Janet nodded, accepting the pointed insult. But she shook her hair out of her face, her expression already reflecting a stubborn un-repentance.
Christ, Haydon thought. This had all the makings of a disaster.
The five of them left together, Haydon following the woman, Janet and her bodyguard behind him, and the second man covering their rear. They went out into the courtyard, turned left and entered a dark corridor with a stairway that doubled back above them. At the top landing they entered a door through a three-foot-thick wall that took them into the next building where they hurried to yet another balcony, fast-walking its length to enter another doorway. This time they traveled the length of a dim corridor that had doors on either side with numbers on them, a hotel or boarding house, Haydon guessed, and then down a double-back stairwell into a third corridor that led into a private home. The stucco-covered stone walls here smelled of old, mildewed plaster, and twice they had to go down two or three steps through narrow doorways since the house was built on a falling street. Once Haydon saw a dark face retreat around a door beyond the woman’s shoulder, but when they passed by the face was gone and the door was closed.
They had stayed to the inner corridors as much as possible, but now they had to exit the buildings and enter another courtyard. It was small and bare, splotched with puddles of gray water, and patrolled by three or four ill-tempered geese, their breasts stained with mud. A wheel-less Toyota pickup that looked as if it had tumbled down the side of a mountain rested on its axles near the high wooden gates that gave access to the street. Another truck, with wooden side panels and a tarpaulin strapped down over its sideboards, sat with its nose against the gates.
They were hustled across the muddy compound and ushered through an open door into a small room that was empty except for a couple of crude wooden benches sitting against the walls and a corner fireplace with a smoldering fire.
“We’ll be here a while,” the woman said. “You might as well sit down and get comfortable.”
Janet sat down immediately on one of the benches nearest the fireplace and wrapped her sweater tightly around her and folded her arms. Haydon sat opposite her so that he had a good view of the courtyard.
The woman and the other man disappeared through a doorway near Haydon, while Janet’s bodyguard sat on a creaky chair, resting his Uzi on his lap. He lighted a cigarette and offered one to Janet, who refused, and then to Haydon, who gratefully accepted, letting the man light it for him. As he inhaled smoke from the bitter Guatemalan cigarette, Haydon heard radio static coming through the doorway from another room.
He looked at Janet as he smoked, but she kept her gaze on the floor. Finally, feeling him looking at her, she turned her eyes to him, and he saw something there that made him think of a lost soul, not a tortured one, not one grieving for past deeds and lost opportunities and abandoned dreams, but one who cursed the condemnation, defiant and begrudging to the end.
“You don’t think I would understand if you explained it to me?” he asked.
“That’s not the point,” she said, turning her eyes to the fire. “I don’t give a damn whether you ‘understand’ or not.”
He smoked a moment, trying to see in her profile some hint of the complicated emotions she must be feeling.
“Do you love him that much?” he asked.
She said nothing. Haydon rested his head against the stucco wall and watched her. Her hair, already wiry from the humidity, was even more disheveled because of her encounter with the woman. Several of the buttons had been torn off her sundress, so she had to cover herself with the sweater, which also helped to ward off the damp chill. The sweater was smeared with pinkish stains from her nosebleed, and mud had splashed on the lower part of her sundress in their hurried flight through the buildings and across courtyards.
He finished his cigarette and ground it out on the floor as the bodyguard had done a few moments before him. Standing, he stepped over to Janet and reached out his hand.
“Give me the handkerchief,” he said.
She had been holding it, wadded into a tight tiny ball, in her hands. She looked up and handed it to him, and he took it to the doorway and held it out under the dribbling eaves and washed out the blood, wrung it out and held it under the dribble again. Then he walked back to Janet and gave it back to her.
“You’ve got some dried blood…” he said, pointing to his own nose.
