Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  “I was beginning to wonder,” Janet said as he sat down.

  “What’s happened?” he asked, immediately filling his small plate with a variety of the appetizers. He was suddenly ravenous.

  “I’ve seen only the one van,” she said, nodding toward the parking lot. “The dark one straight across from the Rover. It came in while you were walking back to the phones. No one’s gotten out or anything. It’s just been sitting there.”

  “Who are the new diners since we’ve come in?” His gin was watery, sitting with the ice melting the whole time he was away.

  “The young American-looking couple by the bar; the four tourists near the window; the Guatemalan man and Anglo woman just to my left, behind me; and the two Guatemalan businessmen over here,” she said, picking up her glass and raising her index finger to her right.

  As a safety precaution they weren’t talking in the Land-Rover, so Haydon had to tell her the little he wanted her to know about what would happen next before they left the restaurant.

  “I’ve decided not to go by the Residencial Reforma for the rest of my things,” he said. “It will only raise questions, make it look like we’re about to do something different, that there’s a plan underway. It’s best if they think we’re waiting for instructions.”

  He paused for a few bites of shrimp and to review his own mental checklist. He didn’t want to tell her even a syllable too much. She needed to know only enough for her to function within the plan. Besides, there was still so much flexibility he himself couldn’t predict much more than generalities at this point.

  “When you go out of town,” Haydon asked, “does Mirtha still come and open the house every day?”

  “Yes, she does. But there’s not much to do. I just want someone there every day, routinely.”

  “Okay, before we leave here I want you to call her and tell her you’re leaving for a couple of days and that you’ll probably leave before she arrives in the morning. Will she ask you where you’re going?”

  “Maybe. I usually tell her.”

  “Okay, just do whatever seems natural, but tell her you’re going to Panajachel.”

  “If I want to make sure ‘they’ get the message, why don’t I just call her from home?” Janet asked. “If the phones are tapped like you think, they’ll pick it up.”

  “But that’s not what you’d do if you suspected the phones were tapped and you didn’t want them to know, is it?” Haydon ate another shrimp stuffed with crabmeat. “Don’t worry. She’ll pass it on.”

  They finished the appetizers and their drinks, and then, just before they left, he told Janet to make her call to Mirtha.

  When she got up to go, he said, “I think I’ll walk back there with you.”

  She gave him a strange look. “Sure, okay,” she said.

  The call was brief, and they returned to their table and paid and walked out into the smoky greenish glow, the hopeless result of landscape design in a city rapidly sinking under waves of impoverished immigrants. They got into the Land-Rover and made their way back to Janet’s house, Haydon watching the progress of the dark van, which behaved as though the driver knew there was no urgency to their progress.

  As they rounded the last corner on the approach to Janet’s house, they saw a car parked in front of the wrought-iron gates. Taylor Cage was leaning against the fender.

  Janet said nothing, but in the amber glow coming off the dials on her dash Haydon could see the flat expression of a woman steeling herself for what she clearly expected to be a stressful encounter. She pushed the remote control on the gates, and when they opened, pulled into the driveway of the walled courtyard.

  Haydon got out of the Land-Rover carrying the flight bag and walked around the rear of the vehicle to where Cage was coming up the drive like a determined water buffalo. He was carrying a large manila folder, slapping it against his leg impatiently.

  “Long time no see,” he said to Haydon. He was wearing what must be his suit of business nowadays in the Central American heat, dress pants and a white guayabera, the tail out, doing a poor job of hiding his sidearm.

  “I doubt that.”

  Cage snorted and turned to Janet, who was approaching, digging in her purse for the security-system key. She stopped. “Hello, Cage,” she said.

  Cage grinned at her and nodded. “Janet.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Time to parlay.” Cage slapped the envelope against his leg again.

  Janet turned on him. “Parlay?” There was venom in her voice. It struck Haydon as she spoke that he didn’t know anything about their relationship after their affair. Neither of them had ever mentioned it, an omission that suddenly alerted him.

