Body of Truth (10 page)

“That’s Janet. I don’t remember exactly how she got to know Lena, but it was on one of those leaves the Peace Corps kids get from time to time. It was at an embassy party, I think. Anyway, Janet kind of adopted her. One time when I was going up in the highlands, up in the Cuchumatanes, Janet asked me to take some coffee to Lena who was with her Indians up there, the Chuj. So I did, found her up there in Huehuetenango, shit, thirty-six hundred kilometers up in the mountains in this remote little village called Ocante, up in the thinning pine and spruce forests where the mornings are frosty and foggy. Big vistas. She was a good-looking kid, brown as a berry from that clear, high-mountain sun. There were all these colorful Indian women in their bright
huipiles
and cones and here was Lena wearing these damn filthy khakis. But…”—Cage was looking across the smoky room, not seeing, just remembering—”…she had her long blond hair plaited in the Indian style, with an absolutely brilliant scarlet
cinta
interwoven in her braids.”

Cage shrugged, but not before Haydon detected something more than a simple descriptive interest in his story.

“Anyway,” he went on. “I stayed overnight because it was a full day’s trip back down to the next
aldea
of any size. She turned out to be different than I expected. Entirely unselfconscious. She wasn’t coy, didn’t give a shit about her filthy khakis or stubby fingernails or having to piss behind a bush. And the Indians respected her, especially the women, who treated her with affection. I’ve visited these kids before, or other Americans out in the boonies, archaeologists, isolated missionaries, whatever, who after a few months would rather be anywhere else on the damn globe than where they were. Not her. The whole time I was there she didn’t ask a single question about life beyond the village. In fact, I was kind of a distraction for her. She was more concerned about where they were going to find the best grazing for the sheep they herded through those damn high, cold valleys, and preoccupied with the health of the cold-weather fruit trees they tended the year around. Shit.”

Haydon was surprised to hear a hint of a grudging admiration in Cage’s voice, and he watched as Cage took several swigs from his Gallo, and looked around the room while he got it down his throat. Haydon did the same. It seemed to him that Cage was making an effort to sound casual about this.

“Next time I saw her,” Cage continued, “was several months later and under conditions that were a hell of a lot different. She had finished her tour of duty, and Janet was giving her a ‘leaving-the-Corps’ party before she flew home. Jesus, the American clothes and hairstyle transformed her, but it didn’t change her personality any. She was still unpretentious, unassuming, but completely at ease in the swanky Trattoria, eating overpriced cuisine with all of Janet’s privileged haute monde Guatemalan rich, the embassy crowd, the wealthy foreigners who live permanently in Guatemala. She was funny to watch, you know. Here are all these superficial party people and here’s Lena, congenial, but not overly generous with herself. She was at ease, but not as though she endorsed all that shit. She wasn’t uncomplicated. The kid was older than her age, but nobody seemed to notice that.”

This last was an insightful observation from Cage, and one that Haydon wouldn’t have expected of him. Not that he wasn’t perceptive, Cage wouldn’t have lived as long as he had in his line of business if he hadn’t been perceptive about human behavior. It was the fact that Cage had allowed a crack in the monolithic façade he had constructed for himself. But the crack wasn’t the kind that betrayed weakness; it was the kind that allowed you to glimpse something on the inside. Cage smoked the tail end of his last cigarette and ground out the butt.

“So she went home and in a month she was back down here. Janet’s ex-husband got her this job with USAID. That was about three months ago, I guess. I haven’t seen her but once or twice since she got back.”

Cage abruptly took a small notebook from one of the pockets of his guayabera, ripped a sheet from the notebook, snapped the point out on a ballpoint pen, scribbled something on the paper, and shoved it across to Haydon.

“This is Janet Pittner’s address,” he said. “If you’re thinking about going to the embassy with all this, think some more. Think about it for twelve hours. A lot can happen in twelve hours down here. And the embassy…I have my prejudices about the way the State Department handles its business in Central America.”

This last was a huge understatement. Haydon said nothing.

“Think about it,” Cage repeated. “It could save you some grief.”

