Dr. Grajeda’s eyes stirred in alarm, but he remained calm. “No. Why? Have you seen her?”
“No, I haven’t seen her,” he said. “Can we stand up and talk. I’ve got to stretch my legs.” He wanted to get away from the table, from the sofa and the chairs, which easily could be wired.
“Of course, of course,” Grajeda said, and as he stood he spoke to the man and the woman telling them they only wanted to stand for a while, that they were tired of sitting.
They moved away from the small collection of furniture in the center of the cavernous room and walked over to one of the stone walls and then away from it, to a point roughly equidistant between the wall and the furniture, and stood together on the bare wooden floor.
“Janet Pittner received a message late last night at her home,” Haydon said. He and Grajeda were side by side, facing the windows. “It was delivered by a child, a little girl.” Haydon quoted the message verbatim.
“Jesus God,” Grajeda said. “No. I can swear to you that these people would never have allowed Lena to do that. This did not come from her.”
“Janet Pittner swears it was Lena’s handwriting.”
“I don’t care what she swears,” Grajeda said. “It did not come from Lena.”
“I don’t know why anyone else would want to do that,” Haydon said. “I don’t know who would want to lure me into anything. I’m no particular threat to anyone.”
“This would be strictly prohibited by these people,” Grajeda said. He had yet to name who “these people” were. Haydon could only surmise he was working with one of the many guerrilla groups who persisted in Guatemala despite thirty years of the army’s brutal counterinsurgency operations.
“Okay, fine,” Haydon said. “I needed to know. I’ll be careful with it.”
Dr. Grajeda did not seem comforted by Haydon’s acceptance of his convictions. Haydon had planted a seed of doubt in the doctor’s mind, which he regretted, but which also told Haydon something of the doctor’s circumstances. Perhaps he was not as sure of his guerrilla friends as he wanted Haydon to believe, or even as he wanted to believe himself. Haydon was slowly learning that no one could be sure of anything in Guatemala, not even of the workings of one’s own mind.
CHAPTER 35
Leaving Dr. Grajeda was almost as complicated as meeting him in the first place. The woman who had taken Haydon’s weapon and radio on the landing outside had changed clothes and was now wearing a honey-colored wig. Haydon guessed that she had changed clothes because she had been somewhere on the streets during the time he was working his way to the shoe store—another “faction” monitoring his approach—and did not wish to wear anything that might have been spotted earlier by the competitor surveillants. She looked good in the wig, and Haydon wondered if she had a blond one as well. Dr. Grajeda’s story about how “they” had gone to the morgue in Huehuetenango to claim the body of a blond woman made Haydon wonder how they could have done that if they were clearly Guatemalans themselves. Surely, to claim an Anglo body from a Guatemalan morgue required something of a good story if the claimants were Guatemalans. Or perhaps Haydon was making assumptions, being too logical for a society where the vast majority of the people were so desperately poor that virtually everything was negotiable, virtually everyone was open to graft simply as a means of survival. In such an environment the word “graft” almost lost its meaning and took on an entirely different definition by virtue of its skewed context.
“We’re going to take you out a different way than you came in,” the woman said, tucking the last of her jet hair up under the honey wig. Haydon was surprised that she spoke to him in English and that she hadn’t the slightest trace of an Hispanic accent despite the fact that she was obviously Guatemalan. “They know you’re here somewhere, somewhere on 18 calle, and they’re all over us.”
“Who are ‘they’?” Haydon asked.
“We’re going to go down the stairs the way you came up,” she said, ignoring his question. “And then we’re going to leave by the back of the courtyard instead of through the shoe store.” She was wearing 18 calle clothes, a skirt that fit her poorly, a dingy mauve blouse that hung loosely over her waist. She raised the blouse and unfastened a strap on a leather holster held with a tight elastic band stretched around her naked midriff.
