Body of Truth (50 page)

In a few kilometers they went through a village of scattered dwellings known as Pasmolon and shortly thereafter passed into the
departamento
of Alta Verapaz, the Upper True Peace.

CHAPTER 48

C
oban was a cloudy and mist-laden little town situated on the Cahabón River and surrounded by mountainous countryside veined with clear streams and pockets of meadows and small valleys that were kept lush and verdant by the constant gentle drizzle. In the late nineteenth century, President Barrios granted thousands of acres of this rich mountain country to German immigrants who were willing to plant the land in coffee. The coffee plantations flourished as did the German community until its members dominated the economy of the region, shipping their coffee harvests by rail and boat down through the Polochic River valley and thence to Puerto Barrios for export. The wealthy Germans reigned supreme in the high mountain valleys of Alta Verapaz, which in its richness and beauty was so much like their homeland, until the 1930s. Their open support of the Nazis back home, however, brought about their ruin when Guatemala entered the war on the side of the Allies, and the wealthy Germans who had retained their German citizenship were booted out of the country and their well-run and productive coffee fincas were appropriated by the Guatemalan government. Today the German influence remained only in subtleties, in the occasional German surname or the Nordic architecture of an old home or in the blue-eyed Indian with unusually fair skin.

The central plaza of Cobán was small and triangular with its base facing east and anchored by the lichen-stained stone Catedral de Santo Domingo where a sixteenth-century wood carving of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child presided over the main altar. The other two sides of the plaza were fronted by the arcaded palace headquarters of the departmental government and the local army headquarters. Near the apex of the triangle, which pointed west, was the office of Guatel, the national telephone company.

It was here that Haydon wanted to go first, parking the Blazer at the curb of the cement sidewalk in front of the tiny La Providencia Hotel.

“Now what?” Janet asked. They had not talked much in the last hour since they had left the small inn near the Biotopo. The countryside had been beautiful, the weather cool, and the impending meeting with Lena very much on their minds.

“I’ve got to make a telephone call,” Haydon said, cutting the engine and opening the door.

“I’ll just wait here,” Janet said.

Haydon looked at her, and she rolled her head and got out of the truck. Haydon got the flight bag out of the backseat, stuffed his 10mm into his waistband, and locked the doors. He gave three Indian boys a few quetzals to “watch” the Blazer, and they started across the apex of the plaza, up the slight incline to the Guatel office. The quietness of this small and isolated departmental capital was welcome after the madness of Guatemala City, but Haydon did not like the feeling of knowing he was being watched. In some ways it was even more eerie than knowing you were being tailed.

The Guatel office was a large gloomy room with the familiar apathetic air of a governmental business. On the far side of the room behind a rail with swinging gates was a row of half a dozen wooden telephone booths, one or two of them occupied. In the middle of the room, with their backs to the railing, were two rows of wooden chairs. To his left was a wooden cage of the sort seen in old banks and post offices, behind which several women and a man worked in silence. The man was doing paperwork and the women were operating the antiquated telephone system.

Janet went over to the chairs and sat down, while Haydon walked to one of the grilled windows and gave the woman the number he wanted to call in Belize. She scribbled the number on a piece of paper, and then he went back and sat down beside Janet, who seemed preoccupied, staring out the open door to the gray street.

“Where was the place where she wanted to buy the candles?” he asked.

Janet made a vague gesture with her right arm. “Down that way, a little shop that sells coffee and cardamom and ‘artifacts.’ It’s up some stairs, on the second floor. It’s got a turquoise wainscoting on the outside, if I remember right.”

“When was this?”

“Last year.”

The telephone in one of the open telephone booths began ringing, and Haydon looked at the woman behind the cage, who tilted her head toward the ringing telephone and nodded at him. He got up and went through one of the swinging gates and went into the booth and closed the door, keeping his eye on Janet through the glass. The call was brief. Things were confirmed. Clarified. He hung up and went back through the gate to the grilled windows again, where the woman told him how long his call had been and what it cost. He paid; the woman gave him a receipt, and he and Janet walked back out onto the street.

