Body of Truth (31 page)

He began looking for a church. It was an old standby he used for smoking out a tail who would not be satisfied with simply knowing that he had entered a church and waiting on the street for him to return. If the tail wanted to know who he was meeting there, then he had to follow Haydon inside. Haydon didn’t have far to go. Above the trees in the median, he saw a bell tower to his left, on the other side of the street. He quickened his pace and headed straight for it. Crossing the street, he cut between the cars in the stalled traffic, stepped under the trees on the median, which itself was no wider than a sidewalk, and then crossed the other side of the street right in front of a line of buses that had just started up from a stop a block away. This in itself would delay a single tail, even eliminate him if Haydon got into the church fast enough. But some of them would be following him in a team, one on each side of the street in anticipation of his using the traffic as a shield. Eventually they would get together again, so it was important that he get to the church before the one he had left behind had caught up with the one who had picked him up when he crossed over. The few moments alone in the church were crucial. To give himself an edge, Haydon crossed the street just before he was parallel to the church.

The Santuario de la Sagrada Madre was large, but not of cathedral size, and was made of huge slabs and blocks of cut limestone, its gray surfaces mottled and stained from decades of rainy seasons and dry seasons, and pitted and sooty from the acidic toxins of the modern gasoline and diesel engine. The broad sidewalk in front of the church was scattered with the cloth-covered booths of vendors and with old women who had spread their shawls on the cracked cement to sell their candles and flowers under the hot sun, at the bottom of the tier of steps that ascended to the church doors. Haydon hurried through this crowd of pedestrians and vendors, past the old women, and up the steps and into the cool shade of the narthex, which lay just inside the heavy wooden doors thrown open to the city.

He had done this enough to know where the confessionals usually were situated and before his eyes could even become adjusted to the dim interior (another advantage to this simple maneuver) he hurried to the right side of the church and followed its wall toward the front. He found one of two booths, one on each of the side aisles, and approached it quickly. Two more strokes of luck: the priest was not hearing confessions and the confessional door was latticework. In an instant he was inside, the door closed, peering through the lattice. He quickly surveyed the nave. Two women, that was all, both of them in the back half of the church, no one at the front.

For a moment no one came in and the only sound Haydon could hear was the muffled echo of traffic outside and his own labored breathing against the wooden latticework. The building smelled of wax candles and stone and old wooden pews. A door closed far off in one of the transepts, echoing deep and hollow in the high environs of the church. An old woman came in, but he had seen her outside below the steps. She made a painful entrance carrying a load of candles in her shawl, which she proceeded to spread out to one side of the doors in the narthex. To sell her candles here was forbidden, but she knew it would be a while before a priest would discover her, and in the meantime she was out of the sun and close to the people who wanted her wares.

Then a man ran up into the entrance from the steps and stopped abruptly. He was Guatemalan, and he had a decision to make. He moved into the shadows to make it. The thing about churches was that they had several entrances. The front doors, of course, and then depending on their construction usually another two, one in either direction, in the aisle that crossed in front of the altar, and then often others that led into hallways on either side of the nave and which wound around and exited in courtyards or out onto the sidewalks at the rear of the church. The important thing was that there were always multiple exits.

If the tails were in teams, one or several of them would be diverted immediately to try to find these exits from the outside of the church, while the person who followed Haydon would wait in the narthex. At some point one of them would have to make a decision to either search the environs of the church, or to give it up, or to keep one man in the narthex while the others spread out onto the sidewalks.

An Indian woman carrying a child in a
rebozo
came into the church. She was not old. She was not Lita. She stopped and bought a candle from the old woman who had just arrived with her wares and then went to one of the banks of candles at the back of the church, not far from Haydon, where she lighted the candle she had just purchased. Then she moved to the pews toward the back of the nave and sat down. She knelt as if to pray, but her head was not bowed as much as those of the women already there.

