Body of Truth (24 page)

“Was she involved with something she wasn’t telling you about?”

“We have to think so.”

“You don’t have a clue?”

Pittner shook his head. “We don’t.”

Haydon didn’t believe him. “But you don’t think her death was ‘criminal’?”

They both knew it could have been. The country was in its worst condition in decades, the economy was disintegrating, Cerezo had capitulated his authority to the army long ago and had spent his last two years in office scooping up loose cash anywhere he could find it, sometimes prying it loose himself, and the new president was expected to be as timid with the army as Cerezo had been. The army was deep into the burgeoning poppy trade. There was no real means of maintaining civil order, because the National Police was in shambles, pervaded with corruption. Vigilante groups flourished everywhere as right-wingers took “law and order” into their own hands. The previous weekend there had been forty-six murders in forty-eight hours. No one even pretended to keep up with the rapes. United States intelligence was flooded with data to analyze, and there was a real feeling everywhere that an entire society was unraveling. If Lena Muller had been a victim of common crime, neither of them would have been surprised.

“The point is,” Pittner said, “we don’t want her to become a headline. I know her disappearance was quite a high-profile case, that her father used his influence to stir things up, keep it in the media. That would be unacceptable down here, make us vulnerable on several fronts. Damn, the blowback would be enormous.”

Haydon looked at Pittner. “How in the hell do you think you’re going to keep quiet the fact that three U.S. citizens have disappeared in Guatemala in the last thirty-six hours?”

Pittner nodded. “We can’t indefinitely. But we can for a while. We need time to get some explanations ourselves. We’re caught with our britches down here.”

“What about Baine? What about Jim Fossler?”

“We don’t know where the hell they are.”

“I don’t believe that, of course.”

“I didn’t expect you would. That’s why I’m asking you to give us a leg up here. Let us get on the damned horse before you smack it on the rump. This is damage control here, pure and simple. This has gotten way out of hand.”

“Out of your hand,” Haydon said.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

Haydon looked away, out to the smoky haze and the winking lights. In the stillness he heard a peacock cry way off somewhere in the ravines, a shrill wail that echoed weirdly.

“I don’t believe in ‘larger considerations,’” Haydon said.

“I know that.”

“I understand damage control. I don’t understand cover-up.”

Pittner nodded.

“You’re telling me this is going to be different from what usually goes on down here?”

“We’d like to think so.”

That weak-sister phrasing infuriated Haydon, but he kept himself in check. Pittner was, after all, warning him under the guise that he believed that the United States had ever had anything ‘in hand’ in Guatemala in the first place. If Haydon asked too many questions, it wouldn’t be the U.S. State Department he would have to answer to, but one of the Guatemalan army’s many death squads, the beasts behind the darkened windows of ominous vehicles who turned men to cold stone as surely as the face of Medusa.

“I’d like to think so too,” Haydon said, “but I don’t.”

Pittner sat back in his chair. His hair somehow had become less well groomed, and his heavy eyelids had grown heavier from the bourbon. He regarded Haydon with an unenthusiastic thoughtfulness.

“So what do you plan to do?” he asked, the words lolling out of his mouth contumeliously. “Treat Guatemala City as if it were Houston? Carry on a legitimate investigation? That would be intelligent, then we’d have four missing Americans in forty-eight hours instead of three in thirty-six.”

Haydon said nothing for a moment. “I’ve got to get back to my hotel,” he said.

Pittner pondered him with his floating eyelids and then sat up in his chair, his hand bringing his glass to his mouth, his eyes remaining on Haydon as he finished off his drink.

“All right,” he said, taking a deep breath and fishing in his pockets. “I’ll drive you.”

He finally found the keys on a table next to the front door, and they walked out into the smoky night to the car. On the way back to Avenida La Reforma, Pittner said very little. Haydon didn’t know whether it was the bourbon, or the fact that his role had been played and he was reverting to a more real self, or whether he was pissed or simply exhausted. It was clear he hadn’t been getting much sleep. As with all men who found themselves in positions that occasionally called for crisis management, the crisis was running his life now.

