Body of Truth (16 page)

As soon as Haydon got to his room he removed his clothes and, even as late as it was, went straight to the shower. He bathed quickly, got out, put on his pajamas and got into bed with the manila folder.

The police report from Huehuetenango was several pages, but only because the police clerk had double-spaced it. The text itself was brief. A group of Ixil Indian women had brought Lena’s body to the military commissioner in Soloma from Yajaucú, a small village on the Rio Quisil, a tributary of the larger Rio Ixcán, which roared into Guatemala from Mexico not many kilometers to the north. Because they came from so close to the Quiché border, near an area of refuge, the women had put their own lives in considerable danger by emerging from that country with a dead white woman whom, incidentally, they said they had found in their milpa where they had gone early that morning to work.

Though Soloma was only a dusty little town that lies in what once was probably the bed of a lake and surrounded by the Cuchumatanes, it was a designated
cabecera municipal
, a district headquarters. The men who were the local authorities there had obligations. An investigation was made into Lena’s death by the local military commissioner—who neither slept nor dreamed without permission from the nearby garrison commandante—and it was determined that the guerrillas had killed her and “violated” her. If Lena had been an Indian, she would have been buried there, but no one wanted the responsibility of burying a white woman, so they “requisitioned” a place for her on a truck loaded with cassava and other vegetables destined for the departmental capital of Huehuetenango.

No doubt eager to be rid of the responsibility of this ghastly cargo foisted upon him, the truck driver drove at night over the dangerously crooked and precipitous dirt roads that crossed the Cuchumatanes to Huehuetenango. Still receiving special treatment, the “XX,” as Lena and every other unidentified body was known, was taken to the main hospital, where an autopsy was performed by Dr. Aris Grajeda, a visiting physician from Guatemala City. He was told by the truck driver that the XX’s mother wanted her in Guatemala. Dr. Grajeda agreed to see that she got to the capital. She was put into a heavy plastic bag along with several chunks of ice from the hospital commissary and loaded into Dr. Grajeda’s van. End of report.

There was a separate document attached to the first, written by the precinct chief of the Gabinete de Identificación in Zona 6 in Guatemala City: The unidentified female was delivered to them “anonymously” on Sunday night, accompanied by the attached report, which was found in an envelope inside the plastic bag with her. She was photographed, and her picture was placed in the book of the dead. Her body was sent to the morgue at the Cementerio General that same night.

CHAPTER 17

H
aydon slept until nine o’clock the next morning, when even his disconnected dreams about what he had seen and heard and smelled and felt since he had arrived in Guatemala City the night before could no longer ignore the roar of traffic that poured in through the two windows above his bed. Sometime during the still, quiet hours before daybreak a chill had crept into the old house, and he had groped around at the foot of the bed and pulled up the covers he had thrown off as he went to sleep. Now, as the morning began to warm again, he pushed back the covers once more and rolled over, his limbs feeling thick and heavy, his stiff neck making it difficult for him to find a comfortable position now that he was conscious. Even though he had showered the night before, he got up from the bed and pulled off his pajamas and stepped into the shower again. He felt as if he wouldn’t be able to think straight if he didn’t.

And he had to think straight. Lena Muller could no longer be the focus of Haydon’s reason for being there. In the States he would be plunged headlong into a homicide investigation, here he could only walk away from it. At least that would be the conventional wisdom. Report her death and go home. It seemed an outrageous option, but he knew it was the only real one. But there was Fossler’s disappearance. This was not so easily reconciled. There were options. He had no doubt that Cage had been right to walk away from Jim Fossler’s place. If there was anything Haydon could do for Fossler—and he didn’t have the remotest idea what it might be—he didn’t think it would be through the embassy with its slow-moving front-door policies and its unknown backdoor policies with their hidden agendas and unofficial status and deniable operations. Throughout the world U.S. ambassadors handled the CIA presence in their embassies in different ways; some tried to stay on top of CIA activities, tried to keep themselves at least halfway informed about the operations being conducted under the guise of the embassy’s aegis, while others simply turned their backs, covered their ears, and shut their eyes. Deniability as a form of moral triage. Haydon didn’t have the time to invest in trying to negotiate with the many faces of officialdom.

