The Squares of the City Page 24

  “Then who loved money the more—Señor Dalban or Señor Arrio, who took all Dalban’s money away from him although he himself is already very rich?”

  That floored her completely; she sat staring wide-eyed at me as if I were stirring her personal cosmos around and around with a spoon, and she had lost all her bearings. I tried another tack.

  “You remember Señor Brown, who was killed the other day?”

  “Yes, señor. I read about it in the newspaper.”

  “What do you actually know about the matter? What do you think he had done?”

  She looked down and spoke hesitantly. “Well, señor, everyone knew what Estrelita Jaliscos was like, so what he had done—well …”

  I was about to rescue her from her painful embarrassment when the significance of what she had actually said went through my stupidly thick skull. I almost spilled my drink as I shot forward in my chair.

  “Did you say ‘everyone knew’ what she was like?”

  “Why, yes!” She put her hand up to her throat as though my violent reaction had made her dizzy. “What is wrong?”

  “You did say they knew?” I insisted. “Not ‘everyone knows’? You knew what sort of girl Estrelita Jaliscos was before all this happened? You haven’t come to that idea because of what the bishop has said on television, for example?”

  “No, señor! What would we need to be told, in the district where I live? We have seen for many years how she carried on. She was going out alone with young men when she was only fourteen; she drank liquor—aguardiente, even tequila and rum. And it was said she—she even sold her honor.” The girl uttered these last remarks with a faintly defiant air, as though challenging anyone to contradict them.

  “In short,” I said, “Estrelita Jaliscos had a reputation as an accomplished tart.”

  “Señor!” she said reproachfully, and blushed brightly. I turned and signaled the bartender.

  “If you were really as sheltered as you try to make out,” I said, “you wouldn’t even have known what the word means. You’ve given me some very valuable information, and I’m going to buy you a drink on the strength of it. What’ll it be?”

  She giggled nervously. “First I must sing you a song,” she said. “Manuel, there behind the bar, is a friend of my father, and all the time I am here he keeps his eyes on me. I will sing, and then when you give me the drink you will say it is because you like my singing, understand?”

  I gave her a sarcastic look. “I suppose you go out with boys, too,” I said.

  “Señor!”

  “All right, that wasn’t an invitation. Go ahead and sing. How about La Cucaracha?”

  “That is a bad song, señor. It is all about marijuana. Let me sing you a song of my own.”

  It was an ordinary sort of pop, such as one might have heard over the radio any day anywhere in Latin America. I watched her as she sang, and came to the decision that she was about one-tenth as much of a shy violet as she liked to make out. Probably Manuel let his eyes wander occasionally.

  So nothing was what it seemed, I now discovered. Estrelita Jaliscos had been a real tart, going downhill since she was fourteen. And for her sake Fats Brown was being buried tomorrow. If he’d come to trial and evidence of character had been brought, surely the prosecution’s case would have collapsed like cardboard!

  Then why hadn’t he risked trial? He’d said himself on the night I found him getting drunk to “celebrate” that he was sure Estrelita Jaliscos was a tart. He knew the legal setup in Vados; he could have built a case against her for blackmail stronger than any case against himself for murder.

  There was only one reason that fitted his actions. He must have been damned sure that this demand by Estrelita hadn’t simply been hatched in the brain of a teen-age gold-digger. He must have known, or have convinced himself, that he would never be permitted to clear himself.

  Who could be gunning for him that hard? His rival lawyer Lucas?

  No, of course not. Lucas didn’t need that kind of out.

  Or—didn’t he?

  There were a lot of things I needed to know about Lucas before I could answer that question. The best person to tell me them would be his other legal opponent, who had also been a good friend of Fats Brown’s—Miguel Dominguez.

  I wondered if I could get hold of him at this time of the evening. I got up from my chair, and the girl singing broke off with a hurt look.

  “Oh, yes!” I said, remembering. “Manuel!”

  The barman came down toward me, smiling.

