The Squares of the City

XX

Something howled, screamed, and rattled past the hotel. I blinked wildly at the pattern of lights drifting across my ceiling — I always prefer to sleep with the curtains open — interpreting them into nonsense.

I got out of bed and stared down toward the street.

A fire engine, its siren crying like a soul in torment (I thought of Brown’s wife at her husband’s death), swung around a corner and tore off into darkness. A helicopter buzzed past, seeming so close that I could have jumped up beside the pilot. Two police patrol cars took the same route as the fire engine.

By this time I was beginning to understand what was going on, and I lifted my eyes toward the hills. There was a glare up there — a red, shifting glare that was patently no sort of street lighting. A plane crashed into the mountainside was my first guess; then I realized that it wasn’t necessary to implicate a plane. The broadcasting center was on fire.

I glanced at my watch as I went to fetch my binoculars. Three-tena.m. A dead time of night. From the way it showed up, the blaze had had plenty of time to take hold before it was discovered. Perhaps there was no one in the entire building.

But surely there would be sprinkler systems in a place like that, and probably also an alarm system connected directly with fire headquarters -

I stopped myself making empty guesses, because whether or not there were sprinklers and alarms, they hadn’t saved the place. Through the glasses it was an impressive sight. The antennae, stilted and stiff atop the hard square outline of the building, seemed to be walking with vast deliberation into the mouth of hell. A section of wall and roof would slip; accordingly, one leg of one of the masts would dip, like a man taking a short step forward. After that, the mast would wait, as children do when playing Red Light, for an opportunity to move again.

I couldn’t see the fire engines — they were hidden from view by intervening buildings and the slope of the ground — but their presence could be detected wherever the red glow dulled with the impact of their thousand-gallons-a-minute pumps. I considered going out to see the fire from close at hand; then I decided that anybody who did would certainly interfere with the serious job of fighting the flames. Though Vados’s traffic flow was excellent, even a single extra vehicle on the road up to the broadcasting center might delay an essential ambulance or another fire engine.

So after ten minutes or so I went back to bed.

My mind was slightly muzzy. It wasn’t until I’d lain down again that the full impact of what I’d just seen came home to me. Vados’s Minister of Information and Communications wouldn’t be broadcasting any retractions, or anything else, today, tomorrow, or for months to come.

And if Vados’s government was really dependent on the operations of Mayor’s public misinformation service to mold the pliable opinion of Vadeanos, then for that period el Presidente was going to be like a man with one hand tied behind his back.

I thought of what Dalban had said, standing outside that imposing building which the age-old force of fire was now reducing to a shell. And I wondered…

Wondering, I dozed off. But I wasn’t allowed to get much rest. It was still before daylight, only a little after five o’clock, when I heard voices at my door.

“Este cuarto es el No. 1317,” said a hard, low voice. “Abría la puerta.”

It was uttered in too quiet a tone to be addressed to me, but the number of the room was certainly mine. I sat up in bed.

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. “Quien está?” I said loudly, “Y que 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 Jose 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 fivea.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 Jose 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 Cortes 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.

Tiempohad 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 allowed 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.