But there were other ways to look for Fossler, and he himself had given Haydon a lead or two. If Haydon could believe Janet Pittner, and he doubted he could, she didn’t know anything about Jim Fossler. She was not going to be forthcoming, not just yet anyway. Cage had done his part. Baine was gone. And Lena was…gone. Of the names that Fossler had given him over the telephone that left only Dr. Aris Grajeda, who had already brought himself onstage again through the police report Haydon had read just a few hours earlier. Grajeda would be his next stop.

Haydon got out of the shower and dressed in his other change of clothes. He left the clothes he’d worn the day before in his room with a note to the maid to have them cleaned that day and went down to breakfast in the long atrium dining room.

The Residencial Reforma was usually comfortably full, and Haydon had never stayed there when he didn’t meet half a dozen Americans. With the embassy nearby, it was a popular place with people who had business there, from businessmen to student travelers. It was a quiet, comfortable place that was relatively inexpensive and had the kind of residential atmosphere—with its two parlors, American television channels, and friendly staff—that appealed to a more interesting kind of clientele than the Club Med trade.

He ate alone at a small corner table next to two of the marble pillars. Since the dining room opened at seven o’clock, the people who had business in the city had already eaten and were gone and the people there now were less likely to be on a strict schedule. He saw a couple of men who were dead ringers for “American advisors,” of which there were scores circulating throughout Guatemala, a girl by herself who seemed to be a student, a young couple reading travel brochures on the Mayan pyramids, a middle-aged couple speaking German, and a young auburn-haired woman reading a French novel.

By nine-fifty Haydon was walking south on the Avenida La Reforma to the Camino Real, where he knew he could get a rental car. By ten-thirty he had rented a Japanese sedan and had spent ten minutes with a new map of the city.

There was no easy way to get to Mezquital. Even though it was not that far as the crow flies, it was on the other side of one of the major ravines that cut into the south side of the city and accommodated the Rio Guadrón. Haydon had to drive northward on Diagonal 12 and then switch back southward at the
Trébol
, picking up Petapa, the main avenue to the University of San Carlos.

But where he was heading was far beyond San Carlos, the entrance to which he passed in only a few minutes. He continued along the increasingly industrialized thoroughfare past the Shell and Chevron storage facilities, past steelworks and a paraffin processing plant and a sack manufacturing company. There were few houses, all of them poor, and then even those became sparse, giving way to acres of weedy lots that surrounded the industries. He passed a glass factory on the left and then a tire manufacturing plant, on the right an industrial adhesives plant and a plastics manufactory, and then he crossed the railroad tracks. To his left even the industries gave way to broad parched spaces of scrub brush and weeds entangled with windblown trash, and then on the right a poor
colonia
sprang up like an afterthought. From there, nothing but the squatters’ shacks and, in the distance, the majestic purple slopes and cloudy crowns of volcanos Pacaya and Agua southwest of the city.

Ahead of him a barefooted woman was walking toward him leading a scrawny, long-legged pig on a thin rope. As Haydon approached, he put his arm out the window and raised his hand as he slowed the car and stopped.

“
Perdoname, señora. Buscando para un doctor, un guatemalteco, que vive aquí
.”

The woman pulled the pig up short and smiled. Her teeth were bad, but she had beautiful jet hair braided up in the traditional Indian style with a brilliant green
cinta
. She wore the Indian
corte
wraparound skirt, but her
huipil
had been discarded for a man’s baggy and transparent nylon shirt. She told Haydon she knew the doctor, a good man. She told him to go to the
pirul
tree and follow the path over the sandy embankment and down through the houses on the slope on the other side. Cross the railroad tracks. The
clínica
was to the left a little way.

Haydon thanked her.

“
Se va bien
,” she said, and turned away as Haydon put the car in gear.

