Body of Truth (8 page)

It was no surprise to Haydon that the taxi driver sped right through the city’s nicest sectors on his way to the address of Fossler’s hotel. Even with the exchange rate in his favor, Fossler was going third-class, which in Latin America could make for pretty bare accommodations. Posada Cofino was in Zona 1, the heart of the old central city where the streets were tight and narrow and poorly lighted, some of them only a block or two long. They were five or six blocks from the Plaza Mayor, where the National Palace and the Metropolitan Cathedral dominated the north and east boundaries respectively, when the driver pulled into a short street with a cobblestone surface and crept past six doorways before he found the posada, identifiable only by its name on a ceramic plaque set into the stone wall beside a grated stairwell. One weak light bulb burned inside the gate at the foot of the stairs.

Haydon got out and paid the driver, who put his car in reverse and backed out of the narrow street with his tires thrumming on the cobblestones and his motor whining all the way to the intersection of the avenida where they had turned in. Haydon stood on the sidewalk a moment and looked in either direction of the small dead-end street that was little more than a long courtyard. There was a stationer’s across from him, a drugstore on the corner where they had come in, and a barbershop across from that, just down the sidewalk from Haydon. The rest of the doorways had no identifications that he could see, probably private residences or rooming houses or small business offices.

He turned to the gate in the wall behind him, expecting to find a button to press or a speaker box, but there was nothing. Nor was the gate locked. He pushed it open and saw that beside the stairwell there was a narrow passageway that led back to a courtyard. He was looking for room number 4, but no sign gave him a clue as to whether it could be found back in the courtyard, from which issued the vague, tinny transmission of a radio. Hoping to avoid having to climb the stairs, he walked down the short corridor that smelled of dank stone to the small courtyard that opened to his left, its center filled with plantains and a few scrubby palms that had grown high enough to obscure most of the opposite side. The sound of the radio was clearer here, coming from across palms. There was one door on each side of the enclosure. He stepped to the door closest to him, in the wall to his right, and saw a number 1 on the stone lintel. He turned back to the door on the other side of the passageway where he had entered and looked above the door. It was number 4.

Before knocking, he surveyed the courtyard once again. Mixed with the odor of musty stone was that of grilled onions and peppers and com tortillas. Beside each door that opened onto the courtyard was a single window, and though numbers 1 and 4 were dark, 3 and 2, partially hidden by the vegetation, were lighted. Haydon eased along the wall a little way near number 3, and though the window was open to the night heat, he heard no sounds coming from the inside. Across the way, however, the radio voice, now identifiable as that of an evangelical minister, was coming from the other open and lighted window, and Haydon could hear, too, the clinking of dishes and someone coughing.

He went back around to Fossler’s door, but the silence of the small courtyard made him hesitate to knock. If Fossler wasn’t in, he didn’t want to draw attention to his own presence. Fossler’s room was dark, and Haydon doubted he was there. He reached down and tried the doorknob. It turned, and there was a soft click, a sound that made Haydon sweat. If Fossler had left, he would have locked the door. Haydon remembered Fossler saying that Lena and Baine knew where he was staying, and he remembered, too, that Fossler said he had moved several times. It seemed incredible to Haydon at this moment that he hadn’t asked Fossler why he had done that.

He was holding the door knob, keeping the tension against the spring to keep it from clicking again as it moved back in place. He desperately missed his Beretta. Slowly rotating his wrist, he eased back the tension on the knob until the handle was in place. He stepped back against the wall and carefully, with outstretched arm pushed the door open into the room, while behind him, through the plantains, a chorus of tinny evangelical voices sang “Know, My Soul, Thy Full Salvation.”

“Fossler,” he said, not loud, but loud enough. “Fossler.”

As the door drifted open, Haydon saw in the glow of a powder-blue light that came from another window that fronted the street that the room was exactly that, one room. He stepped across the doorway and looked into the room from the opposite angle. The door was open all the way, flat against the inside wall so that no one could have been hiding behind it. Haydon stepped into the doorway and surveyed the room as best he could in the half-light, the foot of the single bed facing him and above it the window, to the right a partition that was supposed to hide a toilet and shower, and then to the right of that a table and two chairs and a closet without a door. Something was hanging in the closet. Haydon picked up his bag and stepped inside and closed the door. He put one knee on the unmade bed and reached up over the headboard and pulled closed the simple curtain. The window that looked out onto the courtyard was closed. The room was hot and smelled of mildew. Haydon moved cautiously to the table, sliding his feet on the floor to avoid tripping, and flipped on the light.