They were standing by one of the beds on the floor of the warehouse, and she had dropped down on one knee on the mattress and was filling several clips, which she then put in a yellow plastic purse. Bullets and clips and silencer tubes and flashlight batteries and a couple of Uzi’s were laid out neatly on the bed together with Haydon’s automatic, which lay on a shred of blue towel. She picked it up as she stood.
“Do not be tempted to use this,” she said, handing it to him. “We’re going to keep the radio. Sorry, but they’re hard to come by sometimes, and this is one of those times.” She smiled a crooked and not unattractive smile. Her face was rather oblong, with a pretty mouth and a mole that was very much a beauty mark just to the right of her lips. “Okay?”
“That’s fine,” Haydon said needlessly. He was grateful, and surprised, to get the gun back. He turned up the butt, saw the clip, popped it and saw that it was full. “Thanks,” he said, “I appreciate it.”
“De nada,” the girl said. “Let’s go.”
Haydon turned once again toward Dr. Axis Grajeda, who had not moved away from the collection of soiled furniture in the center of the warehouse. “Take care of yourself,” Haydon said.
“Y su también,” Grajeda said. He was standing with his arms crossed, one small hand toying with his salt-and-pepper goatee. “Hasta la vista,” he said, and he tilted his head in a gracious bow and smiled kindly. He looked like a man out of place, and yet at the same time philosophically at ease. Dr. Axis Grajeda was not a man who flinched at hard decisions.
nor did he grieve for himself when it came time to live with the consequences.
The guerrillas had not survived for thirty years in Guatemala—though some would say only barely survived—without at least a modicum of expertise. Haydon did not doubt that the route they would be taking was lined with invisible compas with those hard-to-find radios who had already cleared the way as much as possible. They were operating in a very dicey territory, and Haydon wondered if they were truly risking all this solely for the benefit of having a doctor at their disposal for a couple of years. He wondered, too, how Dr. Grajeda had come to have such an easy relationship with these people. The man and the woman with Haydon were close to the doctor’s age, and the woman at least, was well educated. It wasn’t hard to imagine that the doctor’s connections were old ones.
“What we want to do,” the woman said, as the three of them walked out of the warehouse onto the veranda outside, “is to get you several blocks away from here before we let you ‘surface.’ We don’t want to taint the neighborhood. The fact that you came to 18 calle to make your connection does not mean that the meeting itself actually took place here. The busy street life here makes it a favorite place for losing tails before going on to other locations. We gambled by setting the meeting here. We want to make sure we don’t burn a nice touch, you know.”
The man went down the stairs first, followed by Haydon and then the girl. They descended the same flight Haydon came up, setting foot in the courtyard near the three jade parrots. Haydon glanced at the foot of the stairs on the other side and saw that someone had scattered sand over the blood at the foot of the steps.
The girl saw Haydon glance at the steps.
“Did you know the guy?”
“No,” Haydon said. “But I think I know who he worked for.”
“Who?”
“Sorry,” Haydon said.
“Okay. Look,” the girl said as they stopped at the head of the damp path that led into the banana trees, “when we get to the door at the back of the courtyard, he’s going to go first. I’ll tell you when to go after him, and then you maintain that same distance, and I’ll keep the same distance behind
you. You just follow him, and then you’ll know when you’re on your own. Okay?”
“Okay.”
They wound through the banana trees for fifteen or twenty meters before they came to a heavy wooden door in the high wall at the back of the courtyard. Above them, clinging precariously to the old stone and stucco building, the veranda ran gray and rickety, turning at the back of the courtyard and crossing above their heads at the back door. The man said something into his radio and got a response and then opened the door without hesitation and walked outside. The alley-like lane was one of those narrow corridors that ran between high walls and emerged onto a busy street that could be seen fifty meters farther ahead. Without saying anything to Haydon, the man stepped out into the lane, taking a long stretching step over a rivulet of sewage that dribbled down toward them from the main street above. The girl moved in front of Haydon and watched until it was time for Haydon to follow.
“Okay,” she said. “He’s on the street. When you get to the end of this lane, turn left. He’ll be waiting for you at the newsstand. It’ll be right in front of you. When he sees you come out and is sure you’ve spotted him, he’ll move on. Keep that distance. Do what you know how to do.”
