“Fine with me.”
Pittner threaded through the cars and moved out into the twenty-meter space between the front of the truck and the roadblock. He was wearing a cheap, gray plastic raincoat over his suit, and it glistened in the mist like the surface of the road. He wasn’t carrying any weapon.
Keeping his gun in his hand, hanging straight down at his side. Cage moved away from the front fender and joined Pittner in the no-man’s-land of headlight beams. Lita stayed at the front bumper of the truck.
“What’s the deal here?” Pittner asked.
“Lena’s dead,” Cage said. Their voices were clear.
“Yeah,” Pittner said. “I know that.”
“Hard luck,” Cage said, his voice a bit tight.
“Is everybody all right?”
“Janet’s in the truck. Haydon’s back there.”
“You find anything?”
“Not yet. But we’re emptying the coffee sacks.”
Pittner nodded. He seemed to think a moment.
The two shots were so close together that one sounded like the immediate echo of the other. The first came from the headlights behind the roadblock, a little to Cage’s right, blowing his head apart. He fell heavily right where he stood, like a fear-disdaining water buffalo. The second one came from behind Haydon and caught Lita in the back of the head, but she was lighter and the velocity of the hollow-point bullet snapped her off her feet and pitched her out onto the bright pavement. She lay on the front of her head where her face used to be. Not ten meters apart, their bodies bled in the drizzle long after their lives were gone.
CHAPTER 54
Janet was immediately taken out of the truck, and two of Pittner’s men, from the embassy, put her in one of their cars and started back to Guatemala City. Haydon wasn’t allowed to speak to her.
The traitorous ex-Kaibiles who had worked for the burly American—and one of whom had fired the single shot that killed Lita—were paid off by one of the G-2 officers and drove away toward the Cobán highway.
While Cage and Lita’s bodies remained where they had fallen in the rain, the G-2 men in street clothes finished searching the truck—a formality, Pittner said—emptying the rest of the coffee sacks on the side of the road while Haydon and Pittner watched from one of the cars where they sat alone, staring over the two bodies in the road.
Haydon looked at the bodies in the rain and wondered how much this sort of thing happened in the world that Pittner and Cage occupied, and he wondered in how many third-world countries similar scenarios were played out in how many different languages, wrecking how many different lives.
“The poor bastard,” Pittner said as they stared out through the rainy windshield. “When the decision finally came down that he just couldn’t be allowed to go on, everyone was surprised how quickly his people were bought off.” Pittner snorted. “Crazy thing is, Cage would have understood that. They went for the better money.”
“What about Lita?”
“We didn’t even try. You couldn’t have bought her. By Cage’s standards she was a failure, putting her life on the line for abstract ideas like fealty and love and respect.”
“Did he care for her at all?”
“If he did, I’m not sure he ever understood it the way…other people would understand it.” He paused. “Of course, I don’t really know, I knew the man a long time, but…that doesn’t mean anything.”
He took his eyes off the grim scene lighted by the headlights and gestured toward the glove compartment in front of Haydon. “Open that thing up, will you. There’s a flask in there.”
Haydon opened the small door in the dash and took out a silver flask, not a hip-pocket-sized one, but a rather heavier one with a good capacity.
“Go ahead,” Pittner said.
Haydon unscrewed the cap and took a drink. It was Pittner’s beloved bourbon. He passed it to Pittner.
“He told me about Grajeda,” Haydon said. “About an assassin. Is that true?”
Pittner nodded. “Yeah.”
“Is there any chance it will fail?”
“Oh, sure. Happens all the time.”
“But it didn’t happen here tonight.”
“No.”
“Janet carried the transmitter for you, didn’t she.”
Pittner didn’t answer immediately. He took another sip of the bourbon, his gaze resting on Cage’s body in the rain on the pavement. Then he nodded again. “We had to get him here. I figured you would do your best to get out of Guatemala City without being followed, so…she agreed to offer to ‘help’ him. His people rigged the purse—he had access to good electronics people.”
