Body of Truth (46 page)

He got up with the envelope and walked over to a chair not far from Janet and flipped on the lamp beside it. “Sit down,” he said. Haydon did, and Cage gave him the envelope.

They were morgue shots, the kind of cheap theatrical photographs that morgue shots in color tend to be, like the promotional still photographs they used to put up along with the posters outside movie theaters when Technicolor was just coming into its own. Jim Fossler looked his worst, his lean naked body gaunt in death, the bruises painfully purple to a fault, the dried blood still with tinges of maroon, the burned away eyes not so terribly disgusting as one might imagine. But there were other wounds that boggled the mind.

Haydon went through all of the pictures, there were nine, and then he put them back in the envelope. Cage had walked back to the liquor caddy and had sloshed out some more whiskey.

“Those were taken in Chajul, El Quiché. That’s where the guerrillas caught up with him,” he said, turning around, putting one hand into his trousers, the other holding the drink as though he were at a cocktail party. “The same people you chummed up with this morning. That’s who did Fossler.” He looked at Haydon. “Dr. Aris Grajeda,” he said. “He’s disappeared. That who you went to see?”

Haydon felt like he was in some kind of creep show in which every episode, every new scene was just a little more grotesque than the previous one. The photographs of Jim Fossler seemed beyond the pale of decency. Cage carrying them around with ghoulish unconcern, slapping them against his leg in good-humored indifference.

“Grajeda is a sly one,” Cage continued. “A little rich fart who’s playing at this business of ‘internal struggle.’ By God, if I had a dollar for every one of those damned ideologues I’ve come across in all my years down here I could retire in Geneva tomorrow. And Grajeda’s the worst kind. He dabbles at it.” He gestured at the photographs with his glass as he paced back toward the French doors. “This kind of shit is what comes of it. Him and his bunch have taken Lena in because she is the best thing that’s happened to their pissy little struggle in the thirty years it’s been going on. She’s being used and she hasn’t got the foggiest idea of what the hell she’s into. She’s going to come through with this ‘documentation’ on Azcona, and the guerrillas are going to get publicity mileage out of her like you can’t imagine. ‘Black Market Babies: American Peace Corps Girl Reveals the Truth About Guatemala.’ Hey, this is going to be big.”

“What’s your point here?” Haydon said. He was having a hard time even concentrating on what Cage was blowing hard about. He was thinking about Mari Fossler, and about Dystal’s “Guate-goddamn-mala,” and his “Fossler ought to get out of down there while he can still draw breath,” a remark which, at the time, Haydon had discounted with a secret condescension as being an uninformed overreaction.

Cage continued pacing, gesturing with his drink, looking at Haydon, tossing his head to emphasize his words.

“My point is, Haydon, that I think she’s getting the short end of the stick here, and you’re going way out of your way to help her get it. My scenario: she’s going to give you these files. They’re potent stuff. Big story here because Azcona Contrera is our man in Guatemala. The usual shit will hit the fan with the righteous left…‘U.S. Right-wingers Giving Millions in Foreign Aid to Monster.’ I think she’s going to come out with this, and she’s going to be hailed as a saint, a champion of poor people, a freedom fighter for moral causes, a child of new-age selflessness, the whole hoo-haa that only the American press can do up right, with lip-smacking photographs of this Madonna of Modem Goodness (not only is she good, she looks good), everybody getting worked up in misty-eyed admiration…and then somebody will lift up the curtain and look behind the medicine-show backdrop. The ‘stuff’ she’s got on Azcona is going to be examined oh-so-closely by serious journalists, and they’re going to find guerrilla black propaganda written all over it. The kid was put up. She was had. But it won’t stop there. Some reporter’s going to dig into her personal life. They’re going to find out that she has screwed her way from one end of the Central American isthmus to the other, that she is cunning, conniving, and a user.”

Cage was standing in the middle of the room with his empty glass, his hand in his pocket, his face a little red from reciting his “scenario,” and the butt of his pistol making a bulge in the tail of his guayabera. “This has all the makings of a real piece of work, my friend. And you’re right in the middle of it.”

