The Squares of the City

XXXII

The words seemed to exist in a vacuum. They bore no relation that I could understand to anything that had gone before. Yet certainly an answer was expected of me. After a long, incredulous pause while I struggled to find a context for what Vados had said, I uttered stupidly, “Am I?”

“Madre de Dios!” said Diaz in a choking voice, and struggled to his feet. He swung menacingly to face Vados and would, I thought, have struck at him but that another spasm seized him and made him clutch dizzily at a chair back for support. “I did not think he knew, and now — but he did not know, Juan, stupid one, he did not know!”

He bent his head and shook it slowly from side to side. I thought the rhythmic movement would never cease.

It was as though the other people in the room did not exist except as shadowy background figures. A fierce spotlight seemed to have selected Vados, Diaz, and myself and left Garcia, the women, and the servants in a twilight from which they could not emerge. In that brilliant glare I could see the very pores of Vados’s face as more sweat gathered and oozed from them, as it was squeezed forth by the terrible tension of the muscles underneath.

“So tomorrow there will perhaps be fighting in the streets,” said Vados glacially. “I can no longer care, Esteban. You say he did not know; I say he did know — sufficient to destroy our work. These past few days the burden has been more than I could bear. I said at first I thought it was the better way, better than to have my beautiful city torn apart in civil war. So I did think at first. And yet those who have died because of us have died in ignorance, without choice; at least those who die in war have a chance to know that there is a war, and why men are dying.”

He was mastering himself bit by bit and now became aware again of the other people in the room. He turned to his wife with a smile that came and went as though it had cost him a tremendous effort to conjure it up.

“Consuela, this is nothing with which to trouble you or Pablo Garcia — or you, madame,” he added with a shadow-bow toward the unidentified woman. “I wish you to begin to dine as planned. Jaime!” he snapped at one of the servants. “Take Señor Diaz to another room and let him rest; bring him restoratives and brandy, and telephone to Dr. Ruiz if there is another attack. And you, Señor Hakluyt — I wish you very much to come with me.”

I thought Diaz would protest; he glanced up, but thought better of it. I saw that he had fumbled open the front of his dress shirt and was touching a small gold cross that hung on a chain against his chest.

Vados did not wait to see if his instructions were followed; he started from the room by the door that had admitted me, and I followed, not yet having understood everything that had been said but beginning to suspect. The suspicion had the quality of nightmare.

Across the hall, into a room identical in shape to the one we had just left; across that room to the double doors at the other end, which were locked. Vados thrust a key into the lock, turned it, threw back the doors, and snapped on the lights.

This was furnished as a lounge, with low chairs, small tables, but there were also many glass-fronted cases of books, and one tall cabinet that almost but not quite disguised its construction of steel plates with a veneer of wood. Breathing heavily, Vados spun the dial of a combination lock that held its doors together.

Not knowing what to expect, I waited tensely, prepared to dodge through the door again if Vados produced a weapon from the cabinet.

Then the front swung aside, to reveal shelved rows of file covers, stacks of paper, documents of a dozen kinds — and a chessboard standing with pieces in play upon it.

For a long moment Vados gazed at the board, leaning on the door of the cabinet. Then in a sudden savage outburst of — not anger, perhaps self-disgust — he picked it up, pieces and all, and flung it against the wall. Pawns and officers bounced with little dull taps all over the room.

“I feel as though I were at confession,” he said half-inaudibly, and wiped his shaking hand over his forehead.

I stood waiting by the door. At length he turned to me, and this time he was smiling as though he meant it.

“Come here, Señor Hakluyt, and I will show you. You are the cause and agent of my salvation. I have been carrying a great guilt. I have been pretending to the powers of God. Here! Look! You will understand completely.”

I went forward uncertainly, only able to think he was insane.

“Look at the documents in this cabinet. There are many of them, too many to read, but you need only look at them to understand.”

Still I was hesitant, and impatiently he snatched down one of the files at random and thrust it into my hands. It was bulky with papers. I looked at the superscription. Typed on a pasted label was a name — Felipe Mendoza — and below had been added by hand two different comments.

The first said: “Black king’s bishop.”

The second said: “Taken.”

“Oh, no!” I said. Then with a sudden burst of energy, “Let me at those files!”

Vados stood back, mechanically rubbing one hand against the other while I shuffled feverishly through the files. I came to one bearing my own name, and likewise two comments.

“White king’s knight.”

“Taken.”

