Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  “But it wasn’t, because she had told John Baine about it.”

  Dr. Grajeda nodded. “Yes, I am afraid she did.”

  “And he began snooping.”

  Grajeda nodded. “And then before I knew it, she had returned to Guatemala and had a job with USAID.”

  Yes, Haydon thought, and soon she was working for Bennett Pittner. “Do you know if she continued looking into the story about stolen children after she returned?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Grajeda said. “She came to see me again. I almost had reached the point that I was wondering if I was paranoid. The DIC had not visited me. Perhaps I was being silly. Perhaps Lena had not inadvertently led them to me after all. And then one day she was back, and she came to see me at my clinic in Mezquital. She said she had this job with USAID, and she was going to be working again in the highlands. She was very excited about this. She told me she was going to expose Vera Beatriz, that she had the documentation to do it. Frankly I was skeptical of this. I cautioned her about what she was doing. I told her she could be killed for this. Yes, yes, of course, she said, but she now had very powerful protection.” Grajeda shook his head. “I don’t know what that meant, and, naturally, she didn’t tell me.”

  “Do you believe that Lena actually had—has—good information?”

  “I don’t know,” Grajeda sounded weary. “With her…do you know her?”

  “No, I’ve never met her.”

  “Well, with her you never know. She can be surprisingly astute, intelligent, and then sometimes so childish. Is she from a wealthy family?”

  It was an interesting question from Grajeda. If he didn’t know, then Lena must never have told him, but still he surmised it. He was quite perceptive himself.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so,” he nodded. “She never hinted that she was, but still, I thought as much.”

  Dr. Grajeda stood and stepped around behind his chair. He walked several paces, rather idly toward the high windows, and someone hissed from the end of the room behind Haydon. Dr. Grajeda turned around with a smile and held up his hand. “I know, I know. Don’t go near the windows.” He looked at Haydon and rolled his eyes slightly. “This is going to be a long two years with my cautious subversive friends, huh?” He wandered back toward Haydon. He came to the sofa and sat on the back of it, one foot on the floor.

  “Actually, my two years with my brothers, here…well, one year is for me, and one year is for Lena. They are keeping her safe in Antigua.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Antigua was a famously beautiful little colonial town about forty-five kilometers west of Guatemala City, practically in the shadows of the volcanoes, Agua, Fuego, and Acatenango. Haydon looked at Grajeda. The doctor was full of surprises, and Haydon suddenly realized that he had guessed another. “You were the one responsible for the blond girl in the morgue.”

  “Let me tell you something,” Grajeda said, fixing his eyes on Haydon. “We would not be sitting here right now if it hadn’t been for that girl. If I live to be a hundred years old I will never encounter a more bizarre occurrence of serendipity, if that is not too light a word to use in conjunction with such a grisly murder. It happened just as I told you—even Dr. Salviati’s illness. I was still fuzzy headed from exhaustion and sleep when they took the girl out of the body bag and rolled her onto the table and told me they wanted an autopsy. I almost went to my knees in shock. I literally had to grab the side of the operating table to keep from falling. Those stupid men looked at me, but they were too dense to realize that I thought I was looking at someone I knew.”

  Grajeda stood up from the back of the sofa, unable to talk about this sitting down. He put his hands in the side pockets of his suit coat.

  “I started crying, but these men didn’t see this. Her face was unrecognizable. My mind was an explosion of thoughts: how did this happen? Azcona? Where did they find her? Why have they brought her here? Is this some perverse game to see how I will react or just to toy with me before they take me away too? Above all…can I actually do this autopsy? How can I? And it was while I was staring at her that I slowly, haltingly realized that this was not Lena at all.”

  Dr. Grajeda took one hand from his pocket and wiped it over his goatee. “I knew some identifying marks on Lena’s torso,” he said softly. “And this…young woman…this girl’s breasts were noticeably smaller than Lena’s. And then upon closer examination…I knew. So. The rest of the story goes on as I told you when you came to my clinic. It happened just the way I said.

