The Squares of the City

V

The first “black spot” due for our inspection was a cheap market that had grown up in what was intended to be a quiet lower-income-group residential backwater in the angle between two of the access roads coming from the main highway nexus. Itinerant merchants had found it a convenient spot to set up shop when the city was being built; they traded there with the construction workers. And somehow, through some loophole in the regulations, it had continued as a permanent feature of the area.

But if it hadn’t been for the arrival of the squatters in the shantytowns, so Angers told me, it would naturally have withered away, and the area would have continued the way it was designed. Here the squatters garnered practically the whole of their exiguous income, and their tenacious persistence was rapidly making the section degenerate toward a slum.

Complicating the issue, the high cost of living made many people prefer to buy their vegetables here — too many for a simple city ordinance to decree it out of existence without strong and vocal opposition. It was part of the technique that had made Vados’s regime so durable that he always preferred to replace the substance of a nuisance to himself or his supporters with the fait accompli of a universal benefit.

And in this case it was going to take a lot of doing.

The market was colorful — but it stank like a pigsty; picturesque — but so noisy it was hardly to be wondered that the dwellings in the vicinity were going downhill toward tenement standards.

“Does this go on all day?” I asked Angers. “Every day?”

“Except for Sunday,” he confirmed. “These people have no conception of time, of course — and nothing better to do anyway. It’s all one to them whether they sit here twelve hours or two hours — look at the flies on that baby’s face! Isn’t it disgusting? — so long as they sell what they’ve brought.”

I swatted a fly as it buzzed past, but missed. “All right,” I grunted. “Let’s take a look at the next on the list.”

The next eyesore was — of all places — right underneath the main monorail nexus. Ciudad de Vados had a first-class cross-and around-town network of tracks, in the so-called “spider’s web” pattern that is rather efficient but suffers from one serious drawback — the need for a large central interchange station.

In Vados, of course, this hadn’t been such a disadvantage as it usually was; they were building from scratch and could afford to be lavish with space for the central. The result was that a good acre or more of surface was barred from the sun by the overhead concrete platforms.

“What happened here was largely due to sheer greed,” Angers told me flatly. “It’s also a sample of what would probably have been Ciudad de Vados if Diaz had had his way instead of the president. The owner of this land was the original director of the monorail system. He asked for a lease on the area under the station as part of his citizens’ rights endowment when the city was first incorporated. It seemed like an innocuous enough request — everyone assumed he would rent it out as warehouse space, or something harmless like that. So no one took the precaution of placing limitations on his use of it.

“What happened? He fitted up the spaces between the foundations with flimsy partitions and rickety flooring, let the resulting chicken coops to his friends and relatives, and found it so profitable to be a landlord that he resigned his job. Now he devotes his full time to this. ”

He pointed; I looked at “this,” and it wasn’t pretty.

The lie of the ground here was a series of sloping ridges over which the platforms of the station jutted out. Standing where we were on the crest of one of the banks that ran between the two main entrances for passengers, we could see directly down into the space between the steel girders and thick concrete pillars that carried the platforms. There was a smell down there of rotting food and close-packed human beings and their waste products. Smoke from fires drifted up to us; the squalling of children merged into one hideous row together with the braying of donkeys, mooing of cows, grunting of pigs, and the wail of an elderly phonograph playing a record long worn past comprehensibility.

“Tezol lives here, by the way,” Angers informed me.

“It hardly seems possible that human beings could live down there,” I muttered.

Angers laughed sourly. “Either the natives desire nothing better, or this is actually an improvement on what they’re used to. I say, we’re honored! Look who’s coming to see us — the proprietor himself.”

A fat Negro was hauling himself up from the depths beneath the station. The path was very steep and very slippery, for dogs, domestic cattle, and, it appeared, children had used it indiscriminately to relieve themselves, so the landlord was forced to use his arms more than his legs in the ascent.

He pulled himself over the lip of the bank, grunting, and wiped his face with a large red bandanna. Thrusting it back in the pocket of his bulging jeans, he called out to us.