I dropped Mendoza’s file on a table and flung open the one bearing my name. Its contents were divided into two parts. One was a thick wad of handwritten foolscap, which I found too difficult to read with attention — there were many abbreviations, and the writing was crabbed and irregular. The other was a dossier about myself. It included photostats of the letter I had sent when applying for the Ciudad de Vados assignment, of the questionnaire I had completed about myself at the time, of the letter of acceptance and the contract engaging me. I knew about the existence of these documents; they were no surprise to me.

But there were surprising things that followed.

Someone, apparently, had shadowed me for three days in Miami before my arrival. Someone had taken the trouble to go to New York and see my last employer. Someone had interviewed half a dozen of my business colleagues in the States. And a name that I recognized was appended to the last of these reports.

Flores.

The man who had shared my seat in the plane coming here.

It was Flores’s signature, too, that was appended to the most remarkable item of all. That was a typed sheet that ran:

“As directed, I have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into the antecedents of the traffic expert Boyd Daniel HAKLUYT. Owing to the extreme distances involved, I have not been able to investigate his career outside the Americas. It appears that he is indisputably of great skill in his speciality. I have heard him spoken of most highly.

“As to his personal relationships and attitudes, it seems that he deliberately avoids forming close personal relationships while engaged on a particular project. This is in accord with the pattern of his life — viz., that he works for about seven or eight months of the year and takes extended vacations for the rest of the time. The nature of his work would appear to have made him essentially a mercenary, and I have no doubt that his loyalty will be to his employer exclusively.

“As to the information I was particularly asked to obtain, while his Australian origin suggests an inherent intolerance, the fact that he has worked in such countries as the UAR and India may have offset his original reactions. I am unable to state definitely one way or the other on the basis of available data. It is, however, a platitude that childhood conditioning remains throughout life. At least one may expect a disrespectful attitude toward ‘the natives.’ This seems to be in conformity with the desired attributes.”

Vados was watching me as I read the report, and when I looked up, I found his dark eyes on my face. “Yes, Señor Hakluyt,” he said levelly. “It would seem that our mistake lay there.”

“That little bastard Flores!” I said between my teeth. “If I’d known, I’d have kicked him off the plane.”

“Do not bear a grudge against him. He was acting exactly as he was ordered. And I ordered him.”

He dropped into a chair and reached toward a bell. “A drink, señor?” he suggested. “I am ready to answer all your questions.”

“No drink,” I said. “Explanations are all I want.”

“You think perhaps that I would poison you.” He smiled faintly. “The time for that is past. But as you wish. Be seated.”

I drew down another half-dozen of the folders at random and put them on a table as I sat down. I glanced at the names they bore, but they hardly meant anything to me. Too much of my mind was taken up in insisting to myself that I was not dreaming.

“You will perhaps not understand much of this that I am, about to tell you, Señor Hakluyt,” said Vados with a sigh. “You are, after all — forgive me, but it is true — a man without deep roots, without a real homeland. You have left your home behind and chosen to work all over the world as a mercenary. We misjudged how deeply that had affected you, how it had cut you off from the influences that must have shaped your personality as a young man. However, it is well that we made such a mistake.”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to betold platitudes about myself. I want to know what this means.” I tapped the pile of papers on the table. “As far as I can see, it says here you’ve been playing chess with human beings.”

I could hear the still strong disbelief in my voice as if it were coming from a neighboring chair.

Vados inclined his head. “This is exact,” he muttered. “Are you insane?”

“Perhaps. But not as you mean it. Señor, I have said to you more than once that Ciudad de Vados is to me like a son. If you had a son, would you wish to see him scarred, injured, perhaps crippled for life? That much I can make clear. I love my country! I have been its ruler for many years, and — oh, I have failed in many ways, but in others I have been fortunate enough to achieve great things where someone else would have patched and scraped and ended up with inferior botched work…

“And there was this disagreement, this mutual hate, growing out of something I had not foreseen and wished to set right — out of the peasant squatters who poison my beautiful city like germs in its bloodstream. Yes, they, too, are men of my country, but they are my soldiers, too, and I am fighting a war. A war against backwardness, señor!

“They tell me sometimes, ‘You were wrong to build Ciudad de Vados when there are slums in Astoria Negra, lairs of criminals in Puerto Joaquín.’ How was I wrong? Before there was a Ciudad de Vados, what did the world know of Aguazul? It was a blot on maps, no more! There was no trade to speak of, no foreign investment, nothing but peasants and their cattle plodding through mud and dust. Oh, there was the oil, but that was not ours — it was leased for a pittance to people who could afford the equipment to work it. Perhaps you did not know that, señor. That was the way twenty years ago. Today we own a quarter of the oil-drilling equipment in Aguazul; tomorrow we shall own all of it.

