The Squares of the City Read online

  But, for this moment, Maria Posador was cleverer. She had obviously reached the same conclusion that I had; she had decided what to do about it. She stood up. That was all. But the glare of the flashbulb shone on her back, and I saw that her shadow would have masked Sam Francis completely. Guerrero’s hastily adopted smile vanished like frost in sunlight.

  “I think perhaps we should not keep Señor Guerrero any longer, Sam,” she said quietly, but loudly enough for it to be emphatic. “He doubtless has—pressing business.”

  Her eyes brushed over Guerrero’s companion just long enough for her meaning to be unmistakable, and then the two of them pushed away through the bystanders. Guerrero watched them go, eyes narrowed; then he gave me a long, hard stare and finally yielded to the insistence of his companion and entered the bar.

  The girl with the guitar shook back her hair and began to sing an old lullaby, very softly; I finished my drink and went into the hotel.

  Who the hell was this Posador woman, anyway?

  I bypassed the crowded bar, which was slowly beginning to lose its customers as curtaintime at the opera house drew near, and was going through the foyer to collect my key at the registration desk when one of the bellhops trotted toward me.

  “Señor Hakluyt!” he said. “Una señora preguntó por Vd.”

  I reflected that I seemed to be pretty much in demand. “Donde está?” I inquired, hoping to hear she had gone home.

  She hadn’t; she was waiting for me in the lounge—a slim middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair and green-framed spectacles, idly stirring a long, cool-looking drink with a gold pencil. A young man with a shaven head and a broken nose lounged in the chair next to her, drawing shapeless patterns on a notepad.

  “Señor Hakluyt,” the bellhop told the woman, and left me to it.

  She hastily took the pencil out of her glass and gave me a beaming smile, extending her hand. “Señor Hakluyt!” she purred. “I’m so glad we caught you. Do sit down. This is my assistant, Señor Rioco. My name is Isabela Cortés, and I’m from the state broadcasting commission.”

  I sat down; Rioco shut his notebook with a snap and put away his pencil. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long for me,” I said.

  She waved a carefully manicured hand on which an emerald ring glistened gigantically. “We have been here no more than ten minutes, truly,” she declared. “In any case, that is of no importance whatever, since we have found you. It is a special request we have to make of you.”

  I looked expectant and cooperative.

  “I am the director of—of what you might in English call current affairs broadcasts on both our radio and television networks,” Señora Cortés expounded. “Each day on the television we produce a program about life in Vados and the interesting people who come here, and we have also the news, of course. Señor Rioco has been preparing for tonight a program about the new developments that are planned for the city. We are desolated that we approach you on such short notice, but—”

  She’ glanced expectantly at her companion, who jerked his jacket higher up around his body and leaned forward. When he spoke, he sounded as though he’d learned his English somewhere around Louisiana and then crossed it with Hollywood.

  “Ought to have thought of it earlier,” he said in this half-lazy, half-tough accent. “It was Angers in the traffic department who put us on to you—we canned an interview with him this morning, and he said you were the only guy who knew what was in your mind, so we been trying to track you down. We reckoned we’d best try to catch you when you got in here an’ run you straight out to the studio.” He checked his watch. “Program goes out in—uh—hour an’ a quarter, at twenty-oh-five. Mind comin’ along to say a few words?”

  “We do hope you’ll agree,” said Señora Cortés sweetly.

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. “Just give me time to clean up and change clothes, and I’ll be right with you.”

  “That’s great!” said Rioco, and sat back in his chair, composing himself visibly for the short wait.

  As I ran my razor over my chin in the hotel bedroom, I reflected there were certain other things I didn’t see, as well as why not. Such as why I was considered important enough for the director of current affairs broadcasting and the producer of the program both to come calling; why, if Angers had suggested enlisting my cooperation for the program, he’d left it as late as today to bring the matter up—presumably it hadn’t just been sprung on him this morning without notice.

  And more important than either of these: how Señora Cortés had known I was going to be here, now, when the previous evenings I’d stayed out till the small hours.

  Was it a lucky guess? Or information received?

  If it hadn’t been for the few minutes’ conversation I’d had with Señora Posador and Sam Francis before coming into the hotel, I’d have arrived coincidentally at almost the same moment as Señora Cortés and this shaven-headed assistant of hers. It looked altogether too much as though someone had worked out my estimated time of arrival; logically, this implied that someone was keeping an eye on me, probably had been since I started work—and further implied that someone didn’t trust me.

  Or—another alternative occurred to me as I was going down to the lounge again—or else someone was protecting me. The idea stopped me in my tracks, and a cold shiver threaded beneath my jacket. With the high-running feeling against the project I was supposed to be undertaking, it struck me now for the first time that I could become a target.

  VII

  The slab-sided bulk of the television and radio center was set high up on the hillside across the city from the airport, so as to keep the towering antennae well clear of incoming planes. We whirled up toward it in a luxuriously comfortable car driven by a girl in a dark green uniform.

  The evening lights of Ciudad de Vados spread out below us like a carpet of jewels. It was the finest view I had yet had of the city; I said so to Señora Cortés.

