Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  Phan surprised Haydon again. He emerged from the bookstore smoking a cigarette and in the company of a young Asian woman. They were smiling and talking, and Phan was slightly more animated than he had been before, using the cigarette to give himself a more self-assured and worldly manner. The young woman was rather dainty and once or twice touched Phan’s arm when she spoke to him. It was a mutual flirtation.

  Haydon followed them back to the main street where Phan dutifully headed for Haydon’s car once again. Haydon followed them from the opposite side of the street, watching them through the throngs of people and over the tops of the bumper-to-bumper traffic, through the boiling haze of diesel fumes.

  Phan and the girl made their way down the block. Haydon had parked on a busy section of the street with a pharmacy and photocopying store nearby. The signs of all the stores hanging over the sidewalks added to the crowded, bazaarlike atmosphere, and now five or six young men wanting to buy American dollars at an inflated exchange rate were openly and aggressively hawking their illegal bargains on the sidewalk, yelling out their rates to the bumper-to-bumper vehicles, sometimes stepping out into the street to shout into the windows of cars stalled in traffic. This sideshow ambience circulated around Haydon’s car itself and was entirely ignored by Phan and the young woman.

  Phan opened the passenger door with the key Haydon had given him and helped the young woman into the car, which was something of a tight squeeze because of the high sidewalks at that point in the street. After he got her inside, Phan went around the front of the car, pushed his way past a yelling money changer who was standing between the bumpers of the cars waving a fistful of quetzals. The girl leaned across and opened the door for him from the inside, and, pausing for a bus belching clouds of oily diesel smoke to pass, Phan swung open the door and quickly got in.

  Haydon wondered what Phan had told the girl he was doing. He wondered what they were saying now and wondered if he was witnessing the stolen moments and tender pleasures of a man who had lived too few of them, fewer than most men were allowed by whatever or whomever it was that allocated such things in any man’s life. He wondered what Phan was feeling.

  The explosion was stunning.

  The initial force of its shock killed everyone within twenty meters of the car who did not have the quirky luck to be protected from the direct blast, and knocked down people half a block away. The ball of fire that rolled up from Haydon’s car engulfed the front of the closest stores and set afire people who had managed to survive the blast itself.

  In the chaos of the aftermath, images of individual suffering remained with Haydon as though he had possessed them always, as though he had been born with the memory of them already planted in his psyche: the two teenaged girls standing next to him who had been knocked down by the ragged left half of one of the young money changers, the folded multicolored quetzals still in his fingers; the little street urchin draped over the horizontal arm of an old-fashioned street-lamp half a block away, one leg thrown backward over his head like a marionette’s; the old woman who sold fruit slices from a two-wheeled cart, and whose small white skull had been completely and surgically skinned in an instant by the flying glass; the Indian child whose charred and flaming little body, arms and legs straight out, had cartwheeled and bounced across the hoods of cars like a macabre carnival effigy.

  Even before the heat from the blast had begun to fade from his face like the passing of a foul, hot breath, it occurred to Haydon that Phan’s sad little amourette would now remain a secret, the first bit of luck that the young man had had, perhaps, in all of his short, drab life.

  CHAPTER 36

  Haydon’s instinct for survival took advantage of the chaos. If anyone had spotted him in his approach, they were surely distracted by the explosion and its Dantesque aftermath. Amid the screams and flames and horns and sirens and shoving, panicked crowds surging away from—and then back toward—the inferno and horror, Haydon had made his way eastward through the narrow streets filled with streams of wide-eyed, confused men and women going toward the explosion, drawn toward the catastrophe by that inner magnet in human nature that lures the curious individual to the very bosom of calamity.

  He stopped once, briefly, to vomit into the gutter and then moved on. It wasn’t only the slaughter that made him weak-kneed. He could no longer believe himself to be an outsider to this endemic violence, no matter how he tried to view it or rationalize it. He had become an integral part of it, of this particular series of violent events, and if he suddenly were to cease to exist, he was sure it would be diminished in some proportional degree by his absence. The hell of Guatemala’s violence stuck to you like napalm if you were foolish enough to let yourself be caught in the path of its fire. And he had done exactly that, with a degree of naïveté that was astonishing.