“I saw this coming! I trod down other men because I had a vision, and I had seen part of the vision come true. All of it might come true, I think — and then there is this problem dragging disaster in its wake. You will have been told that civil war — ah, but I am not here to make excuses, only to tell you the facts so you may judge.

“Diaz is a good man. He, too, loves his country — our country. But he hears all the little cries of the little people and wishes to run to every one of them and give them comfort. Good, good! But I know that some must suffer for the future happiness of all. Suppose I did not allot four millions of dolaros for the task we set you — what do I do with it? Say I give ten dolaros each to four hundred thousand hungry people in Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquín. They spend it; it has gone. And perhaps a company that was considering setting its Latin American headquarters here, which would have brought us four millions not of our dolaros but of the better, stronger North American dollar in a very few years, decides to go instead to Brasilia because Ciudad de Vados has lowered its standard. Oh, no, señor! (Yet if Diaz were in here, he and I would be shouting argument at one another…)

“And in the end what happens? Diaz says that if I will not do as he asks, he will compel me to do it. Or he will oust me and do it himself.

“Am I to see my city bombed? See men and women bleeding in the gutters, at the corners of streets? I have seen that, in Cuatrovientos, before I was president. I have seen men thrown through windows; I have seen children shot down while they cried for mercy. Am I to do as others do, across the border — murder Diaz to be free of his opposition? He is a good man! We have worked long and well together, and only now do we begin to hate each other.

“So at the meetings of the cabinet we rage at one another until one day Alejo — Alejandro Mayor whom you knew, may his soul rest in peace — he comes to me and to Esteban Diaz and suggests to us—”

I saw Vados’s hands tighten, one over the other; the veins stood out knotted on their backs. He was not looking at me. He was reliving the moment he was describing.

“—that since we could not resolve our disagreement except by conflict, that conflict must be bound by rules. He said we both knew rules that were acceptable. He said that he could not — oh, remember, señor, this was perhaps the greatest master of government and political science who has ever lived! — he could not determine from day to day all the actions of all the members of our population, but it would be possible to control very subtly individuals about whom one had gathered sufficient knowledge.”

I could imagine Mayor as he made his proposition: his eyes bright behind his spectacles, his face perhaps shiny with excitement, his voice shaking for fear he might not get this chance to carry out the ultimate experiment in government.

“So perhaps it was a kind of madness,” said Vados, his voice dropping. “But we thought it was a better madness than some. I would not see my city torn apart by civil war; Diaz would not see his people die in a bath of blood. So we agreed, and we took our solemn oath upon it: we would fight out our battle on the squares of the city, serving us for a chessboard, with no man knowing such a game was being played.”

I said a little foolishly, still uncertain whether this was a vast hoax or sober truth, “At the chess match last night — I saw that one side of the audience was dark-skinned and the other was light…”

“One side of this whole country is dark-skinned and the other light. As Alejo explained it to us, one cannot predict when a man will feel hungry or thirsty unless one knows when and what he last ate or drank, and many other things. But one can say certainly that if he does not die, he will feel hungry and thirsty sooner or later. And there are certain things that do not change — a man who hates the religious will always be anticlerical, whether he be sick or well, drunk or sober. Oh, how small and unworthy it makes a man seem!

“To listen to him, señor — and we listened, for he had been at my right hand for twenty years nearly — you would have said he was a foolish mystic, a clairvoyant claiming to foretell the future. But we had seen what he could do already, and we agreed. If we had not agreed, we should have split Aguazul apart, and like the dog in the fable of Aesop that dropped its bone in the river through greed, we should have lost all that we were fighting to save.

“But no one else knew, Señor Hakluyt. Until you, no one else in the world knew what was being done.”

“I don’t see how it could be possible?” I said helplessly. “People— people are—”

“You find it humiliating that you, too, have been employed as a piece on the board.” Vados looked at me unblinkingly. “I understand. But you may take comfort, for you are also the first and only to see what was being done. It is truly quite simple — so simple it can be done without the person knowing there has been a change in his life. Or so I believed, so we believed.

“We needed first a people which is well and firmly ruled. We had that; there is order and law in force in Ciudad de Vados.

