Body of Truth (3 page)

The snow itself had not remained long—two days, a trace of it on the third day, a ragged, dusty blue line of it next to the footing of the stone wall that surrounded the garden and the lawn—but Haydon was plunged into an unshakable gloom by the sudden plunder. To get his mind off the dreary setting, which was made even more somber on this January afternoon by the damp, lowering sky, he had taken out his dictionaries and his two collections of Leopardi, a questionable choice since the Italian poet-scholar himself had a cold eye and was given to sober moods that colored all his writings.

Haydon had turned to this kind of diversion before, and although he wasn’t very good at it, he stuck with it, battling verb forms, wrestling with the baffling rules of grammar and grappling with a system of sentence structure that seemed to fold back over itself. The lines accumulated, the stanzas multiplied, and the paragraphs became pages as he unlaced the finely woven garment of Leopardi’s eloquent language and listened to the clear, contrapuntal voices of Palestrina’s
Messa per i defunti
.

This was what he had been doing when Germaine Muller had called, and this was what he had come back to when he had left her sitting alone in her car on the foggy lane in the woods of the Rice campus. But it wasn’t any good now. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t even complete a sentence without his thoughts wandering back to the sad image of an alienated woman refusing consolation as she slumped against his car door, and to the unexpected news that Fossler had found and talked to Lena Muller.

“How are you doing over there?”

Haydon started. The library was quiet; Palestrina’s
Lacrimosa
had ended, and he hadn’t even been aware of it. He turned around and looked at her. Nina was sitting behind him on a small leather sofa, her feet shoved up under one of the cushions as she rested her back against the padded arm. Wearing a black vee-neck sweater of ribbed cotton with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows and a pair of black pleated pants, she had been reading an article in
Progressive Architecture
. Her reading glasses had slipped slightly down on her nose, and she was looking at him over the rims, just over the tops of them so that it seemed as if her pupils were hidden exactly behind the thin border of the tortoiseshell frames. The magazine was propped against her raised thighs, and she was holding it open with one hand while the other hand had gathered up her long chestnut hair, holding it up off the nape of her neck.

“Not bad,” he said. He looked at her, olive skin and dark eyes and common sense. He relished moments like this when, by some oddity of perception, he unexpectedly saw her anew, as if for the first time again. Everything about her was fresh and surprising, her dusky coloring, her manner of becalmed curiosity, and her air of self-understanding that projected an emotional stability that was a rare and fine treasure. Even her sexuality, which stemmed from a harmony of all the other attributes together, was an orchestration of qualities of which he had never tired.

“Not bad,” she said, raising her eyebrows and pushing up her glasses as if she were considering what to do with such a feeble response. He knew that she had caught him with his mind wandering and was curious about what was preoccupying him.

For the most part, Nina could live with Haydon’s protean frames of mind. That was the great thing about her and the bad thing about him. If she had been the kind of woman who needed to know what he was thinking every moment, needed to be included in his every waking thought, needed to have an explanation for every queer mood of his nature, or felt slighted by his sometimes introverted temperament, the marriage would never have lasted. Additionally, if Haydon had had to make any fundamental changes in his personality to save the marriage, he couldn’t have done it, though it would not have been for his lack of desire or willingness to do so. It was only that the peculiarities of his character were not susceptible to radical change. He could have willed himself to make the effort; he could not have willed himself to succeed. But neither was Haydon given to self-deception. To his credit, he held no illusions about himself and gratefully acknowledged the good fortune that had come to him in marrying her.

Nina, on the other hand, would have been equally willing to make a change to save their marriage if it had ever been necessary, but where Haydon would have failed, she would have succeeded. She was a survivor, a woman of strength and resilience, who did not have a personality in conflict with itself. She did not find it necessary to steel herself against invisible threats, nor did she create dreadful fictions that compelled her to do battle with Hydra-headed “what ifs”—apprehensions that Haydon lived with as though they were psychic siblings. She perceived life through a clear and finely ground lens, not through the cloudy-green refractions of an old bottle. If she had needed to change to save their marriage, she would have been good for the sacrifice, and she would never have looked back with second thoughts.

