Body of Truth (2 page)

“Apart from all the…heartbreak,”—Haydon was surprised at this word too—“the publicity…the loss of what was ours being ours alone, has been unnerving.”

Haydon had no way of knowing how much the Mullers had known about their daughter’s personal relationships, but the newspaper reporters, every one making an “investigative” effort to bring the story alive on their paper’s pages, had made it abundantly clear that Lena Muller had been a child of her times. Her sexual involvements while she was at Rice could have been described as promiscuous, though that word, too, had lost some of its potency and had fallen into disuse in the wake of the sexual revolution.

“You must have found us to be odd people, George and I, during these past months,” she said. “We’ve felt odd, to tell you the truth. Not ourselves. It’s…been humbling. For me. George, of course…” She shook her head, her shoulders moved, the beginning of a shrug that never developed. “Being affluent, well, you can afford to isolate yourself from so much, can’t you, from the disarray that seems to characterize so much of other people’s lives. You believe you are someone who avoids the stupid muddles other people get themselves into, you avoid scandal and tawdry episodes. You begin to believe that you do this all by yourself, because you are better educated, more intelligent, wiser. If you think like that long enough, keep it up for decades, most of your life, you actually begin to believe you’re…above the foibles of others. You know, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men…’ Maybe you don’t come right out and say it, but you believe, deep down, that you’re somehow superior.” She was pensive, and then she whispered, “Such…hubris…”

Haydon looked at her profile against the fog on the window beside her face. Germaine Muller was a woman in confrontation with the immutable frailties of human nature and with the realization that she, after all, shared them with everyone else.

“I’ve read every word printed in the newspapers about us during these past months,” she continued. “Secretly. George didn’t know it. For him, I’ve pretended to be above it all. Aloof. But I read all of it. I’ve clipped every snippet, however minute, even those Crime Stopper things that appeared from time to time. I was hypnotized. It was as if I were seeing myself from outside my body. A very peculiar experience. There were times when it seemed that I was reading about someone else, while at other times it was clear I was reading about us—George, myself, and Lena—but we didn’t seem…distinctive. Our names easily could have been interchangeable with anyone’s name. There was nothing there, inherent in our lives—and the reporters seemed to have discovered a great deal about us—that distinguished us from anyone else. In fact, we, our lives, seemed terribly common. We could have been…anyone.”

She stopped, suddenly aware of how much she had been talking. Haydon said nothing. What could he say to such a surprising monologue? Nothing was expected of him.

“I imagine that sounds strange to you, maybe even naive, coming from a woman my age,” she said, looking down at her hands, but then returning her attention to the foggy lane in front of them. “But it was so…revelatory, and so sad. For Lena, all they wrote about her. They shouldn’t have. She was a child, really, at twenty-one, all of them are children. Her work in the Peace Corps didn’t seem to carry as much weight with them, not as much as the way…she lived in college.” She shook her head wearily. “Something is out of proportion, isn’t it. The way we see things, the way we think, the way we live, what we require of others and of ourselves. Too much, too little. Ill-proportioned lives.”

Germaine Muller had undergone a sea change during the ninety days since her daughter had disappeared, but Haydon would have been hard pressed to say whether it was a slow turning toward something finer.

“Lena’s alive,” she said bluntly, without prelude. “George has found them.”

Haydon was caught off guard. When Germaine had said “George” had found them, she was referring more precisely to her husband’s obsessive resolve. The person who actually had found them was a private investigator named Jim Fossler, whom George Muller had hired almost three weeks earlier.

“In Guatemala?”

She nodded. “But Mr. Fossler says they are not living together. He doesn’t believe they ever did.” This was an important point for Germaine Muller, a kind of evidential furtherance of the fact that her daughter was not an obsessively sexual creature. And it had merit, coming from Jim Fossler. He was a good man, an ex-cop, a forthright, persistent investigator who was proficient at what he did.

“When did you hear from him?”

“He called me last night.”

“You?”

“Yes, he called on my line. George never answers my line. He doesn’t know yet.” To explain, she turned toward Haydon for the first time, her colorless eyes swollen from the crying, her face drawn. Fifty-six was not old, but Haydon could see the old woman in her skull, the one she would one day become. Grief, as it so often did, was giving him a glimpse of the future.

