Body of Truth (13 page)

Then to their left the powder-blue stucco wall of the cemetery rose to six meters in height and ran nearly a kilometer’s distance to the far end of its façade, and behind it, a necropolis, a true city of the dead, with wooded avenues and streets and alleys, paths, humble
hoyas,
pretentious crypts, and pompous mausoleums. The city of the dead was more organized, cleaner, more beautiful, and kinder to its residents than was the city of the living. And everyone there was mercifully relieved of the constant dread of becoming what they already had become.

Haydon was not aware of the police car they had picked up until Cage swore and began pulling over and the cherry splashes appeared on the windshield and back of Cage’s head. Cage turned into the first side street, in front of a shuttered
marmolería
, its sign in the shape of a gravestone. The police car pulled around too, drove slowly past them, and then made a U-turn and parked on the other side of the street facing in the opposite direction. The police car’s doors opened, and three men got out. The one on the passenger side of the front seat wore civilian clothes.

“DIC,” Cage said. The man in civilian clothes and one of the officers stayed at the car, leaning on the fender, while the other officer began walking across the street toward them.

“Lita,” Cage snapped. “
¡Ven aquá…tu camisa!
Haydon, put her on your lap, facing this way.” The girl scrambled into the front seat with them, crawled onto Haydon’s lap, frantically working at the buttons as Cage rolled down his darkened window halfway, opened the van door, and got out. The girl jerked open her blouse; she wore no bra.

Cage met the officer in the middle of the street, before he could get too close to the van, just as the officer’s flashlight came up to shoulder height. Cage’s body momentarily blocked the beam of light. The officer stopped.

“
Muevese
,” he said, tilting his head warily and using the beam of the flashlight to motion Cage aside. “
¿Qué pasa?
”

The girl put her left arm around Haydon’s neck, and he could smell the faint musky fragrance of her unperfumed skin and feel her breathing hard from her efforts. When Cage moved aside, the officer’s flashlight beam caught Haydon’s profile and the girl’s laughing face and bare breasts just as she crossed her free arm to hide herself.

Cage laughed nervously, and the officer swore and grinned. There was a brief conversation in the middle of the street. Cage’s voice lowering as Haydon heard him explain to the officer that “my boss” had been wanting “this little thing” for a long time. So Cage had arranged it, you know, everyone gets something out of it.

Haydon strained to hear, the girl’s breasts still inches from his face, her body breathing with his, a wild combination of fear and eroticism.

“The two mans with the car no coming,” she whispered to Haydon with a heavy accent. His face was close enough to hers that he felt her breath on his mouth and looked into the dark almond slant of her Mayan eyes as she fixed her attention on the charade in the street behind him. “La mordida,” she whispered again, referring to the inevitable bribe that Cage was proffering and which would be expected and accepted. Close enough to her eyes to see the moisture in them, Haydon was struck by the steely composure with which she was playing this out. Though he could feel the heavy breathing in her chest, he could tell it was only from the exertion of urgency, not from fear. The girl’s face was as placid as a wooden altar angel’s, though when the beam of the policeman’s flashlight had hit her she had quickly laughed as lustily as a prostitute. Now her face was resolute again, waiting for her next cue. She was one of those people, truly rare individuals, who embraced a deadly serenity in a crisis.

Cage’s voice was ingratiating, and the officer hissed and laughed again in macho admiration for what the man in the van was getting himself into. It was coming to a close. The girl quickly pulled Haydon’s free hand to a breast, and almost at the same moment the bribed officer couldn’t resist flashing the beam of his light one more time into the van, catching the side of the girl’s smiling face as she turned away from the bright beam and pushed Haydon’s hand away as if in coy protest and “accidentally” allowing the policeman to get a good look at her naked breasts.

It was over in a minute, and Cage was walking back to the van, opening the door, getting in, and rolling up the darkened window as the girl scrambled out of Haydon’s lap and into the backseat.

