Body of Truth (45 page)

She pushed open the door and came into the shadowy room where Haydon was waiting. Pausing, she closed the door behind her with one arm.

“What’s the matter?” Haydon asked.

“Mirtha’s husband drives a taxi,” Janet said, her voice wooden. She came forward and stood in front of Haydon and folded her arms. “They live in Colonia La Reformita, Zona 12. Every evening at this time he comes and picks her up. Today, when he went by their house to check with the kids as he does routinely every afternoon to make sure they’ve gotten home from school all right, there were men at his house. Three men and a woman…a
gringa
. They were inside.” Janet swallowed. “It was obviously Lena. She knew who he was, who Mirtha was, their routine. She wanted him to tell his wife to give me a message when he picked her up tonight. They made him repeat it several times. She just did that.”

Haydon supposed the fate of the little girl and her mother had been a painful lesson to the guerrillas. This was a good solution, a smart one. This time the message would be delivered by someone who would not raise the suspicion of any stakeout.

“She wants us to meet her tomorrow night—‘where I wanted to buy the amber candles’ was what she said. She said this was the last chance. Be careful. She said, ‘There is a
queez-ling
.’ That’s the way Mirtha pronounced it,
queez-ling
.” Janet was puzzled.

Haydon was stumped for a moment, too, but only for a moment. “Quisling,” he said. “A traitor.”

“A traitor?”

“What about ‘where I wanted to buy the amber candles’?”

“That’s Cobán, a town up in Alta Verapaz. I remember that. Lena and I went there for a weekend one time and she found some huge amber candles there. They were for the altar of the church, I mean, that’s what they were made for, altar candles. But she saw them, fell in love with them, wanted to buy them.” She shrugged. “But the little store, the woman there had just made them for the priest and they were only hanging there until the priest came for them. Lena went on and on about them, they were huge…amber candles.”

Haydon knew what was happening. “Why didn’t she just say ‘Cobán’?” he asked, wondering if Janet was going to see what Lena was getting at. “And why didn’t she simply say ‘traitor’ instead of ‘Quisling,’ a word she must have had to teach Mirtha’s husband to say?”

Janet simply stared at him and shook her head. Even in the night shadows he could see the puzzlement in her face.

“She didn’t want the messenger to understand the message,” he said. “Others besides Borrayo knew we were going to be at the cemetery. Maybe they also found out by other means than that used by Borrayo.”

Janet’s face did not change expression, she simply began shaking her head. “I don’t believe that…”

“You can’t blame her for being tempted,” Haydon said. “Maybe she didn’t even have a choice. She has a family to worry about. She obviously was frightened by Lena’s visit to her house, her husband finding these people waiting there with their children when he came in. Who knows what kind of pressures were put on her to inform on you.”

Janet turned away from him and walked to the windows and looked out to the courtyard. “I feel like a fool,” she said. “Like a child. All this going on around me, and I blithely blundered on.”

Haydon wasn’t going to tell her who he thought Mirtha was informing for. He wasn’t going to tell her that in his estimation Bennett Pittner had known everything that had gone on in Janet’s house ever since he had moved out, and probably long before, too, which in all likelihood is how he knew about Janet’s affair with Cage in the first place.

“What are we going to do?” she said. Janet sounded like a woman who had just had the wind knocked out of her. Perhaps she understood far more than Haydon believed, far more than Haydon could even know.

“If it worked,” Haydon said, walking over to the bed and sitting down near her, “then we have a head start.”

“To Cobán.”

“That’s right.”

“But we’ll be followed.”

“That’s right. But if we can lose them this time, if we do it right, we could make this last chance work.”

“You know some magic tricks?” she asked.

“No magic,” he said. “Just tricks.”

CHAPTER 44

T
hey drove to the nearby Zona Viva where the best restaurants in the city were scattered among high-dollar hotels and expensive shops and exclusive boutiques. They went to a Chinese restaurant, one wing of which was a huge renovated junk nestled into a stand of coconut palms and illuminated by emerald landscaping lights. The parking lot was full.