“At the very beginning, when George hired Mr. Fossler, I met with him privately,” she said. “He’s a perceptive man, not that you need great perception to see what kind of man my husband is. It’s because of how he is that we’ve come to this. Everyone knows that but George. That’s why he has so much antipathy for you. You told him that right up front, in so many words. You’d…you’d think that after a young girl had gone through college, after she had spent two and a half years in the Peace Corps, with all the self-assurance that requires, you’d think that after all that she would be able to claim some independence. But you don’t gain independence from a man like him. When she came home, he was all over her again…I’m sorry. God.”

George Muller was the wealthy founder of a petrochemical company, a man who knew what he wanted and what was required to get it, and whose forceful and unyielding personality had made him a fortune. He was greatly admired by other successful men, men who were like him and who saw something of themselves in Muller’s strong-willed triumphs. But George Muller’s insistence that his self-centered will should never be denied, neither in his professional nor his private life, had not been without a price, a price that must have caused him much dark pain in those secret moments that occur in all men’s lives when they confront the naked reality of their own culpability. His preoccupations with himself had withered his wife’s love and alienated his daughter forever.

“Anyway, I resolved that if we ever again made contact with her I wouldn’t let him…ruin it. I went through all this with Mr. Fossler, a long, honest, detailed conversation. He seemed to be very understanding. I simply asked him to let me know first.”

“And he called you last night.”

“Yes. He said…he said that there might be a chance of persuading her to come home.”

Might-be-a-chance. Haydon studied her. Desperate people could sustain themselves on such airy nourishment.

“But, apparently, he’s concerned about something,” she said. Germaine Muller’s voice quavered slightly, and she leaned her head back against the window and took a deep breath before going on. “He said he thinks she’s in some kind of trouble. That she and that boy are in some kind of trouble.”

In the entire time Haydon had known her, Germaine Muller had never said the words, John Baine. He was always “that boy” or “him” or “that young man.” Something primitive in her kept her from saying his name. George Muller, on the other hand, spoke it all too often, spitting it out like a curse word, “Baine…Baine…Baine.” He was bedeviled by “Baine.”

“What are their circumstances?” Haydon asked. “You said they’re not living together?”

“Lena is living with an American woman in Guatemala City, someone she met during one of her weekend leaves in the Peace Corps. Apparently they had become close friends.”

“And Baine?”

“I don’t know. He’s just on his own, I guess.”

“What kind of trouble?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. He said Lena was fine, she’s safe, but something…Frankly, I was angry with him—Mr. Fossler—for being so vague, but he said he could be all wrong. He said he wanted to talk to you but wanted to clear it with me first.”

“Why me?”

“When I had that first conversation with him and I recounted everything that had happened during the investigation, how helpful you had been despite George, he said he knew you. He had good things to say about you, that he respected you. I guess when he ran into something unexpected…you had handled the investigation…”

“You know that if he contacts me, I’ll be dealing with him in an official capacity,” Haydon said. “I’ll have to write a supplement to the investigation into Lena’s disappearance. This can’t be off the record.”

“That’s what he said you’d say. That’s why he was asking me, wanting to know if I wanted to keep it unofficial. I understand that. I’d like to have your help.”

Haydon looked at Germaine Muller’s tortured eyes. She was looking at him, too, wanting some kind of reaction. His blessing, maybe. Or guidance, or simply assurance that she was doing the right thing. He hated to think what the Mullers’ lives must have been like since their daughter’s disappearance. Westerners, at least those of Anglo and Germanic stock, weren’t given to dramatics in their grief, not the kind of wailing, flailing exorcism of sorrow one sometimes sees in other cultures. Their psychology demanded a gravity that concealed, rather than revealed. In their own way, George and Germaine Muller were still in the calamitous throes of their loss. It had been a mighty lamentation of silence.

“Did Fossler say how Lena was feeling about being found?”

Germaine turned around in her seat and looked out the window again, but it was too foggy for her to see anything. She looked through the windshield to the wet, leaf-strewn lane where the girl had disappeared into the mists.

