Body of Truth (30 page)

The few tables for two were taken when Haydon entered the dining room, and so he chose one of the larger ones, the one most isolated from the other diners. From the cheerful Mateo, Haydon ordered coffee, eggs, toast, and a small bowl of
ensalada tropical
. He was sitting so that he could see into the front parlor and through a window near the small foyer and out into the courtyard. Though unable to distinguish any real detail, he could see the bright morning light on the white marble of the angel and the naked woman who swooned in his arms.

Waiting, his eyes vaguely attending to this scene, Haydon’s thoughts turned to the few options open to him. Cage, Borrayo, Bennett Pittner. These were not appealing possibilities. Even less appealing was the appearance of Janet’s message. He was uneasy about it. If the note was indeed from Lena, it seemed to him unusual that she would be contacting Janet in search of help to extricate herself from her troubles. And Haydon was more than a little worried that his name had been a part of the communication. He couldn’t imagine why he should have entered into it at all. He wondered what Cage would think about such a turn of events. Without a doubt the message was a coveted piece of information, if it was authentic.

Mateo brought Haydon’s breakfast, which Haydon ate without interruption. He had finished his eggs and toast and was eating the small bowl of fruit when a man came through the parlor and into the dining room. He hesitated at one of the marble pillars, quickly surveyed the few people in the dining room, and then headed straight for Haydon. In the moment it took him to walk the short distance, Haydon appraised him: he was in his late thirties, slight of build, not Latin American but dark, good-looking, well-groomed, at ease with himself.

When he reached Haydon’s table he pulled out a chair and quickly sat down, smiling, leaning a little forward and speaking softly, “Pretend that you know me, please, and I will quickly explain. Okay?”

Haydon nodded. “Sure, go ahead.”

The man smiled even more, genuinely this time. “Thank you. It’s very kind of you.” He leaned his forearms on the table. “I am Dr. Bindo Salviati, a friend of Dr. Grajeda’s. You know Dr. Grajeda?”

Haydon nodded again.

“Good.”

Mateo appeared, pleased to have another guest. Salviati quickly ordered coffee to get rid of him.

“I have come to you with a message from Dr. Grajeda. He would like to talk to you.”

“I understand he’s ‘in the country.’”

“Oh, yes. He was.”

“No longer.”

Salviati shook his head. “He would like to meet with you this morn-mg.

“Fine.”

“He is concerned about the meeting being…completely private. You must not be followed.”

“I understand.”

“I am going to give you an address here in the city, okay? I am going to speak it, and you must not write it down.”

The address was in Zona 1, the center of the old city, 18 calle between 6a and 7a avenidas. Haydon knew the street. It was one of the better known in the collection of narrow streets just around the corner from one of the city’s largest markets.

“I understand you are an American detective,” Salviati said. Mateo brought the coffee and poured a fresh cup for Haydon.

“Yes,” Haydon said.

“Then you know how to avoid being followed.”

“I believe so,” Haydon said.

Salviati sipped his coffee and relaxed his smile for the first time. “This is very dangerous for my friend, very dangerous. If the security agents find him they will kill him.”

Haydon was surprised Salviati said this so openly, perhaps he thought it was needed to emphasize how delicately the meeting had to be handled.

“At this address”—and he repeated the address he had already given Haydon—“is a shoe store. It is behind the booths that are along the sidewalk there. Go into the store and go to the back—you don’t have to talk to anyone, just go to the back of the store. There is a door there that will lead out into a courtyard with a stairway. Turn left and go up the stairs to the balcony. A man there will know your name and help you.”

“That’s it?”

Salviati nodded and sipped his coffee.

“Are you the doctor who Grajeda sometimes helps in Huehuetenango?”

“Yes indeed.”

“Can you tell me what this meeting is about?”

“He said you would know.”

“Do you know?”

“Mr. Haydon, I sometimes help Aris, he sometimes helps me. He is a very good doctor. But…he is political. I help him because I am very fond of him, but I am never more than an errand boy. I won’t refuse to do something for him if he asks me, but I am not a political person.”

