Body of Truth (11 page)

A maid answered in Spanish, and Haydon, talking slowly and deliberately, identified himself and mentioned Lena’s name, thinking the maid would most likely garble the rest of it. There was a wait of a minute or two before the maid’s voice came on the speaker. “
Pase adelante
,” she said, and the electronic latch on the small pedestrian gate beside the pillar sprung ajar. Haydon paid his driver again and walked through the gate, pulling it closed behind him.

By the time he walked across the drive to the front courtyard, a maid was coming out to meet him. “
Buenas
,” she said, smiling quickly, and he followed her through low, lush plantings illuminated by footlights placed among the foliage, to a second wrought-iron gate. Immediately inside this they stepped into a wide breezeway that led through into an inner courtyard surrounded by the loggia of the house. However, the maid turned left through a recessed doorway and led him into a living room that overlooked the courtyard outside, and where a worried-looking Janet Pittner was coming over to meet him.

“Mr. Haydon?” she was saying, extending her hand.

“Yes, Stuart Haydon, and I want to apologize immediately for coming so late and without an introduction.”

“No, that’s perfectly all right. I’m glad you did. Come on in,” she said, bringing him into the room. “I’d like you to meet Bennett Pittner,” she said, taking him toward a sofa where a man in his early fifties was already standing with a drink in his hand. They shook hands. “Uh, we…we were formerly married,” she explained, alluding to their same last names.

Janet Pittner must have been ten years younger than her ex-husband. She was rather tall, with a thin frame that wore clothes to their advantage, in this case a sundress of pale lemon cotton. Her sienna hair was pulled back loosely and held in place with a clip, revealing silver pendant earrings. Her sundress had a scooped neck and snug waist, which allowed him to observe that though she was thin, she was not small busted. She was nervous, frowning at Haydon, her arms crossed.

Bennett Pittner, on the other hand, was quite calm. His suit, the coat of which was thrown over the back of the sofa next to where he had been sitting, was decidedly rumpled, and his tie and the collar of his white shirt were loosened. His ginger hair, shot through with gray, was worn rather more full than most State Department types. His mouth was smallish, and he tended to hold it slightly pursed. He held his drink in one hand, his other hand in his pocket, as he regarded Haydon from lazy-lidded eyes over a prominent hawk’s-beak nose.

There was a moment of awkwardness, and then Janet blurted out that Haydon should have a seat, how about a drink. He declined the latter. He sat in an armchair and began to explain. He left out his observation of Jim Fossler’s unusual behavior and said only that he had come to interview Lena to satisfy the requirements for closing the case. He told Janet that Fossler had given him her name and that he had just arrived in the city. He left out his discovery of Fossler’s bloody room and did not mention Taylor Cage or the fact that he knew Lena was, once again, missing.

“So,” he said in conclusion, “If I could talk with her I would appreciate it. I could close the case and go home.”

Pittner had returned to his place on the sofa, one leg crossed nonchalantly over the other, but Janet had not sat down and was standing a little ways from both men with folded arms, occasionally stroking her upper left arm with her right hand in a gesture of agitation. There was a brief silence during which Bennett Pittner simply looked at Haydon as though he expected him to continue.

But Haydon had said all he was going to say. He looked at both of them.

“Well,” Janet said with a huge sigh, twitching her upper torso nervously and taking a few steps toward them. “I…really, it’s not convenient for you to talk to Lena just now. Not tonight. Actually…it’s, well, I’m not sure she’d want to talk to you.”

“Really? Jim Fossler said he had talked to her twice and he didn’t see that she would have any problem with it.”

“It’s not that easy,” Janet said. She was flustered, and Bennett Pittner wasn’t helping her, letting her sputter stupidly until she finally simply stopped and stared at her ex-husband.

He was looking at his drink, sensed she was transfixed on him in frustration, looked up at her in mild surprise, kind of shrugged with his eyebrows, and turned to Haydon.

“Actually,” he said in a modulated tone. “Lena’s gone missing.”

The British phrasing was interesting. Pittner certainly wasn’t British, of course, in fact Haydon had thought he had detected a slight Georgia drawl in his voice. But the British phrasing hung in the air politely, an embarrassed admission.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Janet blurted, flinging her arms up in the air and pacing across to the windows that looked out into the courtyard. There were mellow lights in the shrubbery out in the courtyard, and Haydon could see a fountain burbling in its center and could hear it through the tall open windows. Janet came back to them.

