Body of Truth (25 page)

“Ssssss—sssssst!”

Haydon looked toward the shell of the last building opposite, its gutted windows and doorways allowing imperfect glimpses of its crumbling interior. Borrayo stood at the corner, half in the darkness, half in the poor light. When he knew that Haydon had seen him, he did not move but simply waited for Haydon and the silent man to finish crossing the street.

“
Buenas
,” Borrayo said in a low voice. They shook hands, and Haydon saw the dark panel truck tucked between the stone wall of the building and the undergrowth behind the first shacks. The silent man disappeared into the darkness.

“I’ve got someone for you to talk with,” Borrayo said. His face was sober. “In there,” and he jerked his head toward the truck.

“What about the
orejas
?”

“Oh, well one of them got a last-minute transfer to another sector. Another one had to go to the infirmary. The last one, he is in there too.”

Haydon looked at him. Whatever the hell that meant. Neither of them mentioned the silent man nor the fact that the meeting was not taking place in the ravines as Borrayo had specified.

“Listen, Haydon,” Borrayo said, backing farther into the shadows, Haydon following. They were at the back bumper of the truck now. He was wearing his sidearm, and Haydon could hear the leather creaking as he shifted his weight. “You have maybe only half an hour, and then I am going to drive off with this
maricón
.”

Haydon nodded.

“Okay,” Borrayo said, and he stepped to the back of the panel truck, unlocked it, and pulled open the door.

In the low-wattage glow of the van’s small ceiling light, Haydon saw John Baine lying on his stomach on the ribbed metal floor, his hands secured behind him, his legs tied together, his mouth taped shut, his eyes taped closed. Another man sat across from him, the
oreja
, a thin-as-a-string young man with a beautiful face and shabby, ill-fitting clothes who looked at Haydon with wary eyes as though he were trying to see in Haydon’s face some hint of what was going to happen to him here.

“Get him over here,” Borrayo said to the young man, who immediately grabbed Baine’s arms and dragged him to the van door. He and Borrayo swung Baine around so that he sat at the back of the van, his legs hanging outside.

Borrayo got close to Baine’s face. “I am going to remove the tape,” Borrayo said in a low voice. “Do not yell.
¿Comprendes?
”

Baine nodded reluctantly.

“I will goddamn kill you,” Borrayo said.

Baine nodded more vigorously.

“Okay,” Borrayo said, satisfied. He tore off the tape from around Baine’s mouth and neck with a ripping sound that made Haydon wince, and then did the same with the tape over Baine’s eyes. Baine cocked his head sideways and looked up at Borrayo and Haydon, who were standing in front of him. His lips and eyes were puffy from beatings. His sandy hair was matted and stuck out all over his head, and his filthy clothes reeked of soured urine.

“It’s not important for you to know my name,” Haydon said. Baine jerked up his sagging head at the sound of an obviously American voice and looked in Haydon’s direction, squinting even in the pale light of the alley. He must have had his eyes taped a long time. Haydon added, “But it’s absolutely essential that you cooperate with me if you want any help out of this mess.”

“Oh!” Pause. “Son-of-a-bitch! Oh, son-of-a-…” He wilted. “Oh, God. I thought I was dea—I thought they were taking me out to shoot me. What’re…what…you an American? Huh? Man, get me out of this. Oh, shit, I’m not believing this. You from the embassy, or what?”

Baine was overwrought, his nerves strung way out to the thin ends of themselves. The kid had been through a very bad time. What he didn’t know, mercifully, was that there was going to be more of it before it was over.

CHAPTER 26

“Y
ou want a cigarette?” Haydon asked, going into his pocket for the pack of Pall Malls.

Baine nodded. Haydon looked at Borrayo, who leaned over and un-cuffed Baine’s hands as Haydon lighted the cigarette and then handed it to Baine. He gave one to Borrayo, too, and lighted another for himself.

“I’m not from the embassy,” Haydon said. “They don’t know you’ve been arrested yet, but it won’t be long before they do.”

Baine sucked on the cigarette, which he held with a badly trembling right hand while his left elbow was tucked into his stomach in an apparent effort to alleviate an abdominal pain. His shoulders were hunched as if he were trying to hold himself together.