“You back again, Señor Angers, hey?”

“Yes, Sigueiras, I’m back,” said Angers, not trying to hide the distaste on his face. “We’ll be clearing out that muck heap of yours soon.”

Sigueiras chuckled. “You tried that before, señor! Always it is not possible. If you try to take away my citizens’ rights, what happen to your citizens’ rights? That a big joke, hey?”

“He’s talking about a legal decision that went in his favor a few months ago,” explained Angers to me in an undertone. Raising his voice, he went on, “But citizens’ rights are subordinate to city development plans, aren’t they, Sigueiras?”

“Yes, señor. And I would very willingly give up this little patch of darkness — but where else are my people to go? They wish homes, you will give them no homes, I am forced to give them homes!”

“They must have had homes where they came from,” said Angers sharply.

“Had, Señor Angers! Had! When they were starving because their water was taken for the city, when their land was dry, where else should they go but to the city? Each night and morning I pray to Our Lady and to Saint Joseph that new homes may be built for these people and work be found for them—”

“The old hypocrite!” said Angers under his breath. Sigueiras interrupted himself. “You say — you say city development plans, Señor Angers? I hear you say that! Is it that my prayers are answered?”

“Your prayers are more likely to be for some of your tenants to die so you can move in more at higher rents,” said Angers coldly. “This is Señor Hakluyt, who is going to redesign this area so that it’s all turned into a new road. Or something,” he added, glancing at me.

Sigueiras clubbed his fist and raised it toward me, suppressed fury choking him for a moment. I took a step back for fear he would strike me, almost losing my footing on the bank.

“So you come to Vados from over sea and take away all the home my people have?” he screamed. “You make your living by taking away home from people? I spit on you! I tread you in the dirt! Señor Angers, this I swear on the name of my dead father, rest his soul.” He uttered the last statement with a peculiar passionless intensity, looking again at my companion. “I swear that if you do this thing, if you take away my people only home, I bring them all — all — their cows, their burros, everything — and I move them into your big, beautiful apartment. Then you see!”

“Let’s not waste any more time on this hysterical old fool,” said Angers sourly, and turned to go. I, hesitating, was about to follow him, but Sigueiras caught my sleeve.

“You make your living taking away home from people,” he said, gritting the words. “I give up my living to make home for people. Which of us do better thing, hey?”

And he was gone, slipping-sliding down the path back into his personal inferno.

Angers was already back at the car before I caught up with him again. He was wiping his forehead with a large handkerchief.

“I’m sorry about that outburst,” he said wryly. “I’d have warned you if I’d known we were likely to run into him. You don’t have to take any notice, of course — he always acts abusive like that.”

I shrugged and got into the car. But as we rolled back toward the main road, I saw a long-faced man with a bowed head, wearing a bright serape I was sure I had seen the previous afternoon in the Plaza del Sur. Juan Tezol, going home. I wondered if he had found his thousand dolaros yet.

“It’s a strange comedown for Sigueiras,” said Angers as the car fled along smooth concrete roadway. “I suppose it’s the type — but I remember him as an apparently intelligent and sensible man.”

“And now?” I said, keeping my face absolutely straight. He gave me a sharp glance. “You saw for yourself,” he said. Then he realized there was more to my remark than a foolish question and nodded reluctantly.

“You’re probably right,” he admitted. “He could still be a formidable person.”

He lapsed into a thoughtful silence. I wondered if he was picturing scores of peasants, cattle and all, actually forcing their way into his rooms.

We went next on a tour of the three shantytowns, and all of them were very much like Sigueiras’s slum spread out over a wider area, except that since they weren’t closed in, the smell hanging over them was less repulsive. But although they were superficially alike, I found that each of them had its own kind of organic structure and function, perhaps due to the fact that they were on different sides of Vados and the inhabitants came from districts differing slightly in cultural pattern. There was also, naturally, a marked difference between them because of the local traffic pattern, but this operated at third or fourth remove, and was not especially significant.

