Body of Truth (32 page)

There was a center aisle through the tables, and Haydon could see the door at the far end. He started toward it, leisurely, looking casually at the people about him. All of them ignored him, the few customers, the one or two employees, who were only distinguishable from the customers because they didn’t look as tired. Haydon was invisible to all of them. He got to the back door, which was really only a grillwork gate, and pushed it open, letting himself out into a closed courtyard filled mostly with banana trees and damp beds of flowers and sago palms and a few old vine-strangled mimosas. A tiled path disappeared into the jungle of vegetation, and at the head of the path, just off the cement to his left, were three poles stuck into the earth, each with a bar across its top and a huge green parrot atop the bar. A rusty, horizontal disk jutted out from each bar and was littered with chunks of darkening fruit and a few nuts. The birds blinked at him, as bright and anomalous as emeralds. Immediately to his left, an exterior wooden stairway ascended to a balcony that encircled the courtyard on the second floor.

Suddenly he heard what he thought was the leather sole of a shoe on the gritty cement behind him. He turned as casually as he could manage and saw another set of stairs going up to the balcony on the opposite side of the courtyard. Under the stairs two Guatemalan men were turning to look at him, both of them wide-eyed and panting, frozen. One of the men, the older one, was standing up straight, just out from under the sloping angle of the ascending stairs, putting something into the waistband of his trousers, under his leather jacket. The other man, heavier, younger, was bent over, looking around at Haydon from under the stairs through the open risers. His legs were spread apart, and between his feet a third man lay facedown, blood from his head crawling out from under the lowest tread. Haydon could just see the black and and yellow
Batman
emblem across the back of the dying man’s white T-shirt.

“
Subes la escalera
,” the man wearing the jacket said, pointing to the stairs behind Haydon. He had trouble controlling his voice, which was tight with adrenaline. Haydon looked at him and nodded, looked once more at the man bleeding on the gritty cement, confirmed to himself that it was indeed a
Batman
T-shirt, and turned around and started up the wooden stairs. Behind him one of the parrots screeched, and Haydon flinched. Then he heard them dragging the body across the gritty cement on the other side of the courtyard.

The stairway long ago had given up its last coat of paint to the alternating seasons of sun and rain, and now Haydon’s hand moved along a rail of wood that was split and gray. His gut told him he ought to have the automatic in his hand, but for some reason he didn’t, as if something else told him that if he didn’t give in, if he didn’t commit to violence himself, there was still some hope of averting more of it.

When he reached the top of the stairs he stopped. The wooden balcony completely encircled the well of the courtyard. He resisted the impulse to look down to see where they had dragged the body, as if the drag marks in the grit could be seen from where he stood. He could go in either direction, either way he could walk completely around the balcony to where he had begun. Turning left, he started along the section over the doorway through which he had just entered.

Before he had taken a dozen steps, a man stepped out of a doorway ten meters in front of him. He was wearing dress pants and a white shirt without a tie, its long sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He held an Uzi in his right hand, which hung straight down by his side. Haydon heard another door open behind him, just at the head of the stairs, and he looked around to see a woman, also with an Uzi.

“You have a gun,” the man said in heavily accented English. “Will you please to take it out of your belt and put it on the floor. And also the radio.” He raised his Uzi at Haydon in anticipation.

Haydon moved slowly and did as he was told. He heard the woman walking up behind him as he crouched and put the gun on the floor, unhooked the radio and laid it beside it. As soon as he straightened up, she retrieved the gun and the radio.

“This way, please,” the man said. He moved toward Haydon and opened a door that was about equal distance between the two of them on Haydon’s right. He pushed the door open and then stepped back to let Haydon enter first.

Haydon walked into a single long room the length of the shoe store beneath it. At the far end were tall windows thrown open to the noise and polluted air of 18 calle. Haydon could see the tops of the trees in the median, and just a little to his right was the Santuario de la Sagrada Madre.

In front of the tall windows, isolated in the empty room were an old sofa, a low table, and several kinds of chairs. Against one wall was a kitchen stove, another table with wooden chairs, and “cabinets” made of stacked wooden boxes. Three beds, mattresses lying on the wooden floor, were against another wall.

