The Squares of the City Page 27

  I nodded.

  “S-scandalous!” said Caldwell with vigor. “I’m c-certain O’Rourke has some k-kind of interest in hiding the t-truth. If it weren’t for the sh-shantytowns, m-maybe he’d be out of a job.”

  “This sounds like the old one about doctors having a vested interest in disease,” I said when I’d recovered from my surprise.

  “Oh, you d-don’t understand!” said Caldwell irritably. “I mean s-someone must be p-paying him what-you-call-it. P-p—”

  “Protection money?” I said incredulously. “But what for?”

  “Th-that’s right! What f-for? What for? T-to k-keep quiet about what g-goes on in th-these p-places, naturally.” Caldwell thrust his hands through his already untidy hair and gave me a defiant look through his glasses.

  “Look,” I said, “you’ve obviously been overstraining yourself. I’ve been to the shantytowns, I’ve been through this place under the station, and I haven’t seen anything half as bad as the things they were putting over on television, for instance.”

  “Ah, but you went there in the daytime, didn’t you?” exclaimed Caldwell, pouring the words out in a rush without a hesitation. “I t-told the newspaperman about th-that when I s-spoke to him this morning. I t-told him what the t-truth must be.”

  “You mean you’ve told the papers—I mean Liberdad—that O’Rourke is hiding something?”

  “I t-told the t-truth,” said Caldwell with dignity. “And now I’m going to p-prove it. You’re an outsider, Hakluyt, s-so you’re an independent witness. I want you to c-come along t-tonight and s-see for yourself.”

  I almost said, “You must be out of your mind!” And then I didn’t. Because it occurred to me, watching Caldwell’s wild expression, that that was very probably true.

  I changed the remark to, “Well, what do you think does go on there?”

  “All k-kinds of vice, Hakluyt! I’ve s-seen it. And if you c-come with me tonight, I’ll sh-show you.”

  I frowned and didn’t reply for a moment. It was logical, of course, that there would be at least a few prostitutes operating out of the shantytowns—poverty dictated it. But to accuse el Jefe himself of graft, and to accuse—most likely with justice—a few local police officers of turning a blind eye, were two totally different things.

  “You’ll come with me?” he insisted hotly. I yielded with a sigh, and he rose and shook my hand warmly.

  “You’ll s-see!” he said.

  I went back, frowning, to the traffic department after arranging to see Caldwell at one of the shantytowns at eight p.m., and called in on Angers to consult him about Caldwell’s condition.

  He greeted me with comparative warmth, for him. “We’re going all-out on this plan of yours,” he said. “Well done!”

  I scowled; this enthusiasm for what I could only regard as rubbish was getting me down. “How does Diaz feel about it?” I asked.

  “Well, of course, he hasn’t got a leg to stand on. One almost has to feel sorry for him. I don’t mind saying it’s put me in a pretty sticky position, because of course while Diaz is nominally my chief, Vados is mayor of the city, and in this case it’s what he says that counts. However, I must say the argument has been a very interesting one—it’s a pity you’re not a citizen, because there’s an important principle at stake.”

  “It strikes me a still more important principle would have been to make the whole damned city self-governing, instead of crossing it up with the national government.”

  Angers gave his barking laugh. “They have a genius for complex things like this in Latin America, Hakluyt. You ought to try Brazil for real confusion.”

  “I’ve had enough confusion to last me a lifetime. Angers, what do you make of Caldwell’s behavior lately?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, he asked me to go and see him, and I’ve just been over there. He’s got some crazy notion in his head that O’Rourke is being paid to conceal some kind of vice-racket—at least, as far as I can make sense of what he says. I’m supposed to be going on a sort of voyeur’s tour with him this evening. Is there any foundation for this, do you suppose? Or is he just suffering from overstrain?”

  “Good Lord!” said Angers, blinking. “Well! O’Rourke isn’t exactly a paragon of efficiency—that’s well-known. But I always thought he was a fairly honest man—if he weren’t, I don’t suppose Vados would tolerate him. Who’s supposed to be paying him—anyone in particular, or just individuals?”

