Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  Stepping around a dog who had stopped on the sidewalk to lunch on a splatter of vomit, they crossed the street and went half a block farther to a turquoise building with two doorways. The first doorway was a wide-open sidewalk comedor where the rich savor of grilled meat wafted out into the fog, and the second doorway was a narrow opening above which a sign read, IMPORTACIÓNES TIKAL.

  “Yeah, this is it,” Janet said. “I remember the sign now.”

  Immediately inside the opening the wooden stairs ascended steeply to a landing where the stairs turned left into a frosted glass door. Again the words IMPORTACIÓNES TIKAL. Janet pushed the door, which had just enough room to swing open before another flight of stairs went straight up to a room. At the top of the stairs a hallway turned right, went ten or twelve meters, and opened onto an outside balcony that surrounded an open courtyard. Before reaching the balcony, however, they turned left through a doorway into a long narrow room with a wooden floor. In front of them, against the entire length of the wall, were rows of wooden shelves in front of which a glass display cabinet and counter also ran the length of the room. Opposite these, in the middle of the room, were double doors that opened out onto the balcony over the courtyard.

  The room was full of sacks of coffee beans stacked against the walls and smaller sacks of a finer weave filled with cardamom piled on the shelves. The glass counter displayed candies and jellied fruits and regionally grown spices. Two Indian women were working among the sacks and cans and jars of produce, both of them wearing the traditional Indian clothing of the region: lacy short huipiles decorated with bright embroidered flowers hanging loosely over pleated skirts that reached only to their calves. Each woman had her hair braided in a single long braid that hung past her waist.

  While Janet talked with them, buying small sacks of coffee and cardamom and other spices, Haydon walked through the doors in the center of the room that opened onto the balcony. Half a dozen bright green parrots sat on the wooden railing of the balustrade that encircled the balcony, moving freely along the many meters of railing. Little tin trays of food were attached to some of the wooden pillars that held up the roof.

  A wispy coil of smoke rose lazily from a fire in the courtyard where an elderly man and woman were cooking thin strips of meat and ears of corn over the grill of a brick oven. The courtyard was filled with orchids and bromeliads and plantains, among which little hard-packed dirt paths crossed at convenient angles from one side of the courtyard to the other. While Haydon leaned his forearms on the railing, a huge maroon-fronted parrot sidestepped toward him, thought better of it and then sidestepped away, just as the heavy fog turned to the region’s famed chipichipi and the slow drizzle began thrumming on the tile roof of the building and slapping on the broad leaves of the plantains in the courtyard. The elderly couple, of course, was dry, their oven-grill well under the eaves. Soon the rain was running steadily off the eaves and falling past Haydon as though a shimmering veil had been dropped over the edge of the roof. It fell into a shallow stone trench built around the courtyard to carry the water away into the street. The smell of birds and rain and damp earth filled the air, and the drumming of the drizzle that fell straight down out of the gray was punctuated occasionally by a shriek from one or another of the parrots that waddled along the quadrangle of railings like grouchy old men.

  A door opened halfway down the side of the balcony to Haydon’s left, and a man and woman emerged, talking in low voices. Haydon scooted the flight bag closer to the railing with his foot and started to turn around to see what Janet was doing inside the shop when the couple approached and he recognized the woman, who was staring straight at him. She raised her finger to her lips, and the man stepped inside the doorway, blocking Janet’s line of sight to Haydon, and took his time lighting a cigarette.

  “You weren’t followed into Cobán,” the woman said in the same perfect English she had used in the empty warehouse above the shoe store. She spoke quickly. “But something has gone wrong. The local military intelligence has received a communication from the capital to look for you and to keep you under surveillance. They have discovered your car, and men in plainclothes are combing the area around the square. The old man and woman down there,” she nodded to the courtyard below, “have a comedor. Eat there; don’t leave. Don’t tell the woman.”