“A division into sides was also simple. As you shrewdly say, a partial division exists into black and white, or more nearly darker and lighter. But we selected our pieces where their sympathies lay — some, like Brown, the lawyer, though white-skinned and foreigners, were with the black pieces and with Diaz; some others, although native-born, sided by prejudice with the Citizens of Vados Party and thus with the white cause.

“Then we had to agree that certain pieces should be allotted roles equivalent to the power of the pieces on the actual board. Thus Alejandro Mayor himself — I am sure he did not see what would befall him — was my Queen, the most powerful piece on the board, and wielded equivalent-power affecting everyone in the country, through the television, the radio, and the newspaper Liberdad. And we also agreed that should a piece be taken, it must be rendered incapable of further influencing the real world. That meant—”

“That meant death,” I said. I was looking at some of the names on the files before me. Fats Brown was dead; Felipe Mendoza was dead; Mario Guerrero was dead…

“For some, it meant death,” agreed Vados grayly. “Not for all. After the first few I felt this was worse than — but no matter, it is finished now. Yes, I was saying, it was then amazingly easy to predict and to coerce one’s pieces. Let us take a very clever thing which Diaz did against me. He wished to — to take Mario Guerrero. He knew Guerrero despised and hated Francis, that if they were brought together, Guerrero would insult him, and that if he insulted Francis’s skin, Francis would strike him in uncontrolled rage. Had Francis not killed Guerrero with his fist, moreover, he would in all probability have sought him out afterwards and killed him then, for every previous time he had been so insulted he had grown insanely violent. He had left two countries because of this… I had hardly believed that people were so uncomplicated!”

“What about me, then?”

“Oh, you obeyed orders, you furnished me with plans which we demanded, in some ways you reacted as foreseen — but you were sometimes so difficult! We thought you would dislike Brown, who was so unlike you and who so much hated distinctions of race. Instead, you became friendly with him. And Maria Posador, widow of the defeated rival, widow of him who had not built this city of which you thought so highly — we expected you to be as ice one to the other, perhaps that you would approach her as a beautiful woman and be repelled and insulted by her. But there again, no! So I was faced with an irremediable weakness in one of my pieces, which Diaz might too readily have exploited. In consequence, I moved you only a few times. But in the end the weakness turned against Diaz, and in seeking to take you from the board and also to abide by the agreement that each piece should take what it took, he was forced to an unwieldy contrivance — and it failed.”

“You — you were aware of who the other’s pieces were?”

“All but the pawns we knew of beforehand. We agreed at the beginning that the power and value of pawns vary with the progress of the game, and that therefore we should name our pawns, one to the other, as they came into play. But the officers we named first of all, and agreed on their powers; that took long, even with Alejo as arbitrator.”

“You mean Diaz allowed one of his opponent’s pieces to act as — as referee?”

Vados shrugged. “I think we understood,” he said in low tones, “that what Alejo cared about was not that one or the other of us should emerge the victor, but that the game should be played. It was to him an ultimate goal; whatever the result, nothing in life would ever mean so much to him again.”

“Then he deserved what he got.”

“Perhaps he did.”

I reverted to my questioning. “But I don’t see how you could move a piece!” I said despairingly. “How was — how was I moved from square to square?”

“Oh, you were very difficult, señor! The others — they almost moved themselves. I knew, for instance, that Judge Romero would condemn the suit against Guerrero as political trickery, because he had dined with me the night before and I had heard it from him. If he had not produced the idea himself, I would have guided him in that direction. And then I knew always what Alejo would broadcast, for although he did not know how the game was progressing — that was a secret between Estebin Diaz and myself — he knew of its existence and acted as I advised him. So likewise did Diaz with Cristoforo Mendoza and Tiempo. I knew that Angers hated Brown, regarding him as a traitor, for he was white and English-speaking and had married an Indian woman and gave his services to Sigueiras. Many times it was not necessary to order one piece or another to move — not directly to order it. It sufficed to give a single piece of information or advice and allow it to work in their minds as leaven works in dough. So, to bring about the downfall of Jose Dalban, I had to do no more than advise Luis Arrio that he — or perhaps an agent of his — had burned down the television center. This was true! Then, said Arrio, if the police will do nothing against him, I will act myself by destroying his business — and he did. But before God, I did not foresee that he would kill himself!”