“Holy shit,” Cage said. From behind the darkened glass they watched the police car until it pulled away, went to the intersection, turned out onto 4a avenida, and disappeared. “I don’t like that one damn bit.” He was angry. He lighted a cigarette and sucked on it a couple of times, thinking. The girl was sitting behind them, buttoning her blouse, tucking it into the waist of her skirt, her head down so that her coarse black hair obscured her face.

“‘The DIC wants to talk to you,’ the son of a bitch said.” Cage pulled hard on the cigarette. “DIC. Shit. Those
micos
, the bigger the dog they have with them, the more they want you to pay them not to let him bite you. I don’t like that one bit. I don’t know
when
the last time was I got stopped. That whole thing smelled. I wish I could have gotten a look at the agent.

“Lita”—Cage raised his chin and looked at the girl in the rearview mirror—“did you see the guy?” She was straightening her blouse, her face in that moment still turned away from them. She only shook her head. “Well, I don’t like it,” Cage said again. Then he put the van in gear and made a U-turn.

CHAPTER 14

T
hey were back on 4a avenida. They came to the grand neoclassical entrance to the Cementerio General on their left, looming dark and massive and deserted in the night, and passed by. At the end of the long powder-blue wall on the northern end of the cemetery, the height of the wall dropped to three meters, and the color changed to a smog-coated gray as they pulled off the pavement and onto a caliche strip in front of another set of gates. They had arrived at the Morgue Organismo Judicial. Looking up through the van’s dirty windshield, Haydon saw a bare bulb under a dented reflective pan hanging from a goosenecked pipe on the span above the gates. The small bulb threw an improvised glow on the caliche. Just inside the gate’s bars an equally jaundiced glow issued through the small window of the gatehouse and out through its open door. Everything in Guatemala City was poorly lighted, the bulbs were too weak, the power source overtaxed, the haze ever present.

Cage pulled the emergency brake on the van, left it idling, and got out. He walked around the front of the truck, approached the gates, and called through the bars to the gatehouse. There were shadows of movement inside the small building, and a frail, crooked-backed man who swung his arms in an alternating pumping motion made his way out to the gate and listened to Cage through the bars. The old man nodded deeply and then clacked the latch and swung open the gates as Cage came back to the van.

“Jesus, I’ve never known people who liked formalities so much,” was all Cage said. As they drove through, Haydon heard a preacher of the evangelical
El Verbo
church railing on the radio in the hot little gatehouse.

The large rectangular compound of the morgue was empty except for a lone car parked under a eucalyptus tree in the median that ran the length of the courtyard to the far end where a two-storied building five or six rooms in width was wedged into the back corner of the compound against one of the high walls. The design of the building was spare, looking as though it had been built in the 1950s: a gap in the left side of the bottom floor was a foyer, now dimly lighted, to its right a long white wall with a single row of tiny windows just above head height all the way to the end of the building. Above that, the second floor was a single row of much larger windows where the offices were located, and a flat roof. That was all.

“You been here before?” Cage asked.

“Three years ago.”

“Well, there’s a new morgue under construction over here,” Cage said, jerking his head to his left. Another low-slung building, same design. But the unfinished building was dark except for an empty and vacant foyer and two of the head-high windows from which issued a leprous fluorescent glow that quickly dissipated in the night.

“The new morgue will have refrigeration,” Cage said, pulling up to the front of the old morgue. “But they’re behind schedule on it. They tried to finish out the refrigerated lockers at least, so they could keep the bodies longer.” He stopped the van and turned off the motor and leaned on the steering wheel. “Last month they thought they were ready and started putting bodies over there, half a dozen of them or so. They were so proud of those goddamned lockers that they let the autopsies pile up—you know, sort of to demonstrate there was no rush. ‘Oh, we’ll get to them in a few days’ kind of attitude. ‘Our new refrigerated lockers will keep them forever. No problem. Let’s smoke a cigarette. Let’s have a
cafecito
.’ Well, days passed and then they finally went over to get the bodies to start in on the backlogged autopsies. But, holy shit, a surprise! They found they had had a Freon leak and the refrigeration had shut down. All eight of the bodies had gotten so hot closed up in those stainless-steel locker drawers that they’d swelled up and exploded in there. Big mess.” Cage stomped on the emergency brake. “Come on.”

