The Squares of the City Page 18

  Much of the conversation was concerned with the affairs of the Citizens’ Party. While if flowed past me, I had a chance to study my companions.

  There was Lucas, of course. I had seen enough of him in action to know that he was a brilliant lawyer—he lacked Fats Brown’s gift of identifying himself with the cause he was pleading, but his faculty of analyzing arguments with detachment more than compensated. He struck me as a cold man; he could be an angry man—as I had seen when Sam Francis killed Guerrero—but I doubted if he had it in him to be fanatical.

  Nor had Angers. Dogmatic, certainly, and stubborn. But—well, Angers was almost too much of a type. The reason was probably not far to seek: perhaps it was simply the common expatriate habit of overemphasizing one’s personal background in reaction against alien surroundings.

  I’d have been hard put to it to find a reply if someone had asked me, “Do you like Angers?” His own manner discouraged any strong feeling of like or dislike toward him. I should probably have replied, in an unconscious imitation of Angers’ own British accent, “Oh, he’s all right!”

  Which was probably exactly what Angers himself would desire.

  As for Arrio, I characterized him as an actor. A man who had adopted a role, probably when young, and found that it served him so well he eventually came to live it. I found the role rather impressive; having decided that the man had become the part he played, I could not be less impressed simply because it was a part. Now the role and the individual were inseparable.

  So here were three leading citizens, leading voices of those who spoke in Ciudad de Vados. Steady men. Probably as reliable personally as they were solid in their business. I had, I realized, still been unconsciously worrying about Dalban’s threats and trying to mask the fact from myself. Now I had been assured of Arrio’s support, which seemed worth having, and I felt relieved of an imaginary burden.

  The meal broke up, Arrio apologizing and explaining that he had to go to the television studios and record an interview for tonight’s current affairs program; they were doing a feature on his new appointment. I asked him to give my regards to Señora Cortés and Francisco Córdoban. Wryly, I wondered in passing whether they would put out a picture of Arrio in the guise of an angel; certainly he would look better in the role than I had.

  When he had left us, Lucas, Angers, and I strolled back across the square. After a moment, deep in thought, Angers spoke up.

  “Relieved at not having to face a cross-examination by Brown, Hakluyt?”

  “In a way,” I admitted.

  “Oh, he is one large bluff!” said Lucas offhandedly. “Did he perhaps say to you that he ate expert witnesses for lunch?”

  “As a matter of fact—”

  Lucas nodded, smiling faintly. “He said the same to our good Dr. Ruiz, but he was not taken in. Strange about what has happened, no?”

  “Strange?” echoed Angers. “The sort of thing one might have expected, surely.”

  “I suppose it is,” Lucas agreed abstractedly. “I hear—did I tell you, or did Luis?—that el obispo is also tonight on television, by his special request.”

  “Really?” said Angers in a slightly bored tone; presumably the whim of a Popish bishop held little interest for him.

  “And I have heard—just a rumor, true, but I have definitely heard—that he intends to speak his mind on the matter of morality in Vados.”

  Their eyes met, and it was instantly clear what Lucas was implying.

  Angers smiled reluctantly. “Not by any chance a sermon on the text, ‘The wages of sin is death’?”

  “Anything is possible,” shrugged Lucas. We had reached the sidewalk and had paused in a group with traffic rolling by. “I gather he is considering giving permission for the dead girl to be buried in consecrated ground.”

  I butted in. “You mean he’s already made up his episcopal mind that she was murdered—didn’t kill herself? Look, I saw Fats Brown and his wife and brother-in-law yesterday evening in a bar—in fact I drove them home. I heard his side of the story, and he swore blind he had never seen this—this tramp before.”

  They were both looking at me with quizzical expressions.

  “Speaking professionally, Señor Hakluyt,” said Lucas after a pause, “I assure you that what Brown may have said to you is of no interest in law. If he is innocent, why has he hidden? Oh, admittedly many things might have happened—she might have thrown herself from the window in desperation, she might have been frightened and fallen back, she might have been struck in an argument, all possible! Yet Brown’s brother-in-law tells us that she was hard and self-possessed and seemed well in control of herself. Not distraught, so that she was likely to resort to suicide when she knew she could obtain—uh—sufficient provision for herself from the father of her unborn child.”