Another man entered. He was also Guatemalan. Ignoring the old woman, he did not see the man waiting in the shadows of the narthex as he went to the far side of the nave and sat down in the last row of pews. He did not pretend to pray but simply sat and stared at the front of the church, his eyes scanning, waiting to adjust to the dark.

Haydon looked at his watch. He could get to the shoe store in less than a minute from the front of the church. He had thirty-five minutes for this to settle out. The only thing he was afraid of was that the man in the shadows of the front door would not be satisfied with Haydon’s disappearance and would decide to look for him. A confessional was a lousy place for serious hiding. But he did not think they would do that. If they wanted to kill him, they would do it. But since they only wanted to discover who he was meeting, a search to discovery would be counterproductive. He bet himself they wouldn’t, and then settled back in the confessional to see who would win the wager.

He had been waiting thirteen minutes without anyone moving when he heard footsteps coming down the side aisles from the direction of the altar. The footsteps were overlapping, two people, one walking along each side of the nave next to the walls. He could see the one on the opposite side from him, Guatemalan, wearing a suit without a tie, shirt open at the collar, his coat unbuttoned. He was moving relatively quickly since there was nothing much to see. The footsteps of the man on Haydon’s side of the church grew louder as he lagged slightly behind his partner, who, when he passed the confessional on the opposite side ignored it completely. The man on Haydon’s side, however, could not resist running his hand along the surface of the latticework, an idle, adolescent gesture, his fingers making a soft thrumming noise, passing within an inch of Haydon’s face.

When the two men reached the back of the church, the man in the shadows of the narthex stepped out to talk to them. They held a discussion at the front door, a conversation that attracted the attention of the man in the back pew on the opposite side of the church. He looked toward them, then quickly turned his eyes back to the front. The conversation at the front doors was animated, the man from the shadows punching a forefinger into the chest of the man who had been on the opposite side of the nave. The man who had run his fingers past Haydon’s face looked nervously outside to the bright sunlight, hoping to avoid being included in the chastisement. Their voices rose, a local curse word once, twice, and then the three men hurried from the narthex, their heads disappearing down behind the top row of stone steps outside the door of the church.

Haydon looked at the Indian woman. She did not move, but she had picked up on her competitor across the way. However, the man across the nave got up as soon as the other men were out of sight and hurried toward the altar. He left out of the transept aisle on the opposite side of the church, and after a few moments Haydon heard a door slam hollowly in the distance.

The Indian woman did not move for a moment, but then she permitted herself a look around. She seemed hesitant as to what to do. Then to Haydon’s surprise, she again bowed her head slightly and waited. Haydon looked at his watch again. Another seven minutes had passed. He had fifteen minutes to get to the shoe store. He wanted to give himself some extra time.

Fixing his eyes on the Indian woman, he opened the door of the confessional. At the click of the latch, she ducked her head as if in more fervent prayer, and he had no doubt that her eyes were straining at the top of their sockets as she tried to see the door of the confessional. He opened it and came out. He looked at her. She was stone. He closed the confessional door and walked to the rear of the church, around the pews and then came back up the center aisle until he was at the row behind the Indian woman. He entered it and sidestepped over until he was looking at the back of her head. Taking the automatic from his waistband, he leaned forward and put the barrel of it up beside the woman’s shawl-covered head while his other hand steadied her shoulder.

“
¡Señora, ten cuidado!
” He pressed the barrel to her temple. “
¿Sabe que es este?
” She nodded. Keeping his gun to her temple, he reached around her and carefully moved back the folds of the shawl to reveal the radio. “
Con permiso
,” he said, and he slowly pulled the radio out of the shawl. In Spanish he told her to stand up and go with him. They moved to the aisle, and then together they walked the considerable distance to the choir where they turned to their left and entered the transept aisle. In another five or ten meters they approached a door. Through the windows at the side of it, Haydon could see that it opened out into a courtyard with shrubbery and a small fountain and a wrought-iron gate that let out into 18 calle.