“When the people from the Consular Section come to interview you,” Haydon said, “do not tell them about this interview. People risked their lives for this. They may be able to help you some more, but you’ve got to be savvy about it, know when you’re doing yourself a favor by keeping your mouth shut.”

Haydon paused a moment to let that soak into Baine’s hammered brain. The young man was looking at him, but Haydon couldn’t tell from his expression what was on his mind. Except that he was scared. Baine sucked on the cigarette. His mouth was so misshapen that even putting the cigarette to his lips looked painful.

“You didn’t kill her, I guess,” Haydon said.

Baine shook his head wearily. “Nooo, maaan. Jesus H. Christ! I didn’t even know she was dead till they…the, shit, the G-2 picked me up last night in Masagua.” He groaned, but Haydon couldn’t tell if it had to do with pain or frustration or fear. “Kill her! Shit, man! This is bizarre! I didn’t
kill
her!” Baine looked frantically at Borrayo and then back to Haydon. “No way!”

“Okay, look,” Haydon said. ‘“Just tell me what happened after you left Guatemala City with her. Just go through it.”

Baine hung his head, tired, confused. He raised his hand.

“First. First, where’d they find her?”

“The police report said she was killed around Yajaucú, by the guerrillas.”

Baine looked up, frowning. “When?”

“It must have been Saturday night sometime.”

“Those sons of bitches,” Baine grunted. “That’s such bullshit.”

“Who? What’s bullshit?”

“The damn National Police. Guerrillas.”

“You don’t think it was guerrillas?”

Baine started to say something and then checked himself. “I just don’t ever believe the police, that’s all. It’s a rule of thumb…” He shook his head.

“I need to know what happened,” Haydon insisted.

Baine nodded, seeming to call on some inner reserve of strength. Even in these threatening circumstances, he was still showing considerable backbone.

“I asked her to go to Lake Atitlán with me for a couple of days,” Baine began. “That was it.” He shrugged. “I’ve asked her to travel with me several times, but she doesn’t go that often. I was looking forward to it. We left about noon. It’s an easy half-day drive to Atitlán, but she wanted to stop by Antigua first, to run up to Santa Maria de Jesus. You know, that little Indian village up on the side of the Agua volcano. I didn’t much want to go. It’s hot as hell up there, the dry season’s burned everything up, the road’s rough and powders. Oust just fogs up. But she really wanted to go, so we took off. When we got up there, she said she wanted to see some people she knows, Indians. She knows a lot of Indians everywhere. I didn’t want to sit in one of those damned cinder-block ovens, so I hung around in the square. Got over in the shade of a building and watched the people. Ate some limes. She was gone a long time, longer than she said…longer than she said she’d be. By the time she got back and we got down off the mountain, it was getting on into the afternoon.”

Baine dropped the butt of his cigarette between his feet in the dirt. “Could I have another one?”

Haydon gave it to him, and he and Borrayo lighted another as well.

“Right off, there was a disagreement. She wanted to go the lower route. I didn’t, even though it’s a little shorter. The army had just killed a bunch of people down in there—‘guerrillas.’ I didn’t need that, not the damned army. That didn’t seem to bother her in the least. But it was my car. We went my way, the high road, you know, Tecpán, Zaculeu, Los Encuentros, down to Sololá. In Sololá, Lena wanted to stop again. Same story, to visit some people. By this time it was getting dark, and I didn’t want to do it. But she insisted. You know Sololá? Well, it’s no place to be after dark. We negotiated these tiny cobblestone streets, her telling me where to turn. We finally found the place. She went in, and I waited in the car. She was gone about half an hour, and when she got back we headed down to Panajachel.”

Baine stopped to smoke. Haydon looked at Borrayo, who was frowning, a little preoccupied, Haydon thought. He glanced at the young prisoner who was squatting on the floor of the truck and staring at Haydon with the look of a frightened animal. He didn’t know what the hell was going on. His back was against the van’s ribbed wall, and without a doubt he was nervous, looking like he was calculating his odds of bolting past Baine out the open door and over the cliff.

“We got to Panajachel about seven o’clock. I had reservations so…”

“You
did
have reservations?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Sol Atitlán.”

“And you stayed there?”

“Yeah. Why? What’s the matter?”

“Go ahead,” Haydon said.