  “However, I was not completely through with the autopsy when it occurred to me, this plan. Lena and I both knew that we were very close to being picked up by the DIG, and our ‘window of opportunity’ to evade this was very small. She was frightened and had called me at the hospital there in Huehuetenango several times. I had already talked to these people,” Grajeda said, tilting his head toward the man and woman in the room, “and had made this arrangement, but I could not convince Lena to go along with it. Part of the agreement was that they would get her out of the country. You see, because of the computers now, it is impossible for anyone to leave Guatemala without elaborate escape plans. The airports, the bus stations, the highways, the security agents in all these places are linked by computer, all of them have lists, and it takes only a couple of taps on a keyboard and the security agents know about you all over the country at once.” Grajeda looked at Haydon. “This kind of technology in a country that can not even feed its people.”

  He started toward the windows again and turned after a few steps and came back, glancing toward the man and woman at the door.

  “I knew which morgue in Huehuetenango was used for the XXs. After confirming that she had been taken there, I got in touch with these people in Guatemala City. I told them to go to this lawyer and he would provide them with the papers they would need for a man and woman to go to Huehuetenango and claim the body of their friend and bring it back to Guatemala City where they would deliver it to the Gabinete de Identificación as an XX. I knew the DIG monitored the morgues there, and as soon as a body of this description showed up they would know it. After arranging this, I drove to Guatemala City to talk to Lena about my plan. This was on Friday, and it took me a while to find her because, as a matter of fact, she and John Baine had been meeting with your friend Jim Fossler.”

  “Why was Baine so frightened?” Haydon interrupted. “When I talked to Fossler on the following Sunday and he told me about this meeting, he described Baine as being as frightened as Lena.”

  “Yes, that’s right. By this time Lena had given a lot of information to Fossler. The night before Fossler met with them, Baine’s house was broken into and ransacked. The papers he had kept there were taken. And Lena had begun receiving anonymous telephone calls, warning her off the Azcona story.” Grajeda removed his glasses and dug into a pocket for a handkerchief. He blew on the small lenses and wiped at them, doing this several times to each one as he talked.

  “That’s the way they do, you know, the DIG, the death squads. You get these damned calls. And then they might run you off the road while you are driving. Or you get a crudely written letter: if you do this or don’t do this, we will cut out your tongue or disembowel you or whatever their sick, small minds can think of. They always warn you, sometimes there are a lot of warnings. Sometimes it goes on for months, and some people always think it won’t happen to them, because of course, sometimes it doesn’t happen. But then often it does. It’s a great gamble once they start ‘communicating’ with you.

  “Anyway, I finally found her and told her what I had in mind. She agreed immediately. I think Baine was really frightened, and having him in that condition made her think. So the two of us—Baine didn’t know about it—put our heads together and came up with the plan that she would ‘disappear’ in Panajachel.”

  “Baine had already asked her to go there with him?”

  “That’s right. But to tell you the truth, I’m not sure what that was all about. If Bain
e was so frightened for his life I don’t know why he wanted her to take a ‘holiday’ in Panajachel. It seemed a peculiar thing to me, but…” Grajeda shrugged.

  “What about the report that accompanied the XX to the Gabinete de Identificación?” Haydon asked. “If your people had prepared bogus papers, why did the report say you had brought the body to the city?”

  “I have no idea,” Grajeda said. “I can only speculate that that was the working of the DIG. I imagine the entire report was retyped before the body was sent to the Cementerio General, and they put in it whatever they wanted.”

  Grajeda came around from behind the sofa and sat once again in the wooden chair opposite Haydon.

  “You are seeing here the madness of Guatemala,” he said. “Even I have succumbed to it, as much as I hate it. God knows who that girl was. Who knows where she came from or where she will end? I violated her identity, others did, probably even others will yet again before this ghastly charade is over. This is a mad society. We do things like this…” Grajeda let the words fade away, his eyes settling on the scattered newspapers. Then he looked up. “Do you read very much, Mr. Haydon? Fiction, I mean?”

