Body of Truth (29 page)

“What, your room then?”

“No, here’s fine.”

She frowned at him, but it didn’t take half a beat for her to understand.

“Jesus Christ,” she said.

Haydon took her by the arm and led her to the side of the drive to the grass where there were sago palms and another planted fountain, this one with a heavy-breasted water nymph as its centerpiece, her arms raised above her flowing hair.

When he stopped, Janet reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a piece of paper that she unfolded and gave to him. Then she produced a small penlight and held the narrow beam on the paper. The note appeared to be in a woman’s handwriting:

I’m all right, but hiding. Will be in touch with you again, but only you. Do not show this to anyone but Haydon. I’m in danger. Be careful.

The note was unsigned but dated that day. The time was also recorded, two hours earlier.

“It’s Lena’s handwriting,” Janet said. She was finding it difficult to control her agitation. “It was delivered to my house an hour ago. Mirtha, my maid, brought it in to me. She said a child, a little girl, came to the front gate and left it. She didn’t see a car or anyone else.”

“You’re sure about the handwriting.”

“Yes! Yes! It’s her’s. What in the hell is this? It’s madness.”

“You haven’t told anyone else.”

“No! Of course not…what do you think—?”

“Okay, okay. Did your maid read it?”

“Mirtha…I…she brought it to me folded. I don’t know.”

“Does she read English?”

“I don’t think so, of course not. She hardly speaks it.”

“Turn out the light,” Haydon said.

“Oh.” Janet turned off the penlight and put it back into her purse. “What do we do?”

Haydon refolded the paper. He had looked at his watch when Janet was holding the light. It wasn’t yet eleven-thirty.

“When Fossler came to the house to talk to Lena that first time,” Haydon said, putting the paper in his pocket, “did she talk to you about it after he left?”

“Yes, we talked. She told me what it was all about.”

“Did she say if Fossler mentioned me?”

“No.”

“Did you know that she and Baine met with him again the next day?”

“No, on Friday? The same day she left to go to Panajachel with Baine?”

“That’s right. Jim Fossler called me from here on Sunday and asked me to come down. I flew down Monday night, and he was supposed to meet me at the airport but didn’t show. I went to his room. There was blood all over the place. He’s disappeared.”

Janet stood in the pale greenish aura that came from the streetlamps reflected off the canopies of the cypresses on the median of the Avenida La Reforma, her face half jade, half obscured. The one eye he could see was fixed on him with the gravity that comes with uncertainty. At this hour, there was only an occasional car on the Reforma on the other side of the wrought-iron fence.

“The point is,” Haydon said, “I don’t think Fossler would have told her I was coming down two days before he had even talked to me and asked me to do it. And by that time, she had already disappeared.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m sure of it.”

She didn’t respond immediately. They were looking at each other, their faces only a couple of feet apart, their voices lowered.

“In other words, how does she know about you?”

Haydon nodded.

“Christ! I know it’s her handwriting.”

“You couldn’t be mistaken?”

She shook her head quickly. “No, that’s it. I looked at it for that; I thought about that too.”

Haydon wished he could see her face better. There would be another note, that was certain, and it would most likely contain instructions for Haydon to do something, go somewhere, a kind of treasure-hunt scenario, in preparation for a meeting. If it was genuine, the instructions probably would be complicated, a convoluted effort to avoid surveillance.

“What’s the matter?” Janet asked.

“What do you think is going to happen now?”

“How the hell…I don’t know. Another message, I guess. Something like that. Another note.”

“What if it tells you to go somewhere, to do something?”

“I guess I’ll do it.”

“What if you’re being set up for something?”

“Set up for what, for Christ’s sake?”

“Don’t you wonder why Lena is hiding, why she’s in danger?”

“Of course I do. I think it’s irrelevant to ask these questions now. We don’t know what’s happening, what’s next.”

“Why do you think she didn’t want you to contact anyone but me? Why not Pitt? I’m not a legitimate authority down here. If Lena’s in danger, you ought to be contacting the embassy.”