The bulb must have been forty watts or less, but the jaundiced glow was bright enough to freeze Haydon to the spot. The room had been trashed. The bed covers were shoved up to the head of the bed in a dingy wad, one chair was turned over and the table askew. The shower curtain was ripped from most of its hooks, and for some reason the toilet tissue had been pulled from its roll and was strewn about the room in coiled, wormy strands that ended up in a pile at Haydon’s feet. Even in the bad light he could clearly distinguish the deep rubiginous stains soaked into the soiled gob of paper. Instinctively his eyes went straight to the sink, the filthy, chipped enamel draped with slobbers of bloodied water, and above it, the mirror tracked with blood spatters that climbed right up the wall. He wheeled around to the closet where a shirt was half torn from a hanger, and on the window curtains beside the closet was a bloody smear, an imprint of grasping fingers. Haydon swallowed. Blood was everywhere, splashed, dribbled, spattered, smeared, cast off, and flung, but—Haydon grasped at a thin reason to hope—none pooled. All of this had been shed in some kind of wild frenzy, but whoever had lost it had not stayed here long enough to make a puddle.

Suddenly Haydon heard the doorknob behind him click, and he spun around to watch the wooden door drift gracefully open just as slowly as it had drifted open for him. But the doorway was empty, and then a cat shot out of the passageway and into the plantains, and Taylor Cage stepped into the yellow haze, stuffing a huge handgun into the waistband of his trousers.

CHAPTER 9

“H
ello, Haydon,” Cage said. He hesitated a moment, almost as if he were giving Haydon the time to look him over, size him up, gather his nerves. He was about Haydon’s height, but much more bulky, his familiar barrel chest now accompanied by some additional poundage, though he still carried himself in a solid, surefooted manner that indicated he was action-ready. His fair-to-pinkish skin was weather cured with a recent sunburn that was almost finished peeling on the humped bridge of his straight nose, his glaucous eyes were unchanged. He was wearing his kinky gray hair a little shorter now, but it was just as thick as it had been a decade earlier.

Keeping his eyes on Haydon, he came through the door and stopped just inside and pulled a pack of cigarettes from the chest pocket of his guayabera, which he wore with the tail out as was the fashion, and lighted one without offering any to Haydon.

“You knew I was here, didn’t you?” he said, blowing the smoke away from them. He was perspiring, his forehead loaded with beads and a rivulet at his right temple.

“‘Here’ outside, or ‘here’ in Guatemala?”

Cage looked at Haydon. “Christ, you haven’t changed any, have you. Okay, let’s see, let’s try ‘here’ in Guatemala first.”

“Yes.”

“The street?”

“Of course not.”

Cage turned slightly so that his back wasn’t to the doorway but against the wall. He looked outside into the courtyard and then turned back. The handgun stuck in his waistband was clearly visible through the thin material of the guayabera.

“I don’t know where your friend is,” he said.

“Do you know what happened?” Haydon was having a hard time controlling the adrenaline. He didn’t even want to think about what might have gone on here.

“No.”

“You were here earlier?”

Cage pulled on his cigarette and nodded. Haydon had noticed that he was smoking a Guatemalan brand. Cage was a firm believer of when-in-Rome, even when Rome had pretty nasty cigarettes.

“I was here about half an hour ago.” He looked around. “Shocked the shit out of me.” He wiped a thick hand across his forehead, smeared the sweat, and wiped his hand on the tail of the guayabera.

“How did you know I was here?”

“When I got here, saw all this, I backed out, went down the street and made some telephone calls. On my way back, I heard a car coming down the street and ducked into a doorway.” He nodded toward the other side of the street. “Saw you get out of the cab and go in the passageway here. When I saw the light come on I walked across.”

“Why didn’t you make your calls from here?”

“I wanted them to be private.”

“His telephone was tapped, even here?”

Cage sighed. “This is a long story, Haydon. We need to get out of here. Come on. I’ve got a car around the corner.”

Haydon was reluctant to leave. “You went through the place?”

