Body of Truth (17 page)

“Have you got a few minutes to talk to me?”

“An American?”

“Yes, I am. I’d like to ask you some questions about Lena Muller.”

“Who?” Grajeda was taking no chances.

“The American woman you autopsied in Huehuetenango and brought back to the capital.”

Grajeda looked at Haydon in silence, but because of the dim light in the room, Haydon could not see his expression.

“Are you attached to the American embassy?” Grajeda asked. His voice was rather soft and patient, even polite. He spoke excellent English and pronounced his words precisely. As he turned just right to the weak light coming in from the window just behind him, the surfaces of his eyeglasses threw two discal reflections from the shadows.

“No,” Haydon said. “I’m not from the embassy.” He explained briefly who he was and why he was there, and even took out his shield and handed it across to Grajeda, who examined it, holding it up to the light coming through the window behind him.

“Fossler is a friend?” he asked, handing back the shield.

Haydon nodded, wondering if he should tell him about Fossler’s room.

“Then he did come by and talk to you yesterday morning?” Haydon asked.

“I like Fossler,” Grajeda’s voice lightened as he remembered his conversation with the American. “Why didn’t he come with you?”

“I’m afraid that something might have happened to him,” Haydon said. “He was supposed to have met me at the airport last night, but he wasn’t there. I went to the address he gave me, to his room, and the place had been ransacked. There was blood everywhere, but Fossler was gone.”

Grajeda listened to this without reaction, and there was a lengthy pause before he asked, “You didn’t talk to him after he talked to me?”

“No.”

Grajeda nodded and quietly stroked the child’s hair.

Haydon’s eyes were adjusting to the dim light now. They were standing in a kind of office. There was a desk by a window behind Grajeda and another doorway leading into another room where there was at least one table with a sheet over it. There were a few chairs lined along the wall to Haydon’s left, and handwritten signs everywhere encouraging people not to defecate or urinate on the dirt floors of their houses—the Spanish was earthy: “shit” and “piss”—not to handle food after shitting or pissing until they had washed; not to walk without sandals (this admonition was accompanied by a huge, fierce drawing of a hookworm); not to have sexual intercourse without condoms, which
el doctor
would provide without charge; not to drink water until they had boiled it or put pills in it, which
el doctor
would give them without charge. All of these cautionary encouragements were accompanied by simple drawings with the condemned behavior crossed out.

“I talked to Jim Fossler on Sunday afternoon,” Haydon said. “He told me then that you were a friend of Lena’s, that you had worked with her in the western highlands.”

Grajeda’s face changed at this last remark. Though he was clearly a ladino—of European and Indian blood, rather than pure Indian—the doctor had retained the Mayan eyes of his ancestors, slightly Asian in their oblique relationship to his rather round face. His complexion was dusky and he had the coarse black hair of the Indian as well. He wore a neatly clipped moustache and goatee, and both his beard and his hair were prematurely streaked with gray.

“I am afraid Mr. Fossler has made a mistake,” he said with a respectful smile.

“How’s that?”

“I never knew this woman Muller. He said the same thing to me, that I knew her. I told him I didn’t. Who told him that I knew her?”

“He didn’t say.”

“I’m sorry if both of you have come to see me believing that this is the situation, that I knew her.”

“I don’t know who told him,” Haydon said, “but since I didn’t get a chance to see him after he spoke to you, I don’t know anything about your conversation.”

Grajeda thought about this. “Well then, I suppose we should talk,” he said. He looked down at the girl and then reached up on top of the cabinet and got down a crumpled paper bag that was clearly his lunch sack. Untwisting the top of the bag, he reached in and pulled out an orange and gave it to the little girl. He thanked her for her kindness in bringing this
gringo
to him, and told her to run along, his tone good-natured as if he were used to dealing with children. Turning back to the glass cabinet, he closed its doors, locked them, and put the key in the pocket of the short white laboratory coat he was wearing.

“
¡Siéntese!
” he said, and offered Haydon one of the rickety chairs against the plaster wall. He moved around behind his desk and sat down, the light coming in over his right shoulder from the screenless window. The day was heating up quickly, but a slight coolness remained within the thick walls. Haydon could hear chickens somewhere outside, and snatches of women’s conversations as they passed by the open door of the clinic. Grajeda smiled again, a soft, almost bashful smile, the smile of Buddha.