  “Aside from the fact that he categorically denied being the father,” I insisted, “Brown told me she wanted ten thousand dolaros, and he didn’t have that much.”

  “He could probably have got it,” shrugged Angers. “No, he obviously panicked; presumably, then, he felt he was in too awkward a position to defend himself. If it were just a matter of money, I’m sure he would have been worth ten thousand to the National Party as a capable, experienced liar.”

  “Lawyer?” suggested Lucas.

  “I know what I mean,” said Angers, and barked a laugh.

  Lucas glanced at his watch and started. “Well, excuse me,” he said. “I have much business to attend to. Hasta la vista, Donald—Señor Hakluyt.” He gave a polite little dip of the head and went across the road.

  “Well, I think things are going to liven up a little in Vados now,” Angers commented. “With Arrio and Lucas working together, we should see progress.”

  “You think Arrio a better choice than Guerrero?”

  “No question. Excellent fellow, Arrio—man of decision. I like men like that.”

  I didn’t watch Arrio on television that evening, or the bishop. But when I passed the little wall shrine in the market on my way back to my hotel, dead beat at one in the morning, there were several candles burning. I glanced around for any sign of men with clubs like those who had greeted me just after Guerrero’s death, saw no one, and ventured to examine a slip of paper stuck to one of the unburnt candles.

  It said on it, “Estrelita Jaliscos.”

  Poor Fats, I thought. I remembered how pathetic he had been the night before. Then I recalled how drunk he had been, also, and how unstably poised between anger and self-pity. It had to be admitted: Lucas was right. So many things could have happened to Estrelita Jaliscos; one of them might conceivably have been murder.

  By now it had become a habit for me to read Liberdad and Tiempo every morning; my original intention to improve my Spanish had become secondary, as I spoke it much of the time. Now I read the papers to keep abreast of what was happening in the city. I took up Liberdad first as usual the next morning and found that of course it had everything its way today.

  The appointment of Arrio was the main story, together with a report of what he had said on television. Next to it was an account of Bishop Cruz’s diatribe on Vadeano morals, and that was so strongly worded it made me blink. According to the bishop, Ciudad de Vados was going to be mentioned on Judgment Day in the next breath after Sodom.

  He didn’t mention Fats Brown by name, but there were a dozen barbed references to those who lead the young into sin, and with it there was an ingenious argument to the effect that, since this rush of depravity in what had formerly been (so the bishop stated) a highly moral and reputable city could be traced to its source in the shantytowns and more especially Sigueiras’s slum, then Brown’s spirited defense of Sigueiras must have been due to a desire to perpetuate these hotbeds of vice.

  That was a kind of argument I thought was dead with the two Joes—Stalin and McCarthy.

  Brown’s disappearance was the next major story; there was a picture of the secretary of justice, Gonzales, declaring that he would be found, another of e
l Jefe O’Rourke scowling over the sheet-draped body of the girl, and a story saying that the police were working on various leads. I’d read the same thing practically word-for-word in too many different countries to go through it in detail; I glanced at the next story and found it was a report on some regional chess championship, so I picked up Tiempo, wondering how they were going to save any face at all in view of what had happened. They couldn’t very well defend Brown except vaguely, in general terms; perhaps they would try to distract attention by attacking a scapegoat—

  I was right. It was just the identity of the scapegoat I wasn’t expecting.

  In the middle of the front page was a crude cartoon; it depicted Ciudad de Vados as the Garden of Eden. Standing before it was an angel with a flaming sword, scowling down on ragged peasants—a man holding his hat in his hand, a woman with a baby at her side—who were saying, “Why is it a sin to be poor?”

  And across the angel’s robe in big black letters was scrawled my name.

  XVII

  I was still staring incredulously at the drawing when a discreet knock came at my door and the chambermaid brought in my morning mail. Automatically, my mind not on what I was doing, I slit the two envelopes she gave me and glanced at the contents.