He drove the short distance to the pepper tree and pulled off the road into its thin, lacy shade. He locked the car and looked up at the embankment that rose immediately from the roadside. Two boys were watching him from a hedge of dry weeds, like urchin bandits waiting for the advantage. He beckoned to them, and they came scrambling down the slope, their matted hair and rags and waving arms awash in a small cloud of dust. He gave each of them some money to guard the car and started up the shallow rut of the path. There was a remote chance they wouldn’t strip the car before he returned. When he got to the top of the embankment the path branched out into a
colonia
of squatters’ shacks perched on the slope that fell toward the railroad tracks fifty meters below. He chose one of the widest trails, packed hard by legions of bare feet, and followed it in a switchback pattern down the embankment past cardboard and tin shacks and an occasional better one of
lepa
, a cheap, hand-hewn lumber widely used throughout the city by squatters or anyone wanting to throw up a fast shelter.

He met a single file of women carrying plastic jugs of water on their heads and then on the switchback encountered two little boys squatting together as they defecated on the edge of the path, their dirty, sweaty faces and large dark eyes looking out from under an umbrella of weeds. Their gazes followed Haydon with open curiosity and without embarrassment, as though he had been a large interloping crane that it was their happy pleasure to observe in passing.

At the railroad track at the bottom of the embankment, packs of children played along the rails that curved out of sight around a bend in both directions. He stopped a boy who had perched a runty and fly-pestered pup on a piece of wood that he was scooting along the hot, shiny rails and asked about the doctor. The little boy had no idea who he was talking about, but a girl, nine or ten years old, overheard his question and offered to take Haydon to him. She was well groomed and dressed in the bright woven clothes of one of Guatemala’s many Indian groups, and though Haydon knew too little of their traditional costumes to know which one, he could tell that she was a newcomer from the countryside. She had not yet acquired the haunted look that the slums would inevitably give her, and her native dress had not yet given way to the inescapable filth of her surroundings or to the odd piece of nylon or polyester that would necessarily replace the worn-out
huipil
and
corte.

Haydon followed her across the rails and into another maze of narrow trails and shanties, climbing gradually, the paths converging and veering off, the sounds of children crying and women’s conversation and evangelical radio preachers issuing from the cracks in the shanties, the odors of wood smoke and com tortillas, and of animal and human feces that dotted the edges of the paths and grew odoriferous in the increasing heat.

She walked at a steady pace, glancing back occasionally to see if he was still with her, her little bare feet working the uneven surface of the paths with a sure grip. As she walked she swung a frayed string with a red button on the end of it, around and around, making pink circles in the air. She was a gregarious, carefree child on friendly terms with her surroundings. Occasionally she would pause and quickly peek into a doorway or over a rickety fence and say
Buenas
to whoever was there and be on her way again before Haydon could even catch up with her. She paused to scratch a mongrel who lay in a hole he had dug next to a wall and paused again to touch a naked baby gnawing on a corncob in a doorway. But she never forgot her task, and before Haydon knew it they had reached an area where an occasional cinder-block building began to mark the ragged margin where the permanent slums merged with the squatters’ hovels.

They came into an actual street, a narrow, unpaved one so gouged with holes that it was impassable by vehicle. The child automatically sought the thin ribbon of shade next to the cinder-block buildings, which she followed for three or four minutes before she suddenly turned in to a doorway, and Haydon found himself at the entrance of a dark room redolent of alcohol.

“
El doctor
,” she announced proudly from the dark, and Haydon made out her figure across the room, standing in front of a glass cabinet next to the figure of Aris Grajeda half turned from the shelves where he had been working.

“Dr. Grajeda?” Haydon asked, and then understanding Grajeda’s silence, he quickly added, “I’m Stuart Haydon.”

“Yes,” the Guatemalan said. He squared his shoulders to Haydon and put his arm around the child, who snuggled up to him. He was little more than a dim silhouette, but Haydon could see that he was several inches shorter than himself, the typical Guatemalan stature. His shoulders were neither broad nor narrow, but well proportioned, his weight neither light nor heavy. He waited calmly beside the child, who seemed to regard him with a comfortable intimacy. Haydon had the sense that the doctor was quickly but coolheadedly appraising him.