  Her companion, whom Haydon now saw was not the same man she had been with in Guatemala City, shook out the match that he had used to light his cigarette, and the two of them continued around the corner and descended a flight of stairs that led from the balcony down into the courtyard.

  Haydon picked up the flight bag and walked back into the shop.

  Janet was holding her hand out, receiving change for her purchases from one of the Indian women.

  “There’s a little comedor down in the courtyard,” Haydon said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  “There are some good places to eat just off the square,” Janet said, putting her money into her bag along with the paper sack of her purchases. “There’s a good Chinese food place there, in fact.”

  “Downstairs looks good to me,” Haydon said. “Besides, I don’t want to walk back to the plaza.”

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  “We ought to be careful until someone contacts us. They told us to come here, we did, now we ought to wait as discreetly as possible. If they’re any good they’ll pick us up. We don’t have to parade around town.”

  “We’re not going to ‘parade.’ The plaza’s just four blocks away.”

  “Let’s go downstairs,” Haydon said. “Okay?”

  She looked at him quizzically as if she suspected he knew something she didn’t. “Okay,” she said.

  The rain had slackened and was only dribbling off the eaves of the tile roof as they rounded the corner and started down the wooden stairs into the courtyard.

  The old couple’s comedor opened off the far side of the courtyard and consisted of two adjacent rooms connected by a double-door opening from which the doors themselves had been removed. The rooms were fairly small, allowing for only four simple wooden tables with straight-backed chairs in each room. The outside walls of the two rooms were double French doors that opened onto two narrow balconies with wrought-iron railings and which, because the building was on a sloping hillside, overlooked the street below at about the level of the tops of the cars. The balcony doors were thrown open, letting in the sound of rain and washing the room in a luminous gray light that reflected dully off the time-burnished surfaces of the tables.

  Three tables in the first room were occupied, so Haydon walked through the double-door opening into the second room where only one table was occupied—by the woman and man he had seen on the balcony. Haydon led Janet to a table away from them and near the balcony and sat down. As with the other room, the door that led out to the courtyard was open, and Haydon saw the old man and woman laboring at the open-air oven.

  A young Indian man wearing a frayed dark green cowboy shirt.

  brown bell-bottom polyester trousers, and a wispy moustache came in from the courtyard and brought them bowls of onion soup with spoons and a plate of tortillas. Pieces of chicken were floating in the soup. Simply by walking in and sitting down they tacitly agreed to be served the meal of the day.

  Janet looked at Haydon. “How long do you think we’re going to have to wait?”

  “I’ve got no idea,” he said, picking up a spoon. He folded a tortilla and started eating. The soup was hot and good, the bits of chicken spicy.

  There was no conversation coming from the couple a table away, but in the next room two couples sitting at one table conversed incessantly in a low murmur. As cars passed on the street outside, their tires swished on the rain-slick blacktop and, inexplicably, a rooster crowed somewhere down the hillside in the tiny streets blanketed in mist.

  They finished their soup in silence, and the young man returned and took away their bowls. When he came back again he brought two plates, each with an ear of r
oasted com, slices of lime, slices of avocado, strips of grilled pork, and a mound of black beans mashed to the consistency of pate. And another plate of tortillas.

  “Dos cafecitos?” he asked, and both Haydon and Janet nodded, and the young man quickly returned with two big cups of black coffee to which the sugar already had been added.

  Haydon began to eat. He was so disconcerted by what the woman had told him on the balcony that he ignored Janet altogether. The G-2 had learned of their arrival in Cobán? How could that be? He went back over every step of his planning. The two diversionary couples. Janet hadn’t been out of his sight. The woman had said they had arrived in Cobán alone. Everything had worked…but the G-2 knew he was in Cobán. Neither Dolfo nor the other decoy couple knew where he and Janet were going, so even if the G-2 had resorted to their infamously persuasive questioning techniques, they couldn’t have given them away.

