Life Blood ---XV---Page No--48

With that he gunned his engine and spun out. Jesus! "Mas despacio, por favor."

"Okay," he said, showing off his English as he donned his sunglasses. "I go more slow. No problem."

The initial destination was part of my new plan, hatched while
I was on the plane. When I was reading my guidebook and filling
out my entry card I'd had a bright idea. I knew exactly how I
wanted to begin.

Heading into town, the time now the middle of the afternoon, I
leaned back in the seat and tried to absorb the view, to get a
feeling for where I was. We first traveled through the suburban
fringes, the heavily guarded luxurious mansions of the
landholding and military elite, the one percent of Guatemala who
own ninety-nine percent of the country. Iron fences and wide
expanses of lawn, protected by Uzi-toting security, guarded
whimsical architectural conceits topped by silver satellite dishes.
A twenty-foot wall shielded their delicate eyes from the city's
largest shanty-town, makeshift hovels of bamboo and rusted tin,
with no signs of water or drains or toilets. Guatemala City: as
Steve had put it once, a million doomed citizens, the rich and the
poor, trapped together side by side in the most "modern" capital in
Central America.

Why on earth had Sarah decided to come here? Even if she
did travel with the mesmerizing Alex Goddard it was hard to
imagine a place less spiritual. Couldn't she feel that this was all
wrong? One of us had to be missing something major.
        Fifteen minutes later I was passing through the fetid
atmosphere of downtown, which seemed to be another world,
Guatemala City's twin soul. It was an urban hodgepodge of
Burger King, McDonald's, discount electronics emporia, an eye-
numbing profusion of plastic signs, filthy parking lots, rattletrap
buses and taxis, stalled traffic. Exhaust fumes thickened the air,
and everywhere you looked teenage "guards" in uniforms loitered
in front of stores and banks with sawed-off shotguns, boys so
green and scared-looking you'd think twice about letting one of
them park your car. But there they were, weapons at the ready,
nervously monitoring passersby. Who were they defending all the
wealth from? The ragged street children, with swollen bellies and
skin disease, vending single cigarettes from open packs? Or the
hordes of widows and orphans, beneficiaries of the Army's Mayan
"pacification" program, who now begged for centavos or

plaintively hawked half-rotten fruit from the safety of the shadows?

My bright-idea destination was a government office in the
Palacio Nacional, right in the center of town, where I hoped I
could find Sarah's old landing card, the record of when tourists
arrived and departed. When I'd filled mine out on the plane, I'd
realized you were supposed to put down where you'd be staying in Guatemala. I figured the best way to locate her this time was to find out where she went last time. . .

As my cab pulled up in front, a black Land Rover was parked in a "Prohibido Estacionarse" zone by the front steps. To my eyes it looked like the same one I'd seen at the airport. Shit.

But nobody was around, so I decided maybe I was just being paranoid again.

The Palacio turned out to be a mixture of Moorish and faux

Greek architecture, with a facade of light green imitation stone

that gave off the impression of a large, rococo wedding cake. I

took a long look, paid off the driver—who had turned out to be very nice—and headed in. It was, after all, a public building, open to
tourist gringos.

Nobody in the lobby appeared to take any particular notice of me, so after going through their very serious security, uniforms and guns everywhere, I checked the directory.

It turned out the president, cabinet ministers, and high military
officers all kept offices there, but it didn't take long to find the
bureau I was looking for. Going down the marble-floored hallway
on the third floor, I passed by the Sala de Recepcion, a vast
wood-paneled room of enormous chandeliers, stained-glass
windows, and a massive coat of arms. Quite a place, but not my
destination. At the far end of the hallway, I found the door I
wanted, went in, and tried out the Spanish question I'd been
practicing in the cab. Not necessary: English worked fine.
        "Senora, the records for that time were only kept on paper," a
Ladino woman declared shrugging, her nails colored a brash
mauve, her hair a burst of red, "but you are welcome to look."
She'd been on the phone, chatting in rapid-fire Spanish, but she
quickly hung up and got out her glasses.

"Thanks."

The welcome mat was obviously a little thin. The woman was
trying to be friendly, but very quickly her nervousness began to
come through. "We're always glad to accommodate Americans
searching for friends or relatives," she went on, attempting a