“What do you think has happened to her?”

“I haven’t got a clue.”

Haydon reached out and turned the piece of paper around without picking it up. He saw the address was the same Fossler had given him. He left it where it was. Cage looked at him.

“What’s your relationship with—”

“Carnal knowledge,” Cage said. “But we’ve got all that straightened out now, and it’s a thing of the past. It was a delightful affair, but Janet’s a much better friend than lover. Besides, it was a little incestuous, me working under her husband. I don’t mind lying for business, but lying for pleasure too got confusing. I broke it off before he found out. And then Janet divorced him, which didn’t make any sense, but then that’s another thing about Janet: she doesn’t usually make sense.”

“You worked under Janet’s husband?”

“Bennett Pittner, Chief of Station.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

This was too much. Haydon finished the last of his Gallo to cover his surprise. He wondered if Jim Fossler had any inkling of what he had gotten himself into. And then Haydon realized that he probably had, which opened everything to a labyrinth of possibilities. “Fossler told me you visited him.”

Cage nodded.

“He said you told him you had ‘come across someone’ asking about Lena.”

Cage squeegeed his forehead with his thumb again. “That’s right, I did. My people came across inquiries. Turned out to be Fossler.”

“Fossler was the only one asking questions about her?”

“Only one I looked up.”

“But not the only one.”

Cage’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. “Guatemalan security forces. Military intelligence. Department for Criminal Investigations—they’re Guatemala’s equivalent of the Gestapo. Everybody you ever wanted to avoid was on her ass. Whatever she was doing, she was completely screwed. I couldn’t believe it. I goddamned couldn’t believe it.”

Cage seemed angry more than anything else. Or at least Haydon thought it was anger.

CHAPTER 11

T
here was little to say after that, and in a few moments Cage said he had to go. He didn’t offer to take Haydon to his hotel, in fact, he didn’t even ask where Haydon was staying. He just said he had to go, stood, threw down some quetzals on the table for his meal and walked out.

Haydon sat at the window and watched him disappear down the dark street in the direction of where they had left the car. His thoughts went immediately to Jim Fossler. No wonder Fossler had been so peculiarly loquacious on the telephone. Like many unsuspecting travelers, he had found himself in thrall to Guatemala’s strangeness and was hard pressed to come to grips with it. Fossler must have been mystified by everything he encountered here. He was the kind of man whose first impulse in any new situation was to sort things out, fit the pieces together, put things in order. After five or six weeks in Guatemala he must have come to the panicky realization that nothing was ever sorted out here, nothing was ever put in order.

Haydon looked at his watch. It was shortly after ten o’clock. He hadn’t been with Cage that long after all. He paid his bill—in dollars, having not yet changed his money into quetzals—and the waiter was delighted to receive money that actually had value. Haydon gave him an additional tip and asked if he would call a cab. Within a few minutes the cab arrived, and the grateful waiter appeared instantly and accompanied Haydon to the door. The taxi turned out not to be a taxi at all, but a private car, probably a relative or friend of the waiter’s. The middle-aged driver took Haydon’s bag, put it in the front seat on the passenger’s side, and opened the back door for Haydon. In an instant they were off.

By this time of night most of the Guatemala City’s streets were empty, no matter that it was a city of well over two million inhabitants. At this hour you were safer inside, though if the death squads wanted you, they didn’t care where you were or whether it was day or night. Still, human nature understood the menace of darkness.

The way things were done in Guatemala took a little getting used to. On the surface of things, the country paid a reasonable amount of respect to logic. Guatemala itself was divided into twenty-three regions, or states, called
departamento
s, and its cities were divided into gerrymandered sectors called
zonas
. The streets that had a roughly north/south orientation were called
avenidas
, and the cross streets were called streets, or
calles
. To locate an address you had to know the zona because the numbered calles and avenidas repeated themselves in each sector.