  He thought of Fossler. If he was in fact dead, Haydon was certain he knew how Fossler had felt in his last moments. Both of them were veteran investigators, but it hadn’t helped them avoid the surprise of being caught up in Guatemala’s easy brutality. They were used to violence being in opposition to society, not in step with it. Here the lack of civil order provided no deterrent to spontaneous savagery. Haydon cursed his stupidity and cursed the nausea that came with having needlessly caused another person’s death.

  Turning to look back the way he had come, he saw a huge dark plume of smoke rolling up over the tops of the buildings. Sirens whined in the narrow, clogged streets. He turned away and continued on, the only person within blocks going in the opposite direction from the explosion.

  Haydon started looking for a telephone. In the next block he spotted a parking lot with a little wooden shack for a ticket office at its entrance. He hurried to the office and found an old man listening to an evangelistic radio program. He held up a one dollar bill and asked if he could use the telephone. The old man snatched the bill, unhooked the telephone from the wall and handed the receiver to Haydon. “¿Qué número?” he asked, putting his finger up to whirl the circular dial. Haydon gave him the number of the American embassy.

  He asked for Pittner, gave his name, and then waited on the hot cement skirt of the parking lot. The sun radiated off what was left of the asphalt in the parking lot and off the dusty cars jammed in tight little rows. The bad taste of vomit lingered in his mouth, and he spat out into the street, his head beginning to throb, his shoulders as tight as guy wires. A secretary answered, and Haydon got through her to a man and then, soon, Pittner was on the telephone.

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” Haydon said.

  “Okay,” Pittner said. “You want to come over now? I’m…”

  “No. I want to talk where we talked the other night.”

  “Okay,” Pittner said. “When?”

  “Right now.”

  “Okay.” Pittner was not a colorful conversationalist. “It’ll take me fifteen minutes,” he said.

  “I’ll be there.”

  Haydon gave the telephone back to the old man and stepped out into the street. He had to wait only a few moments before waving down an aging Chevrolet with a broken plastic taxi sign on top. The car careened to Haydon’s side of the street and shuddered to a stop.

  Haydon paid little attention to what was happening outside the dust-glazed windows, noting only the big landmarks, the huge soccer stadium of Olympic City to their right just before crossing into Zona 10, then the medieval monstrosity of the Campo de Marte military complex, the military hospital, the Herrera Llerandi hospital on 6a avenida, where the Americans and wealthy ladinos could consult American-trained doctors, and then he lost track even of the landmarks, his mind’s eye watching the two teenagers knocked over by the half body of the money changer, until the taxi began to slow at the address Haydon had given.

  He got out on the busy avenida, paid the driver and then waited on the sidewalk under a jacaranda. He wondered if Pittner was ahead of him or behind him and finally decided he was ahead of him since Haydon had been twice as far away. When there was a break in t
raffic, he crossed the dusty street and headed into the smaller streets in the wooded neighborhoods above the Rio Negro. He remembered precisely how to get to Pittner’s. It wasn’t much of a walk. The neighborhood was pleasant, even though most of the living took place behind the high walls covered in moneda vines. Still, the sidewalks under a gallery of amate trees wound gracefully and sloped gently providing pleasant glimpses of the Vista Hermosa districts across the ravine. The heat of the day was building steadily, making Haydon even more aware of his still queasy stomach.

  Then he was across from Pittner’s place; two unassuming stucco pillars flanked a gravel drive that disappeared around a curve of underbrush. Haydon looked at the gate from a distance. He saw no electronics, nothing obvious, anyway. If Pittner had an electronic security system, someone had gone to a lot of trouble to conceal it. There were no cars along the street, not even the obligatory pair of radio men. Pittner seemed sure enough of himself to manage to live without the high-tech spookery and personal security trappings that would have attracted attention. Or maybe there were other reasons no one else was there.