  The first was a letter from a friend of mine in the States to whom I’d promised to write and then—as I usually do—had put it off. The second was the front page torn from a copy of this morning’s Tiempo, identical with the one I was reading except that the cartoon had been ringed with red and a single word added in English beside it: “Well?”

  “Dalban,” I said aloud. “Who else?”

  Well, Dalban or whoever was responsible, this was going to stop. Now. Tiempo seemed to get away with a hell of a lot of libel and near libel, but Maria Posador had told me that Seixas obtained an injunction to prevent them from accusing him of taking bribes. Someone was going to have to organize the same for me. Right now.

  I put the torn page back in its envelope, stuffed the envelope in my pocket, and went to the traffic department to see Angers. I told him what had happened, showed him the red-ringed cartoon, and then slammed my fist down on his desk.

  “Right!” I said. “There’s a law about this sort of thing. Get something done!”

  Angers bit his lip. “So you think it’s Dalban behind this, eh? I suppose that’s logical, after the threat he made to you. Your best course, Hakluyt, would be to have a word with Lucas—suppose I call him and see if he’s free to join us for lunch?”

  He picked up the envelope and glanced at the postmark.

  “Posted early this morning or last night, about half a mile from the Plaza del Sur—at least, I think that’s the postal zone in that area. Early today, more likely, unless whoever was responsible got hold of an advance copy of the paper.”

  He picked up his interoffice phone and told his secretary to get Lucas for him. I waited, feeling my first hot-tempered reaction cool perceptibly.

  Lucas was free; he was engaged in sewing up the case against Sam Francis, which was mainly a matter of collating the evidence of witnesses. I told him my story over lunch in the plaza that noon.

  He nodded gravely when I’d finished. “Yes, Señor Hakluyt,” he said. “You have what is, I think, called a hard nut to crack in both these problems. The Mendoza brothers are very skilled at almost libeling persons they disapprove of, without being so rude as to bring the fury of the law about their heads. Since, however, you are not a citizen but, so to say, a guest of our government, I think it well worthwhile to investigate the possibility of a suit over this attack. At the very least, we can obtain an injunction to muzzle them for the time being.”

  “That would help,” I said. “But it’s not enough. I want Dalban investigated. If he is responsible, then I want something done about him. I had no action out of the police when I was threatened by him, except the offer of a bodyguard—and I turned that down because of another experience I’d had with the police just after I got here.”

  Lucas made a note in a small memorandum book. “I will make inquiries for you, señor,” he said. “It is, alas, no secret that a man with the right influence can—uh—discourage the enthusiasm of our Vadeano police force. Dalban certainly is one of them. But as it happens I am interested to know myself what has been going on with Dalban; I expected him to make a move before this.”

  “What sort of move?” demanded Angers.

  “You doubtless recall the fine that was imposed on Juan Tezol? So far it has gone unpaid, aside from a couple of hundred dolaros scraped together by fanatical supporters of the party. But the twenty days’ grace before the reckoning are up today, and many people have been wondering whether Tezol is indeed valuable enough to those behind the party for the money to be forthcoming.”

  Angers nodded. “You have a point. If the fellow doesn’t get ransomed, it means his usefulness is at an end—because he and Francis were so closely linked, one assumes. Some of Francis’s dirt must have rubbed off on Tezol, then.”

  “Of the two, Tezol is probably in fact the dirtier if not the darker,” said Lucas reflectively, and gave a faint smile. “Yes, it will be interesting to see if those thousand dolaros materialize.”

  Angers was deep in thought for a moment. At length he said, “You seem very ready to accept that Dalban is at the bottom of this, by the way. Has he in fact any influence with Tiempo? I always understood that Maria Posador was behind it.”

  Lucas shrugged. “To my way of thinking, Maria Posador is also a—a what is it called? A decoy, precisely. I think that her acceptance of Vados’s invitation to return to Aguazul greatly diminished her influence. Now it is always Dalban that I watch.”

