Body of Truth (26 page)

“What kind of gossip?”

Baine was quick enough to realize his mouth had been ahead of his brain on that one, and he backed off.

“Just gossip,” he said. “There’s always ‘security’ gossip around embassies. Especially the places where there’s a lot of State Department maneuvering with the host government, where there’s a lot of interplay.”

“How did you qualify?”

“What?”

“With Lena.”

Baine winced and grunted as he leaned over to ease a sudden sharp pain in his stomach.

“They do this to me again, I’m dead.” He looked at Haydon. “I’m really going back there?” he asked suddenly.

Haydon nodded.

“Christ Jesus, man! I’m out now!” He looked at Borrayo, then back to Haydon. “There’s some deal here, right? What, I’m here just to talk to you? That’s it? You got me out of that goddamned place just to talk to me…and then send me back?”

“I can’t prevent that,” Haydon said, hating himself. The kid really had thought Haydon had gotten him out, that he wasn’t going back. “But you’ll be all right.” He had no reason to believe this was true. “Just gut it out,” Haydon said. “When the consular people come in, maybe tomorrow, scream your head off. Get a lawyer.”

“What the hell’s going on here?” Baine said, indignant and petrified at the same time. “You son of a bitch, you got to tell me what’s going on here.”

“You’re being framed…”

Baine gaped. “Framed? What…? You mean Lena’s death? Who’s…?”

“I don’t know,” Haydon said, talking quickly now. “I’m trying to find out.”

“Oh, God Almighty…” Baine was holding himself, shaking his head in disbelief.

Haydon watched him a moment. There wasn’t any way he was going to be able to help John Baine. Guatemala was the wrong place to get into trouble.

“You had a talk with Jim Fossler,” Haydon said.

Baine’s eyes shot up at Haydon. If the kid’s face hadn’t been so swollen from being punched Haydon thought he might have seen an expression of surprise.

“Is that what you are? Did Lena’s old man send another private investigator?”

“No, I don’t work for her father. You’d better answer me.”

Baine only nodded. “Yeah, we talked with Fossler.”

“Fossler said you and Lena were afraid of something, that he thought you were in some kind of trouble. Can you explain what that’s all about?”

Baine shook his head. “He seemed to think we were Bonnie and Clyde or something. Lena didn’t want to go back home. Actually, Fossler was sympathetic. He knew her mother wanted her back, but he knew her old man was a monster, too. Well, I guess he’s got something to take home to Lena’s folks now, doesn’t he.”

“I’m not sure he’ll ever get to do that,” Haydon said. “Fossler’s disappeared, and the only thing I can find of him is some blood left in his room.”

This time the shock was evident in Baine’s eyes.

“You’d better tell me what’s going on here,” Haydon said. “There’s a slim chance Fossler’s still alive. I’m trying to find him, but I’ve got to know what he knew that put him in danger. If you hold out on me I’m not going to give much of a damn what happens to you.”

Baine had hunched over farther, almost in a fetal position, grunting in short bursts. Haydon was half afraid the G-2 had taken the beatings too far. The kid looked bad. Without a doubt he was bleeding internally. If Tablaya’s men got to him again before the embassy did, Haydon didn’t think Baine would make it.

Baine coughed up something and leaned over and let it run out of his mouth. He wiped his chin on his shirt sleeve, took a moment to catch his breath, and then turned his head away from Borrayo. “I was onto a story,” he said hoarsely. He steadied himself against the back of the van.

“We’ve only got a few more minutes,” Haydon said.

“I got onto this story about this general, actually his sister…selling orphans, kids out of the highlands.”

“Orphans?”

Baine nodded. “In the highlands, over the years, since the late seventies there’ve been so many deaths, tens of thousands. There’ve been two hundred thousand kids orphaned up there. This country’s full of homeless kids. It’s a bad situation.”

Suddenly Haydon was painfully aware of Borrayo’s presence.

“Lena wanted information on this?”

“Wanted and had. She’d been working on that story a hell of a lot longer than I had. She’d been up there a long time. She saw a lot of shit happening; she knew stuff. I heard she had some documentation, and I’d come across some stuff too. Each of us had something the other wanted.”