  “Janet, if you can just hold off on the bitch thing for right now I think we’d all get more out of this,” Cage said. “Okay?”

  She turned away and went to the courtyard gate and unlocked it, then went into the breezeway and turned off the alarm system.

  “I appreciate your getting back to me,” Haydon said, letting Janet go ahead without them.

  “I don’t understand why you’re not deader than shit,” Cage said, looking at Haydon.

  “I could have used a little help,” Haydon said. “I thought that was the idea, that you were going to give me a little help.”

  Cage held up the envelope. “Come on, let’s go in. I’ve got something for you now.”

  When they got inside, Janet had already gone through to the kitchen, and they could hear her putting away the food that Mirtha had laid out for her and Haydon and that they had not eaten. There was as much nervous energy in what she was doing as practicality. Cage and Haydon stopped in the living room, and Cage walked over to the French doors and looked out into the courtyard. He took his time examining the view, slapped the envelope against his leg, and walked over to the parrot, who was busy eating cashew nuts. He stopped and stared at the bird, which ignored him, said, “Goddamned bird. I hate this bird,” and then, still looking around the room, wandered over to the liquor caddy, tossed the envelope on the sofa and helped himself to a clean glass and a couple of generous splashes of Bennett Pittner’s favorite bourbon. “Some of this?” he asked Haydon, holding up the bottle.

  Haydon shook his head. He guessed it had been a while since Cage had been here.

  “Make yourself at home, Taylor,” Janet said, walking into the room. “What do you want?”

  Cage sat down on the sofa next to the liquor caddy while Janet went over to one of the armchairs with its back to the courtyard, sat down, and crossed her legs. Haydon remained standing, though he had set the flight bag down beside a leather upholstered chair near the living room entrance.

  Cage ignored Janet and directed his attention to Haydon.

  “I suspect you met with the guerrillas this morning during that 18 calle fiasco, didn’t you,” he said straight out.

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Because my people found our man with his throat cut about an hour after the car bomb,” Cage said. “The guerrillas always cut their throats because the stupid shits are so guerrilla oriented.” He shook his head at the idea, as if there were less flamboyant, less juvenile ways to kill. “Them being in the city, though. That’s new. The urban cells have been squashed quite a long time, but now here they are wheeling free on 18 calle. That’s something new.” He sat on the sofa like a minotaur, chesty with powerful shoulders and narrow hips.

  “The General thinks it’s the guerrillas helping her,” he said. “And he’s unleashing his bad boys. The bombing. He’s yelling, los guerrios are turning our peace into war again. He’s got the police scrambling, practically declaring a state of siege. There’ll be articles about it in tomorrow’s papers, about how the General is going to come down hard on this new resurgence of terrorismo, on the ‘foreign subversives.’”

  “Are you telling me to be careful?” Haydon asked. “You think I don’t know who really put the bomb in the car?”

  “Yeah, by
God, I think you don’t know, really, who put the bomb in the car. That’s exactly what I think.”

  “Why?”

  Cage slugged down a mouthful of bourbon, finishing the drink in short order and setting the glass on the edge of the liquor caddy.

  “After you left me last night,” Cage said, “I pulled out all the stops to find your friend Fossler. I did it the way you do here in Guatemala. The hospitals first, then the morgues. I started with my people in the western highlands, because that was the direction Baine and Lena were heading, and I guessed that was where Lena went after she left Baine. I thought maybe Fossler had gone after her.”

  He got up with the envelope and walked over to a chair not far from Janet and flipped on the lamp beside it. “Sit down,” he said. Haydon did, and Cage gave him the envelope.

  They were morgue shots, the kind of cheap theatrical photographs that morgue shots in color tend to be, like the promotional still photographs they used to put up along with the posters outside movie theaters when Technicolor was just coming into its own. Jim Fossler looked his worst, his lean naked body gaunt in death, the bruises painfully purple to a fault, the dried blood still with tinges of maroon, the burned away eyes not so terribly disgusting as one might imagine. But there were other wounds that boggled the mind.

