The Squares of the City Page 22

I hadn’t given back the police automatic that had been forced on me for the visit to Sigueiras’s slum. I eased it from its holster and sat waiting with one hand on the light cord.

  When the door swung open and a man stepped through, I tugged the cord and jerked the muzzle of the gun through an attention-drawing arc. “Quién está?” I said loudly. “Y qué hace Vd.?”

  The man swore loudly and came forward. I saw a scared-looking member of the hotel staff behind him. “Policia, Señor Hakluyt,” he said.

  I lowered the gun. It was Guzman, the sergeant of detectives I had encountered previously—the one who had offered me a twenty-four-hour bodyguard after Dalban first threatened me.

  “All right, Guzman,” I said aggressively. “What do you want?”

  “The señor will please come with me.”

  “The señor will do nothing of the kind. The señor will see you and the entire police department in hell first. Go away and come back at a reasonable hour.”

  His saturnine face did not react. With an air of extreme patience, he answered, “There has been sabotage at the television station, Señor Hakluyt. Last night, we learn, you visited it for some purpose or other. You will certainly be able to help with our investigation.”

  “How? I went to tell your precious Dr. Mayor what I thought of him. Rioco saw me arrive, and José Dalban saw me leave. So, if he had any eyes, did this man who’s supposed to be following me when I leave the hotel. Why don’t you ask Mayor?”

  “Because Dr. Mayor is nowhere to be found.” Guzman spoke unblinkingly. “It is known that he remained late last night to prepare directives about today’s news on the radio. They have not yet been able to reach his office because the fire is too hot.”

  He glanced at his watch. “The señor will come with me. Pronto!”

  “You win,” I said, sighing. “Here, suppose you take this. It belongs to your department, anyway.”

  I handed him the gun. He took it without expression and stood waiting while I dressed. Then he escorted me down to a waiting car, and we were hurried around to police headquarters.

  They took a statement from me, laboriously, with great detail, and then abandoned me to sit on a bench in a small anteroom and smoke my cigarettes, one after the other, for almost four hours. Someone brought me a cup of strong, unsweetened coffee around seven-thirty, and I managed to have someone go out for sandwiches for me.

  Eventually a clerk came and fetched me to go into el Jefe’s office, where O’Rourke himself and Guzman were waiting for me. O’Rourke looked defiantly weary, his eyes red and sore, his tie knotted almost at his waist, his shirt unbuttoned to show the mat of hair on his chest.

  “You are in luck, Señor Hakluyt,” said Guzman, tapping the statement that had been copied down from me earlier. “We had no trouble locating Señor Rioco, who could swear when you arrived, and Señor Barranquilla who—shall we say?—saw you off the premises.” He gave a parody of a smile. “And it is likewise confirmed what time you returned to the hotel. Therefore, if you did not climb from your window, you remained there during the crucial times.”

  “Crucial times for what? And haven’t you got hold of Dr. Mayor yet?”

  “Oh, yes, señor. He was found at ten minutes past seven. That is to say, his bones were found. He was trapped in his office and burned to death.”

  I saw O’Rourke’s red eyes on me. He had hunched his shoulders together and was leaning forward on his desk with hands half-closed as though preparing to seize—something—and throttle it to death.

  I said slowly, “This is incredible to me. I’d have thought there would be fire alarms, sprinkler systems—”

  “There were, señor. The line to fire headquarters, which connects the alarm, had been short-circuited. The sprinkler systems may have operated or may not. We cannot say. The building is empty except for one watchman between half past midnight and half past five a.m. The watchman was also killed, it seems. But him we have not yet found.”

  “But—damn it, that’s a modern building. I was awakened up at about ten past three by the fire sirens, and when I looked at the television center, it was burning as though it were made of matchwood, not concrete! How was it done?”

  Guzman hesitated. O’Rourke glanced at him and snapped a curt query in Spanish. “What does he want?”

  Guzman replied quickly, “To be told how it was done.”

