The Squares of the City (16 page)

I saw O’Rourke stiffen and turn his head fractionally each time one of these screamed insults arrowed upward. The temper of the bystanders was growing ugly; I wanted to ask Fats Brown why O’Rourke wasn’t doing anything about it, but he had gone closer to the body and was hovering around with his eyes bright and a taut expression hardening the lines of his fat-creased face.

A silence fell as ambulance attendants lifted the body and carried it into their vehicle. Several of the bystanders crossed themselves. The doors slammed, and as though that had been a signal, a roar went up and something hurtled through the air—a soft fruit. It struck Sam Francis on the arm and splashed colored pulp all over him.

I hadn’t looked at O’Rourke for a few moments. Suddenly he was moving, shouldering his way through the crowd like a charging bull. There were shouts and cries of alarm. I lost sight of him for a second; then his black-sleeved arm went up over the heads of those around him, came down again viciously.

When he emerged again into the cleared circle where Guerrero had lain, he was dragging a man in a cheap white suit, across whose left cheek a huge bruise was already showing. The man kept shaking his head as though dizzy, and stumbled as he was hurried along.

O’Rourke sent him spinning into the arms of a policeman with a final shove, and then turned, breathing hard, to face the onlookers. He didn’t say anything. But gradually the crowd melted; people dispersed, heads down, across the plaza. Two policemen led Francis down the steps and pushed him into O’Rourke’s car; as he went past Andres Lucas, the lawyer, his face contorted with rage, hissed something to the effect that he would never get out of jail alive.

Then Lucas took the arm of Guerrero’s girl and led her away—she was still sobbing—and it was over.

With a final glance around, Fats Brown scuffed some dust over the smear of blood where Guerrero had lain, and came and took my arm.

“Let’s go get a drink,” he said in a flat voice. “You owe me one, remember?”

We had double tequilas in a bar on the other side of the square, where people were already talking in hushed voices about what had happened. We didn’t talk at first—just sat, waiting for the alcohol to help steady the world.

In the end I said, “Do you have a death penalty in Aguazul?”

Brown shook his head. “Not often. I mean they didn’t use it lately. It’s still on the books—choice of hanging or a firing squad. But only a half dozen guys been shot since Vados came to power, an’ the last was five years back.”

There was a pause. Brown shrugged and shifted on his seat

“Guess you can needle a man just so far—an’ Sam was mad as hell already. … That’s about fixed the Nationals for the time being, of course. Vados’ll laugh like a gargoyle when they tell him.”

I pictured Francis’s stunned horror when he saw what he had done. “Had he—had he done anything like that before?” I asked.

“Sam? Not that I know of. But I’ve seen men like him in Harlem—get what I mean? Saw one guy push a broken bottle in a white man’s face for callin’ him a dirty black bastard. An’ Sam’s always had a temper.”

“Fact is,” I said, looking at the chewed lemon in my left hand, “I half thought he might break my neck before he got around to Guerrero’s.”

Fats gave me a sharp glance. “You met Sam personally? Or you just ventilatin’ an impression?”

“I met him. Maria Posador introduced us at my hotel.”

“You’re a friend of Maria’s?” Fats spoke incredulously. “Hakluyt, you begin to bother me. I wouldn’t have said you were the kind of guy Maria would look at twice.”

“I may not be pretty,” I snapped, nettled. “But what in hell makes her opinion so important? Someone with a grudge a mile wide the way she has a grudge—”

“Calm down!” grunted Fats. “Calm down! No offense—’s just that—ah, put it this way: Vados brought you here, Maria would like to see Vados pegged out for the crows,
ergo
it’s a surprise to me she hasn’t spat in your eye. I could be wrong. Guess I must be wrong.” He emptied his glass, sent salt and lemon after the liquor absent-mindedly, and let the lemon fall in an ashtray on the bar.

