The Squares of the City

XVIII

That night Ciudad de Vados reacted as a sleeping lion reacts when it becomes aware of a human presence. The lion does not move, except to open its eyes. Yet its body ceases to be relaxed. Inside the tawny pelt a thousand living springs are wound up instantly to maximum tension.

The only occasions when I’d ever walked up to a sleeping lion had been on the outside of a cage of steel bars. But I was inside Ciudad de Vados. I was inside the mouth of the lion.

I did something that night that I hadn’t done for years. I felt the need to get loaded with Dutch courage. When I was through at the traffic department — not that much work got done — I went to the bar of the hotel and drank steadily for three hours. The lights went out around me; at one in the morning I was still looking at my hands and seeing them shake. I wanted to leave this place. Now. Today.

Once, a long time ago, I met a newspaperman who had had to cover the great Chicago race riot of the twenties. He had found it difficult, he said, to describe to me exactly how he felt to be in a city divided against itself. If he had walked up to me now in the bar of the Hotel del Principe, I could have told him to save his reminiscences — I knew from the inside how he felt.

He was an old man, but he still closed his eyes and shivered gently when he recalled those terrible days. I wondered between drinks whether I, too, would remember with similar clarity when I was sixty-odd — and decided that I probably would.

Have you ever seen a fragment of ice dropped into supercooled water? The mass sets solid on the instant, like a man confronted with the head of Medusa — and in just such a way had Vados frozen in face of the news first of Tezol’s imprisonment, now of Francis’s suicide.

Suicide?whispered gossip at every street corner. No, of course not. A beating by the police? How should I know? But -

Enter rumor, painted full of tongues.

A fine of a thousand dolaros? Why did so small a sum go unpaid? We are poor — but there are those who say they agree with us, and some of them are rich!

Hence: The defenders of our rights have been robbed! And from there it was a slip of a mental gear, a less-than-jump to a conclusion close at hand, an automatic identification by thousands of people given to thinking in identities, to the plain statement.

“We, the people, have been robbed!”

I ought never to drink on my own. A few drinks give me mental clarity; in company, I could keep my consumption down because of the amount of talking I did. I’d got two reputations that way — as a good conversationalist and as a bore. On my own, I always reached too far too fast in search of still greater clarity, and wound up fuddled.

When I threw myself into bed, I fell deeply asleep for the first part of the night. About four or five o’clock I began to toss and dream. I was wearing an awkward nightshirt that kept tangling my legs; I had gone to a Latin American carnival dressed as an angel with a flaming sword, but the sword was pasteboard. Dark, piteous faces kept rising before me. I slashed at them with the sword, knowing it would not harm them. Yet every time I slashed, the heads rolled and spurts of blood two feet high leaped into the air. Desperately I tried to control the sword, but even when I let go of it it kept slashing and slashing, and the heads rolled until they made a monstrous grinning pile around my feet and my nightshirt was soaked with blood.

In the morning my bed was damp with sweat, and that was not due to the warmth of the night. It had been warm every night since I arrived.

I washed and shaved and went down to the lounge without having eaten my breakfast. I had that curious unsatisfied hollow feeling that isn’t quite a hangover but is compounded of too many cigarettes, slightly too much to drink, and not at all enough sleep. I called for the morning papers and then didn’t bother to open them; my mind was too distraught. I wasted a bit of time smoking a couple of cigarettes and went down to the traffic department to see Angers.

“Morning, Hakluyt,” he greeted me. “Just looking at those costings. Your scheme seems pretty sound — works out under two and a half million dolaros.”

“That’s bad,” I contradicted grumpily. “It oughtn’t to take more than half the appropriation — after all, it’s only half the job. I’ll take a look at it and cut the corners off: then if I can’t get it below two million I’ll have to start over.”

“But there’s no need for that,” said Angers, looking at me in mild surprise. “I’m sure we can raise the additional—”

“Four million I was told; four million it can very probably be,” I interrupted. “Oh, don’t let it bother you. I can lose half a million out of that, I imagine. I was generous as hell with the estimates — weighted them for rise in cost of living, suppliers’ greed, everything. And for bribery in the treasury department.”

I don’t know why I added that. Angers gave me a sharp stare.