  “Tell him—what does it matter!”

  Guzman nodded and switched back to English. “There were eight thousand liters of oil stored for the generators which power the transmitter if the main electricity supply runs low. It would appear that an incendiary bomb was placed in the oil store. As soon as the wreckage is cool, it will be investigated.”

  I thought again of Dalban saying, “On the contrary, Dr. Mayor. I am just beginning.”

  Not that Vados would be a worse place to live in with Mayor dead. But to have had a hot-tempered wish translated into stark fact so quickly was unsettling, and I was acutely afraid that I might turn out to be the material witness whose evidence caused Dalban’s arrest on a murder charge. I didn’t want to get more involved than I was—

  “Señor Hakluyt,” Guzman was saying. I blinked back to the present moment.

  “Yes?”

  “Señor Barranquilla has also testified that in Dr. Mayor’s office he overheard José Dalban declare that Dr. Mayor would be better off dead. Did you also hear this?”

  I hesitated, seeing O’Rourke’s tired eyes on me, and in the end nodded. “I think he said something like that,” I confirmed reluctantly.

  “Thank you, señor. I think that is all. But we may need to contact you again.”

  Had it been intended as murder? Had it been chance that Mayor had remained in the building, or was the moment of the sabotage chosen because Mayor was there alone?

  And was that what Dalban had meant when he declared he was just beginning?

  There weren’t any answers to those questions.

  As soon as I left police headquarters I bought the day’s papers and went into a restaurant to read them over coffee and rolls. My head was buzzing; I had to force myself to concentrate, but if there was anything the papers could add to my personal knowledge of what had happened yesterday, I badly needed the information.

  Liberdad, naturally, was playing up Fats Brown’s death as the end of a desperate villain—the same tune that the television service had been whistling yesterday. There was a long article on an inside page by Luis Arrio, now chairman of the Citizens of Vados, that contained an attack on Dalban. The fire was, of course, not mentioned—this was on an inside page and would probably have been put to bed early the previous evening. It was concerned mainly with what he had done to me; he had villainously tried to put off the day when the good Señor Hakluyt would sweep away Sigueiras’s breeding ground for crime and criminals. Arrio warmly praised Andres Lucas for his handling of the Sigueiras case and went on to quote Professor Cortés extensively on the social problems of the slum.

  Why the hell did they have to go on making me responsible for the continued existence of Sigueiras’s hell-hole? I’d done my best to make it clear that any solution of that one in terms of traffic would be artificial and that what was wanted was a good healthy governmental decree about it. In any case, now that Sigueiras was wanted for harboring a murderer, the whole thing would straighten itself out.

  Tiempo had really let itself go—mainly on me, as though the force of Romero’s injunction had expired. Which it had not, of course. This morning I didn’t much care; I was as ready to hate the guts of the people of Ciudad de Vados as they seemed to be to hate mine.

  And to add to the recklessness of today’s issue, Felipe Mendoza had gone back to his attacks on Seixas, and this time was imputing directly that Vados knew about Seixas taking bribes, but connived at it. They weren’t going to get away with that kind of thing for long.

  But I didn’t spend time thinking about that. All I wanted now was out. I’d finish the job, if that was allowe
d me—and at present it seemed that it wasn’t allowed. Without being asked, I’d found myself caught up in Vadeano affairs that didn’t concern me, and now they were tangling me at every turn.

  I wanted to get the job over. And for precisely the same reasons I wanted to quit—for a while at least—and give myself a chance to start thinking straight again.

  Today, moreover, I did not want to see Angers. My first nausea was cooling, but I doubted that Angers’ selfsatisfaction and smugness with what he had done would have shrunk at the same rate. If they hadn’t, the sight of him was likely to make me explode. Oh, true, Brown would certainly have killed Angers, or manhandled him severely, if he hadn’t missed or slipped; true, he was a presumed murderer and had fled rather than attempt to prove his innocence as the law required. … He nonetheless seemed to me an honest man, and honest men don’t grow on trees.

