Free Body of Truth by David L Lindsey

most attractive avenues in Central America, with towering cypresses that shaded both sides of the avenue. To Haydon’s right was Zona 10 where the several-block area between 13 and 16 calles was known as Zona Viva, a sector of elegant shopping and dining and expensive hotels. They passed the ever-popular Camino Real hotel where Americans stayed who didn’t want to leave the U.S. behind when they crossed the border, and a few blocks farther down was the American embassy. This section of the city was as good as the city got, and even then there wasn’t much of it.
    Looking through the dirty windshield of the taxi at the avenue, whose reputation for elegance outstripped its reality, Haydon felt the first twinges of eeriness that was the city’s gift to any arriving traveler who knew anything about the country’s history. The low-powered street-lamps gave a macabre glow to the smoke that hung among the towering cypresses of the boulevard like an infernal breath. Haydon could not avoid thinking of what the smog consisted of, for he had seen more than a few bodies dumped in the garbage of the ravines, most of them mutilated and swollen like sausages from the tropical heat. And often they smoldered like everything else in the dumps, adding their oily effluvia to the filthy air for the rest of the city to breathe. Here death was literally in the air, and everyone could taste it.
    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