“Sure. There’s nothing. Cleaned out.” If he wasn’t lying, if he really had gone through the place, then Haydon could believe there was nothing to turn up. Cage knew how to go over a scene.

Cage turned and Haydon picked up his bag and followed him. At the door he stopped, turned around for one last look at the room, snapped off the light, and closed the door behind him. They returned down the dim passageway to the wrought-iron gate, the closing of which echoed out across the cobblestones and off the stucco walls on either side of the narrow street. The night was a little cooler here, away from the stuffy confines of Fossler’s cramped compartment.

As they walked side by side along the gritty sidewalk, Haydon next to the buildings, Cage on the street side, their footsteps were the only sounds on the deserted street. Cage seemed preoccupied, and Haydon tried to remember back ten years whether this was his manner or if present circumstances were affecting him. He couldn’t recall, one way or the other. Nor could he shake off the feeling that by walking away from Fossler’s room he was walking away from Fossler, turning his back on him as surely as if he had turned on his heel and walked away from his friend’s bleeding body. Haydon felt like he was leaving something behind in the stink of Fossler’s ghastly little cell.

At the corner of the avenida. Cage hesitated but didn’t stop, barreling on across the intersection, following the street down a slight decline toward the Plaza Mayor. They passed some storefronts and then ducked into a tiny drive that led to a dark walled courtyard where a few cars were parked along the walls and
ranchera
music came from a radio inside a lighted doorway. Cage went to one of the cars, a large-sized Japanese model, and unlocked it. Haydon threw his bag into the backseat as Cage started the car, and they eased out of the courtyard, into the narrow passage, and then out into the street, the tires thrumming on the cobblestones as Cage picked up speed.

“I get a different one of these about every ninety days,” Cage said, shifting the car. “Mexican used-car dealer out on the Mixco highway. I trade them in, he gives me a decent deal, a little profit for himself—plus a little to keep his mouth shut—and I have a new car every few months. Makes it harder for them to keep up with me.”

“Where are we going?” Haydon asked, thinking of the shirt half torn from the hanger in Fossler’s closet. He thought of the bloody slobbers on the dirty enamel basin, the gore-soaked toilet tissue strewn crazily around the room. They were still in the tight streets of the old central city, but now there was traffic, a few people on the sidewalks, the traffic lights were working, a few sparsely populated cafés were open to the night.

“I’m hungry,” Cage said. “We’ll get something to eat, where we can talk.”

They were on one of the calles crossing the avenidas heading east, the streets getting busier, and then Cage turned onto 6a avenida, and the narrow street was awash with neon signs that hung out over the street, advertisements for Jordache jeans, Panasonic stereos, Chinese restaurants, Wrangler jeans, Sony radios, Pepsi, shoe stores, beauty shops, Toshiba, Fuji, 7-Up—the first world, one street of it anyway—and then Cage turned again, and the commercial volume was reduced by half and then with each block it was reduced by half again until they turned for the last time. They were on 9a avenida, a gloomy street with a slower pace, dimmer lights, fewer people, and more shadows.

Martin Fierro’s was an Argentine steak house with a front entry that opened off the corner of the building at 9a avenida and calle 15, its windows right on the sidewalk, thrown open to the night. It had a low-timbered ceiling shrouded in a haze of smoke from the cook fires, and simple wooden chairs and tables with oilcloth covers. It was in Zona 1, in the kind of location that Cage made it his business to know intimately in all the cities of Latin America. It wasn’t the sort of place you went to accidentally.

Though the place was busy, they were able to grab a table from three men who were standing up to go. It was next to a window just inside the double front doors, but behind a railing that gave it some privacy. They sat down among the dirty dishes, and Haydon slipped his bag under the table, between the wall and his leg. Cage had said he ought to bring it; you should never leave anything in your car. The dishes were immediately cleared away by a young Indian girl with beautifully plaited hair who wore a traditional
corte
skirt and a
Die Harder
T-shirt through which her small breasts made little protrusions on either side of Bruce Willis’ posturing heroics. When she had gone, the waiter came and they ordered Gallos, Guatemala’s most popular beer. Cage also ordered
churrasco
, thin fillets of grilled beef. Haydon passed. The beer appeared immediately, its gold label sporting the bright red rooster trademark.