“You lucky perishin’ bastard,” he said. “Chances are, you won’t even be called as a witness. But Lucas, damn his muckin’ soul, would probably give his right arm to get me for aidin’ and abettin’—an’ I wouldn’t put it past him to try an’ drag Mig Dominguez in as well. An’ we have other problems, Mig an’ I. I better go home an’ look up some law, Hakluyt. Want to try an’ get Mig off this hook Romero hung him on. There’s a loophole—I think. Mig’s pretty close to Diaz—he was Diaz’s white-haired boy at one time, an’ they’re still pals. I hafta get the copy of the court record in this morning’s case to Diaz; if he feels inclined, he can tell Gonzales to discharge Romero on grounds of incompetence an’ order a new trial. Leastways, I think that’s the way the law stands. Could make Romero pretty damn uncomfortable, anyway. If Diaz’ll play.”

He got up and paid his check. “See if Mig wants to play it that way. He’d be a damn fool not to try it, at least. So long, Hakluyt—see you around.”

I don’t know whether Judge Romero had been right or wrong to see this case against Guerrero as a pure political maneuver. One fact, though, kept hammering at my mind. Francis had been as bitter about it as though it really were a plot gone wrong—and in the grip of a savage rage he had struck Guerrero down.

This was supposed to be a political leader. If the rest of the National Party resembled him at all, they were a bunch of barbarians.

It was time for lunch, but I couldn’t face the idea of eating, or of working, either, until I’d got the shock out of my system. I went slowly back to the hotel.

In the Plaza del Sur, where there should normally have been two large rival meetings going on and sundry minor speakers, the field was monopolized by the Citizens of Vados. Under a banner hastily draped with black mourning streamers, an orator I didn’t know was haranguing an angry crowd, lamenting Guerrero’s death, and vowing terrible vengeance on the National Party. Someone must have got the news through to Tezol; there was no sign of him or any of his followers.

When I entered the hotel, I checked my mailbox and found the invitation Angers had referred to—a handsomely printed gilt-edged card which I was asked to display to the person appointed when presenting myself at a garden party at Presidential House, et cetera et cetera. I put it in my wallet, wondering whether the death of Guerrero was going to mean that the affair would now be canceled.

The death was splashed all over the afternoon papers, of course—or rather paper, since as I had earlier learned only
Liberdad
could afford more than one edition a day. The following morning, though,
Tiempo
also went to town on the matter. It was lurid in the details it gave of the supposed provocation offered by Guerrero, and sympathetic—of course—toward Francis. But the best hope it could hold out for him was an optimistic assurance that he would get prison rather than a death sentence. There was a leading article on the subject by the novelist, Felipe Mendoza, whom I had previously noticed as a contributor, but it was mere empty thundering. Nothing could hide the fact that Francis had stupidly and viciously given way to bad temper—and had condemned himself to suffer for the result.

In an attempt to brighten up the picture, presumably, the paper also gave a lot of space to the allegedly disgraceful handling of the Guerrero dangerous driving case, illustrated with a photo of Fats Brown wearing a pugnacious expression and Miguel Dominguez looking saintly and put upon. Fats had apparently declared in an interview that Francis had been driven beyond endurance by the travesty of justice he had witnessed—but there was no explanation of why, supposing the case against Guerrero to have been a genuine one, Francis had been anywhere near the court unless his interest was political.

There were two other points that did emerge from the article, however. The first was that Dominguez was doing what Fats had suggested; he was going to try to have Romero removed from office and arrange another trial before a different judge. It puzzled me for a moment to wonder how they could get around the double jeopardy provision; then I remembered that Romero had dismissed the charge against the chauffeur without hearing evidence. That would probably explain it.

The second was something of Francis’s background. As I had thought, he was neither Vadeano by naturalization nor a native-born citizen. By reading between the lines, I found that he had been kicked out successively from his homeland of Barbados, British Guiana, Honduras, and Puerto Rico for political agitation and had merely been continuing the same in Vados. As I had suspected, he seemed to be a professional demagogue.

