The Squares of the City

IV

Angers, so he told me, had arranged appointments for me with the police chief, whose name was O’Rourke, and with the treasury department official he had previously mentioned, Seixas, who was handling the estimates for the replanning. But these were not until late in the afternoon, and I saw no point in hanging around the traffic department while they got things ready for me; besides, I’d probably have been in Angers’ way.

Accordingly, having finished lunch, I left him and made my way back to the Plaza del Sur to have a look at the day’s parade of grievances.

The speakers were in full swing when I arrived, and some thousand-odd people were idly listening to them or dozing on the ground or the benches under the palms. I dawdled through the crowd to see what the speakers’ hobbyhorses might be.

The two most heavily patronized were on opposite sides of the square: one under a Citizens of Vados banner, one a swarthy mulatto with a demagogue’s manner who emphasized his remarks by pounding fist into palm and who stood beneath a banner saying NACIONAL.

Beside him on his small dais, legs dangling, sat a man with a long, morose Indian face, wrapped in a gorgeous serape; he seemed to be paying no attention.

After a while the mulatto stopped talking, there was a spatter of applause mixed with booing from the hundred or so people clustered in front of the dais, and a troupe of Indian musicians in traditional costume came forward and played the pipe and drums in an insistent, repetitive style. Obviously this was not to everyone’s taste; as I pushed forward to hear better and to get a sight of the players, I noticed a strange coincidence — even with my Florida tan, I was the palest among the people who had stayed to hear the music, whereas on the other side of the square, where I had been at first, it was a swarthy skin that was a rarity. A division of sophistication, perhaps.

A collection box jangled under my nose; I presumed this was for the musicians, so I thrust a folded one-dolaro bill into it. The man carrying the box had a face as wooden as a cigar-store Indian’s; his only reaction was to incline his head a few degrees forward before passing on.

A familiar, husky voice addressed me as the collector went away.

“Are you aware what you have just paid for, Señor Hakluyt?”

I turned to see Maria Posador standing beside me. She wore narrow biscuit-colored linen slacks today, a white tailored shirt, and sandals on her bare feet; she looked dressed more for an expensive holiday resort than for this crowd. Enormous dark glasses made her face inscrutable, and her tone of voice had been absolutely neutral.

“For the musicians, I suppose,” I said, belatedly answering her question.

“That, and other things. Indirectly, you have helped to get Juan Tezol out of an impossible situation. You have heard perhaps that they fined him one thousand dolaros this morning?” She gestured at the group of people around us. “If you went through the pockets of all these people — those who have pockets — you would find perhaps one hundred dolaros.”

I shrugged. “I have no great interest in the matter.”

“No?” The great dark lenses searched my face. “You would perhaps not even recognize Tezol?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t.”

“There he is, sitting like one of his ancestors’ idols on the steps of the speaker’s platform. He is wondering how the world can be so unjust to him. If you showed him a thousand dolaros, he would be able to count them in a week — perhaps. The man of mixed blood who was addressing the crowd on his behalf is a certain Sam Francis. He had just assured the crowd — and I, for one, believe him — that he will not spend a cento on himself until the fine is paid. And yet there are holes in his shoes.”

She swung around and pointed at the speaker under the Citizens of Vados banner. “There you see Andres Lucas, secretary of the Citizens Party. The shoes he is wearing probably cost him fifty dolaros, and he probably has more than twenty pairs. I do not know where Guerrero is, their chairman.”

“I do,” I said after a pause. “Lunching in the Plaza del Norte.”

She nodded without surprise. “The check there will be as much as a pair of Lucas’s shoes. You may consider you are lucky, señor, not to have a great interest in the matter.” She uttered the last sentence bitingly.

“I begin to see what the customs officer meant,” I murmured, and she snapped a quick “Who?” at me.

I explained, and she laughed without humor. “You may expect to find that often in Vados, Señor Hakluyt. The reason, of course, is that much money has already been swallowed up in this city — and while we are all proud of it, there are those here, and many more in Cuatrovientos and Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquín, who think that it is about time money was spent elsewhere. Perhaps they are right; perhaps they are.”

The crowd was breaking up; two men of middle age carefully carrying a chessboard with an unfinished game went past us, dispersing like the rest back to their work. The speakers had come down from their platforms, and energetic youths were dismantling these and carrying them and the banners away.

We watched in silence for a few minutes. Then Señora Posador came to herself briskly. “Well, señor, I will delay you no longer — indeed, I cannot, for I have an appointment. But we shall meet again, and we must have this match at chess sometime. Hasta la vista!”

“Hasta la vista!” I echoed automatically; then she was gone, striding like a man with an air of purpose and determination across the square.