A radio crackled under the dashboard at the front of the van, and the driver answered, speaking in a low, fast voice. He turned around quickly and spoke through the dark van.

“Efran!
¡Vamos!
”

“What documentation?”

Borrayo spoke to the young prisoner in the van. “
Maricón
, get out!”

The youth jumped out of the van and grabbed Baine’s arm to help him get in, but he had misunderstood. “No, no,” Borrayo said, and he stepped over to him.

“Do you know
which
general?” Haydon snapped. “What was his…”

There were two explosions, and Haydon reflexively fell back against the stone wall, reaching for his Beretta that wasn’t there. Borrayo had his back to Haydon and was standing over the young prisoner, who had sat down hard in the dirt, stunned, weaving, dying. The driver started the van, and Borrayo turned to Haydon, his hands and his gun in the air with a placating gesture.

“It had to be,” Borrayo explained, talking fast. “He was the only one I could not get away from. Look, friend,” Borrayo said. “This had to be. This boy, he is a snake. Do you think Tablaya would learn of this meeting? Yes, of course he would. I want to help you, Haydon, but I don’t want to die for you. Okay?” He raised his eyebrows in conclusion. “But this little
pinche
, he will have to die for you.”

Haydon’s heart was hitting his chest like a fist as Borrayo slowly turned back to the youth. The boy wasn’t dying quickly, because Borrayo had shot him in the stomach. His eyes had stopped seeing, but he was making bleating noises, trying not to fall over in the dirt where there was death. Borrayo shot him in the face, which blew it away and knocked him backward as hard as if he had been hit by a cannonball. What was left of his head was in the shadows, the lower half of his body in the dim light that spilled out of the open back door of the van.

Haydon saw how thin his ankles were, sticking out of his pants legs. He was wearing shoes without socks. Borrayo’s shot had blown him out of one of his shoes.

Borrayo turned slowly to Haydon. “Okay?”

The gunshots were still ringing in Haydon’s ears. What the hell was he going to say? That it wasn’t okay?

“Now I have to go,” Borrayo said, returning his gun to its shoulder holster under his jacket. He reached for Baine, who was stunned and glassy-eyed, leaning sideways on the back of the van. His muscles had failed him out of fear, and he couldn’t hold himself up. His eyes walled in terror, and his swollen lips were peeled back in disbelief as Borrayo grabbed him, recuffed him, and rolled him back onto the ribbed floor of the van.

“You had better get the hell out of here,” Borrayo said to Haydon, locking the back of the van.

“What about the driver?” Haydon asked, surprising himself that he was even thinking that logically.

“No problem,” Borrayo said. “He is my brother-in-law.” He slapped Haydon on the back. “Get out of here,” he said again.

Haydon stood against the wall, hugging the darkness, as Borrayo got into the van, and his brother-in-law gunned the engine. The back wheels threw up gravel, and the van tore along the side of the building to the alley, then turned and disappeared.

Haydon thought about John Baine in the back, aching from his beatings and horrified. In the quiet night he could hear the van’s engine revving through the deserted, distant streets. For the first time since he had arrived at this steep ridge above the ravines, he was aware of the heavy, oily stench of the smoldering dumps. He looked one last time at the young prisoner’s brain-spattered legs in the bloody weeds. In the dark, Haydon imagined he could hear the kid’s blood draining out of the place that had been his face and into the sand.

CHAPTER 27

H
e took several deep breaths of the foul night air and held them, trying to bring his heart rate under control. Colonia Santa Isabel was quiet, holding its own collective breath after Borrayo’s gunshots. Business was being conducted in the night streets, and no one wanted to know anything about it. Through the margin of brush that separated Haydon from the edge of the sharp banks of the ravine, he could see the lights of the Incense Bridge, wan and distant through the hazy space.

With difficulty he turned away from the dead boy and eased to the corner of the building, the rough stone and chipped stucco wall plucking at the shoulder of his suit coat. From the shadows he surveyed the street, the occasional lamp providing uneven blotches of sallow light. Two blocks away, his car was now alone by the curb.