  “Yes, we have a beautiful city,” she answered, smiling faintly. “It is good to know that you, señor, will help us to keep it so.”

  Rioco, sitting in the front beside the driver, gave a short laugh, perhaps not at Señora Cortés’s remark.

  Like everything else in Vados, the studio building was spacious and impressive. We pulled up in front of the brilliantly lit main foyer whose high glass doors stood open to the warm night. An attendant—a man, but uniformed in the same shade of green as the girl driving our car—whisked the door open for us to get out.

  In the foyer people were coming and going with an air of quiet busyness; several of them greeted Señora Cortés as we entered. There were bored-looking actors, actresses, and commentators whose makeup gave them a slightly inhuman appearance; executives and technicians dashing from office to office; a man leading a trio of carefully clipped French poodles by blue ribbons around their necks; an unshaven man with narrow eyes, carrying a trumpet without a case, who looked lost; several tall, slim girls who from their movements could only be precision dancers—it was the sort of mixture one might see anywhere in the vicinity of a TV studio.

  Altogether unexpected, though, was what happened when our elevator arrived.

  We crossed the floor of the foyer directly to the elevator doors; Señora Cortés pressed the button and stood tapping her foot impatiently while the signal light over the door moved from 3 to 2 to 1. The moment the door started to slide open, she moved forward, only to fall back in astonishment and confusion.

  There was a bishop in the car, in full episcopal regalia.

  He nodded to us, eyes twinkling, and moved forward with the stateliness of a one-man procession, surrounded by lesser clerics, and a hush fell on the foyer as he approached the exit. I glanced back as we got into the elevator, and saw one of the dancers stop him and drop on one knee to kiss his ring.

  Noting my amazement, Rioco chuckled. “That is our good Bishop Cruz,” he said. “He comes each week to record a—a—how do you say it? A lecture?”

&n
bsp; “A sermon,” I said, and he nodded.

  “A sermon, that would be it. But that’s the first time I ever saw him go out in all his fine clothes like that.” He chuckled again. “Me, I thought for a moment it was someone dressed up for a show!”

  The elevator disgorged us on the top floor, and as we emerged into the corridor, a stout man going thin on top caught sight of my companions and addressed them sternly in Spanish.

  “Where in the name of the good God have you been, Isabela? You know this evening’s program has to be good! What was the reason for running off and taking Enrique with you?” He flung out an arm in a grandiose gesture. “The chaos in the place is beyond conceiving!”

  Señora Cortés blanched slightly, but replied peaceably, explaining who I was and where she had been. “Go into the studio, Enrique,” she added to Rioco. “Things can’t be in too bad a muddle, but something probably needs setting right.”

  Rioco nodded and disappeared through the nearest door. The balding man seemed to have been pacified by what Señora Cortés had to say and shook my hand absent-mindedly. “I’m beginning to think I should have handled the details of this program myself,” he said in a depressed voice, not paying me any more attention. “Please make sure it is good, won’t you, Isabela?”

  He turned away and strode down the corridor. Showing signs of relief at his departure, Señora Cortés turned to me again.

  “Please come with me,” she said. “I will show you the studio from which we make this broadcast. Much of it is on tape already, of course, but the interview with you and some other parts will transmit live. This way.”

  We went through the same door as that which Rioco had taken, picked our way through a tangle of cables snaking across the floor, dodged technicians and avoided cameramen lining up angles. Finally we took refuge in an alcove next to the director’s goldfish bowl.

  Rioco had changed his personality as soon as he entered the studio, obviously. Now, standing between a girl in glasses who held a pile of duplicated scripts and a man with cigarette-yellowed fingers who seemed to be the lighting technician, he was crackling out authoritative directions to his staff.

  “Francisco!” called Señora Cortés to a pleasant-faced young man crossing the floor. He turned and came up to us, and she introduced him as Francisco Córdoban. “Our regular interviewer on this program,” she explained.

  “Glad to meet you, Mr. Hakluyt,” said Córdoban, gripping my hand squarely. “Bit short notice, I’m afraid, asking you to appear for us, but it’s extremely good of you to come. The interview won’t run too long, I’m afraid—I’m figuring on between seven and nine minutes near the end of the program. How’s your Spanish? I can run it in either English or Spanish, but we lose a lot of time if I have to interpret, of course.”

  I shrugged. “Well, my Spanish is pretty poor, but I’m willing to try it if you like.”

  “Excellent. Look, let’s step into the control room for a few minutes—Enrique won’t be ready to come in for a while, I imagine. I can give you an idea of the questions I want to ask and find out if answering them in Spanish gives you any trouble.”

  He pushed open the door and stood aside to let me pass. The goldfish bowl was fairly cramped, but of course as soon as the door was closed again it was dead silent. None of the monitor screens was working yet, and only a whisper indicating that current was flowing came from the speakers.

  Córdoban gave me a chair and himself leaned back against a panel of lights. “Well, I’ll start off with a bit about your background and the kind of work you do—you’re a traffic analyst, isn’t that correct? And you’ve worked almost all over the world. Anywhere in particular you’d like me to mention?”

  “Oh—India, the UAR, the States. And my native Australia, of course.”

