Body of Truth (36 page)

He started back in the general direction of the car, imagining the crowd full of the other surveillants, imagining that he had already been picked up and was being followed by half a dozen persons of unknown loyalties. Then he stopped. If he had been “clean” five minutes ago, then he ought to be dean now. If the girl and her
compa
were as good as they seemed to be, and she knew her stuff as well as she seemed to, it was likely that the other surveillants had not stayed in 18 calle after they lost Haydon—with the exception, perhaps, of Cage’s people, who had lost a man there and were probably frantically trying to find him.

He stopped where he was. Damn it, he wasn’t thinking. It would be stupid for him to go back to the car. To get out of the stream of sidewalk traffic, he backed into a
tienda
to think. He would bet his life—in fact might be betting his life—that they were watching his car like buzzards over a carcass. It would be the one sure way of picking him up again. If he had indeed shaken his surveillants, he wanted to stay free of them as long as possible.

Turning in to the
tienda
, he found a less than clean little eatery with three small round and wobbly pedestal tables and four or five metal folding chairs. There were dozens of flies and four Vietnamese watching him from behind a high wooden counter: a ferret-eyed old woman, a slight young man in his twenties, and two women of the same age. Haydon guessed the latter were sisters, one of them perhaps the wife of the young man. The old woman, he decided, belonged to the girls. Haydon stepped to one of the tables, and the old woman’s head zipped along the top of the counter, and she came around to him without ever taking her eyes off of him.

He ordered coffee in Spanish, and she literally jumped to oblige him as her family flew into a flurry of accommodation ludicrously inordinate to the task at hand. Magically, the coffee was suddenly on the unsteady round table, the old woman’s eyes riveted to his to see if she could discern his pleasure or displeasure with what she had placed before him in a small white demitasse cup, no saucer. Haydon thanked her and for several minutes sipped the stout coffee as he watched the morning shade on the sidewalk shrink in the face of the advancing sun.

Turning, he encountered eight Vietnamese eyes, six instantly turned away, and the head of the ferret-eyed old woman again zipped down the length of the wooden counter and was instantly at the edge of his table.

Haydon asked for another cup of coffee, and when she returned with it he asked her if this shop belonged to her family. Yes, yes, to her son and her daughter-in-law and her daughter-in-law’s sister. Haydon asked if they had been in Guatemala long. Only eight years. The oriental perspective. They lived in Flores for a while, she said, chewing something haphazardly with fewer teeth than she once had had, but they were starving there so they went to Puerto Barrios. That was a goddamned bad town, she said, proving how well she had learned Spanish in eight years. Her daughter-in-law’s sister got raped there. Her son got malaria. Her daughter-in-law had a miscarriage. It was hot there, hotter than Kuantan—that was in Malaya. Also a bad place. But Puerto Barrios was goddamned bad, and everybody there was a bandit. And there were diseases. She herself got hookworms. Once the guerrillas took over the entire neighborhood where they lived, and they had to feed the men for four days. And they didn’t get any pay for it; all they got was not to be killed. They used up all their food and then the guerrillas just left. Just like the Vietcong. She hadn’t seen any peace since she was a girl on a rubber plantation in the old French occupation. She didn’t know what they would do. If this little
tienda
didn’t make it, she was going to cut her throat and let the young ones worry about it. She was goddamned tired of worrying about it.

Haydon guessed the old woman had her share of opinions about most things and that she pretty well decided what the group of them did. Haydon said that he was an American. Yeah, yeah, she said. She knew that. What was her son’s name, he asked. Phan. His father’s name was Phan; and his grandfather’s too. Could Phan drive, Haydon asked. The old woman looked at him, suddenly suspicious. Haydon gave her a bogus story that seemed to satisfy her. If Phan would drive his car to the hotel for him, Haydon would pay him and pay for his taxi ride back into Zona 1 from the hotel. All he had to do was park the car in the parking lot of the Residencial Reforma and give the keys to the concierge.