“And you mean you solemnly stuck to the rules of the game when you knew perfectly well that Dalban had done that — and killed Mayor in doing it?” My voice cracked on the last word. “You mean you let it go so far that you actually stopped the police from going after Dalban so that Arrio could get at him instead?”

“Yes, I do assure you, we would study the board as it was; we would select the next move to make, make it — disregarding what the person concerned did of his own accord, because we had to justify every single move one to the other and show how it was effected. Then we would change the position of the pieces here and wait for the next move to be made. The game in fact was played out there in the city — that board in the locked cabinet served merely as a reference.”

He looked now worn out, as though he had undergone a terrific physical strain. His voice had been getting steadily lower, so that now I had to lean forward in my chair to catch his final words.

“We kept faith with each other,” he muttered. “We moved always according to the rules.”

I felt altogether helpless. For no reason except chance, without my demanding it, I suddenly found myself in a position of power over this man who had power I could scarcely believe — and had used it.

Could this story be true? Or was it all some vast shared delusion, shared by Vados and Diaz,. shadow-played out to hide from themselves the fact that they were allowing their mutual disagreement to destroy what they wished to preserve? The more I studied the terrifying contents of the flies I had taken from the cabinet the less I was able to persuade myself that this had not in fact been done.

I thought of my cynical — well, speech — to Maria Posador about the impersonal forces that move human beings. I thought of the sensation I had sometimes had since coming to Vados — the sensation that I was being unwillingly involved in the clash of opposed interests. Maybe I had had a clue to what was happening.

I opened one of the folders — a very slim one, with only a few summary notes inside. The name on the cover was that of General Molinas, the commander in chief.

On top of the packet of papers inside was a handwritten slip, presumably by Vados himself. It said:

“Wondered at first why D. selected him for his side; felt him to be more sympathetic to white. As it turns out… N.B.: investigate reliability of.”

And that snatched me back at one jerk from fantasy to the world of hard facts.

I said, “At least this could not happen anywhere else.” Vados raised his head sharply. “It could have been done anywhere! Anyone could have done it — with Alejo’s skill to guide them and his audacity to persuade them to try it.”

“No!” I said violently. “And God be thanked that that’s not true! You said your first need was a well and firmly governed population. What you mean is a population too damned apathetic to care that it’s being pushed around on a chessboard. You have to begin with a dictatorship; you have to begin with ‘the most thoroughly governed country in the world.’

“For the sake of your vision, you’ve bled the spirit out of half your people; for fear that your pretty new town would suffer, you’ve insulted the personal dignity of everyone in it. With your camouflage — like these mock public-opinion polls — you’ve given the average man in the street a comforting sense that his views count; at the same time you’ve used every underhand trick to ensure that his views are molded into the same passive conformity as everyone else’s. The only reason you were able to employ the prejudices and fears of your victims to drive them around this chessboard of yours was because you created them! You didn’t create my prejudices, and so you failed to control me.

“I don’t have to claim some special credit for mucking up this bloody scheme of yours. You dug the trap and fell into it yourself, in just the same way as when you called in foreigners to build your city for you because you didn’t have any faith in your own people. Lord, even if your plans had worked out and Maria Posador’s bullet had gone through my head instead of through my arm” — Vados winced and made as though to clasp his head in his hands — “this attempt to reduce the realities of life to a game of chess would still have failed.

“Here you’re swearing that you stuck by the rules, and yet this file here shows that you’re planning to get rid of General Molinas because he doesn’t think the same way as the rest of his officers, doesn’t share your contempt for the ordinary people of Aguazul! He’s one of these chessmen, but do you honestly imagine the army as a whole would have observed the rules of chess if you’d beaten Diaz and got the chance to impose your wishes? Do you suppose that if Diaz had played so skillfully that he threatened to eliminate Bishop Cruz, who’s also supposed to be one of your pieces, the clergy would have sat quiet and watched him knocked down? The idea’s nonsensical!

“And Diaz himself! And you, for that matter! Staring defeat in the face, would you or he have still stuck to the rules? If Diaz cares so much about his own people that he accepted this crazy scheme in preference to starting a civil war, he must care for them enough to welsh on his agreement and try another method if he’s beaten. Maybe we’re all nothing but bits of complex machinery responding to stimuli on a totally determinate basis; it often seems to me in my job that we are. But that applies to all of us, and none of us can claim what you called the powers of God to dictate the thoughts and emotions of others.

“Well, you’ve brought yourself and your country and all your ambitions to the edge of disaster. What the hell are you going to do about it?”