Dr. Aris Grajeda stood up from one of the chairs around the low table and sofa and approached from across the room. He was wearing a double-breasted suit without a tie, the coat hanging open. The suit was in need of cleaning and pressing.

“I understand you handled this very resourcefully,” he said. “I am sorry I had to ask you to do it this way. Please, come over and sit down.”

Haydon said nothing. He followed Grajeda over to where he had been sitting alone. The room smelled strongly of the deep resinous fragrance of coffee beans, as if the walls themselves had soaked up the oil from the harvested pods, and of the burlap sacks in which they had been stored. The bare wooden floor was worn shiny in places from decades of warehousemen’s feet.

“I call them José and María,” Grajeda said of the man and woman who had brought Haydon into the room and who now stood out of sight behind him. The doctor smiled at the obviously fictitious names. “They are not betrothed, however, and they are not particularly religious, though José used to be a Jesuit. Please, let’s sit down and talk. Would you want a
cafecito
, Mr. Haydon?”

“I would, yes,” Haydon said.

Grajeda went to the kitchen stove himself and took two coffee cups from the wooden boxes and poured coffee from a pot that sat on the stove.

“I don’t think you were risking your life to come here to see us, Mr. Haydon,” Grajeda said, as he picked up the cups and started back to Haydon. “But I can assure you that the rest of us have risked our lives to come here to see you.” He held one of the cups out to Haydon. The cups were large, mismatched, each of them chipped and crazed. Haydon took the one being offered him and set it on the low wooden table.

Grajeda sat down in one of the straight-backed chairs opposite Haydon. He crossed his legs and balanced his cup on his knee, holding it with one hand while he stroked his beard once or twice with the other. He regarded Haydon a moment with an expression that portrayed ambivalence. His Indian eyes were almost oriental behind the flat lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses, his moustache and goatee cleanly trimmed, his black hair, streaked with strands of premature gray, was combed and looked rather elegant. He was actually a very handsome man.

“I apologize for lying to you yesterday morning,” Grajeda said without preamble. “Surely you must understand that I had to be careful.”

“I’m beginning to understand more all the time,” Haydon said.

A flicker of uncertainty passed quickly over Grajeda’s face. That was fine with Haydon. He was glad to have someone other than himself experience the slippery textures of ambiguity.

“I am guessing that you know that Lena Muller is not dead,” Dr. Grajeda said.

“I’d very much like to know why you’re making that assumption,” Haydon said. “I seem to have met an inordinate number of people here who want to be clever with me.”

“Who were the people following you?” Grajeda asked.

“I don’t know.”

Grajeda looked at Haydon as if he expected Haydon to start quizzing him. He seemed to want to know what Haydon was thinking without having to ask him. Haydon waited. He was in no position to gain anything by asking questions. Grajeda called the meeting, Grajeda could do the talking.

“Lena is in hiding,” the doctor said. “And so am I, as of yesterday.” Now he sipped his coffee for the first time. “I met Lena almost two years ago when she first began working with the Chuj in northern Huehuetenango. Dr. Salviati and I—you met Dr. Salviati.” Grajeda smiled. “He is an old friend, a very good man with a personal philosophy that does not require him to think radically. I admire that. His approach to life, his philosophical attitude is already complete, and now all he has to do is live it, which he does, I should say, with integrity.” Grajeda raised his shoulders, “Well, I am less mature intellectually. I can never settle whether I should strive to be a good Christian, loving my enemies and praying for those who persecute me; or whether I should be a good capitalist—there are several young doctors who want Bindo and me to start a new hospital, in Zona 15 of course—there’s very good money to be made from first-class health care for the wealthy ladinos here in Guatemala; or whether I should be a good revolutionary—the opportunities for fulfillment there are limitless, this is the third world after all, and the masses suffer greatly, democracy is a sham, government is corrupt; or…Well, you see what I mean. Up to this point, however, I have managed to be nothing more than a doctor doing some things that I believe are good, but which my government believes are unpatriotic and counterproductive to their own goals.” Dr. Grajeda smiled and tilted his head. “We have a genuine disagreement, this government and I, about my work.”