“It seems to me you take a lot of risk, considering you are not political.”

Salviati shrugged, and this time the smile was his own, not part of the act. “It is almost impossible to be true to your heart in Guatemala without taking a risk.” He glanced around the room. “The risk, you know, only seems to be important when certain people take it. The
indios
are risking their lives every day in the countryside, just to maintain a little human dignity. Nobody seems to notice that. What is it to me to deliver a message? So small a thing.”

“Dr. Grajeda told you that we talked?”

“He did, yes.”

“Just before I left him yesterday morning, in response to my question about how he supported his clinic, he mentioned his awkward relationship with his family. Do you know very much about that?”

“Something.” Salviati hesitated. “I should tell you that Aris and I are boyhood friends. We grew up together. I am Italian, but a third-generation Italian here in Guatemala. My father and grandfather were doctors. I received my medical training in Britain and Aris went to the United States, to Johns Hopkins. Unlike many men who leave Guatemala for their educations and never come back, we vowed to return. So we, as you say, ‘go back a long way.’”

“Then none of this…secrecy, the way things work here, is new to you.”

Salviati closed his eyes wearily and shook his head. “It is a pity to say, but I have grown up with it.” Then he looked at Haydon. “But Aris and I were on the other side of the fence when we were young. Our families were not poor. We saw Guatemala through the hazy lens of the romantic photographer. Over time that changed.”

“What changed it for you?”

“I have asked myself that many times,” Salviati said. He looked at his watch. “It’s nine-thirty. Can you make it there in an hour? This has to be timed very closely. He has to know that you will be there when you say you will. If you need more time because you are not familiar with the city, if you are not sure where you can park—that is a very crowded area—then I can make it later.”

“No, ten-thirty is all right.”

Salviati reached across the table and offered his hand. Haydon shook it, and the doctor said, “I probably will not see you again. Thank you.” He stood quickly before Haydon could say anything else and walked out of the dining room.

Haydon did not look around at the other diners. Salviati had come unobtrusively, visited briefly and quietly, and had left without any show of the goodbyes that often concluded a conversation with a meal. It would be up to Haydon to be equally inconspicuous.

He signed for his meal and walked through the parlor to the concierge at the front desk.

“Are there any automobile-tire stores near here?” he asked. The young man told him of several, gave him directions to them, at which Haydon nodded and then thanked him for the suggestions. He walked outside to the courtyard and looked at his car. He kicked the rear tire for the young man’s benefit and bent down at the rear bumper to survey the treads. He did not see Cage’s beeper anywhere inside the lip of the curving bumper. He went to the front of the car and did the same, his search hidden by a Jeep Wagoneer parked next to him. The beeper was not under the front bumper either, or in the wheel wells. Cage was no fool. He had probably had his people take it off while they were talking the night before. He knew better than to believe Haydon would allow the device to remain in place. Electronic surveillance could be expensive, and Cage wasn’t about to waste a transmitter. Standing and walking out from between the two cars, he turned one more time and looked at the tires. He shook his head and walked back into the hotel.

Returning to his room, Haydon got the keys to his car, went back downstairs, left his room key with the concierge, and in a few moments was leaving through the Residencial’s open gates. He turned right on the Reforma and left at the first opportunity and headed away from downtown until he came to Diagonal 12 where he turned right and immediately right again and pulled up near one of the few American-style convenience stores, just off the street. He parked and went to the pay telephone outside the store.

Janet was working on a caffeine high. No, she hadn’t heard anything, no, she hadn’t talked to Pitt. Haydon told her he would be out of touch for a couple of hours, and then he would call her again. If she heard from anyone, just sit on the message until he called her. To keep her in his camp, to keep her from getting impatient and doing something unpredictable, he told her he thought he had some information that would be significant and that would help them find Lena. She was immediately grateful, willing to help, willing to do anything. He had a couple of hours to think of something. He told her to try to relax, to stay close to the telephone. Then he went back to his car and headed downtown.