“She’s goddamned disappeared,” Janet said to Pittner who regarded her with a mild expression of unexcited patience. She wheeled around to Haydon. “She’s gone, Mr. Haydon,” she said dramatically. Her hazel eyes were dancing with emotion. In a burst of staccato monologue she quickly told Haydon what Cage already had related, and when she had brought him up to the present, she turned abruptly and walked over to a small table covered with liquor bottles and poured herself a drink, without ice, straight.

Pittner had been sitting back on the sofa. Now he leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, his drink in his hands, and looked at Haydon.

“Janet thinks Lena has met with some misfortune,” he said, without hurry. “The crime rate is bad here right now. People have to watch themselves.”

“Oh, shit,” Janet rolled her head and groaned. “The ‘crime rate.’” She came over and fixed her eyes on Haydon. “You traveled down here before?”

Haydon nodded. “Some,” he said.

Janet sat down on the sofa, at the opposite end from Pittner, closer to Haydon. “Then you know about the ‘crime rate’ down here. If you’re aware at all, then you know that the ‘crime rate’”—she said the two words as if they were an insult—“is institutional. It’s the National Police’s Department for Criminal Investigation, the DIG It’s the G-2, military intelligence. It’s the Guardia de Hacienda, the border police. It’s the goon squads that every political party keeps on its payroll so they can knock off their rivals a la mafia. All of these fall under the general rubric of ‘death squads’…a.k.a., ‘the crime rate.’”

She jerked her head around to Pittner. “Isn’t that right, Pitt?” Back to Haydon. “Somebody gets killed down here, all these organizations blame it on the ‘common criminal element,’ but in reality everyone knows it’s the work of the death squads, which everyone knows could be anybody. The only way you know who did it is to know something about the victims. Who’d they piss off? Whose way were they in? Who would benefit from the victims’ death? What were the victims’ politics?” She looked around at Pittner again. “‘Common crime’ my little American ass.”

Pittner let his heavy-lidded eyes rest on her a moment while she took a strong hit of her straight drink. He turned to Haydon.

“I doubt if anything like that happened,” he drawled. Pittner had the raw complexion of a heavy drinker. Haydon wondered if his slow-motion deportment was his manner or his condition. “It’s rare—rare—that United States citizens fall victim to the ‘death squad’ kind of thing. That stuff…it’s internal.” He closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. “I just can’t see it.”

“That’s for goddamned sure,” Janet snapped.

CHAPTER 12

T
here was a silent moment while each of them turned to their drinks, as though the bell had rung and each had retreated to a neutral corner. Haydon glanced around the room. It was expensively appointed, a grand piano, dark antiques against the dun-colored stucco walls, a massive, well-used fireplace at one end of the room, over which hung an enormous oil painting of a Guatemalan landscape whose focal point was one of the country’s numerous volcanoes. And there were books, a lot of them, scattered around and obviously read, a pile of them stacked on the floor at Janet’s end of the creamy leather sofa. On a perch at the far end of the room was a majestic scarlet macaw, his scarlet and lemon and sapphire feathers as startlingly brilliant as if he had been made of richly dyed silk. He was as motionless as an artifact, but Haydon had seen him blink.

“What about John Baine?” Haydon asked, thinking he ought to break the silence, give them some relief.

“What about him?” Pittner asked.

“No one’s heard from him either?”

“Oh, hell no,” Janet said. Haydon couldn’t tell whether her sarcasm was directed at her ex-husband’s skeptical attitude or reflected her opinion of Baine.

Haydon looked at Pittner. “You don’t think anything serious has happened to her?”

“Let’s just say I really wouldn’t expect to find her picture in the Gabinete de Identificación’s book of unidentified bodies. We just don’t have any reason to think like that.” He regarded Haydon. “I mean, look at you. She disappeared on you, didn’t she? That’s why you’re down here, isn’t it? She seems to have this habit…” He gestured vaguely with his glass, which was empty, and the little bit of remaining ice zinged around in the bottom, attracting his attention to the fact that it was empty. He got up and went to the liquor table. Haydon noticed that he drank good American bourbon.