I’d never liked that type; they were always unhappy unless they had a chip on their shoulder, and if they had no chip of their own, they would load up with someone else’s, whether they were asked to or not. On the other hand, to give people like Guerrero, Lucas, and even Angers their due, they had an ideal of their own—they wanted Ciudad de Vados to continue as it had begun, a showpiece of the Western Hemisphere and the kind of place they had envisaged when it was founded. From a personal point of view, I shared that ideal; if the city society was ever to achieve its inherent potentialities, then it was essential to make the best of its finest manifestations.

The next morning it was a saint’s day; there should have been heavy traffic. I went out early on the job, but after only a few hours I gave up. The situation was far too abnormal for my findings to be valid. The city had closed up like a clam. Outside the churches—even outside the great cathedral—there were far fewer people than usual coming from Mass; many of them wore mourning bands or had even put on formal mourning complete. Overnight, slogans had been scrawled up on walls, condemning Sam Francis and the National Party; when I went into the market district, where a saint’s day should have produced an extra-heavy crowd, I found only half as many people as usual. The window of a store had been smashed in, and there were signs that there might have been rioting. A peasant’s ramshackle vegetable barrow had been overturned; someone had unsuccessfully tried to set the wooden frame on fire. The little bar where Fats had stood me a drink was closed, and wooden slats from fruit crates had been nailed over the windows. The walls nearby were spattered with the traces of thrown fruit and eggs.

Under the brilliant sun, Ciudad de Vados was as still and as enigmatic as a package with a tick in it. Like such a package, though, it was certain that either the fuse would fizzle out—or there was going to be an explosion.

The tension contended with the heat; from both at once the people of the city sweated rivers.

XI

Despite Guerrero’s death, Vados was going ahead with his garden party; Angers told me that public enthusiasm for the local champion who had won the Caribbean chess tournament was nearly as strong as the public anger at Guerrero’s death, so they had agreed to give him his reception regardless.

I had a good view of the city by night as we drove to the television center. On the way to Presidential House I had a still better one by day. Very probably Vados had had his—or nominally the incumbent’s, which meant his—home located where it was because of the splendid panorama it commanded over the city.

It was a vast white building, backed on the mountainside, at a ninety-degree angle from the airport on the landward side of the city. An airliner on one of the Caribbean routes was nosing down for a landing as I approached the main gates, but its noise was hardly more than a whisper.

Police in summer uniform, on guard at the gates, swung carbines from their shoulders as I came up the road. I wondered for a moment why I had been selected for that honor, since the cars ahead of me had not. Then I realized that they bore senior officers in dress uniform, conspicuous enough to guarantee themselves.

I pulled up at the gate and showed my invitation card to the nearest guard; he waved down his companion’s gun and gave me a snappy salute before telling me to carry on. I drove on up the drive.

Marquees and tables had been set out on a hundred-yard-square lawn before the house. Steeply banked flower beds bordered the lawn on three sides; in the middle of the left-hand side was an ornamental cascade, and opposite it was a small pavilion in which a military band was playing a waltz. At the house end of the lawn was a wall running parallel to the central portico of the house; at either end of the wall a flight of steps descended to lawn level, flanked by pots of trailing, brilliantly flowered creepers. At the other end was a long pergola, also swarming with flowers, and behind that an avenue shaded by trees. There were perhaps four hundred people already present.

I noticed that between the avenue of trees and the limit of the Presidential estate was a double fence of high wire netting, screened from view inside by the trees, but briefly visible as one passed the gatehouse. The sun glinted on a searchlight glass aligned to illuminate the whole space between the two rows of fencing.

A policeman directed me to park my car on a hard tennis court adjacent to the house; here another policeman directed me to go down onto the lawn. At the head of each of the creeper-decked flights of steps stood still other policemen, who courteously checked invitation cards a second time and ticked names off on a list. The one who checked my card gave me a hard, searching look, as though memorizing the face of a potential assassin.