  Haydon crossed the lane to Pittner’s gate and entered the gravel drive, his feet crunching every step of the way to the front door. Pittner’s car was already there. In the daylight, Haydon could see the house was considerably less grand than Janet’s. It was, like Pittner, a little disheveled in a well-dressed sort of way. The stucco wall in front was crazed and mildew stained. There were flowers, but they had received no recent attention and were rather past their prime, hanging on because no one had bothered to clip them.

  The weathered wooden door set into the front wall was standing open, and Haydon walked into a breezeway that went on through to the inner courtyard.

  “Come on in,” he heard Pittner say. Haydon turned in to a modest living room, and across the obliquely lighted space he saw Pittner in a kitchen adjacent to the dining room surrounded by windows where they had had dinner together. “I’m making a drink,” Pittner said as Haydon approached him. “I’m drinking lunch.” He looked up. “Want something?”

  “A Coke or Pepsi, something like that.”

  “Okay.” Pittner looked at Haydon. “You all right?”

  Haydon nodded, loosening his tie and sitting down at the dining room table, facing the windows that overlooked the palms at the end of the property and the ravine beyond. In a moment Pittner came over to the table, put the soft drink in front of Haydon with a glass of ice, and sat down at the end of the table to Haydon’s left. He was drinking his amber bourbon again, one ice cube. “What’s the matter?”

  “Who did it?” Haydon asked, pouring Coke into his glass.

  Pittner said nothing, his heavy-lidded eyes, rather red rimmed today, regarding Haydon without giving anything away. He sipped his drink, swirled the single cube of ice, sipped the drink, obviously trying to decide how to handle this. Something told Haydon that Pittner was furious, but the man was sitting on it, which after all was part of his business, part of what he did for a living, swallowing his anger and frustration, keeping his own counsel. It was what was expected of him.

  “We heard that John Baine has been picked up,” Pittner said. “You don’t know anything about that, do you?”

  Haydon thought about the kid Borrayo had shot in the face. “Apparently it was the DIC,” Haydon said. “He’s in Pavón. Not in the regular part…Azcona’s got clandestine cells there.”

  Pittner stared at Haydon. “How in God’s name do you know that?”

  Haydon explained about Borrayo. He explained about the meeting with Baine, about Borrayo killing the kid. About Vera Beatriz Azcona de Sandoval. About Lena’s involvement. He didn’t worry about Pittner burning him. Whatever they did about Baine, however they handled it, Haydon knew they would do it in such a way that they would keep him out of it.

  “I think you’ve done a worse job with Lena than you’d led me to believe,” Haydon said. He had taken several sips of his Coke, dampening the aftertaste of vomit. He wanted this out front immediately. “Either you recruited her without knowing about her interest in the kidnapping business, or you knew and used her in a situation that was way out of line with her experience. In either case it seems inept.” He looked at Pittner. “But it only ‘seems’ inept, doesn’t it.”

  Pittner had reassumed his mute role, his eyes seemed too tired even to react in a superficial way.

  “Baine emphasized that she was insistent that they not go to the embassy with this kidnapping story,” Haydon said with only partial honesty. “He said she would let the whole thing go if she had to go through the embassy. He didn’t know, of course, that Lena was working for you. Did she in fact come to you with it? Did you know what she was doing?”

  Pittner had made short work of most of his bourbon, and now it was only just covering the top of the ice cube. The two men were looking at each other, and Haydon thought how fatigued Pittner looked.

  “You know,” Pittner said, “your friend disappeared doing just what you’ve been doing. I don’t know how the hell you missed the car deal just now.”

  Haydon told him. Pittner’s face was emotionless. “You know who did it?” Haydon said.

  “We don’t know,” Pittner shook his head. “We assume…Azcona, that whole operation.”