  “Bring the young lady her usual, and charge it up to me. I’ll be back.”

  “Her—usual, señor?” He looked at me expressionlessly.

  “Yes, whatever she has on these occasions. A double tequila con sangrita de la viuda, I should imagine.” I grinned at the girl’s outraged expression. “I’m sorry, señorita, but I think your song is terrible. Never mind—have two drinks on me while you’re about it, and you’ll get to be a big girl one day.”

  And why she didn’t spit in my eye I’m still not sure.

  XXIII

  I must have got Dominguez away from his dinner table or something, because he sounded irritable when I called him. He thawed a little when I’d told him why I called, though not completely.

  “Thank you for advising me, Señor Hakluyt,” he said. “You must, of course, understand that since Brown was never brought to trial, the character of this Jaliscos girl is of mainly academic interest. But it would be kind to his widow to do something toward clearing his reputation, if possible.”

  I said, “But it mustn’t be allowed to go at that, señor. Fats Brown was a good man, better than most people I’ve met in Vados. And from the bishop on down, people continue to smear him. Now that Judge Romero’s attack on your good standing has been countered, your position in the legal world here is close to Andres Lucas’s—”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he put in rather frigidly.

  “A lot of people are saying it. Look, Fats was convinced that Estrelita Jaliscos was no more than an amateur tart who wouldn’t have had the brains to pick on him without prompting. If there was someone behind her, then that someone ought to be hauled out of hiding—”

  “Señor,” he said, sounding almost regretful, “I think you are building too much on the word of one young lady. It would be erring as much on our side as those who condemn Señor Brown have erred on theirs if we were to jump to the conclusion that this was a vile scheme to defame him. We simply do not know. I can promise no more than that we who are old friends of Señor Brown will do our best for him and especially for his widow.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted. But I had to make do with what I got.

  They were supposed to be burying Fats the following day. I was unable to find out where. A curtain of silence seemed to have been drawn—presumably disturbances were feared, as there had been on the day of Guerrero’s funeral. I wouldn’t have thought he was so poor that he had to be buried at city expense, and he wasn’t a convicted criminal, but when I called the two non-Catholic burial grounds in the neighborhood of the city, I was told that he was being buried in neither. He certainly hadn’t been a practicing Catholic, but I called the bishop’s secretary on the outside chance, and was told he was not a member of the Church and nothing was known of the arrangements for his funeral.

  So Fats Brown was laid to rest somewhere—in obscurity—and I had to go back to work.

  Things were going smoothly enough. Simple figuring had already chopped a quarter-million dolaros off my original estimates for the market district scheme, and the objections raised by Diaz turned out to be rather sensible ones. I let the costing clerks get ahead with it and went in to see Angers late in the morning.

  He seemed to shrink a little when I entered his office, to draw further into his shell; bit by bit, as though he had at first been afraid I was going to strike him, he came back as we talked.

  “The reason I’ve come in,” I said, lighting a cigarette, “is the need for a de
cision about Sigueiras’s slum.”

  Angers didn’t say anything, just waited for me to go on.

  I tried to sound impressive and didactic. “As I’ve said before, only it hasn’t penetrated, it’s essentially a matter of saying, ‘Get out.’ As things stand, apparently you have to add something like, ‘Get out, we want this for warehouse space.’ Fine; it’d make a good storage place. Trouble is, there’s no genuine need for storage space there. The center of this city was much too well planned for that. It boils down to this: is the city going to throw Sigueiras out on his face, or am I still supposed to fake an official reason?”

  “We still can’t just throw him out,” said Angers wearily. “Harboring a wanted man isn’t a felony that carries automatic loss of citizens’ rights. If it were, the whole thing would be perfectly simple. We still need a redevelopment plan before we can pass legislation depriving him.”