Haydon turned the woman around and looked at her. She was older than Lita, but still young, her oval Indian face looking up at him impassively, her dark eyes wide but not excited. He asked her if she had a watch. She nodded, and he reached down and pulled back the sleeve of her blouse. It was a black plastic Swatch. Cage. In Spanish he told her that he had come to the church by prearrangement. He said that he had people watching the exits and that after he was gone he wanted her to wait ten minutes before she left. He told her that she would be safe if she did what he said, implying that the alternative would be risky. Again she nodded.

Haydon took her by the arm and walked her to a bench against the corridor wall, facing the windows that looked out into the courtyard. He asked her where the people were who were working with her. She said there was a man in a car. Haydon asked her to describe it, which she did. She said he was around the corner on the side of the
mercado
, on the opposite side of the church from the courtyard gate. Who else? A man wearing a
Batman
T-shirt. He was carrying a leather jacket over his arm to hide his radio. Who else? That was all. Haydon reached down and picked up her wrist and moved her sleeve back with the barrel of the automatic. Ten minutes, he said. The girl nodded for the last time.

Haydon pushed open the door and walked out into the courtyard. That had taken four minutes. Eleven minutes remained. As he crossed the courtyard, he tucked the automatic into his waistband and hung the radio onto his belt by its metal clip, covering both of them with his suit coat.

He lingered a moment at the wrought-iron gate, watching the crowded sidewalk, first in one direction and then in the other. The traffic on this side of the median came from his left, and Haydon monitored its tempo, waiting until the traffic light a block away released a slug of cars and buses and trucks. Then he flung open the gate, burst out of the courtyard and across the sidewalk through surprised pedestrians and past vendors, and out into the street, just clearing the front of the first truck. He was out of the way even before the driver could use his horn. His heart pounding, he stood on the median only a moment before the traffic in the west-bound lanes jammed to a stop. Haydon moved quickly, cutting between the bumpers of the cars, swallowing mouthfuls of oily, acrid exhaust fumes, barely missing being hit by a motorcycle barreling between the booths and the traffic, before he ducked under the canvas side of a booth selling leather goods and plunged into the crowd streaming along in the dingy twilight of the sidewalk.

Quickly he headed toward the address Salviati had given him, saw it, approached it, passed it, and went into the store next to it. It was an appliance store, mostly televisions, five or six of them turned to the same channel, three clerks watching “The Price Is Right.” One of them started toward him, but Haydon waved him off, moved behind a bank of sets still in their cardboard cartons and glued his eyes to the sidewalk. He was breathing as if he’d run a marathon. The three clerks looked at each other and then one of them, the biggest of them, who moved with his arms slightly out from his sides, started toward him with a frown. “
¡Qué pasó?
” he said, and the other two followed. Haydon pulled out the radio, clicked it on for the static, and let them get a glimpse of the automatic stuck into his belt. He reached into his pocket and brought out his shield and held it out to them. They were not close enough to read it, but they knew what it was and they knew what it meant. They all stopped at the same time, and Haydon fixed his eyes on the sidewalk again.

It seemed like an hour, but it was only six minutes. No one passed on the sidewalk wearing a
Batman
T-shirt. No one passed who looked like they were looking for someone. Haydon turned to the three clerks behind him, and six eyes stared back at him. They wanted nothing to do with him; they only wanted him to go away.

“
Cinco minutos más
,” he said, gulping air.

The big man lifted his chin in a half nod, and then all of them pretended to be once again interested in “The Price Is Right,” and Haydon turned his attention back to the street.

CHAPTER 32

H
e walked out of the appliance store with an all-or-nothing feeling, and in fifteen seconds he had entered the gloomy Monaco shoe store next door. The store was a bargain-basement establishment, with crudely made wooden tables piled with tangled heaps of shoes and sandals of every imaginable kind. The place had a high ceiling and no lights so that its only illumination was a pale reflected glow from the shady sidewalk outside. It smelled old and unused, but a few weary-looking people stood around here and there in its dusky, cheerless environs, raking through the tables of footwear.