Body of Truth (6 page)

“Shit,” Dystal said. “The damn State Department sure can work with some squirrels, and they don’t get any squirrelier than Cage, I guess. That’s scary, dammit. Jee-sus.” Dystal shook his head, thinking. “Fossler didn’t believe the kids were trafficking, didn’t think it was the police they were worried about?”

“He never referred to the police at all. Which, I suppose, you could figure is consistent with his hunch that it wasn’t drugs. And he was definitely a little rattled.”

“Not like him.”

“No.”

“Well, hell. I’d be rattled too, the second I stepped off the plane down there. He’s got a right to be rattled. You don’t go snooping around in a country that sends a death squad after you when they don’t like the way you pick your nose. He found the kid, and that’s what he went down there for. Fossler ought to come on home while he can still draw breath.”

“I think he feels an obligation to find out a little more about the mess the girl may be involved in.”

“Well, I guess I can see that,” Dystal said, rolling his head toward Haydon. “What I don’t see is why you think you need to help him.”

“Come on, Bob, what was I going to do? Tell him I wasn’t going to help him? Tell him he was on his own?”

“He’s a grown man.”

“He’s in a bind.”

“He shouldn’t have jumped off in that kind of business. You cut yourself loose from the organization that goes along with law enforcement, you get out there on your own, you gotta expect to get into a bind.”

Haydon didn’t say anything.

“That whole Muller thing pisses me off,” Dystal added.

Haydon knew that, of course. Dystal had been truly offended by George Muller’s efforts to throw his weight around and manipulate the department. Dystal wasn’t easily offended, but he found Muller particularly reprehensible.

“He’s asking for a favor,” Haydon said, referring to Fossler.

“Hell, that’s a big favor, down to Guate-goddamn-mala.” Dystal quickly held up his hand in concession. “I know, I know. You’re doing the right thing.” Then he squinted at Haydon. “But I’m not sure you’re doing the smart thing. When you going?”

“The flight leaves at five-forty. I’ll get there a little after nightfall.”

“Department’s not going to spring for this, you know. All you got to do to close this case is move the girl’s file to the back of the drawer. You don’t need a damn affidavit that says she’s alive.”

Haydon nodded. “I know it. Everything’s in order here. I haven’t got anything going that’s urgent, nothing that can’t wait a few days.”

Haydon was working now without a partner, which he liked fine enough. After he had gotten back from Mexico City and before he had been assigned another partner to take Mooney’s place, he immediately had been picked up for a couple of special assignments that required him to work independently. After that he had spent six months breaking in a rookie who eventually teamed up with someone else, and by then Captain Mercer had preoccupations elsewhere. Time passed, and Haydon simply continued to work alone.

“Okay, then you’re looking at two days,” Dystal said, pulling himself up out of the chair and walking around to his desk. He sat down, put his tin cup aside, and picked up a computer printout of officers’ schedules. He got the ballpoint pen he had been writing with and, frowning, made a notation on the light green lines of the printout. He looked up. “Done. I hope to hell you know what you’re doing.”

Haydon went to his office cubicle on the far side of the squad room from Dystal’s and made a call to his travel agent, who confirmed a seat on Continental’s afternoon flight to Guatemala City. He made a few calls canceling appointments he had coming up in the next few days and checked his calendar to make sure he hadn’t forgotten something that couldn’t be postponed. When he was satisfied that everything was in order, that everything else could wait until he returned, he turned to his filing cabinet and took out his folder on Guatemala. Haydon had learned to be a copious note-taker whenever he worked a case that took him out of the country, which usually meant Latin America. He kept a file for each of these cases, complete with photographs and maps and the names of police agents with whom he had worked and names of informants he had used. Time didn’t stand still, of course, and people and their circumstances changed with the passing years, but reestablishing contact with former acquaintances often was the quickest way to be brought up to the moment about the changes in the society in which these people had to function. But Haydon’s contacts within the security forces in Latin America were more complex because of their endemic intrigues. There was a lot to take into account.

He flipped through his Guatemalan file, reviewed faces and names—enough for a start—closed the folder, grabbed his overcoat and trilby, and walked out of the homicide division without having spoken to anyone but Dystal.