  I was silent for a moment, thinking back to that visit to the slum. I’d forgotten about the data I’d come to gather, the moment I recognized Señora Brown. But up till then I’d been reluctantly forced to the conclusion that there was nothing to choose between evicting the slum-dwellers and leaving them where they were. Left where they were, they had a home—of sorts. Evicted, their problem would become conspicuous enough to compel the government to act. They were plainly not equipped to inhabit modern dwellings—but hell, that question had to be faced every time you cleared tenement blocks or hovels, and they certainly wouldn’t learn any better down in their mucky pit.

  “I think I’m going to compose a long memorandum,” I said. “A memorandum to Diaz.”

  “I could arrange for you to see him personally if you prefer,” Angers suggested. The offer was like a kind of flag of truce.

  “I don’t think I do prefer, thanks. I couldn’t be so persuasive in Spanish as I’d need to be, and an interpreter would waste time. I’ll tell you what I’m going to say, anyway.”

  I looked at the wall map, which was open and hanging down, and took time to compose my thoughts.

  “Roughly, it’s this,” I said at length. “I can fake a development plan that’ll allow the city to throw Sigueiras out with no objections from anyone. Purely incidentally, unless arrangements are made to absorb the slum-dwellers when it goes into effect, it will also trigger off a civil war.”

  “That seems like a strong way of putting it,” said Angers, staring.

  “I’m not kidding. I’m simply saying that the answer isn’t to—to build parking lots under the station or whatever. The best bet is to disperse the slum-dwellers on moral and health grounds, leave the monorail central as it is, and subsidize new villages for these people. Use the available funds, not to patch up the site, but to get them out of the city’s hair. Build ’em new houses, buy ’em livestock, give ’em ground to cultivate and the tools to work it with. Hire a couple of U. N.-trained experts to teach them how to live in the twentieth century. That’ll cure the problem—and it’ll likely stay cured.”

  Angers was slowly shaking his head. “Diaz wouldn’t accept that,” he said. “I agree it’s superficially the best answer, and of course it would be good for the city simply to get these peasants back into the country again. Mark you, I’m not sure they’d agree to go—a taste for sponging is hard to lose once it’s acquired, and even in Sigueiras’s stinking cubbyholes they’ve probably lived an easier and lazier life than they ever did in their villages. But that’s not the objection I’m quite sure Diaz would raise.

  “No, to accept such a plan would be tacitly to acknowledge these people’s inferiority, and he refuses always to face that. He’s of the same stock, and to him it’s like denying his own family, if you follow me. I don’t doubt that he feels inferior himself, compared to Vados, for instance. Vados is a well-educated, widely traveled man with a cultured background, whereas Diaz is an earthy man, a real son of the soil. With him it’s practically an article of religious faith that his people are as good as we are—I mean, the foreign-born citizens and the native-born members of the higher cultural strata. Let’s face it, Hakluyt: you know as well as I do that there’s a great gulf fixed, as the saying goes. I agree completely that what these people most need is educating up to modern standards—but to a man like Diaz, admitting the need for education of this kind is equivalent to admitting inferiority.”

  “I don’t agree. I’ve never met Diaz—I’ve only seen him once, at Vados’s garden party—but I can’t believe that a man who’s got as far ahead from lowly beginnings as he has can’t recognize a hard fact when it’s presented to him.”

  Angers sighed. “Very well—go ahead. I’ll make sure he doesn’t actually dismiss it out of hand, but more I can’t promise.”

  “I’ll let you have the memo this afternoon. While it’s fermenting, I’m going to take a day off. I’m going to go and take a look at these traffic nightmares you told me about in the rest of the country. This bloody town has about driven me insane, with its hypermodern façade and its seething primitive instincts. I want to go somewhere dirty for a change.”

  “You’ll find things very different outside Vados,” said Angers neutrally. “I’ll tell the police you’re going, so no one will worry. When do you expect to get back?”

  “Tomorrow some time. Depends how bored I am.”

  “Enjoy yourself.” The thin smile came and went. “They say a change is as good as a rest, you know.”