He pulled into the gates at the Residencial Reforma and rounded the statue of the naked angel and the naked mortal and stopped his government car in front of the door.

“Thanks for having me,” Haydon said. “And I appreciate the advice.”

Pittner was sitting behind the steering wheel stoop shouldered and rather limp.

“You know where to find me,” he said. “You never know when you might want to reach out and touch someone you disdain.” His grin was not altogether convincing.

CHAPTER 25

H
aydon had managed to avoid looking at his watch the entire time he was with Pittner, but judged correctly that they were not overlong at dinner or in their discussion afterward. It was eight-forty when he let himself into his room.

He had left it dark, and he didn’t bother to turn on the lights now since he could see rather well from the lights filtering through the cypresses on the boulevard. He hung his suit coat in the closet and removed his shoes. Pulling a comfortable armchair over, he propped his feet on the edge of the bed and leaned his head against the soft back of the chair. He had just started to think about his conversation with Pittner when the telephone rang and he grabbed it.

“Do you remember where that
pinche
, Berto, found God?” It was Borrayo.

“Yes.”

“Be there in half an hour. The very same spot.”

“Okay,” Haydon said.

Berto Colones had been a vicious and corpulent officer in the Guardia de Hacienda, the Treasury Police, whom Haydon had gotten to know during his sallies up and down Central America chasing the notorious Colombian. He had agreed to sell Haydon and the DEA information about his superior officer, who was running a lucrative cocaine operation out of an isolated little port in Suchitepéquez called Chicago. Haydon’s fugitive Colombian had been one of the superior’s major suppliers, and the captain was supposed to know how to get in touch with him. It was a complicated operation, and Berto knew the details, which he was willing to tell a DEA agent for certain financial considerations. The agent insisted that Borrayo, who was then still with the Department of Technical Investigations and was working drug cases with the DEA, be at the meeting.

Berto had set up the meeting in the cinder-block hovel of a prostitute he knew in Colonia Santa Isabel, one of the most miserable slums in the city in Zona 3. The site, deep in the ravines of the Rio La Barranca, was in an area he knew well, and he felt secure in using its dark labyrinth of paths and trails as an escape route if it became necessary. Haydon and Berto got there early and hid on a path well up the hillside and watched Borrayo and the DEA agent arrive and make their way down the switchbacks to the prostitute’s hovel. They waited a few minutes to make sure they were not accompanied and then followed them down through the garbage on the slopes and the stench of sewage rising from the bottom of the ravine below. When they got to the hovel, Berto preceded Haydon into the single, dimly lighted room. Haydon paused only a second to scrape the mud from his shoes on a car bumper half hidden in the weeds outside the door.

Suddenly there was a shout, yelling, and then a boom of gunfire, and the hefty Berto came backing out of the door with Borrayo embracing him in a grim dance, Borrayo’s 9mm automatic jammed into Berto’s lardaceous girth, his other arm encircling Berto’s fat neck, the muzzle exploding again and again in muffled whumps, eating into the fat and blowing Berto’s blood all over both of them. At the edge of the path outside the shanty door, Borrayo stopped and released his deadly embrace and fired one last time, blasting Berto over the edge and down into the ravine, his elephantine corpse crashing through the dark underbrush with a smashing commotion that set all the dogs in Santa Isabel barking.

The meeting was over.

The killing was a setback to the investigation, but as Borrayo said later, it had to be. It seemed that the moment Berto had walked through the door, Borrayo had recognized him as the man who had raped his niece three years before. It had been a bad thing. Through a strange set of circumstances, Borrayo had seen the man only moments after the crime but had not known who he was. It was only great good luck, according Borrayo, that Haydon had brought this bastard to his long-overdue destiny.

It was then that Borrayo started helping them with their investigation. Having deprived them of a major lead, he felt obligated to make it up to them.