  He checked the time and started to get up. “You will excuse me; I have spent too long talking. Rest assured, Señor Hakluyt—this affair of yours will quickly be regulated.”

  He acted remarkably promptly. On my breakfast tray at the hotel the following morning was an envelope containing two items: the first, a certified copy of an injunction issued by Judge Romero with, pinned to it, a slip of paper saying, “With compliments from Andres Lucas.” And the second, the morning’s issue of Tiempo.

  Today the most conspicuous item on the front page was a yawning gap, bearing a facsimile of the official censor’s stamp and a note to the effect that this section of the paper had originally contained material which contravened such-and-such a subsection of the Public Order Act.

  This was more like it. As I found later, police had descended on the Tiempo office early this morning, acting on Judge Romero’s instructions, and had removed another article about me from the actual stone on which it was set up.

  Looking through the rest of the paper, I discovered that Romero had had a busy day yesterday. Tezol, his fine unpaid, had been arrested on Romero’s order last night and was now in jail, without Dalban or his associates—who were supposed to be backing the National Party—lifting a finger to help him.

  The Nationals seemed capable of some really bloody things on occasion. I had no doubt that so long as this illiterate peasant orator had been useful to them, they were only too happy to have him trust them; when it came to a pinch, they’d dropped him without a word.

  I turned to the inside pages and there found an example of the Mendoza brothers’ cleverness, of which Lucas had spoken yesterday. Felipe Mendoza was at it again, hammering his well-worn theme of bribery in the treasury department and vested interests in highway corporations. Owing, I presumed, to the injunction Seixas had previously obtained against the paper, he wasn’t mentioned by name; nonetheless, all the “for examples” given in the article would have fitted him like a glove, down to the jug of sickly cocktail he kept on the desk in his office. This gave me cause to frown. So having an injunction against the Mendozas wasn’t as watertight as I had hoped. I’d have to go on watching for trouble in this quarter.

  Well, there was hope in another direction. Lucas had spoken of investigations into Dalban’s part in the affair; if they paid off,
I might be able to get on with my job in peace. Frankly, by this time I was wishing to God it was over and done with.

  I made a mental note to call Lucas and thank him as soon as I got the chance, and finished my breakfast in a considerably better mood than I’d been in twenty-four hours before.

  Sitting in the lounge with an air of extreme dejection, studying a chess problem and idly moving a pawn back and forth as though unable to decide what to do with it, was Maria Posador.

  What the hell did she do at this hotel when she had a house a little distance away? Did she just like it? Come here for the company? Use it as an office for whatever she did with the National Party?

  I went over to her. “Señora Posador! I’d like a word with you.”

  “You are welcome, Señor Hakluyt,” she murmured without looking up. “Be seated.” She gestured at another chair, an unlit Russian cigarette between her fingers.

  I sat down and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Maybe I’m more welcome than what I want to say,” I said. “Are you responsible for what Tiempo has been saying about me lately?”

  She dropped the pawn she was toying with, sat back, crossed her legs. “I am responsible for nothing Tiempo says or does. Who informed you that I was?”

  “That’s beside the point. What is your connection with Tiempo?”

  “I have sometimes given money to Cristoforo Mendoza—no more than that.”

  No evasion, so far as I could judge; a plain answer to the question. I relaxed a little. “If you’re a friend of the Mendoza brothers, maybe you can tell me why they’re picking on me at the moment.”

  She was silent for a while, regarding me. She said finally, “Perhaps, Señor Hakluyt, you are thinking of news papers.” Two words; she made the distinction perfectly clear. “Tiempo is not a news paper. It cannot be, because Liberdad is not. These are tools for shaping the opinions of people. Let me put it this way. Liberdad is little more than a—spare wheel for the television and radio services; it carries extra weight among those highly literate and influential persons who, after all, are the operative factors in our country. Against this, the opposition has Tiempo—and word of mouth. It has been a great achievement of Vados, to retain public confidence in his propaganda services; often, after twenty years, government organs speaking for a regime have outworn their public acceptance. People say, ‘I no longer believe! I have read—or seen—or heard—too many obvious falsehoods.’ Not here, señor.”