The Squares of the City Read online

  He extended his hand, realizing only at the last moment that he was still holding the crucifix. As he made to put it away, he saw my eyes on it and mutely displayed it to me on his open palm.

  “You are a Catholic?” he inquired.

  I shook my head.

  He closed his hand around the crucifix. “In some ways I envy you. It is often hard to be both a good Christian and a good statesman.”

  “I’d have said it was impossible,” I countered. “A state is concerned with people’s condition here and now; almost all religions are concerned with their state hereafter. And the two pretty often contradict each other.”

  “Still, there is the ideal toward which we work.” He sighed heavily. “A Christian government for a Christian community—and almost all my people are believers. … Señor, you must come and dine with me at Presidential House sometime soon. It has become rare for me to meet foreigners who have no personal interest in the way I run my country. I meet bankers negotiating loans, oilmen seeking favorable tariffs, importers and exporters desirous of exploiting our markets—and who else? Sometimes I even envy the man who might, had things been different, have ruled in my place. … But I waste your time in empty talk, señor. Hasta la vista!”

  He pocketed the crucifix, shook my hand, and returned to his study of the relief map of the city as I left the room.

  XXV

  I had a dim recollection that when I came to Vados five weeks ago I’d felt excited and proud of having been selected to do this job.

  Well, the excitement and the pride were finished. Now I was reduced to doing a scrappy job, collecting my pay, and getting the hell out. The only part of that I wouldn’t regret would be getting the hell out.

  It took me about four and a half hours to work out a scheme for the monorail central that was exactly what Vados wanted: two new passenger access ways, extra storage room, and a parking lot that might be half full on saints’ days and holidays. It looked all right superficially, of course; I’ve worked the basic rhythms so far into my system that I don’t think I could any longer design a bad-looking layout. But there wasn’t any need for any of this. There was no organic unity about it. It was like—well, creating a demand artificially by clever advertising and then complimenting oneself on having filled a long-felt want. Compared with the scheme I’d worked out for the market district—which was real development, worthy, I liked to think, of the painstaking original planning of the whole city—this was patchwork.

  I turned it in for computing at the end of the afternoon. It would cost more than it was worth—but then, anything of this kind was essentially worth nothing. The hell with it. I went back to the hotel and had dinner.

  Vados’s directive had amounted to an ultimatum. What else was I to do except get this thing over quickly?

  Not long after I entered the dining room at the hotel, Maria Posador also came in. I hadn’t seen her for some days, and at the back of my mind I’d been wondering where she might have got to. Now she showed up with someone I failed to recognize at first, because I’d never before seen him in plain clothes. It was el Jefe O’Rourke, looking incredibly wrong as a foil to Señora Posador’s effortless elegance.

  For someone who supposedly enjoyed a merely tolerated status in Ciudad de Vados, a bitter enemy of the president, who was alleged to be permitted to remain in the country only so that an eye could be kept on her subversive activities, Maria Posador had a respectably long list of influential friends. This particular mismatch just about capped all the others. I watched covertly while I was eating and saw that O’Rourke ate with gusto and was talking little, while Maria Posador ate rather little and seemed to be saying a lot. Occasionally O’Rourke rumbled into laughter, while his companion looked on with a tolerant smile. Their whole manner was that of old and close friends.

  I was really getting curious when I finished my meal.

  They came into the lounge for coffee and a game of chess after dinner, and, much to my relief, Maria Posador invited me to join them. O’Rourke commented on the fact by glancing at her, at me, and then at her again, but said nothing. In fact, his contribution to the conversation at first consisted of grunts before making his own moves and after Maria Posador had made hers.

  I would never have pictured O’Rourke as a chess-player in any other country in the world, except perhaps the Soviet Union. In the States or back home I’d have said he probably played poker for relaxation. Nonetheless he played competently, with a style that fitted his personality: direct, aggressive, concentrating on the officers and not worrying much about pawn development except to ensure that his pawns got in his opponent’s way rather than his own. This two-fisted technique had faults; he would probably have made mincemeat out of me, but Maria Posador was on playing terms with grand master Pablo Garcia, and pretty soon the game was going all her way.