It was not that neither of them hadn’t made sacrifices. No two people could remain together for eighteen years without experiencing disappointments in the other, without discontents and the painful renunciation of selfish ends, both significant and incidental. But none of their sacrifices had been beyond their ability to make, or more importantly, greater than their regard for each other. The true good fortune of their marriage had been that by virtue of the incalculable odds of serendipity, they had chanced upon that famed, but all too rare, felicitous paradox: the true compatibility of opposites. That, and the fact that they never had forgotten all that was good and exceptional about their beginning.

Still turned in his chair, Haydon crossed his long legs, rested one arm on the chair back, and with the forefinger and thumb of his other hand, lightly touched his moustache, unconsciously checking the preciseness of its trim.

“I don’t understand
fa
,” he said.

She nodded slowly, her eyes still on him. They looked at each other a moment, and then they both smiled at the same time.

“I know what we need,” Nina said. “How would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Perfect.”

“What kind?” She put down her magazine and took off her glasses, which she laid beside the lamp on the mahogany table behind the sofa.

“Something dark.”

“Colombian Supremo?”

“Okay, that.”

“Strong.”

Haydon nodded. “Grind an extra spoon of beans.”

“That’ll make it too strong,” she said. But he knew she would do it.

“And some Lindt’s too, okay?”

“You’re self-indulgent,” she said. “Too self-indulgent. It ought to bother your conscience.”

“It does,” he said.

She looked at him. “It probably does,” she said, shaking her head. She stood and ran her fingers through her hair as she leaned back in a twisting stretch, then relaxed and straightened her sweater, her loose, thick hair falling back around her face. With the wan winter light of late afternoon turning the rich hues of the library into muted colors, it seemed to Haydon that he was looking at an Italian baroque canvas in which Nina’s modern face and form had been set in anachronistic, but perfect, consonance with the seventeenth-century painting.

“Be back in a little bit,” she said.

Haydon watched her walk out of the library and listened to her footsteps as she crossed the marble hall to the dining room and into the kitchen. Within moments he heard her talking and then heard the liquid, Colombian lilt of Ramona’s voice. It had been a little over two years now since she had come to live with them as a favor to her uncle, a homicide detective Haydon knew in Bogota. A long-legged girl with an easy smile and the eyes of a woman twice her age, Ramona had been a freshman at Rice University then, and though the arrangement was supposed to have been only for one year while she got used to her new surroundings, Nina and Gabriela, and even Haydon, had grown so fond of her that they invited her to stay on. Listening to snatches of their conversation, a polyglot of English and Spanish in which they interchanged the words of the two languages with a careless freedom that Haydon never had achieved, he heard them discussing psychology and grade-point averages and prerequisites. Ramona was in the midst of midterm exams, and Nina, who was especially fond of the girl and treated her like a younger sister, was wanting to know how she was doing.

Suddenly aware of a chill on his feet, Haydon wiggled his toes in his well-worn suede oxfords. He hated having cold feet, and in the old house with its limestone and marble floors it was something he constantly fought during the brief few months that constituted winter. The old shoes were favorites because they were just sloppy enough to allow him two pairs of socks. He got up from the refectory table and walked over to the fireplace, took several logs from the copper-lined bin beside the bookcases and stacked them on the grate. Taking a match off the limestone mantel, he lighted the gas jet under the grate and watched the blue flames from the jet lick up the rough sides of the logs from the bottom, watched the logs begin to burn until he smelled the first sweet wafts of the oak fire.

CHAPTER 3

T
he telephone in the library had been altered so that its ring was little more than a soft mutter. Haydon, stirred from his thoughts in front of the fireplace, walked over to his desk and picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

“Stuart?”

“Yes.”

“This is Jim Fossler.”

Haydon could have bet money on Fossler and not been afraid of losing a dime. He was dependable and methodical. Common sense was high on his personal list of virtues, a list he took seriously. Fossler was a lanky man of fifty-four with a quiet disposition, thinning black hair, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and slightly bulging eyes that didn’t miss anything they weren’t supposed to miss. Low key, but often impatient with the frequent wrongheaded thinking of a municipal bureaucracy, he took an early retirement when the second of his two sons graduated from college, and started his own investigation agency. His wife, Mari, a talkative and bright Filipino whom Fossler had married after the death of his first wife, while the boys were still in high school, quit her position with an accounting firm and used her keen eye for business to help Fossler build his agency. After five years, Fossler’s work was distinguished by his high success rate and his preference for keeping a low profile. As Fossler saw it, he was basically in the information business and you didn’t get information by attracting attention to yourself. He was very good.