“She said not to.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Janet raised her arms and combed back her hair with her fingers. She gave a sigh of exasperation. “I don’t know.” She looked around her, not because she thought anyone was watching them, but because she was impatient. She didn’t want all these questions from him. She wanted him to give her some answers.

“What if she’s involved in a criminal situation…”

“Criminal situation! Good God. In this country?”

“It doesn’t matter what you think about a hypocritical government. They consider certain things ‘criminal.’ That’s all that matters. The fact is, if you’re going to live in Wonderland you’ve got to live by the Queen’s rules.”

“Look!” Janet snapped at him. “I thought you were going to be some help here. Your name is the one she mentions, not mine.”

“But you’re the one who’s going to have to make a decision.”

“You’re not?”

“Of course, we’re both going to have to decide something,” Haydon said. “I’m only saying you’d better be ready to make a decision you might later regret. If you don’t want to be involved beyond this point, be ready to tell me that when you get the next message.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to have to go on with it. For me it’s more a question of ‘how,’ not ‘if.’”

She looked at him. “Then I guess it depends on what we hear next. If it’s okay with you,” she said sarcastically, “I’ll wait and make my decision then.”

Haydon nodded. There was a moment when there was nothing else for them to say, a moment when Janet seemed to want something more from him, something more than uncertainty.

“One thing,” Haydon added. “If you don’t want to kill her, you’d better not have a change of heart about telling Pitt.”

“What in God’s name does that mean?”

“I mean if you have second thoughts, if you want a second opinion about what to do. If you do anything other than what she asked you to do, you’d better be prepared for the consequences. She trusted you. You’d better be good for it.”

“I don’t need any goddamned lectures from you, Haydon,” Janet snapped indignantly. “Give me the note.” She held out her hand.

“I’m going to keep it.”

She started to protest.

“My name’s in it, Janet. I’d feel safer.”

She backed off. “Okay, sure, you’re right. I’m sorry.” She pushed back her hair again. “This…this is wild. I can’t imagine what’s happening with her; I really can’t. Driving me crazy.”

“Have you talked to Pitt again?”

“No. And I’ve waited. This is the first time I’ve left the house since you were over there. I kept thinking he’d call with bad news. I’d almost resigned myself to…something else, that she was dead. Now this…It’s absolutely wild.”

He thought about asking her if she wanted a drink. The bar in the Camino Real a few blocks away would still be open. But then he changed his mind. That would be a mistake. He didn’t know how, exactly, but he was sure it would be.

“Look, you ought to get back,” he said. “I’ll check with you in the morning. If you hear anything, call me immediately. I won’t go anywhere tomorrow without letting you know, and in the meantime you can get me here.”

She nodded. Together they walked back to the stone drive, and he walked her to her car, a Land-Rover. A four-wheel-drive vehicle was a popular commodity in Guatemala where paved roads were at a minimum. Practically anyone who could afford one had one. She unlocked the Rover and got in and rolled down her window.

“Listen,” she said, “you haven’t seen Cage again, have you?”

Haydon shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”

She nodded again and started the Rover, and Haydon walked to the door of the old house and told the concierge to open the front gates. From the small foyer he watched her taillights wink cherry at the Reforma and then turn out of the drive, and she was gone.

He got his key—the concierge was a different young man from the night before—and went through the parlor, past the few people slouched in front of the television. He climbed the curving stairs, weary and worried. There was no way of knowing now what was happening. There wasn’t a single person in the whole lot of them that he could trust. The only person who could qualify was Jim Fossler, and if the note was real, he was the only one now who had completely disappeared.

He let himself into his room and kicked off his shoes. The place was strange and lonely, and he wanted to talk to Nina, to hear her say something safe and predictable and reliable. He would call her in the morning. With stinging eyes, he took the gun from his waistband and put it on the small secretary by the bed, took off his suit coat and tossed it onto one of the armchairs, and then his shirt and his trousers and socks. He walked into the bathroom and washed his face with soap, brushed his teeth, and then went into the bedroom and fell onto the bed. Sleep was sudden and deep.