  “Search me. Frankly, I think the guy’s about to blow his top. Who’s his chief—Ruiz? Someone ought to keep an eye on him. I mean, there’s enough mud being thrown at O’Rourke already, and some of it probably ought to stick, but this is irresponsible nonsense so far as I can see.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Caldwell’s young and hard-working; he’s always been the nervous type, but then one can understand that, with that stutter he suffers from. I’d be inclined to think there was something to what he says. But on the other hand it has all been denied by O’Rourke, hasn’t it?”

  He made a note on his scratch pad. “I’ll say something to Ruiz, if you like. Maybe he needs a rest.”

  And yet, when I met him that evening at the appointed time and place, he seemed much calmer and more in control of himself. He wasn’t alone; there were two policemen and a photographer with him. I wondered whether O’Rourke knew about the policemen—I didn’t think he would approve of them helping Caldwell to gather evidence against him.

  It was cloudy tonight, but warm, and the shantytown was like a set for an experimental film as we moved into it, Caldwell authoritatively taking the lead. An air of sullen hostility met us, brooding heavy over the beaten, unweather-proofed matchboard hovels, decorated if at all with torn oil-company posters and pinup calendars from the year before last. If we had not been a formidable group, we would probably have had things thrown at us. Rotten eggs, perhaps. Or knives.

  Caldwell was carrying a flashlight; as we passed a patch of ground scratched with a hoe into some kind of cultivable condition, he stabbed the beam down at the plants growing there. He said, “Look!”

  I looked; I saw only a plant growing.

  “Th-that’s hemp,” said Caldwell. “You g-get marijuana from th-that.” His voice was tense and triumphant. “S-see, Hakluyt?”

  I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I wasn’t surprised at anything Caldwell showed me during our tour. We walked in on families sleeping five to a hut, and Caldwell invited me to express disgust, which I duly did. But this was no surprise; it was inevitable, given the conditions.

  Before another hut we halted, and Caldwell turned to me, indicating silence. “A s-streetwalker lives here,” he hissed in confidential tones. “Th-there are d-dozens of them!”

  “There are always dozens of them!” I said irritably. So far the biggest surprise he’d sprung on me was his comparatively reasonable manner this evening, his air of confidence.

  He walked up and flung back the door of the hut. The beam of his flashlight speared around the empty interior. “Off after more customers,” he said in a low tone. “See here, Hakluyt—in this box.”

  His voice shook a little. I shrugged and went to see what he had found. It proved to be a crude wooden chest containing a leather whip and some boxes of contraceptives.

  His eyes searched my face for a reaction. Slowly his confidence began to evaporate.

  “Look, Caldwell,” I said as kindly as I could, “you’ll always get this sort of thing where there’s poverty in a big city. You can’t legislate it out of existence. It’s been tried, over and over again. I’m afraid you haven’t proved anything that wasn’t self-evident.”

  He drew himself up and kicked the wooden box aside. “It was a mistake for so many people to come,” he snapped, his stutter vanishing for the moment as it seemed to when he shot out a single phrase he had been turning over in his mind beforehand. “S-sorry, Hakluyt,” he added after a moment. “I ought really t-to sh-show you what g-goes on down in S-Sigueiras’s p-p
lace, but it’s d-dangerous to g-go th-there.”

  We went back in silence to the place where our cars were parked. Caldwell was muttering something under his breath when we stopped, and I asked for a repeat.

  “I said Mendoza knew,” he declared. “He wrote about it in one of his b-books. He d-described exactly the s-sort of th-thing I s-saw. Someone is c-covering it up now. Who? Why? We’ve g-got to find out, Hakluyt!”

  “For the last time,” I said, taking a deep breath, “how much of this alleged vice have you seen for yourself, and how much did you just get out of some dirty story by Felipe Mendoza?”