“I was hoping you’d call tonight,” Haydon said. “I hear you’ve had some luck down there.”

“Then you’ve talked to Germaine Muller?”

“This afternoon. A few hours ago.”

“Good. I’ll tell you, I’m not at all sure what the hell’s going on down here,” Fossler said, his voice calm. He must have been calling from a pay telephone, because he seemed to be speaking close to the mouthpiece, and Haydon thought he heard traffic. “Long story about how I finally got to the girl, which we can get into some other time, but I can tell you this, nothing in this country is simple. I went from coast to coast and border to border before I found her right here where I’d started out. Which was a surprise.”

But Fossler didn’t sound surprised. Not only did he have a personality that some would consider unexciting, he was also unexcitable. Day in and day out he could make you want to climb the walls, but in a fast-breaking situation, in a squeeze, he was steady on, the kind of man you prayed for.

“Listen,” Fossler said, “before I even get started here I want you to take down a couple of names and addresses. I’ll get to why in a minute. You got something to write with?”

“Yeah, I do. Go ahead.”

“Okay. John Baine.” Haydon wrote down the address.

“Janet Pittner.” He gave her address and telephone number. “She’s the woman Lena’s living with, been living with her almost the whole time she’s been gone. This woman’s older than the girl by ten or fifteen years, I’d guess. Wealthy American, socially connected. Everybody in the American community here—which is pretty big—knows her, and she knows everybody. Good looking, but kind of crazy, I think. High strung.

“Dr. Aris Grajeda. He works in the slums here, no telephone, and no street address except somewhere in a shantytown called…I’ll spell it: M-e-z-q-u-i-t-a-l. I haven’t met this guy yet, but I’m going to try to see him tomorrow. I understand he worked with Lena, with some Indian tribe up in the western highlands. He’s maybe in his mid thirties. A Guatemalan. Got his medical degree from Johns Hopkins, for Christ’s sake. He’s been back in Guatemala three years now. I hear his personal life is pretty interesting, very dedicated to his work. Not popular with the police here, because he calls a spade a spade. Considered a leftist, probably going to get himself killed.

“And before I forget…” Fossler gave Haydon his own address. “It’s an old boarding house kind of thing, an old hotel.”

“What about a telephone number?”

Fossler didn’t respond immediately, and Haydon could hear the roar of trucks. It sounded like Fossler was in some kind of depot, maybe a bus station.

“No. You can’t get me that way,” Fossler said. “I mean there’s a telephone there, but it’s not good.” He paused. “None of the telephones are good down here, understand? I’m calling you from a pay telephone, but…, I’m still not sure it’s good.”

Haydon sat down slowly at his desk. “What’s going on, Jim?”

“I’ve talked with the Muller girl twice,” Fossler said. “The first time was Thursday afternoon. After I found out where she was living I just went there and asked for her.”

“That was at Janet Pittner’s?”

“Right. There was a kind of an awkward moment when Lena realized who I was. It seemed to me Janet Pittner didn’t know about the trouble back in Houston. So Lena asks the woman to leave us alone for a few minutes. We had a pretty good talk, as a matter of fact. I told her that after she’d first disappeared it was thought she had been murdered and Baine was the suspect. She couldn’t believe it, claimed she didn’t have any idea. She asked a lot about her mother, how she was, seemed to regret having put her through all the worry, but she didn’t give a shit about her dad. Didn’t even care to talk about him. I told her about her mother’s concern, that she wasn’t going to tell her dad, that she wanted to work it out with the girl, just between the two of them. She started crying. I didn’t know what to think, whether she was afraid or relieved or depressed or what. Finally I got her calmed down. I told her to think it over, and that we ought to get together again the next morning—Friday—and talk it over. But she didn’t want me to come back to Pittner’s again, so we agreed to meet at a pastry shop.