I stayed looking thoughtfully after her until she disappeared from sight. There had been a quality of bitterness in what she had said about Tezol that made me revise my original assessment of her as a woman of wealth with much leisure and no more.

Not just a person, plainly — a personality. I would have to find out more about her — and since she was not the sort of woman to be overlooked, almost certainly Angers would be able to tell me about her.

There was only one thing I regretted. I had almost failed when I started out as a free-lance, through inability to discipline myself; after two false starts I’d imposed rules on myself that included one about not chasing women while on a job, and now after ten or twelve years it had become second nature to me. Accordingly, I was making no effort at all to interest her in me.

But it seemed a pity, all the same.

I came back to the traffic department a few minutes ahead of time and was shown into Angers’ office. The Englishman was smoking at his desk, reading through a typed report; he gestured that I should take the same chair I had had this morning.

“Won’t keep you a moment,” he said. “Just got to finish this memo. Then we’ll go over to Seixas’ and get him to brief you on the financial side of it.”

I nodded and sat down. A few minutes passed in silence. At length Angers folded the report, rattled its sheets together, and scribbled a minute on the flyleaf before ringing for a secretary to collect it and pass it on its way.

“Fine,” he said with a glance at the clock. “We only have to go next door, and I’m afraid Seixas is like too many other people in Vados — doesn’t know what time is, I sometimes think. Still, that’s no reason why we should be late. Let’s go.”

We strolled through clean, bright passages out of the building and across the intervening lawns to the treasury offices. We were almost at the entrance when Angers said, as though struck by a sudden thought, “Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you — there’s a woman called Maria Posador who spends a lot of time around your hotel. Have you run into her?”

Surprised, I nodded.

Angers gave me his habitual wintry smile. “A word to the wise, and all that, then,” he said. “She’s not good company.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Well… just that maybe you oughtn’t to cultivate her acquaintance. Bear in mind what I said about remaining detached, won’t you?”

I don’t think I showed it, but I found the flat, dogmatic, English way in which Angers put his warning very unpleasant. I said shortly, “Why?”

“Uh—” He ushered me forward through the revolving door of the treasury building. “Well, she’s a well-known local personality and something of an opponent of the president — it’s a long story, and I won’t go into it. Take it from me, though: if you’re seen about with her, it would make people assume you weren’t a disinterested outside expert.”

“Well, here’s something for you to bear in mind,” I said. “The best way to ensure that I stay disinterested is to treat me as though I were and not to jump to the conclusion that because Señora Posador is prettier than you I’m going to take orders from her.”

“My dear chap!” said Angers, distressed. “I assure you—”

“Forget it,” I said.

A tense silence took us into Seixas’ office, which, although basically identical with Angers’, bore the stamp of an altogether different personality. Seixas, who rose from behind hisdesk to greet us with both hands outstretched, was a stout, sweating man with a round red face and black hair. A large black cigar like an exclamation mark jutted up from his wide-lipped mouth; it bore the widest band I had ever seen — gaudy with gold and red. He wore a sky-blue suit and a white shirt, down the front of which a tie with a design of pineapples poured like an illuminated cascade. As well as the office equipment on his desk, there was a large jug of something sickly-looking with ice cubes floating in it, and an enormous pinup calendar with a steatopygic nude hung from the tag of the rolled-up wall map.

“So you’re Hakluyt, hey?” he said. “Siddown, siddown! Have a drink! Have a cigar!”

We both refused the drink — it seemed to be Bols Parfait Amour, which is a sickly liqueur the color of methylated spirit, cut with gin and water — but I took a cigar and found it surprisingly mild for all its coal-black appearance.

“Brazilian, hey!” said Seixas with satisfaction, sucking hard on his own. “Well, whaddya think of Vados, Hakluyt? The burg, not the man!”

“Impressive,” I said, watching Angers out of the corner of my eye. It was plain that he found Seixas unbearable; it was equally plain that Seixas was thick-skinned enough not to realize the fact. I found this amusing.

“Yeah!” said Seixas with deep satisfaction. “This is one hell of a town! And you’re gonna bring it one step nearer heaven, hey?” He shook with laughter, squeezing up his eyes, and the ash from his cigar fell down the geometrical center of his brilliant tie.

“Well, with Angers there looking sour like a fresh lime, guess we’d better get on with the business.” He shoved his large body forward in his chair so that he could put his elbows on the desk, and swiveled his cigar up to an angle that he had probably copied from a bad Hollywood movie when he was in his teens: the tycoon angle.