Haydon looked at Cage for a moment without saying anything. It seemed to him that Cage was curiously close to reversing himself on Lena. The irreverence with which he had just spoken of her conflicted seriously with his attitude about her before. Which of these two Cages was Haydon supposed to believe? And who was Cage trying to straighten out? Haydon or himself. The room was quiet except for the small crackling sounds of the parrot breaking open cashews.

Haydon picked up the envelope of photographs and held it up.

“Who did this?”

Cage gaped at him as if he was incredulous that Haydon was missing the whole point of his exposition.

“Who did it? Jesus Christ, man, haven’t you heard anything I’ve just said.”

“I’ve heard all of it,” Haydon said. “I just want to hear you say it.”

“I told you, the guerrillas.”

“Why?”

“Look,” Cage gestured toward the manila envelope, “Fossler was good, Haydon, he’d done his legwork, he’d done his homework, he’d done a lot of work. He’d already snapped to the documents scam…I’m guessing here, okay, but I think he said something about it to Lena, she went straight to Grajeda, and Fossler was shut up. They were almost home with her, almost there. They weren’t going to let something like Fossler’s meddling screw it up at the last minute.”

“Why haven’t they just flown her out of the country?” Haydon asked. “It would be easy enough.”

Cage shook his head. “No, when you’ve worked an operation this long, nothing is ‘easy enough.’ I have to admit this is sophisticated for these guys, a genuine advancement from what their nickel-and-dime struggle used to be, but it’s because of guys like Grajeda. They’re educated. In the past the guerrillas were Indians, homegrown and uneducated, just a lot of guts. Time passes, times change. Grajeda and some of the people around him are a new generation. They don’t talk stupid Marxist crap. They’ve got more intelligent agendas, and they’ve got more intelligent ways of accomplishing them. They know all about disinformation; they know all about the futility of ‘guerrilla’ warfare as it used to be. They’re slowly moving into the political realm. If they can’t defeat the General Azconas of this army with firearms, they’ll do it with words and ideas. The real wars lie ahead, and they’re going to be fought not with arms but with brains. This is phase one. It’s going to be interesting.”

Haydon remembered the Guatemalan girl who had escorted him out of the warehouse where he had talked with Grajeda; he remembered her perfect, unaccented English. He remembered his discussion with Dr. Grajeda about Heinrich Boll’s perspectives on truth. In retrospect, Haydon could see that that discussion had been at the core of what this shell game with Lena was all about, and it might prove to offer the clearest understanding he would ever have of what had happened in these few hectic days.

Haydon sat in the pool of light the lamp was throwing over his shoulder and looked at Cage staring back at him from the middle of the room, a man who had lived and made his living completely outside society’s acceptable codes of behavior. He operated in a moral free-fire zone, and in many ways he was only a more primitive version of Bennett Pittner.

“What the hell are you trying to do?” Cage challenged. “You think you can sit there and make sense out of all this? You think you’re going to figure something out here?” He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. Then he let his head drop and pointed the empty glass at Haydon. “Remember what I said about Pittner being a man you had to lie to to keep your self-respect? About his self-absorbed grief over”—he jerked his head toward Janet without looking at her—“all kinds of shit? I’m beginning to wonder if you’re not cut out of the same cloth. You can’t get this Fossler thing out of your head, can you? Like yo“‘re mooning over some goddamned woman. Jesus.”

Haydon lifted the envelope. “Where is he now?”

Cage gaped at him; he was seething. Haydon’s stubbornness was clearly galling. “He’s on his way down here, someone’s driving him down.”

“From Chajul?”

“From Chajul.”

“Thanks,” Haydon said, standing. “Thanks for coming by and bringing the photographs and for telling me.”

Cage stood rooted to the middle of the room, the whole thing cut unexpectedly short, Haydon’s courteous suggestion that it was time for him to leave was a worse insult by far than if Haydon had slugged him. He gave Haydon a smile that was no smile at all, really, but something to do with his face to keep his anger from getting the best of him.

“You’re a silly goddamned fool, Haydon,” he said in a tone of voice that was supposed to pass for calm, but which had the husky thickness that betrayed a throat strung tight. He looked at Janet, and in what was probably a moment of colossal self-restraint, managed not to say what he was thinking.