  It hadn’t been his planning…it had been his inability to understand the depth of the duplicity with which he was dealing. Thinking back, the only place where either he or Janet had mentioned Cobán was in her house. He looked at her as she squeezed lime juice over her avocado. It was odd about women like her, it didn’t seem logical that such a woman was so constructed that one couldn’t even decipher whether she were incredibly oblivious or incredibly clever. But such was the case. He didn’t know whether Janet was being used or was herself designing. In either case, she was dangerous for him, and that had been abundantly emphasized only twenty minutes earlier when the woman on the balcony had warned him not to tell her of their communication.

  Smoke from the cook fire outside in the courtyard seeped into the modest dining rooms, filling the still air with the tangy fragrance of oak. Outside the balcony windows the chipichipi was once again falling steadily, and a veil of fog drifted in with it, obscuring the red tile roofs along the streets below.

  Haydon’s brooding had the same effect on Janet that it had on Nina, she sensed it and decided to leave him alone. They finished their meal in silence, and when the young Indian came to take away their plates, Haydon asked for another cup of coffee. Janet started to protest and then thought better of it and nodded in agreement.

  It was the first of three cups they were to order over the course of the next two hours. Eventually everyone in the two dining rooms left, even the man and woman from the balcony, but the young Indian never asked them to pay and never came in to bother them at all except when Haydon turned to signal him for more coffee. Haydon didn’t know what he was supposed to expect, but he came to realize that this comedor was their safe house. They had to stay here until it was time…for whatever was going to happen.

  At first Janet decided she was going to play Haydon’s game. She sat with him in silence, sipping the earthy Cobán coffee with its raw cane sugar and swinging her crossed leg impatiently, her eyes wandering about the two rooms, boredom quickly setting in. She lasted twenty minutes. She got up and started over to the balcony to look out, but Haydon stopped her. She knew why; she hadn’t thought. Embarrassed, she went to the door that opened onto the courtyard and stood there looking into the lush, glistening vegetation. Haydon watched her and listened to the parrots shriek sporadically on the railings above. But waiting in silence was against Janet’s nature, and she grew increasingly agitated. Finally she turned and stalked back to the table and picked up her purse, which was sitting in one of the chairs.

  “This is bullshit,” she snapped. “I’m getting out of here.”

  “Wait…” Haydon reached over and grabbed the strap of her purse.

  Janet flared. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” She jerked the bag, but Haydon held on, stood and gripped her by the arm.

  “You’re going to have to stay here, Janet,” his voice was steady, low. “It’s the only way I can be sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “That we’ll get in touch with Lena.”

  She stared at him. “You don’t know that.”

  “What’s your solution?”

  “Get out there and let them know we’re here. What are we hiding in here for?”

  “They said to come here.”

  “They didn’t say to stay here, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Don’t you think they’d let us know to do something else if that’s what they wanted?”

  Janet fixed her eyes on him. “I’m getting the hell out of here,” she said, and an alarm bell went off in Haydon’s head, something about the tone of her voice, as if she thought she had stretched her luck as far as it could go, as if something was overdue.

  The footsteps were sudden and loud on the wooden floor, and Haydon turned reflexively to see the woman from the balcony enter the room with three men, all of them carrying the snub-nosed little Uzi’s, their hair and clothes soaked by the chipichipi.

  “They’re getting signals from here,” the woman said as she stalked across the room and snatched Janet’s purse. “Get over there,” she said to Janet, nodding toward the wall behind Haydon. Her companions stationed themselves at the doors, one of them moving over near Janet. The woman slung her Uzi over her shoulder and emptied Janet’s purse onto the table. Working quickly, she went through everything, taking caps off lipstick, scraping out makeup from Janet’s compact, disassembling a decorative key-chain holder, examining a flacon of perfume, anything large enough to have pieces came apart.

  When she had gone through everything, she stood abruptly.

  “Where is it?”

  Janet was dumbstruck and simply stared at her.

  “Where is it?” the woman snapped.

  Janet stared.