  “Some.”

  “Do you know the novels of Heinrich Boll?”

  “I’ve read Group Portrait with Lady and The Clown.”

  “Really?” Grajeda smiled hugely, surprised. He almost laughed. “How interesting. I am surprised. I mean…”

  “I have a degree in literature,” Haydon said, himself amused at Grajeda’s reaction. “I didn’t come out of the womb a policeman.”

  This time Grajeda did laugh. “This is a wonderful thing,” he said. “What…Ah…”

  “My father was a well-read man,” Haydon said. “He had an excellent library, which I still have, and certain ideas about what an educated man should be. I got a degree in literature, which was fine with him, but it wasn’t what he had wanted for me. He was a lawyer, and he wanted me to be a lawyer too. I entered law school and stayed two years. But I walked away from it. Then I joined the police force.”

  Grajeda listened to this brief biography with an expression of delight. “What a wonderful story,” he said. “I am happy to hear it.” He looked at Haydon, smiling, the surprise still in his eyes. Then he caught himself. “So, good, you know the man, then, Heinrich Boll. Well, I once read an interview with Boll in which the interviewer asked him if he thought of written history as lies. He said, no, not lies perhaps, but it is more like a narrative of inaccuracies in as much as one can never precisely reconstruct it, and it therefore contains untruths. Boll said that, at bottom, truth was an ‘assembled’ thing. That it could not be found in one place, not in one book, one man’s perspective, not in one man’s testimony, or one government’s history. These he implied, were only particles of truth. They had to be assembled, collated to get at the greater thing itself. I thought about that a lot after I read it. It is such an obvious thing, yet until someone says it right out like that one seems not to be cognizant of it. It seems to me that all too often we go through life holding only the particles in our hands, thinking all along that we possess the whole thing itself.

  “Boll said that truth was so difficult to get at because the documents that we gather together in order to assemble the truth may not in themselves be truthful to begin with. He says that we know that governments and statesmen lie to each other and that these lies sometimes are recorded (as truth, of course) in documents which we then assemble (unaware of their deceit) like so many particles, and with the best of intentions, into a body of ‘truth’ that really is not the truth at all.”

  Grajeda looked at Haydon a moment. “And there you have it,” he said. “The death and resurrection of Lena Muller, so intertwined with the death of XX that we may never know Boll’s ‘assembled truth.’ It may not be possible to discover even in a thousand years. We, you and I, are principals in this story, a story that hasn’t yet finished being told, and even we don’t know the pieces of truth that fall within our own purview. As a matter of fact, you are here now, trying to decipher the lies that you have been told, in search of the truth. We have even contributed to the lies…or, forgive me, at least I have. It’s a shameful thing, really, what habitual deceit can do to people, even a whole people, like Guatemalans…or Americans.”

  Haydon looked at Dr. Aris Grajeda. He was alone in this large empty warehouse in a way that Haydon was not, in a way that not even Mary and Joseph were alone, even though they had cast their lots outside the acceptable society, against their government, and lived as outcasts in the back streets and jungles and isolated granjas. He was not a sad figure, but a melancholy one, and Haydon believed that he understood the source of the doctor’s rather wry gravity.

  “Do you love her?” Haydon asked.

  Grajeda didn’t respond immediately, but his handsome features seemed to give up their pretense, and he regarded Haydon with defensive eyes.

  “Does it show that much?”

  “No, not much,” Haydon said. “You do well. But I like to believe I have a faculty for seeing beyond the obvious in men.”

  Dr. Grajeda nodded. “You do well, also,” he said. “Yes, my friend, I love her. The hard thing of it is, you see, I know the futility of experiencing an emotion that is more characteristic of a man half my age. I don’t even have the innocence to be fooled by my own emotions.”

  “Does she know how you feel?”

  “If she does, she has been cruelly reticent about acknowledging it.”