  With dignity, he drew himself up. “I t-tell you I’ve s-seen for myself!” he forced out between his teeth.

  “All right,” I said, losing patience. “I haven’t. And if nothing worse goes on than what you’ve demonstrated this evening, then all I can say is that this is one of the most moral places I’ve ever set eyes on. Good night!”

  I walked away to my car, fuming, feeling his hurt stare following me.

  Baseless or not, Caldwell found a willing audience for his accusations in other people than me.

  Bishop Cruz was one of the first to join the fray. Addressing a class of graduates from the theological faculty at the university, he denounced Sigueiras as close kin to a child of Satan, and his slum as a short cut to hell.

  He probably wasn’t looking for the response he got.

  Somewhat puzzled—so I gathered—but prepared to accept the evidence of a bishop as superior to that of their own senses, the simple-minded inhabitants of the slum grew terribly worried about the state of sin they must be living in. Accordingly, a fair proportion of them bundled up their belongings and walked out, together with their livestock, to set up a brand new shantytown on the Puerto Joaquin road.

  It took forty-eight hours for the police and the National Guard to get them back where they came from, and by that time there were a lot of stories going around about police brutality. Some people accused O’Rourke directly of being involved, but he ignored the accusations and went on hammering at Caldwell. It was said, also, that General Molinas had flatly refused to send in regular army troops against the new squatters, and that the cabinet was fighting regular pitched battles at its meetings.

  The second influential voice to take up Caldwell’s accusations was that of Dr. Ruiz, his chief in the health department. Ruiz had been silent for a long time on this matter—cowed, perhaps, by the risk of exposing himself to further charges about the death of the first Señora Vados, or possibly feeling that Sigueiras was now done for in any case.

  He wasn’t, by any means, as it turned out. After Dominguez’s revelations regarding Lucas and Estrelita Jaliscos, no further talk had been heard from official quarters about his harboring a wanted murderer, and bit by bit the feeling excited by the Jaliscos girl’s death had died down. Apparently this wasn’t to Ruiz’s taste; now he jumped back in the argument with both feet, reiterating the kind of statement he had made on the witness stand when facing examination by Fats Brown.

  This time he piled it on so thick it was a wonder everyone living in Sigueiras’s slum hadn’t long ago suffocated in the foul air alleged to be there. With the three of them—Caldwell, Ruiz, and the bishop—on the job, clearing out that slum was going to have massive support.

  One person whose support was less than lukewarm was I.

  I made this perfectly clear to a correspondent from Roads and Streets, who’d flown down specially from New York to do a story on the redevelopment project. I took him aside into a bar and stood him a succession of whiskeys while I explained the whole sad situation.

  When I was through, he looked at me sympathetically and said in a voice brimming over with emotion and straight rye, “Boy, you’re in a spot, ain’t you?”

  After which he flew back to New York, intending to cancel the proposed story.

  I was half-expecting Sigueiras to retaliate when Ruiz began to go for him; after all, he must know the stories that were current about Ruiz’s “successful treatment” of Vados’s first wife. Someone presumably advised him against it—which was sensible, because with Dominguez on his side and General Molinas refusing his troops for the eviction he was assured of a respite at least. All he did, in fact, was to invite half a dozen local doctors to go down into his slum and see whether there was in fact a reservoir of disease there.

  “If there are sick people,” he said spiritedly, “why don’t people outside catch their diseases from them?”

  The doctors found exactly what I’d seen—rickets, vitamin deficiency diseases, and a lot of skin complaints caused by the squalid conditions. But it wasn’t their findings that took the heat off Sigueiras in the end; it was a stern directive from Vados himself. Apparently one of the current items of publicity about Ciudad de Vados was that it had the lowest death rate of any city of its size in Latin America, and they were worried in case Ruiz’s assertions might affect the tourist trade.

  Not that the recent rioting had helped any, of course.