  Trying to stir up conversation, I said, “This game is so popular here I’m surprised I haven’t seen any fights over it.”

  O’Rourke raised his head and gave me a blunt look. “In our country, señor, we know this is the game which is always honest. We save our bad temper for other things which are not so.”

  Señora Posador cut in quickly, “But that is not always true. You will hear sometimes of fights, if not about the game itself, then about the bets that have been made on the result of a match.”

  O’Rourke moved a pawn and sat back with a satisfied noise. “Betting is for fools. We have more fools than we need, anyway.”

  Maria Posador took the pawn, and O’Rourke scratched his chin thoughtfully. Before making his own countermove, he glanced at me. “The señor himself plays chess?”

  “If you can call it playing. Ask Señora Posador—she beat me easily.”

  “Señor Hakluyt has some understanding of the game,” said Señora Posador, her eyes on the board, “but lacks practice in the principles of combination.”

  “He should then use his eyes and look about him,” O’Rourke retorted, and decided to castle queen side, about four moves later than he should have done. “Except that in actuality few people obey rules, there is much to be learned from what can be seen in the world.”

  I had a fleeting impression that Maria Posador would have preferred the conversation to turn into other channels. I snapped quickly, “In what way, Señor O’Rourke?”

  “Check,” said Señora Posador, taking another of O’Rourke’s pawns. “I think what Tomas means, Señor Hakluyt, is the same as I was saying to you the other day. One must not think from move to move, in real life as in chess; one must remember the overall picture.”

  She gave me a sweet and dazzling smile, and—I thought, but couldn’t be sure—trod hard on O’Rourke’s toe under the table. O’Rourke caught on; I didn’t get anything further out of him, and eventually I gave up trying and went to the bar.

  It was almost empty this evening. The now useless television set was gone from its regular place, and where it had stood was a shabby old radio, obviously dug out of storage. It was giving out with a pep talk when I arrived; I recognized the voice of Professor Cortés, who had assumed temporary direction of the emergency broadcasting service. I listened for a little while, but there was no real meat in the words. Aside from another broadside at Miguel Dominguez—Cortés was still not convinced, apparently, of the charges he had made about Caldwell and the health department—it was a woolly reiteration of trust in God and the President to see the citizens through their time of tribulation.

  Mayor had certainly been a loss to the regime—perhaps far more of a loss than the television center itself. As a publicity man, Cortés was a good dishwasher.

  Shutting my ears, I said to Manuel, who was polishing glasses behind the bar, “Señora Posador spends a lot of time in this place, doesn’t she?”

  Manuel’s dark eyes flitted across my face. “She lived in this hotel when she first returned to Aguazul after her time of exile, señor,” he said. “She had grown fond of it, I am told.”

  “Ah-hah. For someon
e who’s supposed to be in official disgrace, she seems to have a lot of important friends, doesn’t she?”

  “Many of them were friends of her husband, señor.”

  “Of course. Does that include el Jefe?”

  “I believe so, señor. El Jefe is her guest to dinner here this evening—you have perhaps seen?”

  “Yes, I saw. You’re a fountain of information, Manuel—maybe you can tell me whether they’ve made any progress toward finding out who burned down the television center. I was just wondering when I saw this old radio you’ve put up on that shelf.”

  His eyes switched briefly to the radio and back to the glass he was rubbing. “It is said not, señor, and—and some people begin to be disquieted. For many reasons. Whoever took away our television has made himself many enemies. Because, you understand, the chess championships have now commenced, and it has been customary for them to be shown on the television for many years. Now there is no television, and it is much more difficult to understand what is being done from a spoken description on a radio.”

