Body of Truth (21 page)

“
Momentito, por favor
,” he said, forming a tiny space of time between his thumb and forefinger. He walked to a small cubicle in the portico and picked up a telephone. Haydon looked at the other guards. A couple of them ignored him, one studied him with unblinking effrontery, and two others averted their eyes when he looked at them. All of them were armed. All of them probably were illiterate.

The corporal quickly came out of the cubicle, and one of the guards who had been close enough to overhear his conversation, jumped up from where he was sitting beside the evangelical broadcast and preceded him to the gate, unhooking the chain that ran through the gate from the fence post to which it was secured.

“
Pase adelante
,” the corporal said. He handed Haydon’s passport and shield to the surly-eyed man who sat at a small table with a book before him, and who laboriously recorded the numbers off of Haydon’s passport and shield, both of which he then put into a cardboard cigar box for safekeeping until Haydon’s return. He hammered a rubber stamp onto an ink pad and pressed it into the back of Haydon’s hand, and then Haydon turned around and raised his arms to allow another guard to conduct a perfunctory frisking.

“
Pase adelante
,” the corporal repeated, and Haydon walked out into the sun again and headed across the compound yard to the administration building.

Pavón looked almost deserted compared to the days when it was jammed with overcrowding. Haydon had interviewed the Colombian here, and the conditions had been so vile that even the guards were ashamed of it. Now the population had been so drastically reduced—that Haydon could tell even before entering behind the walls—that the teeming bazaar atmosphere was gone. There was no buzz of voices drifting out to the bare front yard. The place did not bristle with armed guards.

He stepped up onto the tile courtyard in front of the administration building, walked past the flagpole, and entered the one-story structure. The place was silent. There was no furniture in the foyer, only one clay pot with a single scrawny rubber plant with a few yellowing leaves. A receptionist’s office to his left was empty, and a couple of minimum-security inmates were walking around pushing rag mops up and down the short halls that led to half a dozen offices. There were few signs, and he saw no one who appeared to be a member of the administrative staff.

But Haydon knew where he was going. He turned down a hallway to his right and followed the pale institutional green tile walls past doors thrown open to empty offices. There was no air-conditioning to speak of in Guatemala, and certainly not here where the screenless windows allowed flies to wander the shady corridors as though it were an abandoned building. At the end of the hall there was a door on the left, half-closed.

“I hear you, Stuart Haydon,” a voice said as Haydon approached. “
Pase adelante, mi amigo
.”

Haydon walked in as Efran Borrayo uncrossed his legs from where they had been propped on the sill of the open window and stood up, taking a cigarette out of his mouth with his left hand and grinning broadly as he offered his right hand to shake.

“I appreciate your taking this time out of your busy schedule to see me,
Director
,” Haydon said with mock formality.

The Guatemalan laughed. “No kidding, huh?” His laugh was slow and deep. He was a hefty man in his early fifties whose swarthy, handsome face, wavy gray hair, and easygoing manner belied a shrewd and vicious nature. “This place looks like something in the States, huh? Hell, it’s no fun anymore. No shit going on here now. It’s like the Boy Scouts.”

“How long have you been here?” Haydon asked.

Borrayo pulled a long face. “Too damned long. Over a year.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Hell, no. Would you like it?” He shook his head. “Reform.” He said the word like it was a venereal disease. “When that shit Cerezo was elected in 1986 he had to throw some little favors to some
políticos
and to the ‘Americans,’ huh.”

Like many Latin Americans, Borrayo had a love-hate relationship with the United States. He simultaneously resented and envied the
gringos
, and one of his pet peeves was that they routinely referred to themselves as “Americans” as though they were the only “Americans” in the western hemisphere, as though the Latin Americans were not real “Americans.”

Haydon nodded in commiseration, and Borrayo gestured for him to sit in the only chair in the room besides his own. It was directly in front of Borrayo’s desk, on the edge of which the Guatemalan sat down facing Haydon, one foot on the floor. Haydon took a pack of Pall Malls out of his pocket. He had brought them along for just this purpose. Sharing your American-made cigarettes was a good thing to do with a man from whom you wanted a favor. He offered one to Borrayo, who eagerly took it. Haydon took one also and lighted them both. Borrayo blew the smoke into the still air of the bare room.