She took it, trying to maintain a dispassionate expression, but clearly grateful. He looked away while she dabbed at her nose, softening the dried blood. The geese were patrolling the puddles in the courtyard, straight backed and challenging. Without preamble the rain began falling heavily again, and the geese made their way over to the tarpaulin-covered truck and got under the rear end of its high bed for shelter. Through the open doorway, Haydon could hear the rain drumming on the tightly stretched tarpaulin.
He turned to Janet. “You want Lena’s skin, is that it? Do you have any idea what will happen if Cage gets to her first?”
“Oh, Christ, nothing’s going to happen to her.”
“He assured you of that?”
She nodded. “Yeah, he did.”
“What did he say?”
She held the handkerchief to her nose a moment, then took it away. “He said the bottom line was that Lena wasn’t going to get out of Guatemala with the documents about Azcona. Period. He said he could at least save her life. If the G-2 got to her first, she was dead.”
“But what about the way it was happening here? What about the way Lena wanted it? These people were giving us safe passage…”
Janet was already shaking her head. “You’re goddamned kidding yourself about this, Haydon. Do you really believe Azcona is going to let this happen, that these people are going to outwit the G-2?” She lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper. “I don’t know where or how, but Azcona’s going to be all over these people. This ragtag operation was doomed from the beginning. This was never the way to have done it, Lena should have known that…” She paused. “You don’t know what in the hell you’re into here. You don’t have a clue.”
Something was wrong about this, very wrong. Haydon felt more trusting of the nameless woman in the next room than he did of Janet or Cage or Pittner or anyone else. He wondered if, perhaps, that could be precisely the conclusion Lena had come to as well. He wondered if she had decided finally just to cut through all the bullshit. Maybe she had decided that life really wasn’t that complicated after all. The simple fact was that General Azcona was a brutal man who bred brutal ways, and if she wanted to drive a stake through his heart these were the only people who could help her do it and that was that. Maybe everybody else’s cooperation—Cage’s, Pittner’s, Janet’s—came washed in solutions of caveats. Everything they touched carried an implicit “yes, but…,” and ultimately those caveats simply watered down every noble intent to such thin soup that in the end nothing with any meaning at all survived. Maybe Lena, in her own youthful abandonment—even if she was being used as Cage alleged—was the only moral person in this entire collection of derelicts because she had the ability and good sense to simplify. Stealing children was wrong, and she wanted to stop the man who callously allowed such things to happen.
On the other hand, Haydon suspected that Dr. Grajeda’s unlikely philosophical alliance with a deceased German novelist was closer to the mark as explanation. Truth was an assembled thing, unknown to a single person, nonexistent in a single ideology. It was more difficult to grasp than expired breath, more complex than the simple desire to possess it.
As the afternoon faded and the sky darkened, a fog rolled in so thick that it turned everything to a ghostly paleness and almost obscured the front gates of the courtyard. A distinctly chill air stirred the mist as the rain started and stopped, started and stopped. But the door to the room remained open, and the only concession to the chill was when the bodyguard got up and put another oak log on the dwindling fire. The simple wooden benches were uncomfortable, and after a
while Janet swung her feet up off the floor, put them on the hearth next to the fireplace and covered them with her skirt. There was only the sound of the rain, the fire, and the scratchy static from the radio in the next room. Haydon heard no voices in the other room, no footsteps.
Then an Indian boy of nine or ten came carefully carrying three huge cups of coffee on a board, his eyes concentrating on the dark brew, of which he had spilled not a drop. He went straight to Janet, placing his crusty bare feet precisely on the gritty stones of the uneven floor, his head bent in concentration, and stopped in front of her. She smiled and thanked him and took a cup, and then he came to Haydon, who did the same, and then he turned to the bodyguard. This time the boy broke out into a big grin as the man took his cup and reached out and patted the side of the boy’s face.
“¿Como le va, mi’jo”? the man asked. Still smiling, the boy mumbled something and then tucked the board under his arm and hurried out of the room.
“Your son?” Haydon asked.
