Body of Truth (22 page)

“Chichoque, Huehuetenango.”

“What part of Huehuetenango is that?”

“What part? In the southeast.”

“How far from the Ixil Triangle?”

Borrayo looked at Haydon. “What the hell is going on here?”

“I heard Lena Muller used to work just across the border from the Ixil Triangle. I wondered if it was close by.”

“Not too far,” Borrayo said, watching Haydon with a frown, his tongue working the yellow petal. He was thinking over his indebtedness to Haydon. A man full of
machismo
had to be given room to maneuver. Borrayo’s own sense of honor demanded reciprocation for Haydon’s help, which Borrayo had benefitted from for four years.

“Who is responsible for this, Efran? The military or the police? Who is worried about what this girl knows?”

Borrayo spit out another yellow pellet. “The army. G-2 were the ones who got this Baine.”

Haydon was looking at Borrayo’s profile obliquely. The prison director’s strong brow was beginning to glisten in the heat, and Haydon saw a single bead of sweat sliding out of the gray hair at his temple and down the side of his jaw. Haydon guessed it wasn’t only the afternoon heat that was wringing it out of him.

“And did they pick up the girl too?”

Borrayo took off his hat, pulled a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and wiped out the band of his hat. Next he wiped his forehead and put his hat on again. He turned to Haydon, and behind him one of the soccer teams burst into shouts and cheers.

“I know nothing about what is happening here, nothing,” Borrayo said, his voice low even though they were isolated in the little spot of shade under the
chilca
tree. “But I will tell you that I have heard Victor Tablaya’s name. Tablaya is an Argentine advisor to G-2. He is a friend, a very close friend of General Luis Azcona Contrera.”

Haydon knew the general’s name. A group of inmates slow-walked up the sloping road from the soccer field, leaning into the incline, not talking, passing a patch of hibiscus that grew in front of a little store that was dug into the side of the slope and which specialized in lukewarm, fruit-flavored drinks.

Borrayo eyed the men from under his visor and took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. He offered one to Haydon, who didn’t want it out in the heat like this, but took it anyway. Borrayo struck a match and lighted Haydon’s cigarette first and then his own.

As the group of men passed, Borrayo and Haydon looked the other way as if they were waiting for someone, and then Borrayo turned and watched them until they were out of earshot.

“Listen to me, Haydon,” he said, blowing his smoke out into the heat. “I’m not shitting you. I think this one is a very nasty woman, you know.”

Haydon nodded. He did know, and he was beginning to think it could only get nastier. Borrayo had been in the business a long time, and he had a fine nose for trouble.

Haydon looked at the Guatemalan, Borrayo had turned his head again, avoiding Haydon’s eyes. He simply glared out into the sun, out across the emptying soccer field.

“He’s here, isn’t he, Efran.”

Borrayo’s mind must have been stumbling over itself. Every man brought to every situation a secret index of possibilities. The way he behaved in each new circumstance depended as much on this concealed index as it did on the apparent elements. Borrayo was now reviewing his index, and Haydon knew that at the top of the Guatemalan’s secret list of possibilities was a concern for self-preservation. Whatever he told Haydon, even if it appeared to be a favor requiring some risk, it would be in Borrayo’s best interest. He was like Taylor Cage in that respect. The world they inhabited made pragmatists of them, simplified their lives by stripping away the crustaceous impediments of moral considerations. Life was reduced to only one major concern—survival. Everything else was secondary and was measured against this single criterion.

“There are a lot of empty cellblocks now, aren’t there, Efran,” Haydon said. “Places where no one goes anymore. It’s handy, close in to the capital. Thick walls, entire wings of dark cellblocks.”

Borrayo swallowed.

Haydon was right. Pavón was two prisons, an official one and an unofficial one. Borrayo had not been hung out to dry in some backwater assignment as he had wanted Haydon to believe. Instead he had been entrusted with a position of major responsibilities, one with close connections with army intelligence. Borrayo had become a key figure in one of the security forces’ darkest secrets, the much-rumored—and angrily denied—network of clandestine prisons, the Latin gulag of the “disappeared.”