  I sipped my drink. “So presumably there are a lot of people who want to know why the police haven’t already presented the culprit’s head on a plate.”

  “Exactly, señor.” Manuel sighed. “I am myself one of the people who desire that, señor. This year my son is playing in the junior division, and I wished much to see him on the television. But—” and he shrugged expressively before putting the glass, sparkling, on its shelf and taking another.

  I thought over what I had just heard. So O’Rourke was in Dutch with the public, was he? I wondered why he hadn’t produced some kind of scapegoat to distract public attention. Maybe he would. Maybe he and Señora Posador were hatching something this evening. I went back to the lounge to see if they were still there, but they had gone.

  Obviously, they had been hatching something. Next morning’s Liberdad stated that the police had descended on the city health department, acting on instructions from someone unspecified, but assumed to be Diaz—assumed by the paper, that is—and had questioned Caldwell extensively about the situation in the shantytowns. O’Rourke was quoted as saying that Caldwell had no right to make wild statements about the incidence of crime among the squatters; the police hadn’t found the lawlessness Caldwell described, and it was an unjustified reflection on their devotion to duty to talk of it.

  In other words, “Mind your own business!”

  That seemed like good advice to me, too. Such as my business was at the moment. Vados accepted the plan I’d given him for the monorail central—I’d been pretty certain he would—and gave orders for it to be published at once. I got the impression that he had been pretty desperate for some favorable publicity, because naturally, since he and his city were so tied together in the public’s mind, the recent disturbances had been extremely bad for his status.

  I could have done without the effusive comments on my skill and ingenuity which accompanied the publication of the plan; if that got to the eyes of any of my potential future employers, it would likely do considerable harm to my status, too.

  What the hell!

  I went over to see Seixas in the treasury department about the estimates for the project, and he greeted me with a smile that threatened to cut his head in two.

  “Señor Hakluyt!” he exclaimed. “Come in! Siddown! Have a drink! Have a cigar!”

  It was a tan suit, with palm-trees on the tie, today, and the cigar I got was bigger than usual. Seixas was plainly in a tremendously good mood.

  “Yeah!” he said, sitting back. “An’ why not? You done me a lot of good, Hakluyt! You know people been throwing mud at me ’cause I hold stock in some construction firms—you saw about that in Tiempo prob’ly.”

  I indicated that I had.

  “Well, I thought I was shut of that crap when Felipe Mendoza got carved up and his brother got jailed for contempt. Not a bit—here comes this lawyer Dominguez an’ starts all over. Well, this plan you turned out, no one can say my company gets a cut, ’cause they don’t do this kinda work. They do big stuff—divided highways, overpasses, that kinda thing. So I call up Dominguez, an’ I say how about it, unless he can prove I get a cut of this one he’d better shut his trap permanently. And I get this back. How’s that for eating dirt?”

  He flipped open the drawer of his desk and hauled out a folded letter for me to read. It was on a neatly printed letterhead bearing the title of Dominguez’s law office, and said:

  Señor Dominguez wishes to inform Señor Seixas that he has taken note of the message received by telephone last evening, and concedes without question the justice of the point made therein. He further assures Señor Seixas that he has not associated himself and will not associate himself with any allegations to the contrary.

  “How’s that, hey?” said Seixas, and poured himself another shot of his habitual nauseating cocktail.

  It didn’t mean much to me; it struck me that it was a most lawyerlike sidestepping of the point, seeming to say a lot, actually saying almost nothing. Still, Seixas was delighted with it, and I made complimentary noises.

  “That’ll show the bastard I mean business!” said Seixas, and shoved the letter back in his drawer.

  With a bit of difficulty I got him down to business and managed to get provisional approval for the estimates I had; I didn’t really much care what happened to such a makeshift plan, and Seixas didn’t, either—maybe because his construction firm genuinely wasn’t getting a slice of this one. So the matter was disposed of quickly, and that was that.