“Well, ’s pretty straightforward. Back a few years — oh, eight years ago — there was a hell of a big dock fire at Puerto Joaquín. Tanker blew up. The docks didn’t do so bad, in the end, but the city fire department wasn’t worth a spit on the sidewalk. ’Bout four hundred people roasted to death; houses burnt like paper, y’know? Well, year or two an’ they got the town put back together, built lotsa new apartment blocks an’ like that — nowhere so good as Vados, though, all scrappy and bitty.

“Anyways, after that Vados gets the cabinet together an’ says we gotta be ready for it happening again, so he puts a levy on oil shipments — the big companies kick up a squawk, but hell, Vados is a good man in their books, straightened out their labor problems, done lotsa good work, so they give in. An’ offa this levy he gets a ’mergency fund, sorta like insurance. Y’see, they was building this burg then, already got started — hadn’t anything left over for Puerto Joaquín or any place else. There’s about eight million dolaros in the fund right now, an’ el Presidente himself says how it gets spent. If. You got four million of ’em if you need.”

He hauled a drawer of his desk open and rummaged inside for something. After taking out a gaudy-covered novel, a flat gin bottle — empty; he dropped it in the wastebasket — and a soiled shirt, he extracted a large file of papers and set it on the desktop with a grunt of satisfaction.

“Now le’s get this straight,” he muttered. “Ah — yeah!”

He selected a sheet of paper with a magnificent embossed letterhead and several wet rings adorning it, and held it up between beringed fingers. “This here’s the official authorization, y’see,” he said. “You get paid twenty thousand plus expenses; you can spend up to ten thousand on research, computing, and like that, but you have to get out a scheme for it. You cost your own scheme, that right?”

“That’s the arrangement.”

“Great — hate costing construction projects. Damn muddle of figures, all those loose ends like sickness losses an’ God knows what… Want I should put y’ on to the firms who’ll be doing the job?”

“That can wait. I’m not interested in who does it — it’s what has to be done that concerns me.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, regarding me thoughtfully. And then a second time, “Uh-huh.”

We spent about twenty minutes after that going into a few of the most significant figures — he sent for some recent records of work done under government contract so that I could get a rough picture of costs, and Angers sat impatiently at the side of the room while we got technical. I was rather surprised to find that under his casual exterior Seixas had a mind like a razor. Of course, I shouldn’t have been — Vados wasn’t the kind of man to tolerate easy riders in his beloved city’s administration.

Our interview over, Seixas got to his feet, beaming. “A helluva lot of luck, Hakluyt!” he said. “Me, I think it’s too damn much money to spend anyway — we could dig those sonsabitches out in half a day with bayonets. Then they’d come back, though, so maybe it ain’t a waste. See you!”

Evidently relieved, Angers got up eagerly, shook Seixas’ hand with a distant expression on his face, and hurried me out of the room.

“Quite a character, isn’t he?” I said when the door was closed behind me.

“By no means unique, I’m afraid,” said Angers glumly. “I mean — well, you saw for yourself. The empty bottles and the dirty clothes in his office desk — I ask you!” He sighed. “Still, one has to admit he’s clever enough. He’s a native, of course,” he added as an afterthought.

“He spoke very good English.”

“Says he taught himself at the cinema.” Angers looked about him as we emerged once more into daylight. “Well, we have to go about a quarter of a mile — do you feel like walking, or shall I call a cab?”

I mentally pictured the layout of this locality; the police headquarters were in a block a short distance north of the Plaza del Norte, behind the Courts of Justice. “I’d like to walk, if you don’t mind,” I said. “The more I can see of the city on foot, the better, at the moment.”

“As you like.”

We walked silently for a while. “By the way.” I said eventually, “why is the chief of police one of the first people I have to see?”

“Oh, a variety of reasons,” said Angers offhandedlv. “I don’t mind saying you may find him a little awkward — he seems to be in two minds about the whole affair.”

I digested the remark blankly. After a pause Angers explained further.

“Well — uh — the people squatting in these shantytowns, of course, are a thorn in his side; there’s a tremendous amount of petty thievery that goes on, and often enough a wanted man can just vanish into the hills with the help of relatives of people here. So he wants to get rid of the mess, like the rest of us. On the other hand, he’s rather the same kind of man as Diaz — country-born, not an educated man at all, or rather, not a cultured man. I’m told that this is one of the reasons why Vados preferred him as police chief — he’s far better able to enter the minds of native criminals than anyone from outside Aguazul. But he has a gruff sort of dislike for — well, for people like myself, for example. For the foreign-born citizens.”

“And what’s his force like?”