“I don’t quite understand how you fellows do it,” Angers said as he watched me doodling flow-curves on a scratch pad, standing on the shoulder of the highway overlooking one of the shantytowns.

“Coming from a highway engineer, that’s a handsome admission,” I said, more sardonically than I’d intended. “Most of the time your boys make me feel I want their permission to breathe in their vicinity.”

Angers colored a little. “No offense,” he said. “I mean it. Oh, it’s largely a matter of instinct and a particular sort of mind. Hard to explain; I suppose the closest analogy is with the way a river deposits silt at a bend — the direction and strength of the current and the nature of the silt determine the way the course of the river develops. In roughly the same way you can establish principles of traffic flow that sometimes — almost invariably in the case of unplanned towns or villages — determine the primary nature and layout of the result.”

I stripped off the sheet of the pad I’d been working on and screwed it up. “No luck?” Angers suggested.

“Oh, it could be done. But… well, I suppose you wouldn’t be interested in the obvious solution.”

Angers raised a sandy eyebrow at me. “I thought we’d considered all the obvious solutions,” he said rather stiffly. “That was why we called in an expert.”

“It’s still obvious. Use the money to build these people a nice clean new housing development and educate them into living there.”

“It may be obvious, but it’s superficial,” he said with the relieved air of one who has met and defeated the same argument many times before. “These aren’t the only peasants we have to cope with, remember. What do you think their relations back in the hills would say when they saw Cousin Pedro and his family of fourteen installed — and I mean in a stall, because they’d take their animals with them! — by the government for nothing?” He shook his head. “No, that would merely aggravate the problem.”

“All right,” I shrugged. “But I can tell you now that if that would aggravate the problem, the best I could do would be to alleviate it. I can make life difficult for these people; I can eliminate their market, so they have to tramp from door to door to sell their vegetables and chickens; I can make their shantytowns into nice clean new — something. But these people are fatalists, damn it! To them it will merely be something new to be endured, like a drought or a famine. The most that can be hoped for is to make things so difficult they can be persuaded back to their villages — but unless something is done there, too, they’ll come back, and you’ll get precisely the same thing happening all over again under new circumstances.”

“Yes, but — -well, frankly, Hakluyt, we aren’t looking for much more than a palliative, you know,” said Angers, blinking. “We’re tackling the other aspects of the problem, but that’s long-term stuff, you know. I mean, there are United Nations teams up in the villages, teaching elementary things like hygiene and baby-care, and there are Vados’s own educational shock troops trying to bring the literacy level up a few per cent. Oh, in another generation these people will probably be pretty well civilized! What we object to, we who are citizens and sweated blood over Vados, is seeing uncivilized people mucking up everything we’ve worked for so hard.”

I judged it better not to pursue the matter. “Well, I’m a stranger,” I said. “All I can do is warn you.”

I turned back toward the car and began to stroll down the shoulder of the highway.

“I think you’ve given me everything I need to be going on with — most other points I can clear up with maps and reference books. For the next week or so I want mainly to be left alone; I can’t say for sure what I’ll be doing, but I’ll most likely be standing around on street corners, taking the mono, getting into crowds wherever they form. Things like that.”

Angers hesitated. “Well, you’re in charge,” he allowed finally, and I had to hide a srnile. Like most traffic men who’ve come up by way of highway engineering, he was used to dealing in — literally — more concrete things. Accordingly, I went into a bit more detail as we returned to the city center.

“For instance,” I said, “consider the problem of that market you want to get rid of. As you pointed out, one reason why it continued to exist after the city was built was that the shanty-town squatters took over the tradition established by the peddlers who traded with the construction gangs in the first place. But a contributory factor to its survival must have been the absence of heavy traffic flow through the roads it occupies. So we have to create such a flow — and it has to be a functional flow in the sense that people have got to be better off when it operates. Okay, achieve that, and you create a sense that the market is a nuisance because it’s a brake on the smooth passage of people who want to get past it. Six months of that kind of irritation, and a contagious urge to get rid of it will enable the city council to legislate it away with the support of a large majority of the public.”