  “The whole operation?”

  Pittner nodded once and took some more bourbon. “The DIC and the generals.” Pittner sat back in his chair, his suit coat falling open to show the butt of the 10mm that had become the weapon of choice now among people in the know. He crossed his legs, his arm out, holding the glass of whiskey with which he was making damp interlocking circles on the wooden table, thinking.

  “It’s not just this seedy deal with the kids,” Pittner said, weary of the whole subject. “The generals and their assorted relatives are into everything: smuggling pre-Colombian artifacts and mahogany out of the Petén; poppies in the northwestern highlands, fincas and food-processing operations in the Northern Transversal Strip where the Indians work for starvation wages on the same land the army took away from them in an ostensible effort to rid the highlands of guerrillas, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, influence peddling, things we haven’t heard of or even imagined. All of these are sorry enterprises that involve every kind of human nastiness. It’s organized in a way, and in a way it isn’t. These people are bad about not sticking to a plan. If an organizational situation does develop, it’s often disrupted by some lower-echelon individuals who toss their flimsy loyalties out the window like a banana peel as soon as they see a way to get an extra-big cut for themselves by screwing the screwers. It’s endless, I mean absolutely endless.

  “We try to keep up with all this as much as possible and use it to our advantage whenever we can and whenever we think it’s necessary and to whatever design the State Department thinks is proper. No secret in that.”

  Pittner finished off his bourbon and set down the glass. For a minute he lightly tapped his fingernails on the empty glass, the sound thin and fragile and empty.

  “It’s a fluid situation,” he continued. “Always. Right now Azcona’s star is ascending in the army and in politics. Two elements that are not always in concert except when the army comes down hard and bullies the políticos into subjection.” Pittner paused, seeming to want to put his words together carefully. He looked away to the windows overlooking the Rio Negro. “We’re co-opting Azcona ,…slowly. We think he’s going to be around for a long time.”

  Enough said. Lena had developed a social conscience at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

  “Azcona knows he’s being courted by the powerful U.S. State Department,” Haydon said. “He sees big possibilities.”

  “That’s right,” Pittner nodded. “You can imagine the rest of it too. He doesn’t want some gringo do-gooder screwing up his chances by stirring up bad press about his sister’s kidnapping sideshow. They don’t have to worry about the niceties of legal prohibitions down here. Of course Azcona is nowhere near the dirty work. I
f you pressed him about the death threats Lena had been receiving”—this was the first time Pittner had mentioned the death threats—“if you pressed him about the disappearance of Jim Fossler, about Baine’s secret arrest, about the car bomb…” Pittner shrugged. “He would agree that many ‘delinquent elements’ in his country are out of control. The country needs a strong arm to keep the peace, the country needs…Yes, General Azcona, but what about these things in particular, we want them investigated. Of course, absolutely. Consider it done. We will begin an investigation immediately.” Pittner shook his head and sighed wearily. “In Guatemala ‘investigation’ is a synonym for ‘limbo.’ Here it means the same thing as it does in the States when they say they’re going to ‘conduct a study’ of a certain situation. Read: sweep it under the rug, hope people will forget about it, hope that something else sensational will come along in the meantime to distract the public interest. Of course here, if you’re the army, you don’t need the public to be distracted. You just tell them to piss off. And that’s pretty well what they’ll tell our State Department too.”

  None of this was new, and for an instant Haydon wondered why the State Department even bothered. But of course he knew why. For all its obvious poverty. Central America had an abundance of natural resources that were seldom discussed in the newspapers because they have to do with commerce and commerce for the most part was boring, even though it drove the politics that everyone found so exciting and controversial. The closest the American public ever got to understanding the relationship between commerce and politics was when it had to do with oil. While coffee and bananas and cotton and sugar may not be a glamorous target for the media, these interests drove Guatemalan politics, and because the United States consumed ever-increasing quantities of these commodities, they were billion-dollar businesses, and that kind of money was worth killing people for…other people.