  All too often, though, that’s where they end up. Hanging.

  I went to the pay phone in the restaurant and called the traffic department to leave a message saying I wouldn’t be in today. Then I went out aimlessly and within a short time found myself in the Plaza del Norte. It was thinking of Brown, perhaps, that brought me to the Courts of Justice.

  I was standing staring at the statues in the middle of the square (someone had cleaned the paint off Vados’s statue) when a squad of police cars howled into sight from the direction of police headquarters and went with sirens wailing down the Calle del Presidente Vados.

  So many cars going out together meant something big, even making allowances for the well-known habit of the Vadeano police of going hunting in large numbers. I idled slowly along the sidewalk. After a minute or two the squad cars were followed by two large lumbering trucks.

  I paused at a roadside stall and had some more coffee and tamales; before I had finished, the police cars came racing back. They halted before the Courts of Justice and their occupants got out. Three or four men in plain clothes were being forcibly led along by uniformed officers.

  I almost poured my coffee down my shirt as I recognized two of the prisoners. They were Cristoforo Mendoza and his brother Felipe.

  Now what?

  I waited until the trucks also returned—they took fifteen minutes longer over the round trip. When they pulled up, the men in charge—police again—started to unload bundles of newspapers baled for distribution, stacks of the etched plates from which newspapers are printed, files and filing cabinets, huge boxes full of paper.

  I thought to myself, well, I’m god-damned. They’re closing down Tiempo.

  And I felt something cold walk down my spine.

  XXI

  I thought of Maria Posador saying in that calm voice from which she seemed to try to eliminate all possible suspicion of emotionalism, “I believe it right and necessary for there to be some sort of counter-propaganda in Vados.”

  And I suddenly felt that the remark contained a truth as stunning as a blow.

  When a dictator silences the opposition’s means of influencing public opinion, then is the time to get the hell out of his domains. Up till now, presumably, Tiempo had not menaced Vados seriously, nor had any other source of information opposed to his régime. After all, one TV broadcast, reinforced with the “evidence of my own eyes” of the subliminal perception technique, was worth a dozen issues of any newspaper.

  Was this new step due to his losing the weapon of broadcasting? Did he feel that his grip was in danger of slipping, that Tiempo now represented a major threat to his security? I speculated frantically for the hour it took me to establish the real facts behind it.

  Today Judge Romero had a hangover.

  So far as I was able to make out, that was the root of the decision. Physical discomfort has often in the past brought nations, let alone single cities like Ciudad de Vados, to the brink of disaster. It was not so long since one sick administration, composed of bodily unwell men, had nearly blown the whole world to pieces through their continued ill-temper.

  In attacking me and Seixas in their issue of today, the editor and staff of Tiempo had, of course, infringed the injunctions against them which Romero had issued. And Romero, not taking time to consult me or Lucas, acting for me, as to whether I wished this to be regarded as an infringement of malice, had decided to haul the Mendozas in for contempt of court and to confiscate the unsold stocks of the day’s issue.

  And he wasn’t playing. Police had closed the offices and were standing guard at the doors. There wasn’t going to be another issue of Tiempo for a long time to come.

  It took the news an hour or so to spread through the city. When it had spread, the reaction was immediate and thorough. The National Party, deprived of its only organ of propaganda, raised a howl that could probably be heard in Puerto Joaquin. Demonstrators were pouring into the Plaza del Sur long before the customary starting time for the daily speakers’ session, bearing improvised banners and placards attacking Romero specifically and the administration in general. The Citizens’ Party was not slow to follow suit; the pegs on which they hung their protests were, of course, the burning of the broadcasting center and the death of Mayor.

  The police descended in force to try to clear the square, but it was hopeless. I stayed to watch until it wasn’t safe any longer, even from inside the entrance of the Hotel del Principe. The staff closed the doors and stood by under the direction of the anxious-looking manager, ready to barricade the ground floor if they had to. And it looked for a while as though they might have to—the rival mobs first swore at each other, then began to clash: a fist-fight here, knives drawn there, until there was a full-scale riot brewing.