Angers nodded his head in reluctant admiration. “It amazes me that the abstract factors you traffic analysts handle can produce such positive results,” he said.

“It’s the way people work. We’re subject to a lot of pressures we’re not conscious of; some of them influence us out of proportion to their importance. But the problem lies here: a new traffic flow through the market quarter will have to pour into the main traffic nexus — there’s no room for it to do anything else. And that complex of intersections was designed — and very well designed — to cope with exactly its present amount and direction of traffic f.ow. You can’t just open a new road into it; you might very well slow the traffic down instead of speeding it up.”

I looked thoughtfully out of the car. We were traversing the Plaza del Este, just in front of the magnificent cathedral. Like ants against the blazing whites, blues, and reds of the frontage, a family of peasants was standing. Their heads were tilted back, staring at the three-hundred-foot aluminum cross rearing into the clear sky overhead, wondering whether the deity inhabiting this august edifice might not be different from the one occupying their little adobe-built village shrine at home.

“At home”; yes, that was the trouble in Vados. Or a good part of it, anyway. Twenty thousand people who couldn’t regard the city as their home, although they lived in it — simply because it wasn’t their home. They were in a foreign country in their own homeland.

“Where would you like me to drop you off?” Angers asked as we rolled on toward his office.

“Anywhere around here will do.”

“And shall we not be seeing anything of you at all for the next week, then?”

“I’ll drop in every morning, of course — find out if there is anything important I should know, ask any questions I’ve dreamed up. Don’t worry about me — I’ll make out fine.”

Angers nodded, looking past me at the street. “Any special time?”

“After the morning rush is over, probably. I want to get a complete picture of the type and density of the traffic flow in the city center all around the clock, but I’ll probably be out in all the rush hours, for the first week at least.”

He sighed. “All right. Keep us posted, won’t you? Cheerio.”

I shook his hand and left him when the car pulled up to the curb, and strolled slowly along the sidewalk back toward the pedestrian underpass at the main traffic nexus.

Well, one thing that was going to be essential if I was to work completely on my own, as I always preferred in the first stages of a job like this, was for me to do something about my rudimentary Spanish. Another was to post myself in better detail on the attitudes and reactions of the average citizen. I’m a firm believer in the platitude that people get the popular press they deserve; accordingly, I bought a copy of the afternoon edition of the government paper, Liberdad, and took it to a bar to look through it. I had a vest-pocket dictionary I’d bought in Florida, and though it didn’t give some of the words I needed, I got ahead quite well with the paper.

One headline caught my eye because it mentioned the name of Mario Guerrero, the chairman of the Citizens of Vados. I struggled through the story under the heading and found that a man called Miguel Dominguez had brought a charge of dangerous driving against Guerrero’s chauffeur, and another of aiding and abetting against Guerrero himself. There was a picture of Guerrero standing beside a big black sedan, the same I had seen roll toward him as he left the Courts of Justice in the Plaza del Norte.

Once again the reporter failed to include a lot of things I wanted to know; he did, however, make it plain that in his view the whole affair was a plot by the National Party, of which Miguel Dominguez was a prominent supporter, to discredit the chairman of their opponents. Of course, it was ridiculous to suppose that Guerrero would do anything to injure the citizens of his beloved Vados — or anyone in Aguazul, for that matter, Fortunately for Guerrero’s honor, the charge against him would be defeated by the legal skill of his close friend and colleague Andres Lucas, and the stigma on his good name would unfailingly be removed.

It was that kind of report.

I inquired for a Tiempo, because I felt pretty sure the independent paper would regard the affair rather differently. But I was told that it wasn’t well enough off to afford more than one edition a day — Liberdadwas government subsidized, of course — and in any case it was getting on toward the end-of-work rush hour, so I left it till the following morning.

I was out early the next day, assessing the incoming traffic as the stores and offices opened up for the day — the regular hours of work seemed to be eight-thirty to noon and two to five-thirty for offices. Around nine-thirty I went back to the hotel for a leisurely late breakfast and found the follow-up I was looking for in Tiempo.