He left the dark and ran across the street, keeping to the ragged margin where the first shanties teetered on the rim of the ravine and the paths started down into a maze of switchbacks. When he got to the other side and started toward the car, the first seventy-five meters were past a weedy stretch of land strewn with rubble and garbage and old car bodies with a backdrop of the city on the other side of the Rio La Barranca. Hurrying to reach the buildings where he could quickly duck into a number of darkened doorways if he needed to, he jogged across the dusty stretch, dust that made him think of the kid with the skinny ankles and no face. It made him think of the unconcerned ease with which Borrayo had dispatched the boy’s life, and it reminded him that if it hadn’t been for him it wouldn’t have happened at all, or at least it wouldn’t have happened because of him. Borrayo was too damned accommodating in matters of death.

He came to the first building and the beginning of the sidewalk that climbed out of the caliche and hugged the buildings as it ran from block to block, at first two feet above the street and then growing closer as the grade grew shallower. He walked the last block to the car, past shuttered windows, past the uric doorway where he had stopped with his nameless driver, and through one of the pale blotches of light from a streetlamp. Haydon had first met Borrayo in the early eighties, during la violencia. One made assumptions about men’s behavior in such extraordinary times, assumptions that often excused extremes, or at least pretended to understand them. He had heard that those times had returned, but he had not been prepared for this: Lena Muller, Fossler, Baine, and now this nameless boy…

He reached the corner, stepped down off the sidewalk and crossed the street to the opposite corner where his car was parked only a couple of meters from the first doorway. He was already reaching into his pocket for the keys, mentally unlocking the car door…

“Hay-don.”

He flinched and wheeled toward the voice in the same instant that he recognized it, though his mind hadn’t yet sorted out why it was out of context. With his last breath still caught in his diaphragm, he peered into the darkness where the corner of the opposite buildings blocked the weak light from the streetlamp. She came along the wall, dressed in an Indian
huipil
and cone, her hair braided on her head in the customary fashion. She was carrying a bundle in her arms, like a child wrapped in a
rebozo
.

“
Estoy Lita. ¡Anda listo!
” she said, and she hurried past him, her sandaled feet slapping against the stones as she descended the steps into the street. They reached the car together, and in a moment he was turning the key in the ignition, flipping on the lights.

“Hurry!” she said, unwrapping the
rebozo
.

“What about Cage?”

“No, no is here…no!”

Christ! Haydon gunned the car into a U-turn, and the narrow streets of Santa Isabel flashed by in the headlights, the buildings on either side dividing to let them through, rushing past their windows like tunnel walls. She gave him directions in a halting mixture of English and Spanish, until they emerged from the narrow streets onto the major Avenida Elena and headed south on the commercial thoroughfare.

“
Veinte cuadras más, más o menos
,” she said, and looked behind them one more time before she turned around, reasonably relaxed, one hand still inside her
rebozo
.

“How did you get there?” Haydon asked. “Where’s Cage?” He was both relieved to see her and furious that Cage had been following him.

“I come with Cage.”

“We weren’t followed,” he said.

She shook her head. “No.
Radio
,” she said, and outlined a box on the dash with her small hand.

Cage had put a beeper on his car.

“And he left you there alone?”

She shook her head again and pulled a radio out of the
rebozo
. She clicked it once and, as if to demonstrate, radioed their position. But it was in code, Haydon recognized none of the coordinates. Hell no, she wasn’t alone; Cage had left her with a radio! Haydon wanted to ask her why he had left her, but decided to save the question for Cage himself. Lita continued to look straight ahead.

Avenida Elena ran parallel to the Cementerio General, and several blocks east of it. They passed darkened furniture stores and cafés and the ubiquitous auto-parts houses that littered every Central American city of any size. The street grew narrower and began to climb slightly, and trees sprang up on either side, tall ones, cedars and cypresses, dark and somber against the stucco walls of the buildings.

In the warm car Haydon could smell the cottony odors of Lita’s
huipil
. Though the Indians’ fabrics could be beautiful and brilliantly designed, they often were hot, being most commonly made of a tightly woven, thick cotton cloth intended for years of everyday use and meant to last through all seasons. In the rainy season nights their clothes kept them warm, but in the dry season they suffered the heavy material in stoic silence. There was no tradition of changing to lighter-weight garments to accommodate the seasons. Who had two complete sets of clothes? That was a notion for the wealthy.