CHAPTER 6

E
ven though it was almost ten o’clock, the morning was dark with a charcoal gloom and a dirty fog hanging in the chilled air. The photosensitive sensors kept the streetlights on as though it was evening, and all the cars on the streets were using their headlights. It would have been easy to believe that dawn was still a few hours away. Haydon avoided the freeways and headed straight down Main. He had plenty of time, so he didn’t fight the traffic, which gave him time to think. He hadn’t bothered to make reservations at any of the hotels in Guatemala City, preferring to remain flexible. As it was, he was going empty-handed. Since this wasn’t a trip for official inquiry, he left the slim files on Lena Muller back at the office, and he would have to leave his Beretta at home too, which made him more than a little uneasy.

He passed through midtown, past the Vietnamese shops and restaurants and clubs, and then under the Southwest Freeway, where the character of the street quickly changed as the ancient and giant water oaks loomed over the wet streets and formed a vast green canopy over the old wealthy neighborhoods of Broad Acres and Shadow Lawn and Southampton, and the Rice University campus. Just as he reached the Museum of Fine Arts, he turned right onto Bissonnet, into an area popular for its art galleries sprinkled among the fine homes in small streets lush with subtropical vegetation.

Turning into one of these lanes, he immediately pulled into a small gravel drive and stopped in front of the Galerie Deux Femmes, an old two-story home that had been renovated into large, open spaces for a gallery on the bottom floor. The top floor belonged entirely to Nina’s architectural firm, which she had founded eleven years before with another woman architect, Margaret Lessing. Haydon & Lessing concentrated solely on residential designs and had decided from the beginning to keep the firm small, handling only one commission at a time in order to devote their full attention to each project. Their decision to concentrate on quality rather than quantity had paid off early on, and now their reputation was such that when they finished one commission there was always another one in line.

Haydon got out of his car and walked up the stone steps of the old house to the long veranda that ran its length. Inside the bright foyer of the first floor, he saw Denise Ronsard, one of the two inquisitive sisters who owned the gallery and the house. He returned her wave and smile, his breath billowing in plumes, and turned toward the stairs halfway down the veranda. In a moment he had rounded the first landing and was at the top of the stairs and walking across to the frosted-glass door that opened into the studio.

Even the ample distribution of skylights in the high ceiling did not allow much illumination from the day’s gloomy sky, and the studio was lighted brightly with electricity, which wasn’t often the case. Several large rooms opened off a spacious central space, with hardwood floors and white walls throughout. There was a conference room with a large oval cherry table directly across from the entry, and to Haydon’s right he could see Margaret working in the model room from which issued the resinous odors of wood shavings and glue.

Margaret was a roan-haired woman with alabaster skin and blue eyes that almost closed when she smiled, which was often. She had a demurring manner that masked a hard-as-nails resolve and a distinctly ribald sense of humor. Just now as she worked over the model of the Careyes house, she had the hem of her long skirt tucked up into the thick leather belt cinched around her small waist, a makeshift style of convenience that resulted in the exposure of a considerable amount of one of her pale legs, while Pavarotti bellowed “
La donna è mobile
” from the speakers they kept in the model room. Bent over the table in a straight-legged stance, Margaret was looking into the model from an angle below grade. Without straightening up, she turned her head and saw him and smiled, not uncomfortable at being caught with her skirt up, her wavy hair floating around her head like a henna nimbus.

Haydon waved—there was no need to speak since Margaret wouldn’t be able to hear him over Pavarotti—and turned to his left and went down the short hall to Nina’s studio. He stopped at the doorway. Nina was at her drawing board, barefooted, half standing, half sitting on her stool, turned three-quarters away from him. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon, her tortoiseshell glasses planted firmly upon her nose as she concentrated over a drawing, a green drawing pencil clamped in her teeth as she measured some small dimension with a triangular scale.

“Can you hear Luciano all right?” Haydon asked, and Nina started and turned around.

“God,” she grinned. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I could have come in shooting and you wouldn’t have heard me,” Haydon said, stepping in and almost closing the door behind him, muting the Italian tenor enough for them to hear each other without screaming. “Do the sisters Ronsard ever complain?”