  “Cruelly?”

  “What, did I say that, ‘cruelly’?” Grajeda for the first time betrayed an awkwardness with himself. “I must’ve. Well, Freudian slips often are difficult to admit.” He was pensive a moment before going on. “We had sexual intercourse, she and I, but I believe that is precisely what it was, sexual intercourse. Lena’s sexuality is robust; she enjoys it totally with her senses the way one enjoys a delicious food or a pipe of opium. I could even say that she enjoys it with her mind, intellectually, even perhaps, like an ecstatic experience.” He smiled wanly and shook his head. “But she does not put her heart into it. Not with me and—I say this with sadness and I hope without any dishonesty to compensate for the pain of my own disappointment—I doubt if she ever has with anyone.”

  Haydon said nothing. He was tempted to talk with this man about Lena Muller, what he himself knew and suspected about her life, but something made him hold back. It might have been his own uncertainty about what he really knew of her. After all, within just the past two days he had learned things he hadn’t known before, and he suspected if he spent a year talking to people, or even to Lena herself, he would never get to the bottom of it. One never did. You could only talk about someone from your perspective at the present, at a given point in time, acknowledging your limitations, acknowledging that you could very well change your convictions tomorrow. But perhaps that was putting too fine a point on it, an excuse for cowardice. There was a very real possibility that Dr. Grajeda already knew Lena Muller better than Haydon did, even without knowing some of the more significant facts. If Haydon had learned anything over the years, it was that facts often had very little to do with what people were really “about.”

  “These people have agreed to take Lena out of the country,” Dr. Grajeda said, changing the subject. “I am telling you this because I know you have come down here to take her home.”

  “No,” Haydon corrected him. “I came only to see that she was alive. Does she want to go home?”

  “I only know that now she’s trying to save her life. If you wish, these people can tell you where, at what border crossing they plan to deliver her, and you can pick her up there. I myself do not know the facts in this. It was difficult enough to arrange this meeting with you. These people stay alive by not taking chances. Any arrangement with them will have to be between you and them.”

  Haydon had no commission from Germaine Muller to bring her daughter back. He had no commission from the Houston Police Department to do anything.
It was a matter of personal responsibility. As for Fossler, he was at a loss.

  “Do these people know anything about Fossler?” Haydon asked.

  “I’ve already inquired. Nothing.”

  It was as if Fossler had vaporized. It was the kind of “disappearance” that was always attributed to the death squads.

  “What about the American embassy?” Haydon asked. “I don’t understand why Lena hasn’t gone to them in order to protect her life. I can see—maybe—why she didn’t want to involve them in the Vera Beatriz affair. She wouldn’t be the only American who was skeptical about what the U.S. State Department can and will do about such things. But I don’t understand why she wouldn’t call the embassy when she knew her life was in danger. Most people would do a lot of things to save their lives that they wouldn’t do otherwise.”

  He was particularly interested in Dr. Grajeda’s response to this. Haydon feared that the answer might lie in a circumstance that he knew should have been a secret, Lena’s relatively recent recruitment by Pittner. If there was some other reason, Grajeda should know it. If there wasn’t, Grajeda should be in the dark about it.

  “I think you should ask the embassy about that,” Dr. Grajeda said. “I don’t know.” He hesitated. “I presume you don’t have to be cautioned…”

  “No,” Haydon said. “I don’t.”

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  “Does Lena want me to pick her up at a border designation?” Haydon asked. “Does she want to return to Houston? It would help if I could talk to her.”

  “I knew you would say that.” Dr. Grajeda nodded. “I am trying to negotiate it. They are beginning to complain that I am asking more than we originally bargained for. Everything for them is a risk; they are always at risk. It is a nerve-wracking way of life, emotionally exhausting. I don’t know. I’m trying to arrange it.”

  Haydon looked at Grajeda and lowered his voice. “The little girl who brought me to your clinic. Has she done any other errands for you…regarding this…regarding Lena?”