Borrayo turned his sober face to Haydon.

“The boy is
un chivo expiatorio
.”

“A scapegoat.”

Borrayo nodded again. “I think they are putting something together. When they have it, they will announce his arrest. I think it will be soon.”

“How soon?”

“A few days, maybe,” Borrayo shrugged. “They have to move fast. Covering up one
gringo’s
death and then arresting another one in secret is a very risky trick, even for the generals, even for the DIC.” So Borrayo knew Lena was dead too. “Everyone knows that ‘Americans’ believe their blood is
más mejor
than any stinking Guatemalan’s. These people, they do not want to step in that shit.”

“Then the American embassy doesn’t know about his arrest?”

“No.”

“What about Jim Fossler?”

“I know nothing about him.”

“I need to talk to Baine,” Haydon said.

Borrayo shook his head emphatically and looked down at his feet, blowing smoke at the hot ground. “They would kill me. I would have to have at least three men to cooperate in moving him to a cell where you could not be seen. I am not sure I can find three men who can be trusted with a modest bribe.”

Still looking down, he grimaced and held his mouth in a tight, teeth-clenching manner that indicated they were facing a dicey situation.

“This is a crazy place,” he said. “Certain people, they have
orejas
here, like a job. ‘You go to Pavón for a year, live in Sector 4, and I will pay you well for everything you hear and see.’” He shrugged. “It is like a job in a bad place. You are not in prison; you have a job in a bad place, with hardships, but you are being paid very well. Stay a year and you will go home with a lot of money.” Borrayo pulled down the sides of his mouth. “It’s not like the old days when a quetzal here and there would buy you information.” He dragged on the cigarette and flipped it out into the burning sand. “
Los ricos
,” he said, “and the generals, they run everything behind the scenes.”

Borrayo was sweating, literally and figuratively. The loudspeaker came on, and from the tops of telephone poles all over the prison grounds an announcement was made that inmate so-and-so was being released that afternoon.

“I have to sign those goddamned papers,” Borrayo said. Again he took off his hat and wiped his forehead and the hatband with his handkerchief before putting it back on and jerking the visor down over his eyes once more.

They left the sparse shade of the
chilca
and started back the way they had come, avoiding the main yards of the prison grounds. It was in the hottest part of the afternoon, but the pine trees were now on their left and were throwing a veil of shadows across the sandy road. They walked in the rutted road between the border of pines and the backs of the cellblocks in silence, the loudest sounds being the crunching of their footsteps on the road and the crows calling from the tops of the pines.

“What would it take for me to talk to him tonight?” Haydon asked.

Borrayo shook his head but said nothing for fifteen or twenty meters. Then, head down, hands in his pockets, he said, “I will try to get you some information. Be at your hotel at nine o’clock.”

He did not ask where Haydon was staying, and Haydon had not told him.

CHAPTER 23

H
aydon walked back across the barren prison yard to the front entrance where he retrieved his passport and shield and was let out through the huge chain-link gate. He labored up the slope to the little store where both of the black-and-white pigs had stretched out in the shade of his car, their heads up under it, just behind the front left tire, blocking the driver’s-side door. Haydon kicked them awake, eliciting startled grunts, causing one of them to bang his head against the oil pan, but eventually getting them from under the door and out into the hot sun where they shook their heads, flapping their oversized ears to shake the dirt out of them.

He started the car and drove away from the bleak collection of buildings, down the road that took him past the women’s unit to the highway and on his way back into the city. He had no idea whether Borrayo would help him or not, but if Borrayo had done nothing else, he at least had alerted Haydon to a very important name. General Luis Azcona was one of Guatemala’s military hard-liners. He had been an ardent supporter of former general and dictator Efrain Rios Montt, who had seized power in a coup in March of 1982. Rios Montt was a born-again evangelical whose eye-for-an-eye brand of justice led to one of the worst periods of human rights abuses in the country’s history. During his brief term of leadership—before he, too, was toppled by a coup—Guatemalans died and disappeared by the thousands. Azcona had been Montt’s most aggressive general, his “sword of righteousness,” always unsheathed and always bloody. He had played a key role in a period of brutal repression, a time that was remembered by the people who survived it as
la violencia
. Both Rios Montt and Luis Azcona had been ardent supporters in the election campaign of the recently elected president. They were once again in favor.