“Some of the boys in the DIT had gotten a bad reputation,” he said offhandedly as if what had gotten them the bad reputation had not been reprehensible, as if their flagrant violence had not received the condemnation of international human rights organizations. “A few of us were asked to move to other branches of the security forces so they could say they had ‘cleaned house.’ I was moved several times, and then they put me here.” He made a sour face. “I hate this shitty place,” he said, like a true bureaucrat, and waved his hand. “So,” he said, dragging on the cigarette, “what wonderful things have been happening to you?”

They caught up on each other’s lives, talked about men Haydon remembered from before, rehashed the Colombian episode, and then Borrayo cursed the declining quetzal, inflation, the leftists, and talked about how the return of military rule (as if it weren’t already a fact) was the country’s only hope.

“Listen,” Haydon said finally, mashing out his cigarette in the ashtray he had been holding in his lap, “I haven’t seen the place since the ‘reform.’ You want to take a walk?”

Borrayo had been enjoying their little
charla
, but at the mention of a walk his enthusiasm faded. This was serious business, this taking a walk. No one in his right mind would rather have a conversation out in the hot sun than in the cool shade of a thick-walled building. But then, everyone knew that the hot sun did not have ears. If you wanted to walk in the sun, you had serious business and only the hot sun would do.

“Of course,” Borrayo said, putting out what was left of his own cigarette and standing up from the edge of the desk. He ran his hands through his thick, gray waves and picked up his black-visored military-style hat. “These
chusma
, they like to see the
cacique
wear a hat, huh?”

He grinned and pulled the hat down firmly, low over his eyes.

CHAPTER 22

T
hey retraced Haydon’s steps down the pale green hallway, empty except for the flies floating like small propellered planes in the dead air heavy with the odor of industrial disinfectant. They passed the pathetically lonely rubber plant in the main entryway and turned right at the intersection and entered a short hallway at the end of which was a shady porch blocked by a chain-link fence and gate. They walked to the gate where guards and a few prisoners were hanging around chatting, most of the prisoners killing time as they waited for their turn at a pay telephone that was on a wall inside the chain-link fence. Each inmate had to reach an arm through a hole in the wire to put his centavo into the telephone and then hold the receiver against the wire, to which he pressed his ear and mouth to communicate. To the left of this porch was a short wing of half a dozen bungalows with an open-air corridor between them,
celdas
for conjugal visits, close enough to the popular porch for the sounds of intimacies to be shared with the loiterers. Beyond them was a long breezeway that led to the main prison yard with the various cellblocks beyond.

Borrayo turned right, however, entering a narrow, sunless passage between the stucco buildings which quickly opened into a small courtyard from which a dirt road emerged to follow a stretch of pine trees that bordered the outside wire fences of the prison. The sparsely forested countryside picked up several hundred meters beyond the three separate cordons of razor wire. To their left the rear walls of the cell-blocks provided a huge slate for graffiti, the common obscenities of bored men, slogans of regional pride, and prejudicial hatreds.

“See,” Borrayo said as each of them chose one of the two ruts of the dirt road. “Everything has changed. No guards follow us. I can go everywhere alone now. All is peace here. No problems.”

Above them, in the tops of the pines, crows sent their caws across the coils of razor wire to echo in the shallow valley beyond.

“Where do you keep the
peligrosos
now, Efran?” Haydon asked.

“Ah, well, of course, the
peligrosos
are not in the general population.”

Haydon reached down and picked up a pinecone and started snapping off the seeds as they walked. “You keep them chained in some pit?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Borrayo said, missing the facetious tone of Haydon’s question and thus the grim humor in his own reply. He put his hands into his pockets and looked out over the valley past the wire. “I would like to put them in the pit. If I had my way, I would hang them by their balls out in the sun. This damn government. They are always, you know, sucking up to you ‘Americans.’” He stopped and turned to Haydon indignantly. “I have to go take human rights courses at the United Nations building now. Can you believe such madness? I choke on it. It is embarrassing to me.”