CHAPTER 45

C
age stormed out of the house, and neither Haydon nor Janet moved to follow him. Outside the fountain splashed almost too softly to hear, and one could easily be distracted from it by the small snicking sounds of the parrot eating cashews just a few feet away. Haydon looked at the manila envelope dangling from his hand and let it drop on the floor. He felt too numb and tried to ignore the crawling nausea in his stomach.

“I’m sorry…” Janet said. “I don’t…” She stopped, it seemed, at the futility of being able to say anything meaningful. She didn’t continue, but she reached up and turned off the lamp that Haydon had turned on between them, and they fell instantly into the softer topaz light of other lamps. Sighing, she laid her head back against her chair.

“The whole house is swept regularly, isn’t it Janet,” Haydon said. “Not just that one bedroom, but the whole place.”

She said nothing, but sat as if wrapped in a dark silence of old and familiar disappointments, failures that no longer could be avoided with redirected enthusiasms and spirited denials, but which, ultimately, had to be confronted as the empty disillusionments of what finally had become the story of her life.

“I didn’t understand…,” Haydon mused thoughtfully, “the extent to which your lives had become interdependent, the three of you, until Cage’s remarks about Pittner just then. I realized Pittner wasn’t wiring the house. Cage wouldn’t have said those things…”

“But not out of respect.”

“No, just because it would have been bad business.”

“Apparently Cage has been talking,” Janet said.

“Some.”

Again there was a long while when there was only the sound of the fountain and the parrot cracking cashews.

“We’ve been unraveling for a long time,” she said. “Each of us in his own peculiar way. We’re just about at the end of it. It’s been going on too long, the three of us. It’s complex…hell, we don’t understand it either.”

Haydon didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t want to listen to anything confessional; he didn’t want to know about it. He only wanted to concentrate on getting out of Guatemala with Lena Muller, if Lena Muller wanted to go.

“How long have you known Pittner was in intelligence work?”

“Years,” she said. “From the beginning, Pitt shared a lot with me. Not actual intelligence, just realities about his job, the eccentricities about how he had to live. I think he did that because it was getting hard for him, the double life. He didn’t want to make up half of what he was anymore. The house became a haven in that way. He made sure it was clean, still does.”

“Why?”

“Because the divorce didn’t really change anything that much. Between us, I mean. He was over here a lot.”

“What about Cage and Pitt?”

“They were great friends, close friends…and enemies…long before I came into the story.” She sat up in her chair. “I’ve got to have a drink. How about you?” Haydon nodded, and Janet stood and walked out of the room and into the kitchen. When she returned she had two glasses with ice and slices of lime in them. She went to the liquor caddy and mixed in gin and tonic. She walked over and handed one to Haydon and then went over to the parrot and stood by its perch and watched him, holding her drink.

“What’s their relationship at this moment?” Haydon asked. “After all that’s passed between them—among you—where do they stand?”

Janet continued looking at the bird, her back half turned from him. She sipped her drink and then reached out to the bird, which quickly leaned over and viciously nipped at her finger. Janet jerked back, her forefinger doubled up, blood already running down the back of her hand. She didn’t say anything, only tucked her finger into her fist, trying to cover the laceration with her thumb. She turned and walked into the kitchen, and Haydon heard her running the water. A drawer opened and closed and then Janet walked back into the room with a damp paper towel wrapped around her finger. She came back to her chair, put her drink on the table between them, and began unwrapping a bandage.

“It was my fault,” she said calmly. “I’ve done it before. I had another parrot, the one before this one, that would let you pet it. I’d had the bird a long time, this one’s still young.” She concentrated on wrapping the adhesive around her finger. “They’re so pretty you want to touch them.”

She finished with the bandage, and when she turned to pick up her drink again, Haydon noticed that she had tears in her eyes, a glistening trail on one cheek.

“I don’t think they’ve seen each other in quite a while,” she said. “I know I haven’t seen them together in a long time.”

“What’s quite a while?” Haydon didn’t think the tears had anything to do with the nip from the parrot.

“Five months, I guess. Tonight was the first time I’d seen Cage in…that long, at least.”