Haydon didn’t try to satisfy his greatest curiosity about this crucial aspect of the arrangement—why did she agree to set Cage up for his execution. He knew the answer anyway. Revenge was ever a potent emotion. He supposed that Janet Pittner had gotten what she wanted, but he didn’t believe it was what she had most desired.
“Then the taxi ride to El Salvador, switching the Land-Rover for the Blazer, none of that worked?”
“It fooled the G-2, the ones who weren’t working with us. As usual, Azcona played with us and also ran a string on his own. His own string went all the way to El Salvador and all the way to Panajachel.”
“How did you know?”
“We wouldn’t have except for the bugs in Janet’s house. That’s the only way we knew.” He paused a while, his plastic raincoat making the same crinkling sounds that Germaine Muller’s coat had made four days ago in a colder rain. “Which reminds me, I’ll need to get Borrayo’s notebooks from you. You know, the clandestine prison business.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Come on, Haydon,” Pittner said, passing the bottle back to Haydon. “Don’t start that.”
Haydon took another drink and handed the flask back to Pittner. Then he leaned back and pulled the 10mm out of his belt. He popped the clip out of the handle and reached down between his feet and unzipped the flight bag. He tossed the clip into the bag and then the gun, and zipped it up again.
“Everything’s in there,” he said.
“Thanks,” Pittner said. In the headlights the G-2 were crawling all over the truck. The doors were open, and the hood was up.
“What if they don’t find anything?” Haydon asked.
“Then that’s it, isn’t it.”
Haydon couldn’t tell anything about what Pittner was feeling. He appeared as lugubrious as always, but Haydon knew that with Pittner appearances didn’t mean much.
“Are you clear about it, in your own mind, why you had him killed?” Haydon asked.
Pittner reached up to the dash and turned on the windshield wipers. He let them make a few swipes and then cut them off again. The car had filled with the sweet, smoky fragrance of the bourbon on their breath. Pittner sat slump shouldered, his body reflecting that he was either completely relaxed or exhausted. It wasn’t easy to tell which.
“We had tried to pension him out all kinds of different ways,” Pittner said. “Did he tell you he’d quit us?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t. We had to cut him loose. He was a rogue, Haydon. It was that simple. He was doing outrageous things. We tried to defang him, transfer him back to Langley, ease him out. We offered him the max allowed in benefits. After all, after you’ve run someone as long as we’d run Cage, in the places we’d sent him, in the circumstances…and he goes over the edge, you feel half responsible. So we tried hard. I did, personally. Then he started operating as if there had never been any rules. He was doing outrageous things, playing us and Azcona, the Israelis. To do what he was doing—it was like stepping out in front of a truck. It was provocative. The reason he’s lying out there right now is more his doing than anyone else’s.”
“And the girl?”
“She was hit in the cross fire.”
Haydon turned to Pittner.
“Metaphorically speaking,” Pittner said.
Haydon stu
died Pittner’s profile. “You’re satisfied, then, with all the reasons.”
“Satisfied?” Pittner’s eyes drooped, and he cleared his throat and took a good swig from the flask and screwed the lid on and laid the flask on the car seat. “I haven’t been satisfied with anything since I was twelve years old, Haydon. And I’m sure as hell not satisfied with any of this.”
The only remaining man from Pittner’s office was standing at the back of the truck, the short collar of his suit coat turned up against the drizzle as he talked to several of the Guatemalan agents. He shook his head, and they shook their heads, and then he nodded and turned and jogged across the pavement, past Lita’s body, past Cage’s body to Pittner’s car door. Pittner rolled down the window.
“I think we’re through, Pitt.”
“Nothing.”
“That’s right.”
Pittner looked at Haydon. “Come on,” he said, and the two of them opened their doors and stepped out into the rain. They proceeded past the bodies again, stepping in the blood and rainwater, and went to the back of the truck where they walked on a layer of crushed coffee beans that had been ground under so many feet that they had become a thin paste covering the pavement. Pittner grabbed the tarpaulin flaps and pulled himself up into the back of the truck as did Haydon and several of the men, including the American. The back of the truck was aromatic with the fragrance of coffee, and it was empty except for Lena’s coffin.