Haydon asked to be seated in the dining room with the largest windows, but at a table well away from them. They ordered drinks and appetizers, and while Janet watched the parking lot and the only entrance to the restaurant, Haydon went to the small anteroom outside the rest rooms. He took a notepad from the shelves underneath the telephones, wrote
DESCOMPUESTO
on a sheet of paper and wedged it into the frame of the telephone next to the one he was going to use.

He made several calls to Belize City before he reached the party he was seeking. He made inquiries, checked data, received confirmations, double-checked data, and hung up. His next series of calls were local. Again he had to make several calls before he reached the party he wanted. This conversation was briefer than the one to Belize City, but it required some explication. When he was satisfied, he hung up and looked at his watch. The calls had taken seventeen minutes in all. He made one more, but no one answered. He wouldn’t call Pittner again. He took the sign off the neighboring telephone and walked back into the dining room.

“I was beginning to wonder,” Janet said as he sat down.

“What’s happened?” he asked, immediately filling his small plate with a variety of the appetizers. He was suddenly ravenous.

“I’ve seen only the one van,” she said, nodding toward the parking lot. “The dark one straight across from the Rover. It came in while you were walking back to the phones. No one’s gotten out or anything. It’s just been sitting there.”

“Who are the new diners since we’ve come in?” His gin was watery, sitting with the ice melting the whole time he was away.

“The young American-looking couple by the bar; the four tourists near the window; the Guatemalan man and Anglo woman just to my left, behind me; and the two Guatemalan businessmen over here,” she said, picking up her glass and raising her index finger to her right.

As a safety precaution they weren’t talking in the Land-Rover, so Haydon had to tell her the little he wanted her to know about what would happen next before they left the restaurant.

“I’ve decided not to go by the Residencial Reforma for the rest of my things,” he said. “It will only raise questions, make it look like we’re about to do something different, that there’s a plan underway. It’s best if they think we’re waiting for instructions.”

He paused for a few bites of shrimp and to review his own mental checklist. He didn’t want to tell her even a syllable too much. She needed to know only enough for her to function within the plan. Besides, there was still so much flexibility he himself couldn’t predict much more than generalities at this point.

“When you go out of town,” Haydon asked, “does Mirtha still come and open the house every day?”

“Yes, she does. But there’s not much to do. I just want someone there every day, routinely.”

“Okay, before we leave here I want you to call her and tell her you’re leaving for a couple of days and that you’ll probably leave before she arrives in the morning. Will she ask you where you’re going?”

“Maybe. I usually tell her.”

“Okay, just do whatever seems natural, but tell her you’re going to Panajachel.”

“If I want to make sure ‘they’ get the message, why don’t I just call her from home?” Janet asked. “If the phones are tapped like you think, they’ll pick it up.”

“But that’s not what you’d do if you suspected the phones were tapped and you didn’t want them to know, is it?” Haydon ate another shrimp stuffed with crabmeat. “Don’t worry. She’ll pass it on.”

They finished the appetizers and their drinks, and then, just before they left, he told Janet to make her call to Mirtha.

When she got up to go, he said, “I think I’ll walk back there with you.”

She gave him a strange look. “Sure, okay,” she said.

The call was brief, and they returned to their table and paid and walked out into the smoky greenish glow, the hopeless result of landscape design in a city rapidly sinking under waves of impoverished immigrants. They got into the Land-Rover and made their way back to Janet’s house, Haydon watching the progress of the dark van, which behaved as though the driver knew there was no urgency to their progress.

As they rounded the last corner on the approach to Janet’s house, they saw a car parked in front of the wrought-iron gates. Taylor Cage was leaning against the fender.

Janet said nothing, but in the amber glow coming off the dials on her dash Haydon could see the flat expression of a woman steeling herself for what she clearly expected to be a stressful encounter. She pushed the remote control on the gates, and when they opened, pulled into the driveway of the walled courtyard.

Haydon got out of the Land-Rover carrying the flight bag and walked around the rear of the vehicle to where Cage was coming up the drive like a determined water buffalo. He was carrying a large manila folder, slapping it against his leg impatiently.