Angers shrugged. “Venal and corrupt by our standards, but pretty good, so I’m assured, for Latin America. Vados cleared out the worst offenders when he took office, and they come down very heavily on policemen who take bribes or falsify evidence out of personal grudges. That’s to say, they come down heavily on the ones they catch; I’m sure there’s a lot more going on than ever comes to light.”

“That was my impression,” I said, and told him about the policeman who had tried to steal from the beggar-boy’s pot.

“What can you expect?” said Angers in a tone of unexpected toleration. “After all, it’s probably only the fact that he has both eyes and both hands that divides the policeman from the beggar. It’s going to take a lot of determination to ensure that the substance of Vados matches the appearance of it. Some of these people are a few generations at most away from the Stone Age; it’s really asking too much of them to turn them into civilized city-dwellers. In another twenty years perhaps — not yet.”

El Jefe — Captain O’Rourke — looked as Irish as his name, aside from an Indian cast to his cheekbones. His short brown hair topped a stage-Irish face, knobby like a potato, with wide lips. He had a wart on his nose and another on the back of his left hand. His fingers were thick, stubby, and ill-kept; there was a mat of coarse hair on the back of each wrist. He wore black uniform pants and boots, a black shirt, and a red tie with the knot pulled down two inches so that he could open his collar. On a peg on the wall behind him hung a shiny-peaked cap and an automatic in a leather holster.

His office smelled a little of frying-oil, as though the air-conditioning had been turned off at noon and had failed to carry away the smell of his subordinates’ packed meals. A huge array of photographs of himself framed him as he sat behind his desk — from a faded street-photographer’s shot of him as a small boy en route to first communion, to a glossy eight-by-ten of him resplendent in dress uniform shaking hands with el Presidente.

On other walls there were also photographs — mainly gory ones. Three bodies being dragged out of a wrecked car. A man bleeding from the corner of his mouth, both eyes closed by bruises. A woman drawing down the top of her blouse to expose an ugly burn scar across one shoulder. Probably mementos of past cases.

He gestured us gruffly to a chair; it was almost a shock to hear his gutteral accented Spanish, in view of his name and his appearance.

“No habla inglés,” he said shortly, as though confessing to a serious fault — perhaps in his eyes, it was one. He added something else rapid, which I failed to follow. I glanced at Angers.

“Uh — in spite of his name,” Angers translated with a bad grace. “I’ll have to interpret for you, I suppose.” He turned to O’Rourke and spoke haltingly.

The interview, such as it was, took a long time and covered very little ground. Since it was practically all platitudes and dull questions to which the answers were obvious, I let Angers do the talking after a while, meantime looking at the pictures on the walls.

A sudden barking exclamation from O’Rourke brought me back to the here and now with a start. I glanced around to find his brown eyes fixed on me, and Angers looking uncomfortable.

“What’s the trouble?” I said.

“I — uh — well, I was telling him about this disgraceful affair of the policeman stealing from a beggar this morning, and—”

“You what?” I said.

“Well, it oughtn’t to be allowed to pass without action,” said Angers defensively.

“All right, if you’ve done it, you’ve done it. What’s the comment?”

Angers licked his lips, with a sidelong look at O’Rourke, whose face was like thunder. “I — I can’t quite make out. He either wants to sack the offender, because he was stealing from his own people — as though it would have been better for him to steal from you instead — or prove that there’s no truth in the accusation at all.”

“It wasn’t that important,” I said wearily. “It probably goes on all the time — don’t translate that! Tell him — oh, hell! Tell him the boy got his money back; tell him there oughtn’t to be any need for beggars in Ciudad de Vados.”

Angers translated hesitantly; astonished, I saw O’Rourke suddenly break into a smile, and he rose from behind his desk to extend his thick-fingered hand.

“He says you are perfectly right,” Angers interpreted. “He hopes you will do a lot of good for the people of the city.”

“So do I,” I said, and rose to shake hands. Then I got up to go, and Angers caught at my arm.

“Not so fast,” he said. “There’s — uh — there’s one other thing.”

I sat down again while he exchanged a few more sentences with el Jefe. Then the interview was in fact over, and we went out again into the warm afternoon air.

“What was the bit at the end all about?” I asked. Angers shrugged. “Nothing of importance,” he said. “I was just telling him what you’d probably be doing for the next day or two. Officially, or course, aliens have to register with the police and report once a week if they’re staying over a month and all kinds of rigmarole like that — but we can avoid your going to so much trouble, O’Rourke says. You’ll only have to notify the police if you move away from your hotel.”

“Fine.”

“Well, that’s about it for tonight, then. Tomorrow I’ll take you out and show you the extent of the problem we have to solve.”