  Another directive came down about the same time. The university year had ended, and accordingly Professor Cortés was confirmed as acting Minister of Information and Communications. Having sampled his work while he was filling in, I wondered how Vados liked making do with Cortés instead of Alejandro Mayor; however, presumably he was the best available, and since there was no sign of Tiempo returning to life, after all, the government’s propaganda now had no competition.

  Well, no effective competition. There were a series of inflammatory news sheets that had sprung up, which were constantly trespassing over the edge of the libel laws and being closed down in consequence—only to start up again the next day or the day after under another name. Most people were resigned to Tiempo’s fate and regarded the news sheets as the best stopgap they could expect.

  But there were some others who were getting restive. They pointed out that even though Romero had been suspended from the judicial bench and looked likely to be declared incompetent, no action had been taken to reverse his committal of Cristoforo Mendoza for contempt or to release the impounded equipment belonging to his paper.

  And that was not the only matter in which there had been a peculiar delay. As Manuel, the barman, had told me, at this crucial time of the chess championships television was sorely missed, and people were demanding that the arsonists be found forthwith.

  It went without saying, of course, that the National Party view was expressed by every one of the succession of news sheets, and these two were the matters at which they hammered again and again: the banning of Tiempo, for obvious reasons, and the failure of O’Rourke to catch the arsonists, to stave off accusations that National Party supporters had been responsible.

  It was something of a surprise to me to find out how these news sheets caught on. Surreptitiously printed and distributed, one day’s issue sometimes remained in circulation for nearly a week, being passed from hand to hand, and not only among people who had formerly read Tiempo, but also among people who merely wanted the television service back.

  I had my own ideas as to who was responsible for keeping these news sheets going, of course. I’d seen no more of Maria Posador since the evening she dined with O’Rourke at the hotel, and nothing before that for some days. And she was the one who believed that an opposition press in Ciudad de Vados had to be maintained at all costs.

  Maybe Vados had been premature to assume that Maria Posador was safer in Aguazul than out of it.

  Manuel kept a supply of these miscellaneous news sheets under the bar for interested customers. I was going through one that I’d missed—I think it was calling itself Verdad in its current incarnation—when I found an interesting item which Cortés hadn’t seen fit to divulge on the radio or in Liberdad. I had no reason to doubt it, though. It was stated that el Jefe O’Rourke agreed with General Molinas on the question of clearing away the slums of Vados. It would be asking for worse trouble than they had already. And the much-vaunted plan of mine for redevel
oping the ground below the monorail central was nothing more than a governmental pretext to kick out Sigueiras.

  Well, that was perfectly true, of course. What shook me rigid was that O’Rourke had supposedly gone on, “And if they try to put this into effect, then we’ll throw Hakluyt out of the country and his plans after him.”

  XXVI

  There is a moment in the demolition of a tower, an old-fashioned factory chimney, or a high wall, when the falling structure—weighing perhaps a hundred tons—seems to float, leaning against the air.

  It lasts perhaps a small fraction of a second, but feels much longer. And in that narrow space of time the whole visible world seems to hesitate, waiting for the inevitable crash.

  I was waiting for a crash now. What was worse, I appeared to be directly in the path of what was falling.

  I folded the news sheet so that O’Rourke’s alleged statement was uppermost, and signaled along the bar to Manuel. He was serving another customer; when he was through, he came down to stand opposite me, his eyes a little wary.

  “Have you seen this, Manuel?” I asked him.

  He sighed. “Yes, señor. I thought you would have seen it also before now.”

  “No, I hadn’t. … What do you make of it, Manuel? What do you think yourself about my job here?”

  At first, I could see, he was not going to reply. I said, hearing my voice harsh and dry, “Say what you think, Manuel. Go ahead, for God’s sake.”

  “I have no views of my own, Señor Hakluyt,” he said reluctantly. “I have a good job. I have profited much by the making of this city. Before, I was in a little hotel in Puerto Joaquin; now here I am, as you see me. Yet it seems to me that there are also people who have suffered because of the coming of the city, and it is easy to understand why they feel differently.”

  “Why should el Jefe be one of those who feel differently?”