Haydon looked at Borrayo. “Do you still have access to anyone in intelligence?” he asked bluntly.

Borrayo didn’t change his expression. He had played games too many years to let an unexpected question appear to have come to him unexpectedly.

“Things have changed,” he said philosophically. “Access? Well, you have to have a good reason for wanting to ask questions about intelligence. One question, one wrong one…” Borrayo shook his head.

Haydon could not expect Borrayo to do much without a full explanation, or something that sounded like a full explanation. No one ever gave the whole story on anything in Guatemala. You always held a little back, something in reserve that could give you an edge if you needed an edge in the event everything else had been leaked or discovered. Borrayo would have to hear Haydon’s story.

They were walking again, approaching a little slope of the road and another sector of the prison, the small shacks and garden plots of the privileged prisoners. A few chickens pecked around outside the doorways and in between the neat rows of vegetables, and here and there a hibiscus burst into hopeful bloom.

Haydon told Borrayo his story without mentioning names or the discovery of Lena Muller’s body and its removal from the Cementerio General. When it was necessary to mention anything that Cage was involved in, Haydon referred to him as “a friend”—perfectly acceptable discretion that Borrayo would understand.

“What I need to know,” Haydon said, “is if any of them are alive—the girl or Baine or Jim Fossler.”

They had come to a fork in the sloping road, the right branch of which went down to a soccer field, while the left one leveled off to a kind of compound about a block in length. On either side of an open area beaten bare of grass were rows of cement-block shops with hand-painted signs.
SHOE HOSPITAL, PAVÓN. SHOP OF THE ARTISANS OF THE DIVINE MASTER
—a metalworking shop that made lamp shades and rings that held pots for hanging plants. An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting room—
BODYWORK AND PAINT OF THE SOUL
. A laundry. A store. A shop where four men were making queer-looking teddy bears out of shaggy fuchsia and chartreuse material. All of these places were devoid of inmate customers, and most of the buildings surrounding the compound were simply empty.

Borrayo stopped again at the edge of the road, looking down to the soccer field where a game was in progress.

“We are in the last day of a three-day tournament,” he said, his hat pulled down low over his eyes. “Sector 2 is the best team. I think they will win the tournament.”

Two teams were on the bare, rocky field, running back and forth after the checkered ball in the hot sun. A few men lounged in the shade of small trees, watching the ball sail from one end of the field to the other, the teams wheeling here and there after it like a herd of stampeding wildebeests, veering and shunting in mass simultaneity.

“You are going to get your throat cut, my friend,” Borrayo said, moving over to a
chilca
tree dotted with yellow blossoms and stepping into its shade. Haydon joined him, both of them squinting toward the soccer field. Occasionally shouts from the players broke through the constant throb of cicadas that filled the hot afternoon. “Do you know what is going on here?”

“I just need to know if they’re alive.”

Borrayo turned and looked at Haydon.

“You don’t know, huh?”

“Not much.”

Borrayo shook his head and pulled a yellow flower off the
chilca
. He plucked a petal off with his lips and folded it with his tongue, thinking, returning his gaze toward the soccer field.

“This is one you should look the other way, Haydon,” Borrayo said. “This is very dangerous.” His eyes squinted from under the black visor.

“You know something about it, then?”

“I’ve heard some things,” Borrayo said, spitting out the little yellow pellet he had made of the petal. He lipped another one off the flower. “I heard about a
gringo
…that the DIC picked up.”

“Baine?”

Borrayo shrugged and shook his head in ignorance. “A
gringo
.” His eyes were on the soccer players.

“Where is he?”

“In one of the secret prisons,” he said, his tongue working the yellow petal.

That wasn’t great news for Baine. The clandestine prisons were used for interrogations, and where there were interrogations there was always torture.

“Where was he picked up?”