Beyond this point, nothing else in the entire country made sense. Reason was not a part of the national
Weltanschauung
. Nothing was reliable or dependable because no one paid any attention to the formalities that were necessary for an organized society. That is, rules. Here the rules were uniformly disobeyed or ignored or made exception to. None of which mattered anyway, since the rules themselves constantly were being changed by people who seemed to have an understanding about something of which no one else had been informed. What was important here was convention, knowing “the way things were done,” and learning how things were done was largely a process of trial and error. The big surprise was that, in Guatemala, the errors could cost you your life.

Luckily Haydon’s driver was content to travel in silence, and in no time at all they were back on the broad, central thoroughfare of the Avenida La Reforma. Haydon always stayed at the same small hotel in Guatemala City, the Residencial Reforma, which once had been a grand old private home belonging to one of the country’s leading historical figures. Justo Rufino Barrios was a wealthy coffee grower who ruled the country as a dictator between 1873 to 1879 at which time he called a constitutional convention and magically became “president” (with a dictator’s unlimited powers) and remained in absolute control of his country until 1885.

The taxi slowed on the avenida, made a U-turn at one of the crossovers that periodically intersected the broad esplanade, came back a block or so and turned into the hotel drive. The home sat back from the avenida the distance of a deep circle drive, which was entered from the avenida between huge pillars supporting wrought-iron gates and flanked by a tall wrought-iron fence almost obscured by manicured shrubbery. The building itself was of an architectural style which could best be described as Moorish with Portuguese influences—two storied, white stucco, terra-cotta clay tile roof. The second floor was fronted by a deep veranda with abbreviated trefoil arches and marble pillars, and from which one had a wonderful view of the grand avenida. The center of the courtyard drive was occupied by a large fountain, its waters long-since silenced, its handsome basin now planted with cinnamon fern and blooming purple liriope, and from the center of which rose an alabaster statue of a naked angel with gloriously spread wings embracing a nude and swooning mortal.

The driver circled these two white souls frozen forever in stony pathos and stopped at the front door. He quickly hopped out of the car, came around to open Haydon’s door and took his bag out of the front seat. Haydon paid him and asked if he would wait a moment and take him somewhere else.

In the small foyer, Haydon filled in the registration card, telling the clerk he wanted a room for two days. As a hotel, the old home had one overriding eccentricity. When it was divided for commercial use, there was no effort made to turn the rooms into spaces of comparable size. The house was seemingly left as originally designed, except that a bath was added to every room. However, all of the rooms were the same price, whether you were put in what once had been a cell-sized servant’s room with little or no circulation or whether you were put in a spacious upstairs suite with a wonderful cross breeze and a view of the city. Travelers who frequented this delightful hotel, affectionately known as “La Casa Grande,” knew in advance to at least request certain rooms. If available, you could get a suite instead of a cell, Haydon asked for and got room 21, one of the largest rooms, with a sitting area and windows on two sides.

He let the eager houseboy take his small bag, and they stepped down into one of the parlors where a few guests slumped on sofas and comfortable armchairs, watching CNN on the television set that was seldom turned off, though always kept at a modest volume. They went up the circular marble stairs, turned right, and the boy let Haydon into his room and gave him the key and left. Haydon threw his bag on the bed and pushed open the glass of the two windows that overlooked the front courtyard. Even with its acrid stench, the cooling night air was preferable to the stuffy heat.

Without taking the time to unpack, Haydon returned downstairs. Giving his key to the concierge, he was told that the front gates closed at eleven, and if he wished to enter after that time he would have to push the button on the speaker box set into the front pillars and the gates would be opened electronically for him.

Janet Pittner’s home was in Zona 10, the same area as Haydon’s hotel. Things were expensive in Zona 10, and mostly they were safe as well. Like almost everything in the zona, Janet Pittner’s home was protected from the tree-covered street by a high, solid wall, which, even in the gloam of the smoky darkness, Haydon could see was covered with
moneda
vine and garlanded along its top with boughs of bougainvillea. The driver stopped at the entrance, and Haydon got out of the car, leaving the door open, and pushed the button on the speaker box set into the pillar at the side of the wrought-iron gate. To his left, farther down the wall was another gate, which was the exit.