Pittner stood a moment under the canopy of the tarpaulin, the flashlights pointed to the canvas roof to provide indirect lighting.
“Get a couple of those guys to open it up and lay her out on the truck bed here,” Pittner said.
It had to be done, Haydon realized that, but knowing it had to be done didn’t make it any easier. The lid came off without effort since Haydon hadn’t been able to nail it on very well with the tire tool. They put the lid aside. The coffin was too small, something Haydon hadn’t noticed before, and the guerrillas had had to roll her shoulders forward a little to get her in. Because of this the easiest way to get her out was simply to turn the box over and let her own weight do the work. They did this carefully, more carefully than they would have if the girl hadn’t been Anglo or if the Anglo men hadn’t been standing there.
She didn’t come out while the box was on its side, so they had to turn it on over on its face. When they pulled it off of her, she lay facedown on the bed of the truck, her arms wrapped tightly against her sides with yards of gauze, a large amount of which was crusty with blood. They righted the box expectantly. It was empty.
No one said anything, they simply stood there looking at the dark stains in the bottom of the box and at Lena’s long blond hair spread out over the dirty boards of the truck bed. Pittner stood there a long time, his rumpled suit seeming even more rumpled than usual under the cheap plastic raincoat. It was his move, but he wasn’t moving. Haydon saw several of the Guatemalans exchange glances. It was almost humorous, as if the longer Pittner was immobile, the more important it was for everyone else to avoid even the slightest twitch or sound.
Finally Pittner said, “Before you put her back in the box, make sure there’s nothing wrapped up in there with her.” He turned away and got out of the truck. Haydon followed him.
The rain had slackened to a heavy mist, falling in a light, sparkling drift. Pittner walked past Lita and Cage without even hesitating, their blood spreading all over the pavement, enormous amounts of it, melting in the rain.
When they got to the cars, Pittner stopped and leaned against one of the fenders and looked back at the truck.
“Was it really a car crash?” Haydon asked.
“Christ. Yes,” Pittner said, almost as though he could hardly believe it himself. “We had observers up in Calvario, and they saw it. She was with a man, one of the guerrillas. The guy was on the switchbacks.
driving like hell, and went over. The son of a bitch lived, but Lena was thrown out of the car.” Pittner shook his head. “It’s…incredible.”
Almost immediately the men began coming out of the back of the truck, their job finished. No one said anything about finding “documents” in Lena’s shroud. Pittner watched them as they picked up Lita and carried her around to the back and loaded her in the truck as well, and then he watched them take Cage. It took four of them.
“You know what I was thinking back there in the truck?” Pittner asked. “I was thinking…that this was what I would remember of her…the back of her head, her hair spread out on the rough wooden bed of a truck, her body wrapped in bloody gauze. I was stunned, didn’t want it to be that way…not that one image. Any of the many other ways…that I had known her…would have been preferable. But then, I didn’t want to see them turn her over, see them…handle her…so, God help me, I’m left with that.”
Pittner cleared his throat. He was growing maudlin and seemed to realize it. He was staring down at his feet on the black asphalt, the light drizzle stippling the toes of his shoes.
“I’m sorry I never met her,” Haydon said.
“The thing is,” Pittner said, “sometimes you can live whole decades of your life and miss the point of it all. It’s so damned easy to do that it’s scary. Knowing Lena was like that. We all wanted something from her, but we never really understood the real value of what she had to offer. We never got past the superficial, her beauty and her sexuality. When we looked at her we saw a pretty woman dancing with the devil, and we read it wrong. All we wanted to do was cut in on the fun. We were too sophisticated, too grasping, too corrupt ourselves to recognize that what they were engaged in was not a dance but a struggle. The truth of it is, we had no real understanding of what she was all about. And that was our fault, not hers.”
CHAPTER 55
It was no trouble getting her body on the plane to Belize. The airstrip was little more than that, a strip of tarmac and a couple of cinder-block buildings painted turquoise and occupied by a couple of guards who almost fled when they saw the caravan pull up to the runway where the mysterious plane had been waiting all night. Pittner and the ranking G-2 officer with him had conversations with the two guards, and Haydon’s plane was airborne while the sky was lightening to gray in the east.