CHAPTER 31

S
ix avenida was the only avenue on which one could travel from the south of the city north, directly into the old narrow streets of downtown without having to make a jog over in one direction or another to accommodate a park or a railway station or a public building or a larger major avenue merging on an oblique approach or a church or one of the city’s many monuments. It ran straight as an arrow right down to the National Palace on the Parque Central.

However, in its undeviating course northward, 6a avenida makes one major change in its appearance. At 18 calle, the avenue drops down in size from a boulevard with a median to a narrow, old-world-style street, crowded, slow moving, and choked with the diesel exhausts of buses and cars, hemmed in by sidewalk vendors and pedestrians, and raucous with shouts and horns and gunning engines.

Eighteen calle itself was something of a crossroads. Only a few blocks from the country’s central railroad station and its second largest produce market, it was known for its bazaar atmosphere. In one crowded section running for five or six blocks the street is divided by a median, with two lanes of traffic on one side going east and two lanes of traffic on the other side going west. Between 8a and 6a avenidas, the median was crowded with good-sized trees whose branches arched over the streets, providing a tunnel of welcome shade. The sidewalks were packed tightly with vendors’ booths, stalls made of contrived frames of thin poles over which large cloths were draped leaving only the fronts open from which the vendors displayed and sold their wares. The backs of the booths were turned to the street to ward off the noise and unctuous exhausts of the traffic, making the sidewalks between the front of the booths and the front of the stores a pinched corridor of twilight shade. When the sidewalks became impassable, pedestrians spilled out into the streets, walking along with the traffic behind the booths, adding to the congestion and confusion.

Haydon parked in a side street not far from the railroad station and began his complicated journey toward the address that Dr. Bindo Salviati had given him. He had nearly three-quarters of an hour to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He did not consider the extra precaution excessive. Aside from Cage’s surveillance, it was a certainty that Pittner had put a tail on him too. There was the incident of the Jeep Cherokee, courtesy of the Guatemalan security forces; that is, Azcona. And finally there was Borrayo, the lynx of perpetual scheming. It seemed ludicrous to believe that all of those people were interested enough in what Haydon was doing to put a tail on him, but, on the other hand, it would have been naïve to think otherwise.

From the side street where he had parked, he walked back to 18 calle not far from the railroad station, turned right and began a slow meander up the street. Eighteen calle was the major shopping section for much of Guatemala City’s population who subsisted just above the poverty line. Soldiers and housemaids came here to buy domestic-made products and clothes and shoes made in Taiwan of plastics and synthetic fibers. Of such a distinctive quality were the products sold here, that it was common to say of someone who was wearing cheap or tacky clothes that he had made his purchases in an “18 calle boutique.”

Haydon stopped at every other booth, examined the products, talked to the vendors. He turned in the opposite direction and looked into the store windows, which were glazed with dirt and soot, most containing wares that seemed never to have moved from their shelves to be replaced with newer stock. Back and forth, back and forth, from booths to windows, he moved slowly up the slightly rising street, down the gloomy corridors of commerce with their smells of human sweat mingled with cheap perfume, cooking food, wafts of wood smoke and old garments, whiffs of souring fruit rinds and peels that had been tossed into the gutters to rot in the dry-season heat, and an occasional deposit of feces left behind by dogs or children. In the course of this rambling walk he was careful to note precisely the landmarks and the address where he was supposed to meet Dr. Grajeda. He found it and passed it by, continuing his leisurely movement up the street.

Every time Haydon turned from one side of the sidewalk to the other he scanned the crowds, hoping to notice a face he had noticed before, or a shirt or a dress or the back of any of these. He took particular notice of women. He remembered what Fossler had said about his tail, and he had seen enough of Lita to know that Cage employed an uncanny collection of surveillants. Evasion seemed a hopeless task. The culture was unfamiliar, which meant he could take nothing for granted, dismiss nothing as being unemployable by a surveillance team. He might be able to evade one tail, or one team, but he had to be very good to get away from the several he believed to be following him. For starters, he had to make them identify themselves. He had to narrow the playing field, eliminate as much of the crowd as possible and move into a setting that would make them more conspicuous, easier for him to identify.