As I’d guessed, the independent organ had a totally different slant on the matter. Their report explained to the world how Guerrero had ordered his chauffeur to drive through a group of children playing with a ball in a side street; the public-spirited Miguel Dominguez had seen the event and had been so shocked at the risk to the children that he had done his duty as a citizen, fearless of the powerful entrenched interests which were bound to smear his act as a political trick.

I cursed local politics and turned over to the inside pages.

Here I found an article that concerned me much more directly — indeed, I was mentioned in it by name, and not at all politely. It was on the shantytown problem; the writer’s name, Felipe Mendoza, rang a bell with me, and I wondered where I had heard it before. I found the clue in the caption to a badly reproduced portrait of Mendoza in a little box at the foot of the page; he was a distinguished local novelist whose work had been published in translation in the States. I’d seen his books but never read any. According to the reviews I’d read, he seemed to be a sort of Latin American William Faulkner, with a dash of Erskine Caldwell.

According to his view of the matter, I was a hireling brought in by the despots of the government to take away the people’s homes — but this was comparatively mild. He reserved his real scorn for Seixas and the other treasury department officials. Seixas, he alleged, had persuaded the president to choose this way of tackling the shantytown problem, instead of rehousing the squatters, because he held shares in a highway construction company which was likely to benefit.

I wondered what the laws of libel were like in Aguazul. Fairly elastic, to judge from this.

As I’d promised, when I was through with breakfast, I went down to the traffic department to look in on Angers and see if there was any news. I found him talking to a pale, fair-haired young man with a slight speech impediment and hornrimmed glasses.

Angers, serious-faced, interrupted the conversation to introduce his companion as Mr. Caldwell of the city health department, and waved me to a chair.

“I’ve just been hearing some rather interesting news, Hakluyt,” he said. “Caldwell, maybe you’d tell Hakluyt what you just told me. I think he ought to hear it right away.”

I sat down and looked attentive. Caldwell cleared his throat nervously and gave me one quick glance before settling his eyes on the wall behind me and speaking in a low, monotonous voice.

“It was yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I was making my regular visit to S-s-sigueiras’s — his s-slum. We’ve been trying literally for years to get him to improve the c-conditions down there. I th-think I must have been there about the s-same time you were.

“Because when he came back he was s-saving he was going to file s-suit against Mr. Angers for this attempt to get rid of his s-slum.”

“Citizens’ rights again, I suppose?” interjected Angers, and Caldwell nodded, swallowing. His Adam’s apple bobbed.

Angers turned to me. “Of course, immediately I heard this, Hakluyt,” he said, “I felt I must ask you to concentrate on this aspect of the problem first, if you can. We don’t want to exert pressure on you in any way — after all, you’re the expert — but you do see what we’re up against, don’t you?”

“I hope you see what I’m up against, too,” I answered dryly. “You asked me to keep personal considerations out of this, and I think that had better go on applying. You’ve given me a budget and a problem to solve; suppose you let me be the judge of the best way to tackle it, and you’ll get the best results. Besides — damn it, if the legal mills grind as slowly here as they do most other places, it’ll take months for Sigueiras to show results in his suit.”

Angers looked unhappy. “Well, that’s the unfortunate part of it,” he said. “The legal mills, as you put it, in Vados grind pretty quickly. It’s a different matter anywhere else in the country, but one of the things that Diaz has always insisted on ever since the city was built was quick handling of law cases — both civil and criminal. He was suspicious of us foreign-born citizens, you see, and he seems to have been afraid that we’d litigate the simple-minded native-born citizens out of their rights. Well, that’s beside the point — in the abstract, it’s a damned good thing that cases don’t hang around for months on end, of course, but Diaz has his own man in as Secretary of Justice — fellow called Gonzales — and he sees to it that if there’s a dispute involving a foreign-born citizen and a native-born citizen, it moves like lightning.”

He looked down at the top of his desk; he had picked up a paper clip and was nervously toying with it.