  Haydon went through all of the pictures, there were nine, and then he put them back in the envelope. Cage had walked back to the liquor caddy and had sloshed out some more whiskey.

  “Those were taken in Chajul, El Quiché. That’s where the guerrillas caught up with him,” he said, turning around, putting one hand into his trousers, the other holding the drink as though he were at a cocktail party. “The same people you chummed up with this morning. That’s who did Fossler.” He looked at Haydon. “Dr. Aris Grajeda,” he said. “He’s disappeared. That who you went to see?”

  Haydon felt like he was in some kind of creep show in which every episode, every new scene was just a little more grotesque than the previous one. The photographs of Jim Fossler seemed beyond the pale of decency. Cage carrying them around with ghoulish unconcern, slapping them against his leg in good-humored indifference.

  “Grajeda is a sly one,” Cage continued. “A little rich fart who’s playing at this business of ‘internal struggle.’ By God, if I had a dollar for every one of those damned ideologues I’ve come across in all my years down here I could retire in Geneva tomorrow. And Grajeda’s the worst kind. He dabbles at it.” He gestured at the photographs with his glass as he paced back toward the French doors. “This kind of shit is what comes of it. Him and his bunch have taken Lena in because she is the best thing that’s happened to their pissy little struggle in the thirty years it’s been going on. She’s being used and she hasn’t got the foggiest idea of what the hell she’s into. She’s going to come through with this ‘documentation’ on Azcona, and the guerrillas are going to get publicity mileage out of her like you can’t imagine. ‘Black Market Babies: American Peace Corps Girl Reveals the Truth About Guatemala.’ Hey, this is going to be big.”

  “What’s your point here?” Haydon said. He was having a hard time even concentrating on what Cage was blowing hard about. He was thinking about Mari Fossler, and about Dystal’s “Guate-goddamn-mala,” and his “Fossler ought to get out of down there while he can still draw breath,” a remark which, at the time, Haydon had discounted with a secret condescension as being an uninformed overreaction.

  Cage continued pacing, gesturing with his drink, looking at Haydon, tossing his head to emphasize his words.

  “My point is, Haydon, that I think she’s getting the short end of the stick here, and you’re going way out of your way to help her get it. My scenario: she’s going to give you these files. They’re potent stuff. Big story here because Azcona Contrera is our man in Guatemala. The usual shit will hit the fan with the righteous left…‘U.S. Right-wingers Giving Millions in Foreign Aid to Monster.’ I think she’s going to come out with this, and she’s going to be hailed as a saint, a champion of poor people, a freedom fighter for moral causes, a child of new-age selflessness, the whole hoo-haa that only the American press can do up right, with lip-smacking photographs of this Madonna of Modem Goodness (not only is she good, she looks good), everybody getting worked up in misty-eyed admiration…and then somebody will lift up the curtain and look behind the medicine-show backdrop. The ‘stuff’ she’s got on Azcona is going to be examined oh-so-closely by serious journalists, and they’re going to find guerrilla black propaganda written all over it. The kid was put up. She was had. But it won’t stop there. Some reporter’s going to dig into her personal life. They’re going to find out that she has screwed her way from one end of the Central American isthmus to the other, that she is cunning, conniving, and a user.”

  Cage was standing in the middle of the room with his empty glass, his hand in his pocket, his face a little red from reciting his “scenario,” and the butt of his pistol making a bulge in the tail of his guayabera. “This has all the makings of a real piece of work, my friend. And you’re right in the middle of it.”

  Haydon looked at Cage for a moment without saying anything. It seemed to him that Cage was curiously close to reversing himself on Lena. The irreverence with which he had just spoken of her conflicted seriously with his attitude about her before. Which of these two Cages was Haydon supposed to believe? And who was Cage trying to straighten out? Haydon or himself. The room was quiet except for the small crackling sounds of the parrot breaking open cashews.

