The Squares of the City

XXXIII

I suppose that, although I had intellectually accepted the truth of what had been said, I didn’t yet feel that it was true. It was so patently unreal, so “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Otherwise, I could never have remained as calm as I did. I had forgotten, or was not reacting to, the fact that this man — Diaz, rather, since I was one of Vados’s own “pieces” — had come within inches of arranging my death this morning.

Of course, it is in any case very hard to accept the possibility of one’s own death; one is so accustomed to thinking of oneself as being indefinitely alive that in mental self-defense one tends to drive the idea out of one’s mind as soon as one can. Maybe that was why I scarcely felt angry anymore. I felt angry later — blindly angry — but in these last few minutes while I was speaking with Vados, I had kept a clear and detached viewpoint, like that of a man whose mind is still lucid although his body rages with fever.

Vados did not reply to my final question. I repeated it.

“What the hell are you going to do?”

“God knows,” he said wearily. “Whichever way I turn I see nothing but disaster. What can I do?”

“You’re asking me?” I said bitterly. “I’m only one of your chessmen, remember? You’ve turned loose forces that have got beyond your control. You must have been crazy to think that the death of someone like Guerrero and Mendoza could be called a move in a chess game. Had you just forgotten about everyone else in the city? Didn’t the feelings of Fats Brown’s wife matter to you, or Mendoza’s brother, or whoever else cared for the people you’ve killed?”

All the anger that had been repressed inside me suddenly undamned, and I roared at him. “Who the hell told you you had to fight over this bloody mess? You call that governing a country — getting yourself into such a damn stupid position you haven’t got any way out except killing people? You may have built Ciudad de Vados and brought prosperity and all the rest of it, but obviously you’ve done it to pander to your own selfish ego, because you must despise everyone else if you can treat them like bits of wood.”

He tried to break in, but my feelings were rising and I ignored him. “You were prepared to stamp down thousands of people just so long as your pretty new buildings didn’t get dirty, weren’t you? Why the hell didn’t you give up a few square yards of Presidential House and make room for some of those poor bastards living in Sigueiras’s slum? He didn’t want ’em there, living like animals — or maybe you think he did. God, but I’m glad I’m not in your shoes. Compared to you, a slave trader has clean hands.”

Vados sat limply, like a badly stuffed rag doll. “I cannot deny it,” he said. “It is all true.”

I made a disgusted noise and went over to the cabinet, to drag down the rest of the files from their shelf. I went through them methodically. Some of the names on them hardly meant anything to me personally: Guyiran — that was one of Diaz’s people from the Ministry of the Interior, and I hadn’t met him; Gonzales — that was the Secretary of Justice, and I hadn’t met him either. But some of them meant a lot to me: Angers, Brown, Posador…

I counted them. Thirty. Two short. “Who were the kings in this lunatic game?” I said harshly to Vados.

“Why, we ourselves,” he said with a shrug.

I sneered. “A very natural role to adopt, of course. The one piece that can never be taken! Like a general directing the massacre of an army from a bombproof shelter.”

He winced a little. I went on shuffling through the files.

“Señor Hakluyt,” he said after a pause, “what will you do? I have delivered myself into your hands as I would not to anyone except my confessor — and he is bound to keep secrets.”

“Don’t try to soothe your conscience like that!” I snapped. “You could ring for servants and have me thrown out. You could deport me tonight. You could silence Garcia and Diaz and even your wife — they say you’re no stranger to that kind of thing. You needn’t even bother deporting me. You could shoot me out of hand. Nobody knows where I am except a hired-car chauffeur and Maria Posador.

“What the hell do you think I am? A kingmaker? Am I maybe supposed to run out into the streets and shout the news so that the people can throw you out on your ear? Nuts! Who’d believe me? Even if I showed them these files, they wouldn’t. Oh, you’ve been clever, and the only person who might believe me would be that poor sick bastard Caldwell.” I happened to have a file labeled “Caldwell” in my hand at the moment; 1 pushed it through the air toward Vados, slapping it with my open palm.

“I didn’t know what you were actually doing to me. Who else would know? The people you’ve ‘moved’ all over the board would deny that anyone had been controlling them. But you’ve done for yourself, nonetheless. You’ve had twenty years of your own way, more than most people ever dream of. Now you’d better start facing the facts of life again instead of the rules of chess, because if you don’t, a firing squad is liable to be facing you.”

He sat dumb. Perhaps there was a picture show going on behind his forehead, with men and women bleeding into the gutters of his beloved city. I thought that was more likely than that he should be worrying about a firing squad for himself. He looked so completely abject that for a few moments I was on the verge of pitying him.

I said, “Damnation! Government’s your business, not mine! Get busy with placating the people — pension Fats Brown’s widow, because he wasn’t guilty, and you know it — oh, what am I telling you this for?”

I had absent-mindedly opened Caldwell’s file as I was talking. Now I glanced down and saw a slip of paper inside, with a few words in Vados’s writing: “30. Pablo says best is P-B5.”

And in that moment I stopped pitying him altogether. “So even in this you cheated,” I said softly. “Even when you swore you were abiding by the rules, you cheated. And you asked Pablo Garcia — grand master Garcia! — what your next move ought to be.”

I flung the file across the room; it opened and shed its contents on the floor like white leaves falling. Vados half-rose, bracing himself as though he feared I would hit him. I shook my head.

“I can’t think of anything I want to do to you that you haven’t got coming anyway,” I said. “All I want is out.”

I felt actual nausea rise inside me, and that lent force to the final word. Vados got distractedly to his feet.

“I — I’ll send for your driver,” he began, but I cut him short.

“Not just out of the house. Out of the country. Anywhere will do. But tonight!”

