Body of Truth (7 page)

Guatemala became and remained one enormous killing field. Death squads operated with impunity, and every day people were “disappeared” off the streets, never to be seen again, at the rate of fifty per month, while “extrajudicial killings”—that is, civilian assassinations—occurred at an average rate of fourteen per day for the last two decades. Regardless of who resided in the presidential residence, the army ruled. It was the most modern, best supplied, and most ruthless army in Latin America and, the modern world being what it was, it had plenty of help from foreign countries, all willing to sell their war materiel to an army that had no enemies but its own people. The generals were busy executioners who preferred to use a new blade every time they lopped off a head. And they wanted the latest in blade refinements, too, the ones with the brightest most technologically advanced edges. So the blade salesmen came from all over the world offering their wares, from the United States first, followed closely by the Israelis and the Germans, the South Africans, Italians, and Taiwanese. The executioner was busy, the blade salesmen were busy. There was a good living to be made in the killing business in Guatemala.

It had been in the killing business that Haydon had his first encounter with Taylor Cage. Late one August in the early 1980s, Haydon had caught three homicides in rapid succession, all in the vicinity of the Houston ship channel. The investigations had been difficult for reasons that were only made clear when Haydon received a telephone call at home one night from Captain Mercer, head of the homicide division. He wanted to come to Haydon’s home and bring “a gentleman” who could shed some light on the ship channel killings. It was the only time Mercer had been to his house, before or since. The man he brought with him introduced himself as being with the State Department and said he had information about each of the three cases Haydon was investigating. The stories took a long time to tell, but in essence, the reason Haydon had not been able to advance his investigations more quickly was because he was running into “American intelligence back-stopping.” Even so, he was pushing the cases to the limit of the cover division’s files, and they had realized he was going to have to be brought into the operation to prevent him from damaging what was left of it.

The three killings were related to an elaborate scheme that, not surprisingly, had gone sour because of every operation’s weakest link, the human factor. Human behavior is never as predictable, or controllable, as the human mind would like it to be, and the environment of covert operations was no exception. The story that unfolded involved the sale of Israeli military intelligence computer technology to the government of South Africa. For reasons that Haydon never understood, the hardware itself was being shipped from Tel Aviv, but the negotiations regarding the payment procedures were being conducted in Houston and involved the transmission of one commodity for another—cocaine was washing South African Krugerrands and Israeli shekels and Panamanian dollars in a complex laundering scheme that was meant to obscure the transaction and its terms beyond tracing. But it fell apart because of homosexual passions and universal greed, and Taylor Cage was brought in from some dark corner of the globe as a salvage expert. Haydon spent every second of seventy-two hours with him and found him to be a civilized human being by only the broadest of definitions. He was a habitual liar with the sexual appetite of a satyr; he was self-centered, incapable of empathy, without conscience, full of arrogance, devoid of malice, as calculating as a chess master, undeniably charming, and as possessing of true bravery as any man Haydon had ever met.

Their brief association had made an indelible impression on Haydon, and Taylor Cage entered Haydon’s personal archive of fascinating, if often notorious, characters of acquaintance. It was only because Haydon knew so much that he was being co-opted at all. They let him play spy for three days, humored him, and when it was over they made it clear to him that it would be best for them—and him—if he developed selective amnesia. He was magically provided with all the documentation he needed to properly close the three homicide cases. No one ever told him, of course, but he had always supposed that Cage was a CIA “outside officer,” an officer in a foreign country who was located outside the embassy, who did not operate within traditional channels.

Considering this, Haydon had mixed emotions about meeting Cage again and was more than a little apprehensive at having learned that Cage seemed to have been in a position to lead Fossler right to Lena’s door. If that was coincidence, it was certainly an extraordinary instance of it.