The man nodded. “Yes. He is a good boy. He has the face of his precious mother.”
It was an oddly poetic statement, and it was the last thing anyone said for more than half an hour as they sat on the benches and nursed the hot, sweet drink that the cook had laced with a trace of cardamom.
Then Haydon heard heavy footsteps and the rattling of buckles against the metal bodies of the Uzi’s. The woman who had brought them there came into the room with her companion. Both of them had changed out of their street clothes and were wearing olive green military fatigues. She wore an olive T-shirt under a long-sleeved khaki shirt, both tucked into her fatigues, and a pair of much-used lightweight army boots with nylon tops. Her dark hair was pulled back in an efficient single braid, which emphasized her high cheekbones and even the mole near her mouth. Each of them had an Uzi hanging from straps on their shoulders.
“Isauro led them north toward Sacanchaj. He left his radio on so we could hear everything. They got close enough to see who he was, and when they realized what was happening they chased him and caught him. They were thoughtful, too, and left his radio on so we could hear what happened.”
“They questioned him?”
“He didn’t die until just a few minutes ago.”
“Cage’s people?”
She nodded. “Cage has some ex-Kaibiles working for him. They are an army special forces branch trained in the jungles of the Petén. In the seventies your people came and taught them the philosophy of counter-insurgency, then the Israelis came and taught them. They learned fast, better than the devil, and improved on what they had been taught. Now your special forces come to the Kaibiles for training.” She smiled sourly. “The Kaibiles call them ‘pussies.’”
“I thought Cage’s only interest was information.”
The woman looked at him. “There are two ways to get information in Guatemala. Money and torture. One of them always works. And as you well know, money is hard to come by in this country.” She paused. “We have to go. Isauro didn’t tell them everything, but he told them too much. We can’t stay here any longer.”
“Wait a second,” Haydon stood. “I don’t see any use in keeping her with us,” he said of Janet. “She’s going to make it hard for me to do what I’ve got to do. She doesn’t figure into it. Why don’t you just keep her out of sight somewhere until it’s over and let her go.”
“If she doesn’t figure into it, what’s she doing here?” the woman asked with rhetorical sarcasm. “Look,” she said, “we know who she is. She does figure into it. Very much.”
The woman turned away and yelled something in an Indian dialect through the door into the back rooms, and there was an immediate flurry of activity. Haydon cut his eyes at Janet, who understood everything perfectly well.
Within moments a number of people, men and women—and the boy who had served them coffee—left through the rainy courtyard, some into each of the buildings on either side, and some through the gates. They were not in military fatigues as were the woman and her companions, but were common Cobáneros like the hundreds of others one saw on the street, like the ones Haydon had seen just that morning. Soon the rooms were silent, even the scratching of the shortwave radio had died, and Haydon and Janet were being hustled outside into the courtyard. They splashed through the muddy puddles as all the others had, and then the tailgate of the tarpaulin-covered truck was dropped open, and they were loaded into the back with piles of burlap sacks filled with coffee beans.
The truck had the name of a coffee finca painted on its door, but it was no ordinary flatbed. A long hole the width of the cab had been cut out of the cab next to the bed, and a low bench, its back attached to the back of the seat in the cab, had been installed. There was room for three people to sit, facing the rear of the truck and a full head lower than the driver and passengers in the cab. Janet and Haydon sat in this makeshift seat, and sacks of coffee were stacked around them until they were hidden. The woman and the two other armed guerrillas in fatigues were also hidden among the sacks. None of this was meant to fool anyone conducting more than a cursory cargo check. If they encountered a military checkpoint, Haydon did not believe the woman would surrender with a loaded Uzi.