Haydon remembered every detail of the morgue. It wasn’t a place you were likely to forget. It was, of course, like so many other buildings in Central America, of cinder-block construction. And stucco. Though the law provided that unidentified bodies could be held up to several weeks, pending identification, in actual practice the lack of refrigeration necessitated that bodies be autopsied as soon as possible and buried within twenty-four hours. Naturally, sometimes schedules could not be kept and bodies lay in the holding rooms until they began to smell. This happened so often, in fact, that there was a permanent smell of death about the place. In the rainy season it smelled so strongly of mildew and death you could actually detect the reek of the building before you got to it.

The three of them got out of the van, and the Indian girl, whom Cage still had not introduced, followed them into the morgue. There was only one attendant on duty, his feet propped on one of the two metal desks in the foyer, reading a sepia-toned comic book. When Cage pushed through the filthy glass doors, the man dropped his feet and looked as if he were going to bolt and run. Indeed, nothing had changed. The place was filthy, with overlooked spatters of blood turning a rusty black here and there on the floor or knee high along the unscrubbed walls. He did not want to be here, in these rooms where the sebaceous smell of death was inexpugnable, even by the candylike sweetness of the disinfectants they used in place of cleanliness and the ever-present charred odors of the smoldering garbage dumps that filled the Rio La Barranca just beyond the long avenues of tombs on the other side of the walls. A soughing breeze moved up through the ravines and drifted in through the open windows and, like the invisible hand of an impatient angel, moved the swinging doors that led to the holding rooms with a lonely, softly lilting rhythm: flap-flap…flap-flap…flap-flap. Haydon looked toward the doors behind which the bodies lay in the ripening heat, and where, even now, he could see a glimpse of a waxy, bare foot.

Haydon had been only half listening to Cage’s dialogue with the attendant, and now he realized that Cage was insisting on getting the papers known as Form 16 which was, in effect, the investigating judge’s report and all the accompanying police reports that come with the discovery of the body of an unknown person, officially known as “XX.”

Finally Cage pulled out a wad of bills, and the man looked at them with an expression that betrayed a crumbling resolve and turned to the filing cabinet. He rifled through some files and pulled out a manila folder. He and Cage exchanged commodities, and Cage handed the papers to the Indian girl.

“Come on, Haydon,” he said, and stalked to the swinging doors.

The room was small. Through poor planning, or more likely no planning, there were two small holding rooms instead of one large one, the second room accessible only by going through the first. Equally inexplicable was the fact that this first room was always filled with bodies before the second one, so that any additional corpses had to be bumped and maneuvered on gurneys through the crowded first room into the empty second one. It apparently never occurred to them to fill the one farthest back first. But only three bodies were in the first room now, not in body bags, but lying on gurneys and covered with thin sheets. The airtight plastic body bags would only have accelerated their deterioration in the stifling heat.

There were six feet showing. Cage paused, looked at them a moment and stepped to the last of the three gurneys and threw back the sheet. Her face was bloated and misshapen, and her blond hair was matted with blood and the debris of what appeared to be straw and twigs. Having seen Lena Muller only in photographs, Haydon did not believe he would have recognized her. She had already been autopsied, so there was the familiar Y-shaped incision, the upper branches of which traversed her chest just below her breasts, while the descending branch went straight down into her pubis. These incisions had been expertly done and neatly sewn. But there were other wounds too, ragged ones, wounds of deliberate cruelty and torture. Her handless forearms were crossed on her chest, and the hands themselves were stacked separately on her lower abdomen.

“Okay, Haydon. In Guatemala death is a hands-on kind of business. Let’s get her in a bag.”

The attendant was right behind them with a crackling plastic body bag, and they proceeded to wrestle her into it by putting a second gurney beside hers, opening the bag, and lifting her over into it. It wasn’t easy, and the feel of her dead, gravity-bound body stirred a visceral anger in Haydon that he hadn’t experienced in a long time and that surprised him by its intensity as it unexpectedly rushed up from his gorge like a sudden nausea.