“I’ve got a nasty feeling that I haven’t been told the whole truth about this problem I’ve been asked to solve,” I said. “What is this legal question involving Sigueiras, anyway?”

“Well, it’s damnably complicated, actually. But I’ll try to boil it down for you.” Angers sat back, avoiding my eyes as Caldwell had done, but for a different reason. “When the city was incorporated, all of us foreign-born citizens, and those native-born citizens who’d qualified in particular ways by contributing to the creation of the city, were given what we call a citizens’ rights endowment. That’s to say, guarantees of options on particular official positions, at fixed levels of salary, or leases on undeveloped land, or something of the kind, and their duration was to be fifty years or the lifetime of the recipient, whichever was shorter. They can’t be inherited, you see — although citizenship as such descends to the progeny and all that.

“The problem with Sigueiras, of course, is that he managed to fiddle the undisputed use of that land under the monorail central as part of his citizens’ rights endowment, and it’s legally unassailable. The only loophole lies in the proviso that the city council retains powers of development, and it can dispossess any leaseholder on payment of compensation. Well, what we’ve got to try to do is dispossess Sigueiras — using this city development clause.”

Caldwell had been listening in mounting excitement to Angers; now he burst out as though unable to control himself any longer.

“We’ve got to get him out. Everybody s-says we must! The health problems are gh-ghastly; the education department is t-terribly worried; it’s affecting the tourists — it’s sh-shocking, Mr. Hakluyt!”

I got up. “Look,” I said, “for the last time. You hired me to do a job, and I’m going to do it if it can be done. I don’t have to be told that this slum development is a blot on the face of Ciudad de Vados — I can see. Suppose you try to be patient — and better still, let me get on with the work.”

I was leaving the traffic department building when I had my first sight of el Presidente in person — from a distance, but unmistakable. Well, how could one mistake him when he drove down the street and into the Plaza del Norte behind a flying wedge of black-uniformed motorcyclists with police sifens howling?

He sat in the back of an open convertible, one arm resting along the side. Next to him was a dark and very beautiful girl — his second wife, presumably. His first, so I had vaguely heard, was a girl he had married in his twenties and who had died soon after the foundation of Ciudad de Vados. He looked older than he had in the photograph at the airport, even behind the dark glasses that hid his eyes.

There was no doubt that he was still popular. People on the sidewalks and in the middle of the square stopped talking to turn and wave at the passing cavalcade, and a bunch of children ran yelling behind his car. El Presidente acknowledged the acclaim with no more than a languid lift of his hand, but his wife smiled and blew kisses at the children.

The car pulled up outside the City Hall, and Vados went inside — to attend to his mayoral duties, presumably. As soon as he had disappeared from sight, his wife leaned forward and said something to the driver; still attended by the motorcycles, the car purred off in the direction of the main shopping streets.

I strolled away, deep in thought, when the interruption was over. Angers, plainly, hadn’t much liked my parting remarks; it was certain that if he got to hear about my actions for the next few days, he wasn’t going to approve of that, either. I intended to spend the immediate future on foot, looking at the places I was supposed to clear up, with a camera slung around my neck, a white Panama hat on my head, and the biggest dark glasses I could find on my nose.

And, in direct contradiction to Angers’ request, I proposed to concentrate first on what I considered the major problem: the street market and the attendant slum area. Sigueiras’s set of pigsties were not in fact essentially a traffic problem; if there were as many people who wanted to get rid of them as Caldwell had claimed, they could be cleared away on the basis of something little stronger than a pretext. But to get rid of the market was going to call for some rather subtle and organic planning.

I’d arrived on Tuesday; today was Friday. The market area deserved at least three days’ close study, and the fact that I would have the end and beginning of the working week in the period meant that I would see it in both its busiest and slackest moments, which was ideal.

The slackest period of all, of course, was Sunday — there was no market at all, and I concentrated on the outward and return flow of cars bearing people out of town for the day.

But with that interruption, I stayed in and around the market area until Monday evening; three or four times a day I worked my way through the market and its surrounding streets, noting the volume of traffic on foot and on wheels at different times of day, estimating how many people had to pass this way, anyway, how many came here only because the market was here, and how many might come this way if it weren’t for the market and the resulting low character of the neighborhood.