A guerrilla in civilian clothes crawled into the cab with the driver, both of them armed, and after a few exchanges with a lookout on the street, the gates swung open, the driver gunned the heavy-duty motor, scattering the geese, and the truck pulled out onto the street. From his backward-facing vantage point on the driver’s side of the truck, Haydon could see along one of the sideboard railings, just under the flap of the tarpaulin. Behind them the narrow Cobán street receded in the drifting mist, the deep charcoal of evening coming early in this region of skyless light. They passed a dog and an Indian woman going in the opposite direction, the woman with one arm raised to steady a jug she was carrying on her head, both of them leaning into the slope of the street that the truck was now descending, downshifting gears in a tight whine. Haydon inhaled the pungent reek of oily exhausts and damp burlap bags and coffee beans and wondered if these were the last odors he would breathe.
CHAPTER 50
Night fell while they drove. It came disguised in its own cloak of fog, the darkest night Haydon had ever seen, so dense it was almost tactile. They drove for a while on what Haydon guessed was the major highway to Guatemala City, and then they veered off on a smaller roadway, still paved, but narrow. This course took them into country where the dripping forests closed in on them like the walls of a green-black dream. From his line of sight along the side of the truck, Haydon could see the draperies of the jungle flare darkroom red whenever the driver slowed and the brake lights illuminated the long scarlet corridor of the receding road. They reduced speed and negotiated curves and twice plowed through low-water crossings, the rushing of the water around the wheels of the truck almost drowning out the sound of the engine itself, the dampness of the streams smelling different from the dampness of the fog, as the wetness of the night smelled different from the wetness of the day. Sometimes he could actually smell the mildew of the decaying jungle floor, and sometimes he could smell the tangy spice of wood fires that drifted to the road from the dooryards of hovels hidden far off in the dark.
Haydon could not see his watch, so he had no idea how long they drove this way, but after a while he sensed a relief of tension among the guerrillas. They no longer crouched behind the sacks but stood spraddle-legged for balance, resting their Uzi’s on top of the mounds of coffee. One of the woman’s companions even lighted a cigarette, its acrid smoke whipping around briefly under the tarpaulin before the night air snatched it away.
Then the truck slowed differently from the way it had slowed before, and almost simultaneously Haydon sensed they were entering a community. Amber lights flickered here and there through the jungle and then more of them appeared closer to the road, and then the houses themselves became visible off to the side. Dogs barked as they passed, and the odor of cook fires became the predominant fragrance. T
hey were among houses now, not just hovels but cinder-block houses, closer and closer together until they were at the edge of an aldea, the truck downshifting as they climbed, crawling, groaning, pitching up a street dying of potholes, to a small plazoleta. People walked along the street in dark knots—the town was too small, or too poor, for streetlights—and the truck rounded and stopped in front of a church.
The driver opened his door and got out as someone walked rapidly over to meet him. There was a conversation. The woman crawled over the coffee sacks and went to the back of the truck where she waited behind the tarpaulin, holding her Uzi down at her side. Haydon twisted beside Janet and was able to see the two men from their armpits down. The man talking to the driver was in uniform, military uniform. Haydon could only hope the man was being paid an adequate sum. The men shook hands, the officer walked away and the driver came to the back of the truck where he spoke to the woman. Their exchange was brief, and then the driver returned to the cab and got behind the wheel while the woman climbed over the sacks again.
They circled to the other side of the plazoleta and took a hard right, and immediately Haydon felt the nose of the truck pitch downward, turning left and traveling a moment or two before turning back the other way in a switchback. The street must have been cobblestones at first: it was rough but uniformly so, and then even the cobblestones played out. The truck straightened, but continued on a long sloping course, its progress reduced to a crawl as the driver time and again eased the wheels into an enormous chug hole or negotiated an eroded rut. The distinctive smell of pigs once or twice wafted up under the tarpaulin, and Haydon could see under the sideboards that they were in the outskirts, if that weren’t too grand a word. The domiciles were hovels once more, with corrugated tin or thatched roofs. Finally the truck lurched to a standstill, and, after a moment’s hesitation, the driver cut the motor.
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