Haydon did as he was instructed. The narrow alleyway smelled of soured fruit and urine, and he had to watch his step. Everything went like clockwork. The man in front of him did as the girl said he would do, Haydon did as he was told to do, and the girl behind him did as she said she would do. They went on like this for one block, turning a corner, playing catch-up, then another block and another block. Haydon watched the crowds as best he could, wondering if he could spot fellow compas. He never did, not that he knew anyway.
They turned another corner, went another block, and at the next turn Haydon suddenly realized he had lost his lead man. He quickened his pace, his eyes picking apart the people in the crowds. When he knew he’d lost him for good, he stopped to rake something off his foot on the curb and glanced back down the sidewalk to see if the girl was showing concern. She was gone. He hadn’t lost anybody. They had cut him loose.
He had been so intent on keeping up with his guide that he had lost his orientation. Continuing to the next corner, he checked the calle and avenida. He was deeper into Zona 1 and about twice as far from his car as he had been when he entered La Santuario de la Sagrada Madre. And in the opposite direction.
He started back in the general direction of the car, imagining the crowd full of the other surveillants, imagining that he had already been picked up and was being followed by half a dozen persons of unknown loyalties. Then he stopped. If he had been “clean” five minutes ago, then he ought to be dean now. If the girl and her compa were as good as they seemed to be, and she knew her stuff as well as she seemed to, it was likely that the other surveillants had not stayed in 18 calle after they lost Haydon—with the exception, perhaps, of Cage’s people, who had lost a man there and were probably frantically trying to find him.
He stopped where he was. Damn it, he wasn’t thinking. It would be stupid for him to go back to the car. To get out of the stream of sidewalk traffic, he backed into a tienda to think. He would bet his life—in fact might be betting his life—that they were watching his car like buzzards over a carcass. It would be the one sure way of picking him up again. If he had indeed shaken his surveillants, he wanted to stay free of them as long as possible.
Turning in to the tienda, he found a less than clean little eatery with three small round and wobbly pedestal tables and four or five metal folding chairs. There were dozens of flies and four Vietnamese watching him from behind a high wooden counter: a ferret-eyed old woman, a slight young man in his twenties, and two women of the same age. Haydon guessed the latter were sisters, one of them perhaps the wife of the young man. The old woman, he decided, belonged to the girls. Haydon stepped to one of the tables, and the old woman’s head zipped along the top of the counter, and she came around to him without ever taking her eyes off of him.
He ordered coffee in Spanish, and she literally jumped to oblige him as her family flew into a flurry of accommodation ludicrously inordinate to the task at hand. Magically, the coffee was suddenly on the unsteady round table, the old woman’s eyes riveted to his to see if she could discern his pleasure or displeasure with what she had placed before him in a small white demitasse cup, no saucer. Haydon thanked her and for several minutes sipped the stout coffee as he watched the morning shade on the sidewalk shrink in the face of the advancing sun.
Turning, he encountered eight Vietnamese eyes, six instantly turned away, and the head of the ferret-eyed old woman again zipped down the length of the wooden counter and was instantly at the edge of his table.
Haydon asked for another cup of coffee, and when she returned with it he asked her if this shop belonged to her family. Yes, yes, to her son and her daughter-in-law and her daughter-in-law’s sister. Haydon asked if they had been in Guatemala long. Only eight years. The oriental perspective. They lived in Flores for a while, she said, chewing something haphazardly with fewer teeth than she once had had, but they were starving there so they went to Puerto Barrios. That was a goddamned bad town, she said, proving how well she had learned Spanish in eight years. Her daughter-in-law’s sister got raped there. Her son got malaria. Her daughter-in-law had a miscarriage. It was hot there, hotter than Kuantan—that was in Malaya. Also a bad place. But Puerto Barrios was goddamned bad, and everybody there was a bandit. And there were diseases. She herself got hookworms. Once the guerrillas took over the entire neighborhood where they lived, and they had to feed the men for four days. And they didn’t get any pay for it; all they got was not to be killed. They used up all their food and then the guerrillas just left. Just like the Vietcong. She hadn’t seen any peace since she was a girl on a rubber plantation in the old French occupation. She didn’t know what they would do. If this little tienda didn’t make it, she was going to cut her throat and let the young ones worry about it. She was goddamned tired of worrying about it.