“I asked him that,” she said. “He said she was upset. He said that she had cried. But…” She looked down at her purse, saw her hands gripping the wadded tissues. Slowly opening her fingers, she turned over her hands and regarded her rings, the diamond cluster, the emerald, the costly black pearl, with a detachment that reduced their value to smoke. “He said—and I was struck by his sensitivity to this—he said he wasn’t sure how to ‘understand’ it.”

Haydon watched her, sensing her discomposure more than actually seeing it. It was as if he were witnessing an emotional implosion.

“You haven’t the remotest…inkling…,” she said hoarsely, stopping to swallow as she raised her gaze to the window again, her empty eyes on the gray beyond the glass. “You haven’t the remotest inkling of the desolation I felt when he said that.”

CHAPTER 2

“C
olpa non perdonata dal genere umano, il quale non odia mai tanto chi fa male, nè il male stesso, quanto chi lo nomina.
”

Haydon flipped through his Italian dictionary and studied the verb forms once again. They made no sense within the context of the Italian sentence, at least as far as he could tell. Without completely understanding the entry, he made a stab at the translation anyway. “Mankind does not forgive fault, or hate so much one who is evil, nor evil itself, as much as one who names it.” His rendering was literal enough, he thought, but it was not graceful, and he wasn’t sure how far he could go in improving the style without distorting the meaning. He studied the sentence a few more moments and then turned to De Piero’s translation: “Men do not so much hate an evildoer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.”

He laid down his pen in the center of his well-worn copy of Giacomo Leopardi’s
Pensieri
, its broken spine allowing the book to lie as flat as unbound sheets, sat back in his chair, and stretched out his legs to rest his feet on the thick cross-brace of the old refectory table. The subdued light of the winter afternoon suffused the library and Haydon’s clutter of Italian dictionaries, papers, and notebooks with a tenuous, hoary sheen. A copy of Leopardi’s
Operette morali
, still in its cellophane wrapper from Blackstone’s from whom he ordered most of his books, lay to one side. Forgetting his inept translation for the moment, he let his attention drift to the recording playing in the background, to the serene, seraphic voices of an a cappella requiem mass by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Normally he couldn’t work with music playing, a personal quirk that he often regretted, but these masses were so extraordinarily ethereal that they offered no resistance at all to concentration.

His eyes wandered to the slightly frosted glass panels of the French doors through which he could see the bare terrace and the dead winter-scape beyond, across the lawn and down to the two greenhouses visible through the naked branches of the trees. It was a desolate setting, and to him winter was a desolate season that he scarcely could tolerate, brief though it was along the Texas coast. He hated the effects of winter’s killing touch that stripped the trees and burned the summer vines, turning their graceful rambles to a bare and brittle unloveliness. Normally this was not a scene he had to contemplate very often, but this year had been exceptional. Just before Christmas a series of numbing northers had driven deep into the South and well into Mexico, hurling sleet and snow across the subtropical landscape with a stunning viciousness that was not seen but once or twice in several decades.

The freezing nights that followed had devastated Haydon’s tropical gardens. The sluggish sap in the lime trees that clustered in a loose orchard down near the greenhouses—where the bromeliads, at least, were safe—swelled as it froze in the plummeting temperatures, bursting the bark in long, serrated wounds that exposed the tender core of the trees. The towering and lacy-leafed flamboyanas at the far end of the terrace near the sun-room, two trees that Haydon had grown from seeds he had brought back from the Yucatán more than fifteen years before, had met the same fate, as had the lank jacarandas, visible now just outside the French doors, below the terrace stairs. The storm had filled the terra-cotta pots of bougainvillea with tiny white kernels of sleet that had lain with the woody stalks of the old vines in a cold and destructive embrace and had left the wild trumpet vines along the high rock walls stunned and dying without their blossoms. Near the bathhouse, the skeletons of the ebony and persimmon trees stood brittle and glazed in pale ice. Though only spring could confirm the lasting effect of the damage, the ever-varied, evergreenness of the subtropical plants, which served as the rich foil for their own gaudy efflorescence, was already reduced to the umber and bister sameness of winter.