How much, the old woman asked, her eyes sliding away from him. Twenty dollars. American? Of course. The old woman brightened and broke into a gap-toothed grin. She would pull the car to his hotel with a rope for that kind of money, she said. Or the girls would, she added with a raspy laugh.

Good. Could Phan go now? The old woman called her son to the front and everything was explained to him. Phan listened politely, said he knew where the Residencial Reforma was. The old woman snapped something to him in Vietnamese, and the young man lowered his eyes and nodded, and then she seemed to scold him for something and he continued nodding and blinking.

Having settled the arrangement, Haydon gave Phan the twenty dollars, which the old woman immediately retrieved and then disappeared behind a curtain to a back room. The two girls came out from behind the high counter, looking worried as Phan seemed to explain to them his mission. One of the girls was pregnant, and she and Phan had a brief exchange of curt phrases during which she darted her eyes reproachfully at Haydon. Phan placated her concern with touches and soft words, which quieted her but in no way erased the anxiety from her face or that of her birdlike sister. Wearing expressions of almost frantic apprehension, the wife and sister were the epitome of concerned women who knew very well that the only thing that stood between them and destitution was this thin young man who was now about to walk away with a stranger to some sure folly of which they had only an instinctive fear. Phan seemed genuinely pained by the protests, but at the same time all too familiar with them, unhurriedly calming the women as though he were clucking to frightened geese. His eyes did not make contact with Haydon’s as he abruptly turned away, and they walked outside into the bright morning light.

When they were only a block from the little
tienda
, Haydon thanked the young man and gave him the car keys and another five dollars, having noticed that the old woman hadn’t given him any cab fare back downtown. He seemed like a mild person, a quiet man whose nature was ill suited for the hard life he must have lived in the past eight years, and probably for many years before that, if his mother was to be believed. He bore the becalmed demeanor of a man who had learned to live with being the last hope of three distressed women.

It was Haydon’s good fortune that Phan moved slowly. His relaxed saunter made it easier for Haydon to keep Phan in sight and also gave him more time to watch for the others whom he knew would be waiting for him.

A couple of blocks from the car, Phan surprised Haydon by suddenly turning in to a side street. Haydon felt a momentary chill until he reminded himself that selecting Phan had been a random occurrence and the Vietnamese couldn’t possibly be in the pay of anyone but Haydon himself. He followed Phan half a block into the side street until the young man entered a small shop. Haydon crossed to the opposite side and read the name:
LIBROS DINH
. A Vietnamese bookstore. The only one, surely, in Guatemala, if not in all of Central America.

Haydon stepped into a bakery, bought a wedge of cinnamon bread, and watched the bookstore. The most telling moment would be when Phan got into the car and drove away. It would be then that the people watching his car would have to make some quick decisions. More than likely they would follow the car. And how would they do it without giving themselves away to competing surveillants? It had the makings of a Keystone Kops skit. If Haydon were in the right position, he should be able to benefit from the spate of activity.

Phan surprised Haydon again. He emerged from the bookstore smoking a cigarette and in the company of a young Asian woman. They were smiling and talking, and Phan was slightly more animated than he had been before, using the cigarette to give himself a more self-assured and worldly manner. The young woman was rather dainty and once or twice touched Phan’s arm when she spoke to him. It was a mutual flirtation.

Haydon followed them back to the main street where Phan dutifully headed for Haydon’s car once again. Haydon followed them from the opposite side of the street, watching them through the throngs of people and over the tops of the bumper-to-bumper traffic, through the boiling haze of diesel fumes.

Phan and the girl made their way down the block. Haydon had parked on a busy section of the street with a pharmacy and photocopying store nearby. The signs of all the stores hanging over the sidewalks added to the crowded, bazaarlike atmosphere, and now five or six young men wanting to buy American dollars at an inflated exchange rate were openly and aggressively hawking their illegal bargains on the sidewalk, yelling out their rates to the bumper-to-bumper vehicles, sometimes stepping out into the street to shout into the windows of cars stalled in traffic. This sideshow ambience circulated around Haydon’s car itself and was entirely ignored by Phan and the young woman.