  Haydon picked up the envelope of photographs and held it up.

  “Who did this?”

  Cage gaped at him as if he was incredulous that Haydon was missing the whole point of his exposition.

  “Who did it? Jesus Christ, man, haven’t you heard anything I’ve just said.”

  “I’ve heard all of it,” Haydon said. “I just want to hear you say it.”

  “I told you, the guerrillas.”

  “Why?”

  “Look,” Cage gestured toward the manila envelope, “Fossler was good, Haydon, he’d done his legwork, he’d done his homework, he’d done a lot of work. He’d already snapped to the documents scam…I’m guessing here, okay, but I think he said something about it to Lena, she went straight to Grajeda, and Fossler was shut up. They were almost home with her, almost there. They weren’t going to let something like Fossler’s meddling screw it up at the last minute.”

  “Why haven’t they just flown her out of the country?” Haydon asked. “It would be easy enough.”

  Cage shook his head. “No, when you’ve worked an operation this long, nothing is ‘easy enough.’ I have to admit this is sophisticated for these guys, a genuine advancement from what their nickel-and-dime struggle used to be, but it’s because of guys like Grajeda. They’re educated. In the past the guerrillas were Indians, homegrown and uneducated, just a lot of guts. Time passes, times change. Grajeda and some of the people around him are a new generation. They don’t talk stupid Marxist crap. They’ve got more intelligent agendas, and they’ve got more intelligent ways of accomplishing them. They know all about disinformation; they know all about the futility of ‘guerrilla’ warfare as it used to be. They’re slowly moving into the political realm. If they can’t defeat the General Azconas of this army with firearms, they’ll do it with words and ideas. The real wars lie ahead, and they’re going to be fought not with arms but with brains. This is phase one. It’s going to be interesting.”

  Haydon remembered the Guatemalan girl who had escorted him out of the warehouse where he had talked with Grajeda; he remembered her perfect, unaccented English. He remembered his discussion with Dr. Grajeda about Heinrich Boll’s perspectives on truth. In retrospect, Haydon could see that that discussion had been at the core of what this shell game with Lena was all about, and it might prove to offer the clearest understanding he would ever have of what had happened in these few hectic days.

  Haydon sat in the pool of light the lamp was throwing over his shoulder
and looked at Cage staring back at him from the middle of the room, a man who had lived and made his living completely outside society’s acceptable codes of behavior. He operated in a moral free-fire zone, and in many ways he was only a more primitive version of Bennett Pittner.

  “What the hell are you trying to do?” Cage challenged. “You think you can sit there and make sense out of all this? You think you’re going to figure something out here?” He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. Then he let his head drop and pointed the empty glass at Haydon. “Remember what I said about Pittner being a man you had to lie to to keep your self-respect? About his self-absorbed grief over”—he jerked his head toward Janet without looking at her—“all kinds of shit? I’m beginning to wonder if you’re not cut out of the same cloth. You can’t get this Fossler thing out of your head, can you? Like yo“‘re mooning over some goddamned woman. Jesus.”

  Haydon lifted the envelope. “Where is he now?”

  Cage gaped at him; he was seething. Haydon’s stubbornness was clearly galling. “He’s on his way down here, someone’s driving him down.”

  “From Chajul?”

  “From Chajul.”

  “Thanks,” Haydon said, standing. “Thanks for coming by and bringing the photographs and for telling me.”

  Cage stood rooted to the middle of the room, the whole thing cut unexpectedly short, Haydon’s courteous suggestion that it was time for him to leave was a worse insult by far than if Haydon had slugged him. He gave Haydon a smile that was no smile at all, really, but something to do with his face to keep his anger from getting the best of him.

  “You’re a silly goddamned fool, Haydon,” he said in a tone of voice that was supposed to pass for calm, but which had the husky thickness that betrayed a throat strung tight. He looked at Janet, and in what was probably a moment of colossal self-restraint, managed not to say what he was thinking.