Baine gave him a look and then went on. “We checked in. You know that place?” Haydon nodded, but Baine went on anyway. “Little bungalows about seventy-five, a hundred meters from the beach. Very nice in a kind of laid-back way. We checked in, threw our things in the bungalow, and headed for the bars. Atitlán was in good form. These neo-hippie kids all over the place as usual, the British and French and Germans—always a lot of German kids—and American kids from places like Boise and Long Beach and Houston and Raleigh. Everybody sunburned and looking like they hadn’t washed their hair in a week and had been running around naked, which they had.

“We had a good time, talking to these ‘
jipis
,’ hanging out. The bars at night, the beach in the day. Everything was going fine.”

He paused for the cigarette again, and somebody came up out of the ravine, three people, talking, not even seeing them, going on down the street. Haydon moved farther into the shadow, and Baine lowered his voice.

“Next morning we got up fairly early—to be the first on the beach. Lena’s like that—she’s one of those people who doesn’t need much sleep. We laid out our towels, stripped naked, and stretched out, letting the sun warm us as it came up.” He shook his head, remembering it. “It was great. We dozed off and on, the beach got busier. We talked to a few people. About ten-thirty Lena got up, brushed off the sand, and said she was going up to the bungalow to get more suntan lotion. She slipped on this long shirt thing she wears—pulls it up over her breasts like a housedress or something—held it in the back so it wouldn’t fall down, and took off. That,” he said, taking another hit on the cigarette, “was the last time I saw her.”

“Go on,” Haydon said. Baine was taking too much time.

Baine nodded. “I laid there. After a while I wondered about her, but I dozed off. When I woke up and saw she was still gone, I got my watch out of my pants I was using for a pillow and saw she’d been gone forty-five minutes. I got my things together, and hers too—she’d left everything there—and walked up to the bungalow. She wasn’t there. I thought maybe she’d run up to the store—there’s a little
tienda
at the top of the…and I went on up there to look for her. But she wasn’t at the store. I looked in a couple of bars nearby, nothing. Nobody had seen her. I went back to the bungalow and sat down with a beer to think about it. It was getting late by now. I finished the beer and walked back up to town and started around to all the bars. I went to all the places we’d been the night before and even to places we hadn’t been. Nothing. Nobody had seen her. To tell you the truth, I got a little scared at this point. My imagination was really cooking now—what if this, what if that. At that point I walked back to the bungalow, trying to decide what next. When I got there the door was open. I’d locked it. I’m sure I’d locked it. Anyway, somebody had been there and all her things were gone.”

Baine again dropped his cigarette butt between his feet, and he shook his head when offered another.

“Then I put two and two together. Or thought I had. The night before, we were at this bar, Popol. There was this good-looking German guy there, and he and Lena were flirting. She did that when she drank a lot. Very reserved…and then when she drank, her juices started squirting all over the place. I remembered that I hadn’t seen him anywhere in any of the clubs I’d been to that night and immediately I knew she’d probably taken off with him. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure of it, and the madder I got. She had a key; she’d probably come back and gotten her clothes. I stayed the night, checked out in the morning, and drove back.”

“You came back to Guatemala City?”

“Right.”

“You didn’t check with Janet Pittner to see if Lena had gotten back all right?”

“No, hell no. I wasn’t going to go back after I thought she’d done that to me.”

Baine started to stand up, but Borrayo shoved him back down, hard, so that Baine grunted sharply at the pain, held himself, gasping. The young prisoner, still squatting, shifted his weight and eyed Borrayo nervously.

“Was she in the habit of doing something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Baine grunted, his eyes avoiding Borrayo. “I just thought that’s what she’d done, that’s all. She could be pretty cold the way she used her sex.”

“What do you mean ‘used her sex’? I was under the impression she didn’t date all that much?”

Baine looked at Haydon. “Who you been talking to?” he grunted again. “Lena was a big lay, for Christ’s sake. You don’t know that? Hey, sit around with embassy guys a while, the guys in the AID programs, wherever, you’ll hear something about Lena. I mean, the doormen didn’t get her, but she was had.”

Haydon felt like an ass.

“But, listen,” Baine said, “she was wicked about it. It wasn’t for nothing. If you had something she wanted, she’d trade you. She wasn’t easy. You had to qualify. Some of the guys at the embassy went out of their way to qualify. There was gossip about security breaches and all that.”