Phan opened the passenger door with the key Haydon had given him and helped the young woman into the car, which was something of a tight squeeze because of the high sidewalks at that point in the street. After he got her inside, Phan went around the front of the car, pushed his way past a yelling money changer who was standing between the bumpers of the cars waving a fistful of quetzals. The girl leaned across and opened the door for him from the inside, and, pausing for a bus belching clouds of oily diesel smoke to pass, Phan swung open the door and quickly got in.

Haydon wondered what Phan had told the girl he was doing. He wondered what they were saying now and wondered if he was witnessing the stolen moments and tender pleasures of a man who had lived too few of them, fewer than most men were allowed by whatever or whomever it was that allocated such things in any man’s life. He wondered what Phan was feeling.

The explosion was stunning.

The initial force of its shock killed everyone within twenty meters of the car who did not have the quirky luck to be protected from the direct blast, and knocked down people half a block away. The ball of fire that rolled up from Haydon’s car engulfed the front of the closest stores and set afire people who had managed to survive the blast itself.

In the chaos of the aftermath, images of individual suffering remained with Haydon as though he had possessed them always, as though he had been born with the memory of them already planted in his psyche: the two teenaged girls standing next to him who had been knocked down by the ragged left half of one of the young money changers, the folded multicolored quetzals still in his fingers; the little street urchin draped over the horizontal arm of an old-fashioned street-lamp half a block away, one leg thrown backward over his head like a marionette’s; the old woman who sold fruit slices from a two-wheeled cart, and whose small white skull had been completely and surgically skinned in an instant by the flying glass; the Indian child whose charred and flaming little body, arms and legs straight out, had cartwheeled and bounced across the hoods of cars like a macabre carnival effigy.

Even before the heat from the blast had begun to fade from his face like the passing of a foul, hot breath, it occurred to Haydon that Phan’s sad little
amourette
would now remain a secret, the first bit of luck that the young man had had, perhaps, in all of his short, drab life.

CHAPTER 36

H
aydon’s instinct for survival took advantage of the chaos. If anyone had spotted him in his approach, they were surely distracted by the explosion and its Dantesque aftermath. Amid the screams and flames and horns and sirens and shoving, panicked crowds surging away from—and then back toward—the inferno and horror, Haydon had made his way eastward through the narrow streets filled with streams of wide-eyed, confused men and women going toward the explosion, drawn toward the catastrophe by that inner magnet in human nature that lures the curious individual to the very bosom of calamity.

He stopped once, briefly, to vomit into the gutter and then moved on. It wasn’t only the slaughter that made him weak-kneed. He could no longer believe himself to be an outsider to this endemic violence, no matter how he tried to view it or rationalize it. He had become an integral part of it, of this particular series of violent events, and if he suddenly were to cease to exist, he was sure it would be diminished in some proportional degree by his absence. The hell of Guatemala’s violence stuck to you like napalm if you were foolish enough to let yourself be caught in the path of its fire. And he had done exactly that, with a degree of naïveté that was astonishing.

He thought of Fossler. If he was in fact dead, Haydon was certain he knew how Fossler had felt in his last moments. Both of them were veteran investigators, but it hadn’t helped them avoid the surprise of being caught up in Guatemala’s easy brutality. They were used to violence being in opposition to society, not in step with it. Here the lack of civil order provided no deterrent to spontaneous savagery. Haydon cursed his stupidity and cursed the nausea that came with having needlessly caused another person’s death.

Turning to look back the way he had come, he saw a huge dark plume of smoke rolling up over the tops of the buildings. Sirens whined in the narrow, clogged streets. He turned away and continued on, the only person within blocks going in the opposite direction from the explosion.

Haydon started looking for a telephone. In the next block he spotted a parking lot with a little wooden shack for a ticket office at its entrance. He hurried to the office and found an old man listening to an evangelistic radio program. He held up a one dollar bill and asked if he could use the telephone. The old man snatched the bill, unhooked the telephone from the wall and handed the receiver to Haydon. “
¿Qué número?
” he asked, putting his finger up to whirl the circular dial. Haydon gave him the number of the American embassy.