  “Take off your clothes,” the woman said.

  “Wait a minute,” Haydon said. “Who’s getting signals?”

  The woman turned on him. “Cage is here.”

  “Cage? I thought you said they were G-2.”

  “They’re both here.”

  Haydon was stunned. He turned to Janet. “What in the hell have you done?”

  “We picked up his people shortly after I spoke to you on the balcony,” the woman said. “Five or six of them—that’s how many we’ve identified so far anyway, scattered around the plaza. And there’s a van parked on the north side of the cathedral. We think the receiver is a powerful one, set up inside the van.”

  “You’ve seen Cage?” Haydon asked.

  “No, not him,” the woman said. “Half an hour ago, everyone, all of them started migrating toward Zona 1. That’s here, and they’ve been working in this direction. We’re leaving, but we’ve got to find the device first.”

  Haydon looked at Janet. “You carrying a transmitter?”

  “Trans…transmitter?” Her face portrayed a calculating confusion. She was stalling, and it made Haydon’s stomach knot.

  The woman walked over to Janet and slapped her hard with the back of her hand, then three more times: whap-whap-whap, and before Janet could react, the woman grabbed the top of her sundress with both hands and ripped it wide open all the way down to her waist. The woman’s left forearm shot up to Janet’s throat and pinned her against the wall while her right hand thrust inside the dress searching for the device. Janet couldn’t speak or breathe, and as her left hand came up reflexively in a futile motion of self-defense, the woman suddenly saw the oversized watch. She jerked her forearm off Janet’s throat and grabbed her wrist, unbuckling the watch as Janet slid to the floor. Walking back to the table, the woman used the butt of her Uzi to smash the watch face. Nothing. The woman turned on Janet again.

  “Wait a minute,” Haydon said. “It’s not going to be anything small if it’s going to have any range at all.” He looked at the pieces of junk the woman had scattered on the table from Janet’s purse. Janet’s purse. He picked up the canvas bag and felt it. He tried to wad it, but it resisted, stiff on the sides. He turned the bag wrong-side out and saw that there was an inner lining. Finding a gap in the seam, he worked his finger under it and jerked hard, ripping out the lining and revealing a thin in
sert of material to which a complicated network of wafer thin transistors and batteries and antenna had been stitched. The entire purse was lined with a meshwork of sophisticated technology, making the bag a powerful one-piece transmitting device. This was not a simple toy.

  He turned and looked at Janet, feeling stupid and confused and angry.

  Janet ignored him, her eyes hidden behind her disarrayed hair as she sat against the wall trying to button the front of her dress and pulling her sweater together as she dabbed at her bloodied nose with the back of her wrist.

  Haydon took out his handkerchief and stepped over to her and helped her up, giving her the handkerchief. She avoided his eyes. Haydon didn’t know which disturbed him more: her betrayal or his own naïveté. They might as well be back in Guatemala City again. Everyone was here. Their guerrilla escorts were clearly feeling the pressure.

  CHAPTER 49

  The woman stuffed the lining back into the purse and gave it to one of the men, who opened his shirt and flattened the bag next to his body, buttoned his shirt, and left through the adjoining dining room.

  “What’s in yours?” the woman asked Haydon, indicating the flight bag.

  “An Uzi, a handgun, some ammunition…”

  “Give the Uzi and the handgun to him,” she said, gesturing to another of her companions. Haydon unzipped the bag and did as he was told. “You still have your automatic?”

  Haydon opened his coat and showed it to her, stuck in his waistband.

  “Good,” she said. “We can travel through three buildings without going outside, then we’ll have to be very careful.” She looked at Janet, who had gotten to her feet, wiping her nose with Haydon’s handkerchief. “If you do anything, he’ll cut your throat,” she said, tilting her head toward the third man, who had moved over close to Janet and who obviously was going to be in charge of her. “I am not going to risk my life—or theirs—for you. We don’t risk anything unless it’s worthwhile. Do you understand that?”