Haydon did not notice the tail until he had left the few miles of flat, straight departmental highway and entered the larger Central American highway that quickly climbed and wound its way into the hills southeast of the city. It was a Jeep Cherokee with darkened windows, a favored security forces vehicle, one that had become so notorious that to use it in surveillance was itself a message. It was not likely that the tail was trying to be invisible. Intimidation was the first step in “civilian control.” If the individual for whom the message was intended didn’t take the hint, the message was reinforced, a sterner tone was employed. But the security forces were short on patience.

A few cars were between Haydon and the Cherokee as the highway grew increasingly crooked. Watching in his side mirror, Haydon saw the Cherokee continually pull out into the approaching lane as if it were about to pass, a maneuver which would not have been out of the ordinary since Guatemalans were outrageous drivers, impatient and foolhardy, and head-on collisions were common on the mountainous highways. But the Cherokee was not going to pass; it simply wanted to be sure that Haydon was aware of its existence.

Road repairs had closed one of the serpentine curves to a single lane, though the work crew was nowhere in sight nor was there a flagman to help the drivers decide which of the directions of traffic would have access to the single lane at any given time. This question of right-of-way was decided by the gutsiest drivers, and just as Haydon was nearing the single lane a truck claimed the right-of-way for the oncoming flow of traffic. The car ahead of Haydon yielded, and Haydon and all the cars behind him had to pull to the outside edge of the cliff just as they were approaching the long descent into the city, which was visible to his right. Just below him was a new housing development, the Refuge of the Beautiful View. And it was a beautiful view, or had been in former times. From here the city would be more beautiful at night, when the smoke and smog were transformed by darkness and their heavy, choking effluents hung low over the city and did not reach this high on the mountain road. But in the daytime you would have to stay in your walled garden to avoid this sight of a smothering city, and you would have to view the western volcanoes over the tops of your brilliant bougainvilleas climbing atop your walls. Nowadays only one’s eyes and the tops of the volcanoes were capable of rising above the city’s burgeoning decay.

Finally there was a break in the oncoming traffic and the driver ahead of Haydon gunned his engine and reclaimed the highway and Haydon and the others pulled back onto the pavement and joined the impatient traffic’s headlong plunge into the valley. The Cherokee stayed with Haydon all the way into the city, always one or two cars behind him.

But when Haydon turned onto Avenida La Reforma at the Parque Independencia, the Cherokee roared up in the lane next to him and stayed beside him on the boulevard, as close as it could get without scraping him, slowing when he slowed, accelerating when he accelerated, its darkened windows making him feel oddly vulnerable. The intimidation infuriated him, but he held himself in check, looking now and then at the darkened windows as if he did not know that he was supposed to stare straight ahead as he had seen people do before, not daring to meet the beast face to face lest it be provoked to do something even worse than bullying.

Perhaps it was his adolescent refusal to be cowed, or perhaps it was the plan all along, but when they were well past the Camino Real hotel and approaching a traffic intersection where an opening in the median allowed cars to cross from the other side of the boulevard, the Cherokee suddenly swerved into Haydon’s lane, cutting in front of him, raking its rear bumper across his front fender and driving him into the curb as he slammed on his brakes to avoid being bashed, and causing the two lanes of traffic to screech to a halt just as the intersecting traffic got the green light. The Cherokee sped through, narrowly missing the intersecting traffic that came only from its left, and disappeared down the boulevard out of sight.

Haydon’s car had skidded halfway out into the intersection, partially blocking the merging traffic, his right front wheel up on the curb. It took him a moment to start his car again, to back it off the curb and out of the way of the merging traffic and back into his own lane where the other cars were also trying to straighten themselves after a near miss at a multicar collision. His heart pounding, Haydon glanced around at the motorists to his left side and behind him. Everyone was staring straight ahead, as though nothing had happened. They knew what they had seen, too, and they wanted nothing to do with the incident, not even to acknowledge having seen it.