Haydon guessed the old woman had her share of opinions about most things and that she pretty well decided what the group of them did. Haydon said that he was an American. Yeah, yeah, she said. She knew that. What was her son’s name, he asked. Phan. His father’s name was Phan; and his grandfather’s too. Could Phan drive, Haydon asked. The old woman looked at him, suddenly suspicious. Haydon gave her a bogus story that seemed to satisfy her. If Phan would drive his car to the hotel for him, Haydon would pay him and pay for his taxi ride back into Zona 1 from the hotel. All he had to do was park the car in the parking lot of the Residencial Reforma and give the keys to the concierge.
How much, the old woman asked, her eyes sliding away from him. Twenty dollars. American? Of course. The old woman brightened and broke into a gap-toothed grin. She would pull the car to his hotel with a rope for that kind of money, she said. Or the girls would, she added with a raspy laugh.
Good. Could Phan go now? The old woman called her son to the front and everything was explained to him. Phan listened politely, said he knew where the Residencial Reforma was. The old woman snapped something to him in Vietnamese, and the young man lowered his eyes and nodded, and then she seemed to scold him for something and he continued nodding and blinking.
Having settled the arrangement, Haydon gave Phan the twenty dollars, which the old woman immediately retrieved and then disappeared behind a curtain to a back room. The two girls came out from behind the high counter, looking worried as Phan seemed to explain to them his mission. One of the girls was pregnant, and she and Phan had a brief exchange of curt phrases during which she darted her eyes reproachfully at Haydon. Phan placated her concern with touches and soft words, which quieted her but in no way erased the anxiety from her face or that of her birdlike sister. Wearing expressions of almost frantic apprehension, the wife and sister were the epitome of concerned women who knew very well that the only thing that stood between them and destitution was this thin young man who was now about to walk away with a
stranger to some sure folly of which they had only an instinctive fear. Phan seemed genuinely pained by the protests, but at the same time all too familiar with them, unhurriedly calming the women as though he were clucking to frightened geese. His eyes did not make contact with Haydon’s as he abruptly turned away, and they walked outside into the bright morning light.
When they were only a block from the little tienda, Haydon thanked the young man and gave him the car keys and another five dollars, having noticed that the old woman hadn’t given him any cab fare back downtown. He seemed like a mild person, a quiet man whose nature was ill suited for the hard life he must have lived in the past eight years, and probably for many years before that, if his mother was to be believed. He bore the becalmed demeanor of a man who had learned to live with being the last hope of three distressed women.
It was Haydon’s good fortune that Phan moved slowly. His relaxed saunter made it easier for Haydon to keep Phan in sight and also gave him more time to watch for the others whom he knew would be waiting for him.
A couple of blocks from the car, Phan surprised Haydon by suddenly turning in to a side street. Haydon felt a momentary chill until he reminded himself that selecting Phan had been a random occurrence and the Vietnamese couldn’t possibly be in the pay of anyone but Haydon himself. He followed Phan half a block into the side street until the young man entered a small shop. Haydon crossed to the opposite side and read the name: LIBROS DINH. A Vietnamese bookstore. The only one, surely, in Guatemala, if not in all of Central America.
Haydon stepped into a bakery, bought a wedge of cinnamon bread, and watched the bookstore. The most telling moment would be when Phan got into the car and drove away. It would be then that the people watching his car would have to make some quick decisions. More than likely they would follow the car. And how would they do it without giving themselves away to competing surveillants? It had the makings of a Keystone Kops skit. If Haydon were in the right position, he should be able to benefit from the spate of activity.
Body of Truth Page 28