  Since my arrival, I hadn’t been farther than to the outskirts of Vados. Now I took the coast road and went to take a look at what I’d been missing.

  Puerto Joaquin: a bustling sprawl of a town, at the mouth of the Rio Rojo, with vast modern dock facilities only a few years old because of the great fire that had destroyed part of the city. And nonetheless, after the clean graciousness of Vados, seeming to belong to the dead past.

  Cuatrovientos: the former capital, the city of riches, the oil town. With the lower labor costs obtaining here and the highly favorable level of taxation, it was a better proposition to work fields down here rather than open up known but so far untapped North American resources.

  And Astoria Negra: farther south than Puerto Joaquin, also on the coast. That was as far as the likeness went. Astoria Negra was farther south, not so favorably located, lacked the facilities to handle such large vessels and had no pipeline from the oilfields. Its life was dominated by the harbor; the harbor was dominated by coastal trading, mostly in guano, and by fishing. There was a small naval station.

  For me, it was like taking three steps out of modern times into the nineteenth century to come to Astoria Negra. It was almost impossible to accept how bad things were here. The average standard of living might have compared with that in the shantytowns around Vados; it was the kind of town where you scratch a house and find a slum. Not all of it was like that, of course—there were fine recent apartment blocks and a few magnificent old houses in time-blessed gardens—but most of it was like an Italian neo-realist film made soon after World War II: crumbling walls, irregular streets, puddles of water splashing underfoot.

  The echoes of the conflict in the capital had hardly spread this far. It seemed that the main highway ran directly from Vados to the outer world, and its line was never touched by the local citizens. I talked with people—an old Indian, a young man with a chip on his shoulder, a peasant who carved traditional wooden figurines for the occasional tourists who came by sea and stopped over to exclaim at the quaintness of Astoria Negra before going on—in most cases thankfully—to the air-conditioning of Vados. Everyone I spoke to had just two subjects of conversation: lack of money and the local chess championships currently in progress. The woodcarver was a chess fanatic; he had in his store a dozen sets he had carved himself, all different, yet all strangely alike, the pieces having the squat, blocky appearance of Aztec idols.

  No one seemed to be concerned about the future of the city, yet if there was a place crying out for some of those four million dolaros, this was it. The wrangling in Vados, to those people, was s
omething that concerned the government, an amorphous body of ill-defined individuals who usually did the wrong thing and couldn’t be got at to put matters right again—hence had been given up as of no concern to the man in the street of Astoria Negra.

  Wherever I looked, I found new ways of spending money. I had hardly to give a glance along a street before my mind was crowded with plans for redevelopment and improvement. Suppose Vados had rebuilt this town instead of founding his new one—what then? Would it have repaid the effort? Of course not. This town was past help; ideally, it should now be left to die a natural death, stripped to its harbor facilities and to a widely spread out, clean new city a quarter the size extending much farther inland.

  Only that would cost around a hundred million dolaros before you began to worry about demolition costs, and it would have to wait till next century, or the century after.

  I went back to the woodcarver’s store and bought one of his chess sets.

  XXIV

  I drove back to Vados in the evening, after about twenty-eight hours’ absence. And in that time things had been happening.

  Of course, the city hadn’t been truly quiet for weeks, but it had at least displayed the sullen tranquillity of a dormant volcano; it did no more than burst a bubble of searing hot gas on the surface of its lava pool occasionally.

  Now, though …

  There were police beacons on the highway two miles out of the city; at the third of them the traffic was cut to single line and armed police officers stood guard. Each car in turn was halted, and some were turned back.

  When it came to my turn, I demanded to know what was going on. The officer inspecting my papers didn’t answer directly; he merely said in a neutral tone, “It might be dangerous for you to go about the city unescorted, Señor Hakluyt. You must go directly to your hotel and telephone to police headquarters that you have arrived safely. We will send to search for you if you are not there within”—he glanced at his watch—“a half hour.”