena is hiding.”

  Haydon said all of this with as much equanimity as he could muster, something he was finding increasingly difficult to do. He wasn’t sure just how long he could hold at bay the craziness that was taking place all around him, following him like a pack of shantytown curs, waiting for him either to make a mistake or lead them to something tastier. Unlike Dr. Grajeda, he was not at all convinced that he had shaken all his surveillants. The man in the Batman T-shirt was just one of the unlucky ones. But there were others, and he did not believe that he and Dr. Grajeda were having this conversation unbeknownst to anyone but themselves and the people guarding them. Haydon had the distinct feeling that he was walking on the brink of a precipice and that the curs were shouldering in closer, right there, just at the edge of light, where the darkness begins.

  “As far as I know,” Dr. Grajeda said, considerably sobered, “most of your assumptions are correct. I honestly don’t know about Mr. Fossler. But I fear the worst for him. And John Baine too, I—”

  “Baine has been picked up by Azcona’s DIC agents,” Haydon interjected. “He’s being held in a clandestine prison.”

  Dr. Grajeda looked at Haydon now with something like suspicion. He was obviously taken aback that Haydon had this kind of information.

  “How do you know this?”

  “Don’t be too impressed,” Haydon said. “Or unduly distrustful. I’ve come onto most of this through dumb luck. Understand, the only thing I want is to get Fossler out of here, if he’s alive, and Lena too, if she wants to go.” As Haydon said this, he felt a twinge of guilt. Nobody gave a shit about Baine. Later the American embassy would give a shit, but just barely, and only because they had to. Having to was weak motivation for an advocate.

  “Only one of your assumptions is a miscalculation,” Dr. Grajeda said. “I don’t want anything from you.” He shifted his eyes toward the door of the warehouse and then back to Haydon. “These people…are helping me.” He lowered his voice. “It’s a very…hard bargain. They will get me out of the city, help me escape Azcona’s goons, but in turn I have to give them two years. I have to serve with their compas, who do not have a doctor. They have many cadres, some urban, some in the jungle. I will be a very busy doctor.”

  This time his smile was distinctly rueful, and he raised his hands in mock helplessness. “I have been drafted by the insurgency. The irony here is that I am only buying time, literally. They are saving my life now, but by the time I have spent two years with the guerrillas and am free to come back home, my life won’t be worth a single cigarette. Even my father’s influence—the reason, I am sure, that I have not been disappeared by the death squads already—will be of no help to me then.”

  “Couldn’t you go into exile?”

  “Oh, yes, there is always exile,” Grajeda said, his expression ironic. “Yes, there’s always that.”

  “Is this the only way you can escape Azcona?”

  “The only sure way.”

  “You must have done something more than ‘talk’ with Lena to have incurred this kind of sentence from Azcona.”

  Dr. Grajeda nodded. “Well, of course, I did. But that is beside the point. Many people have been visited by the death squads for doing far less than I did to offend the General. There is not necessarily any relationship between ‘offense’ and sentence. The General may want someone disappeared because they have stolen national security secrets or because they cut him off in traffic that morning. It is all the same to him. He was offended by both gestures.

  “But yes, you are right. In retrospect it was not so odd that Lena came to me with her suspicions of kidnapping in the highlands. After we became good friends and fell into the habit of talking late into the night about everything under the sun, one night I became rather animated—we were drinking too—about my feelings regarding the condition of the children in the highlands where I had been working. I started out on the subject of health care and then went on to the deplorable plight of the orphans all over Guatemala, but especially in the cities, and on and on. The point is, she knew about my concerns for Guatemalan children.”

  Dr. Grajeda sighed and looked away and seemed for the first time to have difficulty controlling his agitation.

  “Thinking back on it, I wonder if I wasn’t unconsciously luring her into this,” he said, “though I can’t imagine why, I mean, to what purpose. You see, I had already been compiling data on the disappearance of children, both in Guatemala City and in the highlands, actually anywhere I encountered it. I had names and dates and places…and with each instance I provided annotations—sometimes paragraphs, sometimes pages—of the ‘rumors’ of that child’s disappearance. Now, being a doctor, I know that rumor, hearsay, is not a scientific way of doing something like this. On the other hand, if I were an anthropologist, a sociologist, it would only be appropriate to compile this kind of information. Nevertheless, by the time Lena came to me and asked me if I had ever heard anything about kidnappings, I had already accumulated a considerable archive on the subject and had recorded hundreds of incidents ,…along with the rumors about what had happene
d to the child. So I had two kinds of archival information: statistical and anthropological.”

  Dr. Grajeda stopped and removed his glasses and rubbed the sides of the bridge of his nose, no longer pretending he wasn’t tired. When he returned his glasses to his face and hooked the wire arms over his ears, he didn’t look again at Haydon but at one of the warehouse walls where a chunk of plaster has fallen away from the stone.

  “When she came to me she already had blundered terribly,” he continued. “She was being followed by the DIC, and everyone she visited had their names added to the central computer file of ‘subversives.’ After she came to me and told me what she had been doing, I knew that I was marked. I already had been keeping two copies of my ‘archive.’ One here so I could work on it and one with Dr. Salviati. Now I went to a photocopy shop and made two more copies. I put one in my safety deposit box, and the other I took to my mother. I told her the bundle of papers was old medical-school papers that I didn’t want to throw away, and I put them in the attic of her home.”

  “When was this?” Haydon asked.

  Grajeda thought. “It must have been, yes, that was in April, nine months ago.”

  “Then within three months of mentioning this to you, Lena was discharged from the Peace Corps and had returned to Houston.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you talked about this again?”

  “Only once more. Actually I had entered a time when I was helping Dr. Salviati quite a bit. I saw Lena only twice more before she flew back to Houston. Once, we discussed her preoccupation. The last time we did not.”

  “And were you visited by the DIC?”

  “No. I suppose they thought it was over when she left Guatemala.”