A telephone shrilled quietly in another room. It stopped almost at once. Vados half-turned and then sighed. “Very well, Señor Hakluyt. I shall not be sorry when you have gone. Maybe then I can begin to build up myself as I would wish to be again. At this minute I feel I am only a shadow of the man I thought myself to be.”

“Señor Presidente!” came a sharp cry. The door of the room was flung open; it was the chief butler, almost babbling. “Señores, forgive me, but they have telephoned to say there is fighting in the city. General Molinas has ordered mobilization of the reserves, and a mob has attacked the monorail station, which is now on fire!”

I looked at Vados. I didn’t have to say anything. Stony-faced, he began to pull himself together. One could almost see the resolve stiffen inside him as his back stiffened, as his shoulders squared.

“Very well,” he said at last. “Call Señor Hakluyt’s driver to the door. Tell Jaime to go to the safe and obtain twenty thousand dolaros and give them to Señor Hakluyt; if there is not enough cash, he must make up the difference with a sight draft. Then he must go to the Hotel del Principe and obtain Señor Hakluyt’s belongings and go with them to the airport. Arrange yourself that an army plane is available to take Señor Hakluyt wherever he wishes to go.”

“But the—” began the butler in astonishment.

Vados blazed at him, “Do what I tell you, fool, and be quick!”

Dazed, the butler shrugged and left the room. In a great silence Vados looked at me without seeing me.

“All I have secured is a postponement of what I most desired to avoid,” he said musingly. “And at what a cost to my conscience — perhaps to my soul… But that is between me and my people. To you I will only say — adiós. Forgive me.”

He must have read in my face that I would not have shaken his hand, for he turned on his heel and left the room.

In a few moments the butler returned, bearing the money — I didn’t trouble to count it. My car was at the door. I went to it with a sense of overpowering relief, as if I had been released from shackles I had worn since birth and never known I had on.

“The airport,” I said to the driver as I climbed in; he nodded and let the car roll forward.

I felt partly as though I were running away, partly as though I were escaping from unjust bondage. And that was parallel to the true situation. I was running away, because unknowingly I had helped to create this terrible situation; I was also escaping, because I had not understood.

Beyond the gatehouse, we could see out over the city. The flaring of the monorail central was like a red hole in the jeweled face of the city. There was a black hole, too — all the streetlights had been extinguished for an area of ten blocks near the Plaza del Norte. The driver stared incredulously for a moment — of course, I realized, he might not yet have heard — and accelerated slightly.

Then, about a quarter-mile down the road, a light leaped up and faded behind us. I swung around in my seat. Another flash followed, and this time I caught the trail before the explosion. It was a rocket.

Now the facade of Presidential House had two notches torn from it, like gaps in a row of teeth. The emplacement must be across the other side of the city, I reasoned, and the aiming was fantastically good.

“Hurry!” I snapped at the driver. He nodded and increased speed a second time. I was afraid of reaching the airport only to find that Vados’s authority no longer held good and the promised plane had been diverted to another purpose.

I was lucky. The plane was waiting, with its pilot, who was cursing the fact that he had to leave Ciudad de Vados at this of all times, but who respected an order direct from his president sufficiently to obey it regardless. Since Vados was quite possibly dead by this time, I judged it better to leave without waiting for my belongings. I gave a hundred dolaros to an overzealous customs officer to get him out of my hair, and within ten minutes of reaching the airport I was aloft.

The plane was a little side-by-side jet trainer, with the one cockpit for pilot and student pilot. I glanced at my companion’s round dark face.

“If you wish to circle the city… ?” I suggested. He gave me a puzzled look and then nodded, banking the little plane into a sharp turn.

“We may be shot at,” he pointed out. But he waited to say that until we were already swinging around the city.

The fire at the monorail station was dying bit by bit, and greasy smoke masked some of its glow. But it was no longer alone — we could see a dozen such fires now, some of them large and brilliant. A second rocket battery had opened up and was lobbing its missiles at random into the town; one of them by chance fell near the cathedral in the Plaza del Oeste and knocked the three-hundred-foot cross to a canting angle. A mob carrying huge flaming crosses (whose idea was that, I wondered) had descended on the shantytown on the Puerto Joaquín road to wreck and burn, and it was clear even from our height there were thousands of people in the crowd.

“Madre de Dios,” said my pilot simply and flatly. “Ah, madre de Dios!”

And then, as he disgustedly drove the aircraft into a fast, steep climb, another crowd began to detach itself from the lights of the city, like a snake winding slowly from an egg. This one was flowing up the hill to Presidential House.

So there was an end to the rules of the game. Now there would simply be slaughter.

The city grew smaller behind us. The height ticked up on the altimeter — five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand meters. I thought of everything I was carrying away with me — all the burden of knowledge that weighted me down. Knowledge without which any man, anywhere, any time, might be turned into a chesspiece and moved across some vast imaginary board, behaving and reacting with all the predictability of a lump of carved wood.

So maybe no one would believe me. So probably the files which detailed the incredible game played on the squares of Ciudad de Vados were buried under rubble in Presidential House. So maybe I’d have to carry that burden of knowledge by myself. Was that a good reason why I should also carry the burden of guilt? And I was guilty without realizing it. Anyone is guilty who has so far renounced his right to think and act rationally that someone else can press his buttons and make him dance.

I reached across, and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. I said, “If you wish, you may turn back.”

There were phones in the lobby of the airport reception building; fortunately the system was still in full operation. I dialed with fingers that felt more like thumbs, and with a surge of relief I heard Maria Posador’s own voice, tense and urgent at my ear.

“Listen,” I said. “You’ve got to listen. You’re not going to want to believe me, but you’ve got to listen, because what I’m going to sav is very, very important.”

“Boyd!” she said, recognizing the voice. “Yes, go ahead. Please go ahead. I’m listening.”