“I didn’t bring her back from Huehuetenango,” he said with a huge sigh. “It was a tragedy. Fossler knew she was dead. I told him yesterday morning when he was out here.”

CHAPTER 18

D
r. Aris Grajeda was in his early thirties. His thick Indian hair formed a rather low hairline on his forehead, and though it was neatly combed and barbered, a heavy wave of it hung in a romantic coil above his eyes. He had dark eyes that were at once compassionate and unflinching, and a straight nose with the pronounced nostrils of a Mayan. His mouth, however, was European, finely sculpted with a dimple in the center of his upper lip. His steel-rimmed glasses gave him the look of a man on the far edge of his youth. He sat in front of Haydon with his elbows on his desk, his hands clasped together as he leaned forward, and as he talked he sometimes stroked his handsome goatee in the manner of a thoughtful man. The sleeves of his lab coat were too long, and he had folded them back once to reveal the white cuff of a wrinkled shirt. His hands seemed to be the hands of a pianist, with long fingers and cleanly manicured nails.

“I was in Huehuetenango helping a surgeon friend of mine who works in the main hospital there,” he said. “The one on 6a calle, if you are familiar with it, on the road to Guatemala City. He had lined up a number of surgeries, and I went up to assist him. On some of these things, you like to have doctors you know assisting. The man’s an Italian, an ophthalmologist. He helps me here in Mezquital and at the Roosevelt Hospital, and I go up there. We are still cleaning up the human debris left behind by the measles epidemic.” He regarded Haydon through his wire-framed lenses. “You know of the epidemic?”

Haydon nodded.

“You know how bad it was?”

“I read about it.”

Grajeda sat back in his chair, took a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, popped out the point, and made a couple of doodling marks on a notepad.

“In the next
departamento
over, in Quiché, more than a thousand children died in one month of the epidemic,” he said. “Just in one
departamento
. One thousand. Can you imagine one thousand little bodies lined up side by side in a road? Or one thousand tiny caskets? Rubella.” He shrugged. “Just measles, that’s all it was. A lot of charitable organizations from Europe and the United States had given money to the Cerezo government for the purchase of vaccine and to inoculate children through the Accelerated Immunization Project. A little vaccine was obtained, not nearly enough, and most of it went bad anyway. It wasn’t properly refrigerated. It was in a warehouse here in the city. It never even reached the countryside. Not only that, two million dollars of the money disappeared. The Health Ministry blamed USAID; USAID blamed the Health Ministry. There is an investigation, of course. One thousand children. Just rubella, that’s all it was. Very, very sad.”

Though his story was a bitter one, Grajeda’s manner did not reflect that attitude. As he doodled again with his pen, a serene smile remained on his lips as if it were his belief that the corrupt men who had greatly contributed to this catastrophe were stupid children who could only be pitied for their horrible ignorance. He pushed back his chair and turned sideways to Haydon, his profile squarely in the center of the window behind him. He crossed his legs and looked at a colored poster of venereal disease sores on the wall opposite him and shook his head.

“Well, there were deaths in Huehuetenango too,” he said. “Hundreds and hundreds. But there were also many cases, too many cases, in which the children survived…except for a lingering infection in the eyes. That’s not so uncommon, but where you have modern medical facilities you can fight it. However, here…there is only one treatment.” Grajeda looked out the window. “Either you let them keep their eyes and allow the infection to spread to the rest of their system and eventually kill them. Or you remove the source of the infection. Send these children back to their families in the countryside to continue living in poverty…blind. We spent days and nights taking out tiny eyes and throwing them away. ‘Be of good cheer, Mama…we have saved the life of your child.’”

Grajeda watched something out of the window, the side of his face washed in an oblique white light. He reached up and ran a hand through the curl that hung over his forehead, pushing it back out of his eyes, and revealing a dark crescent of perspiration under the arm of his stained laboratory coat. He uncrossed his leg and let his foot drop to the gritty floor as he turned around to face Haydon again. He picked up a tiny, strangely shaped gourd and examined it. He held it up so Haydon could see it.