There were valuable pointers to public opinion, too, to be followed up — sources of irritation and resentment against the market that could be gently magnified until it became possible to decree it out of existence without opposition.

It was fascinating. But then I’m one of those lucky people to whom it is given to enjoy his regular job. There are so many aspects of human existence reflected in the way people move through their streets. I’d had to allow for the snarls in traffic flow caused by the muezzins in Moslem cities calling the devout to prayer, and the consequent five-times-daily interruption of everything, much to the annoyance of the nonreligious citizens. I’d had to work out a design for an embankment along the Ganges where it was certain that at least a million people would suddenly turn up once a year, but which had to cope with them and with its ordinary traffic without wasting unduly much space on the million-strong crowd which would remain idle the rest of the year. I’d helped develop the signal system in Galveston, Texas, designed to get every fire appliance within twenty miles nonstop to any outbreak without interfering with traffic on any route not used by the engines. Those were large-scale tasks, and they had their own interest. But this — by comparison — half-pint puzzle was equally intriguing.

By Monday afternoon I was coming to a tentative conclusion.

I was wandering along the sidewalk, pausing to turn over things displayed for sale and rechecking my guess about how many people came this way just to do their shopping when the offices and businesses nearby closed for the night, when a hoarse voice called out to me. “Ay, señor!”

I glanced around. The only people in the direction from which the yell had come were two shabby old men deep in thought over a chessboard resting on an empty packing case — I saw that the white king was lost or broken and had been replaced by the neck of a bottle, broken off short and stood on its jagged end — and a fat man in a white suit that was soaked with sweat under the arms. He sat on a rickety chair tilted back against the wall. A hat shaded his plump face; one pudgy hand clutched a bottle of some sickly-colored soft drink with a straw in it; the other held a ropy cigar.

I looked inquiring; he beckoned; I went over to him. As I came up, he said something in rapid Spanish, and I had to ask for a repeat.

“Ah, that’s all right,” he said with a sudden surprising switch into strong New York. “Figured you weren’t one of these stuck-up spicks. Tourist?”

I nodded; that was my role at the moment. “Drink?” he suggested, and before I could accept or refuse, he had thrown back his head and yelled, “Pepe!”

I looked at the nearest doorway and found that I was in fact standing outside a shabby bar, converted in makeshift fashion from the entrance hall of a house. A misspelled name scrawled on the wall in black paint announced the fact. “What’ll it be?” said the fat man.

“Something long and cool,” I said in my best tourist manner, wiping my face.

The fat man snorted. “In a hole like this? Pal, if they had a frigidaire here, they’d have to use it for cooking tamales. The power company cut the supply a month ago. Makes it a choice between beer and this muck I’m drinking. Better have beer — at least it doesn’t get dirty inside the cans. “Cerveza!” he added sharply as a worried little man appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on an apron or maybe the flapping tail of his shirt.

“Siddown,” he went on, indicating a folding chair propped against the wall near him. “Reason I called you over was ’cause I figure I’ve seen you around here a few times before. Didn’t I?”

“You might have,” I acknowledged, finding that the chair, seemingly on the point of collapse, was still strong enough to take my weight. I hadn’t seen him; that I was sure of. But I didn’t comment on the fact.

“You seem to be spending a hell of a lot of time down here.” His eyes fixed on me. “Mind my askin’ why? Sort of — uh — unusual for a tourist.”

“A girl I know back home told me to get her one of those fancy Indian shawls — rebozos,” I answered, thinking in high gear. “You know how it is,” I added, trying to make the words imply I thought he was irresistible to every girl for miles. “I wanted to make it something — something classy, if you get me. Can’t find anything I like.”

The fat man spat with great deliberation into the gutter, three inches from the bare feet of a woman carrying a basket of clay pots. “Should think not. Stuff you get here’s not worth a damn. You’d do better to stop off for a couple hours in Mexico City on your way home an’ spend a few bucks in a big store there. These people can’t afford to spin their own thread any more, y’see. Have to make do with lousy commercial stuff — won’t dye properly, won’t weave the same way. No good.”