“Let’s buy some cardamom,” he said. The street came off the north-em angle of the plaza and headed down a slope toward the western end of town, fading away into the mist six or eight blocks in the distance. Cinder-block buildings formed a continuous face on both sides of the narrow street, none more than two stories, most of them only one. The long floppy leaves of plantains hung over head-high walls, and the façades of the buildings were a variety of familiar Central American colors—salmon and turquoise and blue and dun and ocher—sometimes the whole building had been painted and sometimes only a now-faded wainscoting.

Plastic prefabricated signs with lights inside them and announcing Pepsi and Coke battled for supremacy as they hung out in front of business establishments whose names appeared below or above the familiar colorful logo in small black letters:
PEPSI:
El Convite Café;
COCA-COLA
: Cafetería Rosita;
COCA-COLA
: Hotel La Providencia;
COCA-COLA
: Farmacia Cristiana;
PEPSI:
Restaurante El Sombrero Tejano. But Coca-Cola, which easily received first prize for the greatest contribution to the municipal tackiness, hit an advertising bonanza with the Hotel Cobán Imperial. This establishment, which sat on a corner, its façade running in two directions, devoted its entire color scheme to
Coca-Cola
red and white with blistering effect. Only the constant blanket of color-muting fog kept the building from igniting.

Stepping around a dog who had stopped on the sidewalk to lunch on a splatter of vomit, they crossed the street and went half a block farther to a turquoise building with two doorways. The first doorway was a wide-open sidewalk
comedor
where the rich savor of grilled meat wafted out into the fog, and the second doorway was a narrow opening above which a sign read,
IMPORTACIÓNES TIKAL
.

“Yeah, this is it,” Janet said. “I remember the sign now.”

Immediately inside the opening the wooden stairs ascended steeply to a landing where the stairs turned left into a frosted glass door. Again the words
IMPORTACIÓNES TIKAL
. Janet pushed the door, which had just enough room to swing open before another flight of stairs went straight up to a room. At the top of the stairs a hallway turned right, went ten or twelve meters, and opened onto an outside balcony that surrounded an open courtyard. Before reaching the balcony, however, they turned left through a doorway into a long narrow room with a wooden floor. In front of them, against the entire length of the wall, were rows of wooden shelves in front of which a glass display cabinet and counter also ran the length of the room. Opposite these, in the middle of the room, were double doors that opened out onto the balcony over the courtyard.

The room was full of sacks of coffee beans stacked against the walls and smaller sacks of a finer weave filled with cardamom piled on the shelves. The glass counter displayed candies and jellied fruits and regionally grown spices. Two Indian women were working among the sacks and cans and jars of produce, both of them wearing the traditional Indian clothing of the region: lacy short
huipiles
decorated with bright embroidered flowers hanging loosely over pleated skirts that reached only to their calves. Each woman had her hair braided in a single long braid that hung past her waist.

While Janet talked with them, buying small sacks of coffee and cardamom and other spices, Haydon walked through the doors in the center of the room that opened onto the balcony. Half a dozen bright green parrots sat on the wooden railing of the balustrade that encircled the balcony, moving freely along the many meters of railing. Little tin trays of food were attached to some of the wooden pillars that held up the roof.

A wispy coil of smoke rose lazily from a fire in the courtyard where an elderly man and woman were cooking thin strips of meat and ears of corn over the grill of a brick oven. The courtyard was filled with orchids and bromeliads and plantains, among which little hard-packed dirt paths crossed at convenient angles from one side of the courtyard to the other. While Haydon leaned his forearms on the railing, a huge maroon-fronted parrot sidestepped toward him, thought better of it and then sidestepped away, just as the heavy fog turned to the region’s famed
chipichipi
and the slow drizzle began thrumming on the tile roof of the building and slapping on the broad leaves of the plantains in the courtyard. The elderly couple, of course, was dry, their oven-grill well under the eaves. Soon the rain was running steadily off the eaves and falling past Haydon as though a shimmering veil had been dropped over the edge of the roof. It fell into a shallow stone trench built around the courtyard to carry the water away into the street. The smell of birds and rain and damp earth filled the air, and the drumming of the drizzle that fell straight down out of the gray was punctuated occasionally by a shriek from one or another of the parrots that waddled along the quadrangle of railings like grouchy old men.