“‘
¡Un pescado!
’ Does this look like a fish to you?” He made it swim into the light and back, weaving it gently in the airy waters. Then he put it to one side on his desk again and rested his forearms in front of him and looked at it. “A child gave it to me,” he said. “Of course, this child had never seen a fish…what did she know? Her mother had seen one once and told her about it.”

He hung his head a moment, a gesture of weariness, then he looked up.

“So I was in Huehuetenango helping my friend, saving lives like Albert Schweitzer,” Grajeda continued, a self-mocking remark with only a hint of cynicism. “It was ten o’clock at night, or ten-thirty. We had operated a long time, and my colleague had gotten sick and had to stop. A stomach virus hit him quite suddenly. He had been down on the Rio Buca. I think he got something there. Anyway, I was almost glad of the attack. I was exhausted, and if he had not been stricken with cramps and diarrhea I think I would have embarrassed myself by collapsing. They brought her into the hospital, these guys.”

“The police?”

“Two were in National Police uniforms, two in plainclothes. I don’t know if the two men in suits were G-2 or DIG agents. It doesn’t really make any difference. They didn’t bother to show me any identification. I was sleeping on one of the operating tables—it was the best place—and they just wheeled her in there and shook me awake. When I got up, they tossed her onto the table where I had been sleeping. Autopsy.
¡Ahorita!

“She was still wrapped in a
rebozo
, and she stank of rotten cassava. I called in a nurse and we started. She was so…pale. I had gotten used…to dark skin…”

Grajeda wiped a hand over his face and sighed. “It wasn’t much of an autopsy. I was angry at them. I told them to get the hell out while I did my job, but the lieutenant insisted on all of them staying. They were nervous anyway, having the responsibility of a white woman like that. It was
muy importante
that they stay, he said, for official reasons. No. They were only voyeurs.” He swallowed, tried to swallow again but couldn’t. “I tried to do a real job of it, methodical, but they got impatient. I yelled at them to get the hell out of there and waved a scalpel at them. Instantly four Uzi’s cocked and came up.”

Grajeda raised his arms and positioned them close to his chest as if he were gripping the snub-nose Uzi and fixed the imaginary barrel and his eyes on Haydon. He held the pose a moment and then dropped his arms.

“Those guys, they’re in love with those weapons. They love to swing them around and point them at people. They love to see your face when you suddenly realize there is just a small breath between the tension in their fingers and your death. Believe me, when you are in that situation it shows in your face. Forget
machismo
. It makes you want to shit your pants.”

Grajeda stared at the top of his desk.

“While we were squared off like this, frozen, facing each other, one of them, one of the guys in street clothes, slowly reached out the barrel of his Uzi and put it under the hem of the nurse’s dress. He put the barrel up under there, you know. She was petrified.” He shook his head and smiled sadly. “All of these guys are cowards. I knew they could wait. Later the nurse would have to pay for my arrogant belligerence. And they would make sure I heard what they had done to her. That’s the way they do it. My God.” He waved languidly at a fly. “You slip into a kind of moral triage. Your friend was dead. The nurse had to go home to her husband and children. What the hell did it matter, really, if I didn’t do the autopsy by the book? I had a live woman and a dead woman. What was I going to do? The nurse knew all this. She was terror-stricken that I was going to stand on principle or something.

“When I finished, they took the body of the girl away in a plastic bag with some ice from the commissary. That’s all I know.”

“What about the autopsy?”

Grajeda looked at Haydon. “What about it?”

“What happened to her?”

Grajeda was weary; he stroked his goatee. “Oh, she was tortured to death.”

“How?”

Grajeda’s eyes came back to him, and his face assumed an expression of mild curiosity. “Why do you want to know that?”

“I’m a policeman,” Haydon said. “While I don’t see torture as a general rule, I do see it. I have to report it in detail the same way a pathologist does. Unfortunately, it’s necessary for me to know.”

Grajeda’s exotic eyes regarded Haydon through the lenses of his small round glasses. He was a striking figure, almost theatrical in his unusual mixture of features and his manner of seeming to understand and even accept with a kind of pained sorrow the horrors that were commonplace in his country.