“You oughtn’t to go around saying things like that, Hakluyt,” he warned. “Even if you have been reading Tiempo.”

“Are they after Seixas again this morning? I haven’t opened my papers today.”

Angers shrugged. “Nothing special this morning, so far as I know. But this blighter Felipe Mendoza has been insulting Seixas right and left recently. I don’t much care for Seixas personally, as you know, but I don’t believe a word of what Mendoza says, and in any case it is extremely bad for the prestige of the department to repeat his accusations.”

He rattled the papers before him into a neat pile. “Well, I’d like to put this scheme before Diaz, anyway. Any objections?”

“Provided you make it clear it’s by no means final, I suppose you can if you like.” I took out cigarettes and gave him one. “What do you think of the situation in Vados today?”

“Terrible,” said Angers succinctly. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Somebody actually threw a stone at my car on the way to work this morning. And there wasn’t a policeman in sight.”

“Police learn early not to be on hand when they’re really needed.” I thought of the scant help I’d had from them when Dalban started to threaten me. Well, Lucas had that in hand. I hoped.

“Speaking of police, though,” I said after a brief pause, “I’d appreciate having a few of the local force along with me today.”

Angers nodded. “I’ll tell O’Rourke,” he said, making a note on a scratch pad. “So you’ve changed your mind about that bodyguard you were offered, have you? Can’t say I blame you.”

“I don’t want a bodyguard. But if I’m going down into that hole of Sigueiras’, I suppose I’d be safer with an escort.”

He took a few moments to decide that he had heard me correctly. Then he drew a deep breath. “What makes you think of that all of a sudden?” he demanded.

“I’ve been saying — and believing — that this slum was a simple problem, not calling for elaborate answers, and that it’s been dragging on and dragging on.… I want to see what it’s like down there. I want to see the extent of the human problem involved.”

He fiddled with the ball-point pen from his desk stand. “Human problems don’t exactly fall in your province, do they?” he ventured. “I should have thought you could safely leave that to the city council.”

“You misunderstand me. I’m sticking to my own speciality all right.”

He didn’t press that line further. He countered, “But you must realize that to go into that place just now would be worse than walking into a den of lions! It’s Tezol’s home, for instance; now that he’s in jail and Francis has killed himself, it would be — would be foolhardy!”

“As it happens,” I said, “my middle name is Daniel. Boyd Daniel Hakluyt. I’ve already thought about the consequences — I still want to see for myself.”

“Couldn’t Caldwell give you an idea?” Angers insisted. “Or someone else from the health department? There are several people on the staff who’ve been down there—”

“I’m tired of ‘being given an idea,’ ” I said wearily. “I was given a wrong idea when I first came here, and there’ve been enough wrong ideas foisted on me since to make me suspicious as hell. I want to form some ideas of my own.”

“Very well,” said Angers stiffly. “I’ll arrange it for you. It’ll have to be this afternoon, I’m afraid, because I have an appointment with Diaz this morning that I can’t put off.”

My rather grudging respect for him rose a notch or two. I said, “You mean you’re coming with me?”

“Of course. Sigueiras’s main quarrel is with me; I wouldn’t want you to think you were collecting something aimed at my head if there is trouble. I’ll ask O’Rourke for a suitable escort — come to think of it, it might not be a bad idea for them to say they’re looking for Brown.”

“Would that hold up? Haven’t they searched the place already? I’d have thought it was an obvious hideout for him.”

Angers shrugged. “I don’t know whether they’ve searched the place or not, and I don’t care. It would be a good excuse.”

“I wonder what’s become of Fats,” I murmured, more to myself than to Angers, but he caught the words.

“Does it matter?” he countered. “The one certain thing is that he hasn’t dared to show his face in Vados again, and I’m sure that’s not a bad thing.”

I didn’t say anything. Whatever else anyone said, though, Fats Brown had left an impression on me: the impression that he was an honest man.

It was roughly what I had come to expect of the Vadeano police that for the afternoon’s sortie they laid on eight armed officers in two cars — after previously having established that Sigueiras himself was going to be out in the city somewhere. They seemed to be good at shows of this kind; less good at the practical side of police work.