  “Ah-hah. Good. Well, that bit doesn’t involve you; I’ll just do the spiel with you out of shot. Then I’ll start putting questions to you directly. The first ones will be quite simple, about what you think of Vados. Let’s try it through. Ha estado Vd. otra vez en Ciudad de Vados?”

  “Nunca,” I answered.

  “Le gusta a Vd. nuestra ciudad?”

  And so it went smoothly enough: it was much as I had expected—mostly platitudes about how impressive Vados was. The nearest Córdoban came to treading on the edge of the controversy regarding the proposed redesigning was to ask me if I had yet made up my mind about what I would recommend.

  I told him that I had been here only a few days and it was too early to say.

  “Bueno!” he exclaimed, pushing himself away from the panel where he had been leaning. “That’ll do nicely, Mr. Hakluyt. Well, we still have twenty minutes before we go on the air—we could step around to the bar for a drink if you like—”

  He looked out onto the floor of the studio and corrected himself. “Sorry—Enrique’s doing a run-through, so we’ll have to stick around a moment. Cigarette?”

  I accepted the offer.

  “Have you been on television before?” Córdoban inquired. “I didn’t think to ask. Maybe you’d be more interested to stay here and watch what’s happening.”

  “I get put on TV quite often,” I said. “I’ve been in charge of two or three quite big projects in the States, and reporters sometimes come swarming around when work’s in progress.”

  “Ah-hah,” Córdoban nodded. “I can well understand that. We’ll be making a very big feature of the reconstruction when it starts, I imagine.”

  “No matter what form it takes?” I couldn’t resist the jab; it missed, and he gave me a puzzled look.

  “Does it matter what the details are? It’s news, anyway.”

  I passed it off as inconsequential. “Tell me,” I said. “You have quite a setup here—far bigger than I’d expected. Is your broadcasting very extensive?”

  “It’s the highest coverage in Latin America, as a matter of fact,” he said with a hint of pride. “We’ve used television a lot over the past twenty-odd years. I’m not sure what the current percentage is, but according to the last survey a year ago, we were getting to two-thirds of the total population, except, of course, at the big festivals like Easter. Even then there’s television playing in bars and places, of course, and the smallest villages have at least one set apiece now. Then we go over the border to some extent, of course, but the number of sets there is so much smaller it’s negligible.”

  I was impressed. “How about radio?” I said. “I suppose you don’t pay that much attention if your TV audience is so large.”

  “Oh, on the contrary! Except for the hour-a-day educational programs, we only telecast from six in the evening, you know. There isn’t much of an audience during the day, except on Sunday afternoons when we come on at two. But we do radio programs from six in the morning until midnight. Workers in factories listen, peasants take portable radios into the fields with them, drivers on the road and housewives at home listen in—why should we waste a potential audience like that?”

  The way he put it puzzled me slightly; I didn’t press the matter, though, and simply nodded. He looked past me through the glass wall. “Enrique’s still having trouble” he noted. “I don’t think we’d better disturb him for another few moments.”

  I glanced around the room; as he spoke, my eye fell on a small row of books alongside the control panel, and I thought there was something familiar about the nearest of them. They were mainly cheap novels, presumably what the technicians or producer read during lulls or transmission of intercut tape. The one that caught my eye, however, was obviously out of place; it was stout and well-thumbed, and its red binding bore several cigarette burns. It looked like a textbook; I presumed it was a manual of television engineering, but—perhaps the author’s name rang a bell with me—I picked it up.

  A book whose title, even in Spanish, meant something to me because the name of the author was very well-known to me indeed: Alejandro Mayor.

  Several years rolled back in my mind; I was back at the university, arguing heatedly over the
most controversial of many controversial books in our social science curriculum. In its English edition the book was called The Administration of the Twentieth-Century State, and the author was this same Alejandro Mayor.

  I opened the book with interest; its title was El Hombre de la Ciudad de Hoy—The Modern City Man. I wondered if it was as pungent and original as the earlier work, for I saw it had only been published a matter of five years ago. Probably not, I decided with regret; in those days Mayor had been a firebrand type of youthful iconoclast causing a scandal in academic circles with every lecture course he gave at the Mexico City School of Social Science. Now he was probably a sedate conformist. That fate usually overtakes innovators—their ideas cease to be revolutionary.

  Córdoban had been grinning at the inaudible difficulties Rioco was having with his run-through. Now he turned back and saw what I was doing.

  “You’ve read that, perhaps?” he suggested.

  I shook my head. “Not this one. But I read his first book in college. It’s rather an odd sort of book to find in a TV studio, isn’t it?” I stuck it back in the rack. “I wonder what became of that man—I don’t seem to have heard of him for years.”

  Córdoban regarded me with mild astonishment. “No?” he said quizzically. “Why—”

  He glanced around through the glass wall and stiffened as the door of the studio swung open. “Why, there he is now.”

  I followed his gaze and saw the balding, stout man whom I had met with Señora Cortés on my arrival.

  “Him?” I said blankly.

  “But of course. Dr. Mayor has been Minister of Information and Communications in Aguazul for nearly eighteen years.”

  “Why—that’s from long before the founding of Ciudad de Vados.”