“What about it, Haydon?” Pittner asked, straightening up from the little table and turning around. “Why did she run away from up there?”

“She didn’t talk any of that over with you?” Haydon asked, addressing Janet, not Pittner.

“No, she didn’t,” Janet said. “I didn’t even know she was having trouble at home, if she was…whatever it was. Didn’t have an idea until that investigator showed up here asking for her.”

“When I talked to Jim Fossler on the telephone yesterday,” Haydon continued, turning back to Pittner, “he told me that he thought Lena might be in some kind of trouble, and he thought Baine was involved too.”

“Trouble?” Pittner was poker faced. He raised his eyebrows in innocent perplexity and looked at Janet.

“What?” she said.

“You hear her say anything about something like that?” Pittner asked.

“No. No, I didn’t.”

She had, of course. Her denial was as transparent as glass. Janet Pittner was incapable of hiding her emotions. She was the kind of woman who showed you her emotions first, right up front. There was a kind of honesty in it, and a kind of instability as well.

“You don’t remember anything?” Haydon asked needlessly.

“No.” Janet shook her head emphatically.

“Maybe she was pregnant,” Pittner said helpfully.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Pitt.” Janet looked at him as if he was an imbecile.

“Fossler mentioned that she seemed frightened.”

Janet’s face reacted to this.

“Well, Mr. Fossler seems to have been particularly perceptive,” Pittner said, walking back to the sofa and sitting down again. His drink was pure amber. A double. No water. He pursed his lips. “Have you already gone over this with him since you’ve arrived?”

Haydon looked at Pittner closely. “I haven’t had time.”

“But you must’ve come in on, what, that eight-forty flight?” He looked at his watch. “You’ve…well, I guess you’ve had things to do.”

“What kind of work do you do at the embassy?” Haydon asked. If Pittner was going to be impertinent…

“Oh. Well, Political Section. Been doing Political Section for years. But not here always. Other Latin American countries too.”

Janet was not listening. She had tucked one leg up under her on the sofa and was tapping her fingers on her glass, which she cradled in her lap. She was lost in thought. There was another moment of silence, and Pittner’s eyes floated over to the scarlet macaw and then drifted back to Haydon.

“I’d like to know what happens now,” Haydon said, straight to Pittner.

“Mmmmmmm,” Pittner nodded. “I’m going to the Consular Section tomorrow and have them begin looking into it. I guess they’ll poke around. I’m not sure how they’ll do that. Anyway, I promised Janet I’d get something started.”

“Are you planning to notify the girl’s family?”

“Consular will tend to that,” Pittner said. “And, of course, I’m sure they’ll want to consult with the alert Mr. Fossler. And you. You could be helpful. You ought to check in with them tomorrow.”

“What has Fossler said about this?”

“I guess he doesn’t know,” Janet said distractedly. She was massaging her right temple with the ends of her fingers. “We haven’t seen him since…”

“Since Janet decided to get excited,” Pittner said.

“You mentioned the Gabinete de Identificación,” Haydon said to him. “Has anyone gone to the National Police Headquarters and checked the book?”

Haydon didn’t know how long “the book of the dead,” as it was commonly called, had been a part of modern Guatemalan life, but the eerie thing to him was that it had been around long enough for everyone to take it for granted, to act as if it was something that ought properly to exist in a civilized society. Most Guatemalans were so grateful not to be in it themselves, and so frightfully aware of how easily they could be, that they kept their mouths shut about it and didn’t remark on its existence at all. With a few rash and desperate exceptions, the people of Guatemala were governed by fear. Fear had deafened them and blinded them and cauterized their hearts. It had created a suspicious and furtive society.

The grim book was kept in the National Police Headquarters, an old stone, fortresslike structure wedged into the narrow corridor of 6 avenida, Zona 1, on the northeast corner of Enrique Gomez Park. The book contained photographs, regularly collected from every morgue in the country, of unidentified bodies that had been discovered along roadsides, in garbage dumps, washed up on riverbanks and lakeshores and the shores of the Gulf of Honduras and the South Coast, found among the crushed cornstalks of small milpas, in the stagnant cisterns of old fincas, and against curbsides and in gutters, in
plazoletas
and in empty soccer fields. They were ubiquitous, these bodies. Fifty or sixty a month. Seventy. More in an election year, many more. And Guatemala had just been through a national election.