The plane touched down at the Aurora International Airport in Guatemala City at nine-fifteen, well after dark. As the plane’s reversed engines roared in his ears and the airliner lurched and shuddered down to a bumpy taxiing speed toward the terminal, Haydon looked out his porthole at the miscellany of military and private hangars and aircraft and their attendant maintenance pools that shared the airport with the commercial airliners. Everything was dimly lighted, a trademark of Guatemalan nights, and Haydon could see the familiar and ubiquitous figures of armed soldiers lounging in the shadows, their Galils hanging over their shoulders as casually as the purses of prostitutes. It had been a couple of years since he had last been here, but just this first sight of the soldiers was enough to remind him of the sense of menace that was the chief characteristic of the Guatemalan Zeitgeist.

When the aircraft finally pulled into its slip and the engines were cut and its wheels blocked in place, there was no buzz of conversation, no scurrying to unload the overhead compartments, no jostling for position in the aisles. The scarcity of passengers and their disinterest in deplaning was indicative of the attitude of most people arriving in Guatemala. On the other hand, Haydon knew that all departing flights were always packed and hectic and lively. It was a country people much preferred to leave.

Haydon took his soft leather weekender bag from the overhead compartment and walked down the empty aisle to the door, past the smiling stewardesses—they were paid to smile and would be leaving the next morning anyway—and out into the sloping enclosed ramp that led to the terminal. He followed the few people in front of him down several turns of the long corridors until they came to a small desk in an alcove where they obtained temporary visas and paid an entry fee. Having done that, he walked to the customs booths a short distance away where his passport and visa were stamped before he was allowed to go on into the bottom floor of the terminal where all passengers retrieved their luggage in one cavernous reception area that resembled nothing so much as a circus without a ringmaster.

This effect was enhanced by the curious fact that all arrivals were observed by an enthusiastic crowd who viewed the entire process from a balcony, or veranda, on the second floor above. This mezzanine was on the same floor as the gates to the departing planes, duty-free shops, shops selling native handicrafts and woven textiles, a post office, telephone and telegraph offices, a bank, a drugstore, and slot machines. Even with all these diversions, the main form of amusement for departing passengers awaiting their flights with friends and relatives, and for the people who had come to welcome new arrivals, was to lean on the balcony rails and watch the incoming passengers file into the baggage claim arena and wait for their luggage to be off-loaded. And then when they got their bags, there was the pleasure of watching them often their suitcases on long inspection tables for the customs officers and everyone else who was curious about what they were bringing in. While all this was happening, there were shouts back and forth from the balcony to the bottom floor as friends and families spotted each other or tried to get each other’s attention.

It was a congenial chaos, a noisy, cacophonous scene, and one which disguised another, more sinister side. The balcony and the crowds that gathered there provided a perfect cover for the intelligence agents of the security forces who closely monitored, and often photographed and followed, new arrivals who were of special interest to them. It was easy to do. In 1983 when the Israelis installed the Aurora airport’s radar system, they simultaneously “advised” the Guatemalan security forces in the use of computerized intelligence management systems. The Guatemalans had proved to be quick studies.

Haydon went straight to the customs-check tables, and while the agent was going through his bag, he turned and scanned the scattering of people standing behind the railings of the balcony on the second floor. A few were waving and smiling at the passengers getting their bags, some leaning over and shouting a word or two, their voices echoing off the tile and marble floors, some simply staring down, bored. But Haydon did not see Fossler, nor did he see anyone else who seemed to take any interest in him.

The customs officer zipped his bag shut and sent him on with a nod and a sideward jerk of his head. Grabbing the bag, Haydon walked out through one set of swinging doors, out into the long porte cochere where porters and taxi drivers were gathered in idle knots, gossiping and smoking away the slow evening. Immediately the warm, diesel-heavy air of urban Central America reset his psychic barometer. Everything he had ever learned or experienced about this beautiful and brutal country came back to him as if the years between had never existed. It was not an altogether comfortable feeling. Again Haydon scanned the faces, the isolated figure, for Fossler. Still he didn’t see him. Thinking Fossler might be double-parked in the shadows just outside the lighted drive, Haydon walked to one end and then to the other and peered out into the darkness. No Fossler.