The flight was a little more than two hours and at an altitude that allowed Haydon to watch the changing terrain as they crossed over the Sierra de Chamá and dropped down into the vast Petén lowlands of hardwood forests and dry jungle with thin columns of smoke rising straight up from the fires of the slash-and-burn farmers, seasonal swamps, and broad, sprawling savannahs. In no time at all they turned toward the Caribbean, which they first saw as a gray haze that proceeded to turn every shade and gradient of blue and green with the changing light until they circled and landed over turquoise water on a private strip in Belize City.
Haydon arranged for Lena to be taken to a private mortuary where she remained while he made inquiries through his pilots to people who knew people who knew a discreet pathologist who would be able to perform the autopsy in the presence of an equally discreet police captain who was authorized to draw up and sign all the proper Belizean documents necessary for Lena’s departure from the country. By the time all this was arranged, it was late in the afternoon when the pathologist began the autopsy, but it was only minutes after beginning that he extracted a small plastic envelope from beneath Lena Muller’s sternum, where a gash caused by the car crash had been crudely sutured. It seemed that Dr. Aris Grajeda had used Lena Muller for his purposes after all, as Taylor Cage had predicted, though not quite in the way Cage had imagined. None of them could have imagined it, Haydon guessed, but the infamous files of General Luis Azcona Contrera were finally out of Guatemala. And Germaine Muller’s daughter finally came home.
Lena Muller’s story, however, did not end for Haydon for many months to come. On behalf of Mari Fossler and her sons, he handled all the red tape required to recover her husband’s body. It was a cruel and shabby affair, with official corruption causing promises and delays, and when i
t had reached absurd proportions with outrageous “requirements” of funds, Haydon got word to the Political Section of the American embassy that they had better step in and stop the farce. Fossler’s body was back within days, the paperwork cleared, the ordeal at an end. Haydon could never understand why Pittner hadn’t done something about it from the beginning; he hardly could not have known what was happening.
The loose ends of the story that were being played out back in Guatemala came to him like a recurring dream that presented itself in intermittent scenes in the form of anonymous mailings from Guatemala City. The first to arrive were two news clippings, one from La Prensa Libre and the other from El Gráfico, the two leading dailies in Guatemala. They were brief and recounted the death of a forty-three-year-old American tourist, Taylor Lee Cage, who had suffered a heart attack while deep-water fishing in the Bay of Amatique just off Puerto Barrios in the departamento of Izabal. Mr. Cage was visiting from Spokane, Washington, and was survived by a brother, Robert Cage of Fort Myers, Florida, with whom he was fishing when he died. The articles were brief, and identical in both papers.
The second mailing arrived a few weeks later, again two articles from La Prensa Libre and El Gráfico, which recorded the accidental death of a free-lance American journalist. John Baine died from injuries he sustained when his car crashed while traveling “at a high rate of speed” on the northern shores of Lake Atitlán. Mr. Baine, the articles said, had lived in Guatemala only a few years and specialized in stories about “Indian crafts” and articles for tourist magazines. Both stories were brief, and identical in both papers.
In early July, when the short but potent winter was long-since gone and the sweltering heat had returned to Houston and settled in for the long term, Haydon received the printed program from a funeral mass for Dr. Aris Grajeda, who had just been buried, in the drizzly heart of the rainy season, in Guatemala City’s Cemetery of the Cypresses. The program was a cloying document of several pages that gave the order of the service, the hymns sung, the prayers offered. There was a picture of Jesus Christ praying in Gethsemane, eyes cast heavenward. There was a brief biography of Dr. Grajeda emphasizing his academic awards in college and his achievements in medical school, including a special grant awarded him by Johns Hopkins University Medical School to study tropical diseases upon his completion of his internship. After listing his academic achievements, it was simply stated that he practiced medicine in his native Guatemala City. His good friend Dr. Bindo Salviati gave a eulogy. Dr. Grajeda had died of complications following an appendicitis attack he suffered while vacationing among the Mayan pyramids in the Petén.
Body of Truth Page 45