Remembering this, Haydon had mixed emotions about Borrayo’s choice of rendezvous locations. But he had no alternative. He quickly put on his shoes, grabbed his coat, and went downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs he surprised two of the hotel’s dining room waiters, who, when things slowed down at night, spent a lot of their time lingering at the back of the darkened parlor, watching the American cable channels over the heads of the paying guests. He left his room key with the concierge and walked out into the dimly lighted courtyard to his car.

He unlocked it, got in, and rolled down his window as he put the key in the ignition and started it. Just as he was about to back out from under the dark cypress, someone reached through his window and held the steering wheel.

“Borrayo sent me,” the man said, his breath heavy with tobacco. “Please to let me drive.”

Haydon put the car in neutral and left it running as he slid across to the passenger side. The man opened the door and got in behind the steering wheel. He familiarized himself with the car a moment, adjusted the rearview mirror, put the car in gear, and they were off.

The driver did not talk. He was a Guatemalan a decade or so younger than Haydon, dressed in a sport coat and slacks, his hair richly oiled. By the time they passed the National Theater he was driving the car like it was his own, and occasionally, when he used both hands to make a sharp turn, Haydon caught a glimpse of the butt of a pistol stuck in his waistband. He drove carefully, his calm eyes constantly checking the rearview mirror. Sometimes he darted through a stoplight the second it turned red, and sometimes he careened across traffic, turning left or right from the opposite lane. Several times he doubled back on an opposite avenida, going back the way they had just come. He knew narrow, out-of-the-way streets that ran for blocks and blocks without intersections, and once Haydon was sure he signaled a man with a radio who stood on a dark corner just as they emerged from one of these narrow streets. This was more care than Haydon had anticipated. This was much more than simply being cautious.

The shantytown lay west of the tightly woven streets in the old central city, where scrawny fingers of heavily eroded land jutted out above the Rio La Barranca and fell away into ravines that were steeply terraced with shanties and squatters’ shacks. The river itself was a wandering scabrous wound that ran south below the Cementerio General to Colonia Landivar where the city’s largest garbage dump sprawled in a stinking barren plain that resembled nothing so much as a bad dream of the end of time. To the north, the river ran under one of the city’s most distinctive landmarks. El Incienso, the Incense Bridge, that stretched out across the wide basin of La Barranca on the Anillo Periférico, a west-side expressway that was under perpetual construction and suffered from the schizophrenic burden of most Guatemalan building projects, that of deteriorating almost as fast as it was being constructed.

There was no direct route to the internal environs of Santa Isabel, which was most easily approached by any of a number of dead-end calles and avenidas that halted abruptly at the serrated precipices of the several promontories encrusted with cinder-block buildings. It was through such streets that Haydon rode beside the silent man into the smoky neighborhoods north of the Cementerio General and entered an avenida that he knew would take them straight into a fold of the ravine’s rim below which he remembered the prostitute’s house to be located.

His driver stopped the car several blocks away from the dead end and parked along the street with several other cars. On either side of the street was a seamless stretch of stucco buildings with shuttered windows and darkened and bolted doorways behind which patios and dingy rooms sheltered families who had made themselves as secure as possible in a city of uncertain security.

The two of them got out of the car, locked their doors, and the driver tossed the keys to Haydon. Together they started walking toward the dead end two blocks away, but at the first calle the silent man hissed at Haydon, signaled to him, and they stepped into a darkened doorway. They waited a minute, watching the street, the smell of urine and moldy stucco seeping into their clothes. After a little while the silent man tapped Haydon on the shoulder, and they left the shadows and continued along the sidewalk toward the dead end.

As they walked the length of the next block, Haydon saw the contours of the shacks built on the ravine’s rim where the stucco buildings stopped. The shacks were dark, and the ravine was dark where it fell away. Far off he could see the long strings of weak lights of El Incienso glimmering in the smoky distance. They stayed close to the buildings, the glow from the last streetlamp a block back growing so weak Haydon was practically in the shadows by the time they came to where the sidewalk ended and he had to step down into the rocky street. The buildings on the opposite side of the street extended half a block farther on, and they were almost to the encroaching margin of dried weeds that marked the head of the trails that branched off in zigzagging angles down into the ravine when Haydon again heard the familiar hissing.