Haydon was sitting with his back to the door of the long room, facing the windows. Though Grajeda tried to appear relaxed, he seemed to Haydon to be ill at ease, almost as if he were a guest here. Haydon did not have the impression that he slept on these beds or cooked on this stove or read the newspapers that were scattered on the table before them. Grajeda did not seem comfortable with the circumstances in the room or with the kind of life they implied—and which Haydon was still trying to assess—and neither did Haydon have the impression that he was part of this room’s regular business. Haydon wondered how much Grajeda’s hosts were telling him and if he knew what had happened just a few minutes earlier to the man in the
Batman
T-shirt. And he wondered, too, how Cage was going to feel about it.

Grajeda drank some of his coffee. It was good coffee, not the
café basura
, the trashy coffee that had grasses and twigs ground up with inferior beans, the only coffee the poor could afford. In Guatemala, most of the good coffee was exported. Grajeda seemed to savor it, as if it were a special pleasure.

“I met Lena in Huehuetenango,” he said. “Bindo and I were working there, as I told you, and she accompanied one of the Chuj women down from San Mateo. I treated the woman and gave her some medicine that required several hours for a reaction, which I needed to monitor. The woman stayed in the hospital. Lena slept on one of the old sofas in the foyer. I was impressed with how—I hope this is not offensive—but how unlike an American she was. She was simply very comfortable with being where she was and doing what she was doing. I asked her if she would like to have dinner with me at one of the cafés not far from the hospital. We became good friends immediately. Sometimes when I came up to Huehuetenango from the capital I would take an extra day and drive up to San Mateo to see her before going back. It’s about fifty-four kilometers from Huehue to San Mateo, but it’s all dirt roads, so it takes a while. Usually I would stay overnight. We did a lot of talking on those trips, and then she began to come see me when she came into the capital. So we became good friends.”

Another sip of coffee, and then Dr. Grajeda finished it and set it on the table in front of him. He never looked at Joseph and Mary, but gave all of his attention to Haydon. Outside the traffic had worked itself to a significant pitch, diesel fumes rode the hot air up to the windows, and occasionally a blast of a car or truck horn was startlingly loud.

“About six months ago,” Grajeda continued, stroking his beard thoughtfully with a small hand, “Lena very hesitatingly asked me if I had ever heard stories about people kidnapping children, small children, babies. I said, yes, unfortunately it was done from time to time, one heard stories. She said, no not an occasional kidnapping, but an organized situation, a group of people who stole babies and sold them to certain orphanages who are very lax in their adoption rules.

“Now the fact is, in 1988 and 1989 a very professional organization of kidnappers was broken up here in Guatemala. Several human rights organizations kept getting reports of babies being stolen from the Indians in the highlands. During la violencia in the early eighties, there were as many as two hundred thousand war orphans in the highlands, and many of those simply disappeared. During those years, many people in the United States and Israel and Europe adopted little Guatemalan babies under very suspicious circumstances. It was a very simple thing to do, almost like buying a Guatemalan parrot, only easier, because this ‘animal’ didn’t have to be quarantined. As it turned out, it was discovered that some government officials colluded in these operations, generals in the army, even some women related to these generals. A very big scandal. When it was over, of course, nothing was done. It all melted out of the news, new scandals supplanted this one, people went on living their lives.”

Grajeda had grown very sober and had lost his philosophical air. “After I left Johns Hopkins, I did my internship in a large hospital in Baltimore. It was my misfortune to be one of several doctors who formed a team that worked with a group of children who had been ‘circulated’ for almost a year by a ring of child molesters, you know, one of those kinds of organizations that kept in touch with each other on computer networks, and in whose homes were found boxes of despicable photographs and the names and numbers of people with whom they shared these things and these children.”

Grajeda stopped and stared at the litter of newspapers on the little table before them. “Well,” he said, his eyes immobile as he remembered. “You see, I had to make adjustments in my understanding of the nature of man. I had already done that, in a more or less continuous way, throughout my college years in order to try to justify the political and moral system here in this country. You know, the nature of cruelty…the sort of things people wrestle with sometimes…”