“Never,” Nina said. She took off her glasses and laid them on the board and put her pencil in the upward-turned crook of the earpieces. She stood. “But then Margaret doesn’t usually have it that loud. She’s getting frustrated with the model…the music goes up.” She reached for her cup of coffee on a side table beside the drawing board. “What are you doing?”

“Going to Guatemala.”

“Oh,” she said, tilting her head to one side and half shrugging. She walked over to a small sofa under the windows that looked out over the street and sat down. “Now?”

“Well, this afternoon. Five-forty. I’m on the way home to pack.”

“How long will you be?”

“A couple of days. I don’t think more than that.”

“I was hoping Bob would make you behave,” she tried to joke.

“I’ll be home by Thursday. Down-and-back, just like that.”

“I don’t know. Latin America seems to be something of a time warp for you.”

“It’s a time warp for everyone,” he said. “I think Jim Fossler is finding it a bit of a strain.”

Nina nodded. She was sitting forward on the sofa, her legs together, her forearms resting on her knees, holding her coffee. Haydon was holding his hat, hadn’t even taken off his coat. He ran his fingers through his dark hair. He needed a haircut, but it would have to wait.

“It’s summer down there now,” Nina reminded him, looking up. “Don’t forget that. You’d be miserable in those wools.”

“Yeah, Fossler said it was pretty warm.”

“You said the flight was at five-forty. You want me to take you to the airport?”

He shook his head. “You’d just waste a lot of time on the expressway at that hour, and it’ll be even worse with this weather. I’ll leave the car in the long-term lot. That’s easiest.” He looked over at the drawing board. “How’s it going?”

“Not too bad, now,” she said, her voice picking up, glad to get off the subject of his departure. “The Spahns are coming by sometime within the next two weeks to look it over again. That should be about the last review. Then we’ll all get to troop down to Mexico for the ground breaking.” She stood, turning to the board. “What do you think?”

“I’ve told you,” he said, stepping over near her. “The best one yet.”

“Yeah, you know, I like it more all the time. It’s a great site, overlooking the Pacific.”

Haydon was a little behind her, looking over her shoulder. He tossed his hat on the sofa and stepped up and put both his arms around her from behind, encircling her waist, feeling her hips and then moving down her stomach and lower. He kissed her neck, kissed the slope of it as it came off her shoulders, kissed it where his lips could feel the strands of hair pulled taut in the chignon and felt the wisps of it that had worked free feathering his face. He inhaled the smell of her, kissed the lobe of her ear, feeling her warmth on his face, which was still cool from the chill morning air. He brought his hands up to her breasts as she tilted her head back, and he felt her catch her breath as his cool hand slipped inside her blouse, inside her bra. She turned her face to him, and his free hand unbuttoned her blouse.

CHAPTER 7

T
he flight to Guatemala City was forty-five minutes late in departing from the Houston Intercontinental Airport due to the bad weather. They sat on the taxiway in a queue of jetliners, like huge surprised beetles waiting out the gusts of sleet that shouldn’t even have been happening. The cabin lights were dimmed, and Haydon sat alone in his row—the plane was less than half full—and stared out to the glistening tarmac and the huge space station-like terminal across a broad swath of frozen grass. Whatever the weather was like in Guatemala City, it couldn’t offer a more unpleasant prospect than what Haydon was seeing out of his window at the moment. He was glad to leave this aberrant climate behind.

They were two hours and forty minutes in the air, and during that time Haydon declined the meal, drank several scotch and waters, and thought a lot about Jim Fossler and Lena Muller and Taylor Cage, and the last time he had been in Guatemala. The country didn’t have much to recommend it. It was once known as the Land of Eternal Spring, but ever since the 1954 coup, initiated and backed by the CIA to overthrow a democratically elected president who was, nevertheless, too liberal in his thinking for U.S. interests, Guatemala had been wracked by a succession of ruling generals who gained their authority through coups and countercoups and established a tradition of political violence that became so entrenched as a way of life that the country would be forever stained by it. Military rule would prove cruel beyond imagining and would engender the concept of death squads, a phenomenon that would eventually spread to the rest of Latin America and become a trademark of twentieth-century Latin American politics.