“Long time no see,” he said to Haydon. He was wearing what must be his suit of business nowadays in the Central American heat, dress pants and a white guayabera, the tail out, doing a poor job of hiding his sidearm.

“I doubt that.”

Cage snorted and turned to Janet, who was approaching, digging in her purse for the security-system key. She stopped. “Hello, Cage,” she said.

Cage grinned at her and nodded. “Janet.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Time to parlay.” Cage slapped the envelope against his leg again.

Janet turned on him. “Parlay?” There was venom in her voice. It struck Haydon as she spoke that he didn’t know anything about their relationship after their affair. Neither of them had ever mentioned it, an omission that suddenly alerted him.

“Janet, if you can just hold off on the bitch thing for right now I think we’d all get more out of this,” Cage said. “Okay?”

She turned away and went to the courtyard gate and unlocked it, then went into the breezeway and turned off the alarm system.

“I appreciate your getting back to me,” Haydon said, letting Janet go ahead without them.

“I don’t understand why you’re not deader than shit,” Cage said, looking at Haydon.

“I could have used a little help,” Haydon said. “I thought that was the idea, that you were going to give me a little help.”

Cage held up the envelope. “Come on, let’s go in. I’ve got something for you now.”

When they got inside, Janet had already gone through to the kitchen, and they could hear her putting away the food that Mirtha had laid out for her and Haydon and that they had not eaten. There was as much nervous energy in what she was doing as practicality. Cage and Haydon stopped in the living room, and Cage walked over to the French doors and looked out into the courtyard. He took his time examining the view, slapped the envelope against his leg, and walked over to the parrot, who was busy eating cashew nuts. He stopped and stared at the bird, which ignored him, said, “Goddamned bird. I hate this bird,” and then, still looking around the room, wandered over to the liquor caddy, tossed the envelope on the sofa and helped himself to a clean glass and a couple of generous splashes of Bennett Pittner’s favorite bourbon. “Some of this?” he asked Haydon, holding up the bottle.

Haydon shook his head. He guessed it had been a while since Cage had been here.

“Make yourself at home, Taylor,” Janet said, walking into the room. “What do you want?”

Cage sat down on the sofa next to the liquor caddy while Janet went over to one of the armchairs with its back to the courtyard, sat down, and crossed her legs. Haydon remained standing, though he had set the flight bag down beside a leather upholstered chair near the living room entrance.

Cage ignored Janet and directed his attention to Haydon.

“I suspect you met with the guerrillas this morning during that 18 calle fiasco, didn’t you,” he said straight out.

“Why do you think so?”

“Because my people found our man with his throat cut about an hour after the car bomb,” Cage said. “The guerrillas always cut their throats because the stupid shits are so
guerrilla
oriented.” He shook his head at the idea, as if there were less flamboyant, less juvenile ways to kill. “Them being in the city, though. That’s new. The urban cells have been squashed quite a long time, but now here they are wheeling free on 18 calle. That’s something new.” He sat on the sofa like a minotaur, chesty with powerful shoulders and narrow hips.

“The General thinks it’s the guerrillas helping her,” he said. “And he’s unleashing his bad boys. The bombing. He’s yelling,
los guerrios
are turning our peace into war again. He’s got the police scrambling, practically declaring a state of siege. There’ll be articles about it in tomorrow’s papers, about how the General is going to come down hard on this new resurgence of
terrorismo
, on the ‘foreign subversives.’”

“Are you telling me to be careful?” Haydon asked. “You think I don’t know who really put the bomb in the car?”

“Yeah, by God, I think you don’t know, really, who put the bomb in the car. That’s exactly what I think.”

“Why?”

Cage slugged down a mouthful of bourbon, finishing the drink in short order and setting the glass on the edge of the liquor caddy.

“After you left me last night,” Cage said, “I pulled out all the stops to find your friend Fossler. I did it the way you do here in Guatemala. The hospitals first, then the morgues. I started with my people in the western highlands, because that was the direction Baine and Lena were heading, and I guessed that was where Lena went after she left Baine. I thought maybe Fossler had gone after her.”