A door opened halfway down the side of the balcony to Haydon’s left, and a man and woman emerged, talking in low voices. Haydon scooted the flight bag closer to the railing with his foot and started to turn around to see what Janet was doing inside the shop when the couple approached and he recognized the woman, who was staring straight at him. She raised her finger to her lips, and the man stepped inside the doorway, blocking Janet’s line of sight to Haydon, and took his time lighting a cigarette.

“You weren’t followed into Cobán,” the woman said in the same perfect English she had used in the empty warehouse above the shoe store. She spoke quickly. “But something has gone wrong. The local military intelligence has received a communication from the capital to look for you and to keep you under surveillance. They have discovered your car, and men in plainclothes are combing the area around the square. The old man and woman down there,” she nodded to the courtyard below, “have a
comedor
. Eat there; don’t leave. Don’t tell the woman.”

Her companion, whom Haydon now saw was not the same man she had been with in Guatemala City, shook out the match that he had used to light his cigarette, and the two of them continued around the corner and descended a flight of stairs that led from the balcony down into the courtyard.

Haydon picked up the flight bag and walked back into the shop.

Janet was holding her hand out, receiving change for her purchases from one of the Indian women.

“There’s a little
comedor
down in the courtyard,” Haydon said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

“There are some good places to eat just off the square,” Janet said, putting her money into her bag along with the paper sack of her purchases. “There’s a good Chinese food place there, in fact.”

“Downstairs looks good to me,” Haydon said. “Besides, I don’t want to walk back to the plaza.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“We ought to be careful until someone contacts us. They told us to come here, we did, now we ought to wait as discreetly as possible. If they’re any good they’ll pick us up. We don’t have to parade around town.”

“We’re not going to ‘parade.’ The plaza’s just four blocks away.”

“Let’s go downstairs,” Haydon said. “Okay?”

She looked at him quizzically as if she suspected he knew something she didn’t. “Okay,” she said.

The rain had slackened and was only dribbling off the eaves of the tile roof as they rounded the corner and started down the wooden stairs into the courtyard.

The old couple’s
comedor
opened off the far side of the courtyard and consisted of two adjacent rooms connected by a double-door opening from which the doors themselves had been removed. The rooms were fairly small, allowing for only four simple wooden tables with straight-backed chairs in each room. The outside walls of the two rooms were double French doors that opened onto two narrow balconies with wrought-iron railings and which, because the building was on a sloping hillside, overlooked the street below at about the level of the tops of the cars. The balcony doors were thrown open, letting in the sound of rain and washing the room in a luminous gray light that reflected dully off the time-burnished surfaces of the tables.

Three tables in the first room were occupied, so Haydon walked through the double-door opening into the second room where only one table was occupied—by the woman and man he had seen on the balcony. Haydon led Janet to a table away from them and near the balcony and sat down. As with the other room, the door that led out to the courtyard was open, and Haydon saw the old man and woman laboring at the open-air oven.

A young Indian man wearing a frayed dark green cowboy shirt.

brown bell-bottom polyester trousers, and a wispy moustache came in from the courtyard and brought them bowls of onion soup with spoons and a plate of tortillas. Pieces of chicken were floating in the soup. Simply by walking in and sitting down they tacitly agreed to be served the meal of the day.

Janet looked at Haydon. “How long do you think we’re going to have to wait?”

“I’ve got no idea,” he said, picking up a spoon. He folded a tortilla and started eating. The soup was hot and good, the bits of chicken spicy.

There was no conversation coming from the couple a table away, but in the next room two couples sitting at one table conversed incessantly in a low murmur. As cars passed on the street outside, their tires swished on the rain-slick blacktop and, inexplicably, a rooster crowed somewhere down the hillside in the tiny streets blanketed in mist.