Knowing that in Guatemala nothing ever happened when it was supposed to, that schedules were considered to be only suggestions, not literal commitments, Haydon walked over to a concrete ledge near one of the car rental agencies and sat down, waving off overtures from cabdrivers. He would wait half an hour; he didn’t want this to turn into a Laurel and Hardy routine of missed connections. But the half hour dragged by without Fossler’s appearance, and Haydon signaled one of the taxis and headed into the city.

CHAPTER 8

T
he night was hot and the taxi windows were wide open as the driver clipped along the isolated airport boulevard lined with spindly, newly planted palms. Guatemala City’s distinctive night air was already thick with the familiar smoky stench that settled over the urban landscape after the daytime breezes died down. Nearly encircled by mountains, the city sat on a shallow plateau that was severely eroded on all sides by deep ravines. As the army’s thirty-year counterinsurgency war continued in vast areas of the countryside, preying on the rural population and disrupting an already backward economy, and as poverty became as perilous as the unchecked violence, the peasants fled to the capital city in the mistaken hope that life there would offer some refuge from fear and hunger. It didn’t.

The city’s population swelled to over two million, overwhelming municipal services and turning many of the
barrancas
, ravines, that surrounded the city into disease-ridden slums. Hundreds of thousands of squatters’ shanties sprang up along their rims and spilled down their steep slopes together with the tons of garbage that the city dumped there and with what the slum dwellers themselves created. The poor scavenged along with the vultures for garbage to eat. In the rainy season, floods roared down the ravines and wiped out swaths of shanties, which were painfully rebuilt with a tenacity that only the despairing understand. In the dry season, the only moisture in the
barrancas
was runnels of raw sewage that drained down from the overcrowded city above. But regardless of the time of year, every evening the miasma from the perpetually smoldering dumps and shanty fires seeped up over the rims of the ravines and settled across the city like a bad dream. Wet or dry, every night the great populace of the dispossessed sent up a veil of bitter incense to cover the city, a constant reminder of misery’s children.

Haydon always had seen a kind of egalitarian irony in the pervasive stench of these smoldering nights that discomfited the wealthy as well as the poor. Behind Guatemala’s dismal record of human suffering was a small and very wealthy minority that controlled the fortunes of the country through an unflinching exploitation of the poor. Though these wealthy few might build their lavish homes in guarded enclaves and envelop themselves in the trappings of abundance in an effort to put the privations of the filthy masses out of their sight, and even though they might turn a blind eye to the ugliness of the poor who surrounded them in an effort to put their suffering out of mind, they would never, ever, succeed in getting them out of their nostrils. The offensive odors of misfortune did not defer to the priviledged.

They passed under the arches of the ancient stone aqueducts that still ran parallel to Bulevar Liberación and turned right, following the boulevard past the circle of the Clock of Flowers, past the Monument to the Indian, to the huge oval of Parque Independencia with its tall stone Obelisk commemorating Guatemala’s independence from Spain. The taxi driver swung his car halfway around the circle and then shot off northward on Avenida La Reforma, one of the broadest and most attractive avenues in Central America, with towering cypresses that shaded both sides of the avenue. To Haydon’s right was Zona 10 where the several-block area between 13 and 16 calles was known as Zona Viva, a sector of elegant shopping and dining and expensive hotels. They passed the ever-popular Camino Real hotel where Americans stayed who didn’t want to leave the U.S. behind when they crossed the border, and a few blocks farther down was the American embassy. This section of the city was as good as the city got, and even then there wasn’t much of it.

Looking through the dirty windshield of the taxi at the avenue, whose reputation for elegance outstripped its reality, Haydon felt the first twinges of eeriness that was the city’s gift to any arriving traveler who knew anything about the country’s history. The low-powered street-lamps gave a macabre glow to the smoke that hung among the towering cypresses of the boulevard like an infernal breath. Haydon could not avoid thinking of what the smog consisted of, for he had seen more than a few bodies dumped in the garbage of the ravines, most of them mutilated and swollen like sausages from the tropical heat. And often they smoldered like everything else in the dumps, adding their oily effluvia to the filthy air for the rest of the city to breathe. Here death was literally in the air, and everyone could taste it.