“Looks like I’ve been wasting my time, then,” I said. Beer arrived, brought by the worried man; I took it as it was — in the can — and sipped it.

“Maybe not altogether. Get better stuff here than anywhere else in Vados, that’s for sure. And cheaper. Trying to clear this market away — hear about that?”

“No!” I said, feigning astonishment. “Why? Don’t people like having a genuine Indian-style village market right in the heart of Vados? I’d have thought tourists would go for it in a big way.”

“Nuts. Vados is ‘the — most — modern — city — inaworld.’ ” He managed to make the slogan sound faintly obscene. “That’s what tourists come looking for. Old-world crap they can find back in New Mexico or somewhere. What they want here is the day afer tomorrow, not the day before yesterday. ’Sides, the place stinks. Don’t it?”

The smell was pretty thick, and likewise indescribable. Cooking oil and frijoles and rotting fruit and human bodies all had a place in it. So did sun on dust, which smells like nothing else in the world.

“What are these poor bastards gonna do for a living when they clear this market up? Hafta live in that dump of Sigueiras’s — they don’t show that to tourists. Heard about it?”

“Under the main monorail station?”

“Tha’s right.” He looked at me with a speculative expression. “For a tourist, you got eyes, pal — say that for you. Guess you didn’t go down inside, though.” I shook my head. “Guessed right. There’s a guy called Angers in a city traffic department been shooting off his mouth about cleaning out market, shacks, whole damn lot. Him an’ that money-grabbing bum Seixas.”

He gestured with his now empty bottle; he had been sucking enormous gulps between sentences. The movement took in the big-eyed children and the back-bowed women and the shabby men playing chess, the barrows and the baskets and the fruit and corn and clay pots and trinkets. “Riles me! I’m a citizen, same as Angers. I got my stake here, same as him. But it’s these poor bastards’ own damn country, and they don’t get much of a share.”

On the last word he hurled the empty bottle at a rotten melon lying in the gutter; it sank in without breaking and stuck up at an angle, the straw still in the neck. “Have another on me?” I suggested.

“Next time you’re by,” he said, and hauled himself ponderously to his feet. “Got to go make room for it before I have another. Think about Angers while I’m doing it. Maybe we’ll fix him one of these days. Still a law in this country — of sorts. Wouldn’t think I was a lawyer, would you?”

“No,” I said, genuinely astonished.

“Pretty good one, too. Not the sort that gets the classy clients, like that bastard Andres Lucas, but I am a lawyer, and I’m out here drinking in the atmosphere so I can plead a case good tomorrow. Sigueiras filed suit on the traffic people — Angers’ lot — an’ I’m handling it. Name’s Brown. Everyone calls me Fats, even the spicks. Don’t give a damn — I am fat.”

He glared at me as though challenging me to deny it.

“Well, thanks for the beer,” I said, getting up and wondering whether I could safely admit that I was going to be by here again.

“Oh, hell, that’s okay, Hakluyt. Nothin’ against you. Mucky stinkin’ business, but not your fault. Wouldn’t buy Angers a beer, so help me. But don’t blame me if you’re out of a job before you’re started.”

For a moment I was completely stunned. “How did you know who I was?” I asked at length.

“One of Sigueiras’s boys saw you around here Friday and Saturday. I didn’t. Wasn’t here. Won’t be tomorrow. If you want to buy me that drink, you’ll have to come to the courts. So long.”

He disappeared into the dark entry of the bar; he must have turned back immediately, because I hadn’t taken more than one step away before he was calling me back.

“Oughta warn you,” he said. “These lousy double-crossing sonsabitches at the top won’t pay a cent ’less your plan is just what they wanted anyway. Watch yourself.”

He vanished again — so quickly this time that I suspected his succession of soft drinks must finally have made the matter urgent — and left me to walk very thoughtfully off down the street.