  I ran into Dominguez lunching in a restaurant near the law courts the following day. He was by himself, and I saw that he was frowning over the front-page spread in Liberdad that had been given to my plan for the monorail central.

  All the other tables were at least partly occupied; I had the headwaiter show me to Dominguez’s. He looked up and nodded coldly to me, but didn’t speak before going back to his perusal of the newspaper.

  I said after a frigid interval, “You’re perfectly right, Señor Dominguez. It’s a mess, isn’t it?”

  He thrust the paper aside and scowled at me. “Then what have you permitted it for, Señor Hakluyt?” he countered.

  “I’m hired,” I said. “Vados gave me an ultimatum: do it his way, and disregard my personal opinions. So I’ve done it. I did my best to prevent it—I told Vados, I told Diaz, I told Angers, I told everyone I could reach, that if you just throw the squatters out, you’re creating a fund of ill-will that may possibly end in revolution. I sent a memorandum to Diaz about it, and I’m told the cabinet discussed it, and in the end Vados vetoed it. What the hell am I to do?”

  He recognized the genuine bitterness in my tone and appeared to thaw a little. “That is interesting, señor. I had not heard. Have you perhaps heard that you have a powerful ally in your opinion?”

  “The most powerful ally I seem to have is Sigueiras,” I said acidly. “Wherever he may be—he’s still in hiding, I suppose.”

  “Ah—yes, in a sense. He could probably be found today, if it was necessary.” Dominguez spoke indifferently. “But perhaps you have wondered why no steps have been taken to evict the squatters under the monorail central. After all, it seems they all conspired to conceal Señor Brown, a wanted man.”

  “I suppose something ought to have been done by now,” I agreed.

  “Yet it has not. And why not? Because it would be necessary to use troops for the eviction, and our commander in chief General Molinas has declared that he could not trust his men to do the work. Many of them, after all, are peasants like the squatters, who had no better chance in life than to enter our little toy army. Their officers are, most of them, upper-class dilettanti, who would sooner associate with criminals than with common soldiers. Moreover, there is an element of racial prejudice involved; as you are perhaps aware there exists in some parts of Latin America a kind of social hierarchy based on percentage of European blood, and in our army this is quite marked. It is an exceptional man who despit
e Negro or Indian ancestry achieves advancement.”

  “This is most interesting,” I said thoughtfully. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “Do not thank me for anything, Señor Hakluyt. I wish only one thing: that we had met under happier circumstances. For as the situation is, I and those in Ciudad de Vados who think as I do are compelled to regard you as a menace, because you reinforce the capacity of our opponents to implement their highly dangerous plans. This is an honest statement, señor; I hope you will take advice, not offense, from it.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  He folded his newspaper so that the article about my plan was concealed, and let it fall to the floor. “So!” he said. “Let us talk of other things.”

  “I’d rather ask you a further question on the same subject, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I was talking with Seixas yesterday.”

  Dominguez frowned. “I have no doubt what you are going to say. Seixas is a cunning man, but little else than cunning.”

  “I was wondering why you—uh—backed down in your attack on him. I can’t make out if he really is an open scandal or simply a target for random criticism.”

  “Oh, he is notorious. But we have more important matters to deal with. Flagrant offenders will sooner or later hang themselves. We must expose the subtler forms of corruption.”

  After that we did talk of other things, desultorily, until it was time for me to leave. I had been asked to call on Caldwell in the health department, reason unspecified.

  I found him in a pretty bad way. He looked extremely tired, and his stutter was the worst I had heard it since his gruelling by Fats Brown during the Sigueiras case. Distractedly, he waved me to a chair and offered me a cigarette. He was going to take another himself when I pointed out that he already had one burning in an ashtray on the desk.

  He gave a nervous laugh. “I’m s-sorry,” he said with an effort. “I haven’t f-felt so good s-since that b-bastard O’Rourke went for me—d-did you read about that?”