It would have suited my purpose much better if I’d been allowed to go with a single policeman as escort, but I was made to understand that, while they couldn’t stop a foolhardy foreigner from committing suicide this way, the lives of their men were too valuable to risk so lightly. Somehow this went with the Spanish-speaking personality — in Spain itself, the guardias civiles are a species that hunts invariably in pairs; here in the press and hurry of the New World it seemed that nothing short of four times that number would do.

Moreover, they insisted that we each take a police automatic; Angers, possibly picturing himself as Beau Geste or someone of the kind, accepted enthusiastically, but I did my best to refuse the one given to me — after the way my reputation in Vados had been distorted, I thought carrying a gun was a final straw. When I had to give in, I made sure the holster was well out of sight inside my jacket, and hung the sling of my camera across it.

The cars skidded to a halt on the same graveled patch of ground where the traffic department’s car had halted on the occasion of my first visit. A group of children playing a singing game on the lip of the depression below the station caught sight of us and scattered, crying a warning. The officers piled out of the cars and hurried toward the entry; perhaps they didn’t realize what they were letting themselves in for, because one after the other they lost their footing on the slippery slope and raced in undignified manner toward the bottom.

Angers and I followed more slowly. One could sense the wave of silence spreading through the congested heart of the slum as news of the police’s presence was whispered ahead. It was as though the massed human beings were melting into a single hostile organism, like a carnivorous plant on the approach of a fly.

At the entrance a courageous little dark-skinned woman was trying to bar our way. When the police repeated the ostensible reason for the visit, she shook her head determinedly. Fats Brown was not there, had never been there, and never would be there. Everyone was saying he had fled the country.

“Then you won’t mind us looking through the place if you aren’t hiding him,” said the lieutenant in charge of the squad with heavy irony, and thrust her aside.

We threaded our way one by one into darkness and stink.

Two of the police had brought powerful flashlights; they turned them on now, and I saw how this slum had been created. Rough wooden or tin partitions, slatted floors, and rudimentary ladderlike stairs had been attached as best they could be to the original bare steel strutting and concrete buttresses of the monorail station. There was no provision for sanitation, of course, and ventilation was taken care of only by the gaps accidentally left between the ill-fitting sections of board.

Whole families somehow existed here in each of the drawer-like compartments. For furniture they had old boxes, for beds heaps of rags, for cooking stoves sheets of tin with a few glowing sticks heaped in the middle. The smoke mixed with all the other smells and was easier to bear than most.

There were garishly colored prints of the Virgin on most of the walls, along with last year’s pinup calendars from soft drink companies. Occasionally a family ran to a complete home shrine with a crucifix and a couple of wax tapers.

“Don’t they have a lot of trouble with fires here?” I asked Angers, and he snorted.

“Sigueiras is careful about that sort of thing. He knows perfectly well that if this place caught fire, the firemen would just make sure it didn’t spread to the station overhead, and otherwise let it burn itself out. Burning would be a good way of cleaning it out, come to that.”

There were no burros actually in the heart of the slum — but only because if anyone had tried to bring an animal that heavy into the place, its hoofs would have gone straight through the rickety flooring. But there were pigs, and there were chickens, and there were certainly goats somewhere out of sight — their presence was unmistakable.

The police threw back curtains — there was hardly a real door in the place — without ceremony. The word had gone ahead of us; we surprised no one in the kind of situation that Professor Cortes had assured me was commonplace down here. People turned blank faces to us or scowled or half-rose with an ingratiating smile and made meaningless gestures of invitation. Children hesitated between watching the strangers and running to hide; they seemed undernourished and all were dirty, but there were few that were visibly sickly or diseased. I saw cases of eczema, rickets, and something else I could not put a name to — six or eight in all out of perhaps a hundred-odd children.

The extent of the slum was tremendous once one was inside. After twenty minutes we were a long way from the outside air, and the surrounding, dimly sensed hatred was beginning to prey on my nerves. We were going down a particularly dark passage, the police flashlights cutting stark blades of white through the thick air, rough-cut slats creaking under our weight — when a woman in a peasant’s rebozo went past us, head down, carrying a basket. Something about the way she walked struck me as familiar; I paused and looked after her. I never forgave myself for that flash of sudden memory.

For Angers noticed it, and turned to follow my gaze. When he saw the woman, he stiffened.

“By God!” he said softly. “That’s Brown’s wife! What would she be doing here — unless he was here, too?”