CHAPTER 30

W
hat woke Haydon in the morning was the persistent, euphoric burbling of a bird in the large loquat tree outside his balcony window. It was what the Guatemalans called the
sinsonte de agua
, the water mockingbird, but it was the same familiar mockingbird that sang with joyful and prolonged abandon in Haydon’s jacarandas and pyracantha and lime trees at home during the spring and early summer, which it was now in Central America. The morning light in the room was full but not bright, and Haydon noticed that the rumble of traffic on the boulevard was slight but building. He lay without moving, listening to the bird, a welcome celebration of simple happiness that was free of the complexities of human scheming and cruelty. He was glad the bird did not stop or leave, and only half aware of what he was doing, slipped back into a light, drifting sleep.

When he woke again the
sinsonte
was still self-indulgently exuberant, but the light on the walls had grown bright now, and the traffic outside had built to its full pitch, surging and roaring with the changing traffic signals. This time Haydon realized he must have fallen asleep the instant he hit the bed the night before. He was not wearing his pajamas, and he had forgotten to take off his watch, which he now squinted at and saw that it was eight-fifteen.

Rolling over on his side, he unbuckled the watch and laid it beside the automatic and then sat up on the side of the bed. Faintly he could hear the diners downstairs, the clinking of their cups of coffee and flatware echoing off the marble floors and stucco walls and up through the atrium to the mezzanine outside his door. Standing, he took off his underwear, threw it over on his wadded suit, and walked into the shower.

By the time he had shaved and dressed in the clean change of clothes, which was once again hanging in his closet, it was almost nine o’clock. He left another note for the maid to have his clothes cleaned and sat down in the chair at the secretary and called Nina. She was already at the office—Guatemala was in the same time zone as Houston and the only time there was a difference in hours was when the U.S. went on daylight savings time, which the Central Americans did not. As he knew she would, Nina brought him up to date on things: that Ramona had done extremely well on her tests the day before; that Margaret had gotten an emergency call from her sister in Vancouver, who said their mother was seriously ill in Tucson, and she had had to leave before she finished the model of the Spahn house which meant that the upcoming review with the Spahns would have to be postponed; that their accountant had called wanting some kind of clarification on something, and Nina had told her that Haydon was out of town for a few days; that the weather was still cold and messy and overcast.

For his part, Haydon lied to her glibly about how things were going for him and said that because business always moved slower down here than he remembered, he was going to have to be here another couple of days. He said he would call Dystal and let him know and arrange for someone to cover for him a little longer. No news, really. Nina accepted this, which didn’t mean she necessarily believed it. He knew she would make judgments about him more from his mood and the sound of his voice than from what he said. She wouldn’t make much of his having little to say about the case because he never made more than simple references to his cases over the telephone.

He told her he loved her, and she said, “And I love you. Take care,” and that was the end of their conversation. But it made Haydon feel infinitely better. There was, in fact, terra firma, and Nina was standing on it.

The next thing was to call Dystal, which he did with as little honesty as he had used with Nina. He gave generally the same reasons, and then used a vague reference to the “unreliability” of the telephones as an excuse for not going into more detail. Finally he asked Dystal if he could arrange for him to be covered for a couple more days. It was done. Haydon hung up the telephone and went downstairs to eat breakfast.

The bright dining room under the barrel-vaulted glass ceiling two floors above was a spacious setting for a home’s grand
sala,
but it did not allow for many tables as the dining room of a small hotel. To the management’s credit, they did not try to squeeze in more tables than were comfortable, and so the dining room accommodated ten tables, most of them for four people, but a few as well for only two. The tables and chairs were white wrought iron with linen tablecloths with a floral pattern that looked something like frangipani, and white linen napkins.

Haydon had never seen the dining room more than half-full, which was fortunate, because he had never seen more than one waiter. He was always the same young man, a pleasant, cherubic young Indian who dressed in black trousers and vest with a white shirt and bow tie. When more than five tables were occupied at any one time, he seemed actually to suffer real pain, which was demonstrated by an expression of genuine angst that would have done honor to even the greatest silent-film star. His name was Mateo, and his real talent was being pleasant. He relished welcoming you to your table and exchanging felicities for a few moments and practicing his English—which was wretched—before taking your order. Actually serving the food was a burden he had to bear, the downside of being a waiter.