  The police did what they could—perhaps more than I had cynically expected—but they were limited to placing under arrest an individual here and there who didn’t have too many of his own side within easy reach. They were just nibbling the edges of the crowd.

  “They will have to send for troops,” I heard someone say nervously in the hotel lobby. “Why do they not send for the troops?”

  “What could even troops do to quell this?” answered someone else.

  And then nature took a hand.

  All morning a damp wind off the ocean had been piling up gray thunderhead clouds against the inland mountains; now, just as the riot was starting to flare, the storm crashed down on the city. Their grievances dying in the downpour, soaked, cold, and uncomfortable, supporters of both sides dispersed to shelter while the police, sighing with relief, escorted ambulance men into the plaza to pick up the injured.

  But this was merely a respite. The tensions that had so nearly exploded would be fulminating beneath the surface for at least the rest of the day, and if it turned hot again so that tempers frayed …

  And this because an old man had dined too well last night! I cast around in my mind for someone whom I could approach for information as to whether anything was being done to put right this thoughtless and potentially disastrous act. It occurred to me that Luis Arrio ought to know; if the chairman of the Citizens of Vados didn’t, who would?

  I told a waiter to get Arrio on the phone for me, hardly expecting success at the moment, but he was reached for me in minutes—on the strength of my name, it appeared. Getting notorious in Vados had compensations.

  “Señor Arrio,” I said, “I’ve just been watching what might have been a full-scale riot in the Plaza del Sur. Can you tell me what’s being done about this suppression of Tiempo?”

  “Oh, that has gone ahead very satisfactorily,” came back the dismaying answer. “The editor has been jailed until he purges his contempt, and the staff have been forbidden to engage in further journalism until he does so. He’ll be out of the way for some time, probably, and by then the situation should be calmer—”

  “You mean they’re going to let Romero get away with it?”

  A pause, as though wondering if he had heard me correctly. Then: “Why not, señor? It is the law!”

  “The people in the square outside this hotel are paying damned little attention to
the law!” I said harshly. “They think—and I agree—that this is a piece of criminal idiocy!”

  “It is the law, señor,” he said frigidly, and put down his phone.

  I felt as nervous, frustrated, and eager to do something as though the disaster that impended hung over myself personally; whom else could I get in touch with who might understand the danger of the situation?

  The only idea that came to me was Miguel Dominguez. He’d been a friend of Fats Brown’s, of course, and because of that he wouldn’t particularly care for me personally. Not if he believed what he saw on television. On the other hand, he had this hold over Judge Romero—he was trying to get Romero disqualified for his disgraceful handling of that case against Guerrero and his chauffeur. Maybe if he had succeeded or was near success, Romero’s orders of today could be set aside.

  The rain was still pelting down. I drove over to the Courts of Justice, wondering if I would find him. As it happened, he was in court today dealing with some minor case; an usher told me it would be adjourned in a few minutes, and I waited in the passage till then.

  I had expected a colder reception from Dominguez than the one I actually got—not that that was any too warm. But I was spared the need to deny what had been publicized about my part in Fats Brown’s death.

  “I was told by José Dalban what you said to Mayor in his office,” Dominguez informed me. “I am glad to hear that. We were much afraid you cared more for your contract than you did for the rights of the situation.”

  “I don’t,” I said shortly.

  “I accept that. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, as I understand it, Señor Dominguez,” I said, “you were going to try to get an impeachment of Romero, or something of the sort. Is there any hope of hurrying it up? Because closing down Tiempo seems bound to cause disaffection—there was practically a riot in the Plaza del Sur today—and surely, if Romero was removed for incompetence, there’d be a chance of salvaging the situation.”

  He gave me a shrewd, searching stare. “Continue, Señor Hakluyt,” he said in a voice that had suddenly acquired a purr. “I think you are about to speak good sense.”