The Squares of the City (10 page)

That, combined with the shock Fats Brown had given me, decided me in favor of knocking off work early.

It was about half past six when I got back to the hotel. The evening was warm, and the glass panels separating the loggia bar that ran along most of the ground-floor frontage from the sidewalk had been slid back. Several tables had been set outside under a wide green awning. Inside, the bar was crowded with men and women in evening clothes: the women’s jewels glittered brilliantly. I realized that since the opera house was only two blocks south, the Hotel del Principe was conveniently situated for a drink before the show, and there must be some kind of gala performance tonight.

Few people were sitting outside, except for a small group at the far end table; a bored, dark-haired, dark-complexioned girl with a guitar was idly plucking chords on a seat just outside the loggia, stopping every few moments to pick up a cigarette. I was intending to go inside, into the lounge, but a quiet voice called to me.

“Señor Hakluyt!”

I glanced around. Maria Posador was looking at me over her shoulder; she was sitting in one of the chairs at the far end of the awning, with her back to me. I had not noticed her as I came up. Beside her was a dark, scowling man whom I thought I ought to recognize but could not identify.

I walked over and said hello, and she signaled a waiter. “You will drink with us?” she suggested, eyes twinkling. “You have had a thirsty day, no doubt. Please be seated.”

I couldn’t think of a reason for objecting, except for Angers’ ill-phrased advice to stay clear of this woman, and I had reacted against that. I took the place next to the dark man, who continued to scowl. He looked extraordinarily out of place next to Señora Posador’s elegance, for his hands were like a workman’s, blunt-fingered and with broken nails, and he wore a floral shirt and grimy off-white trousers. His feet were thrust without socks into rope-soled espadrilles.

“Señor Hakluyt, I should like you to meet Sam Francis,” said Señora Posador equably, but with a hint of mischief in her tone. “You remember you were listening to him speak in the Plaza del Sur last week. Sam, this is our visiting traffic expert.”

The swarthy man’s scowl didn’t lighten. I managed to smile, though his brooding presence made me uneasy. I wondered what Juan Tezol’s right-hand man was doing here, among the kind of people he seemed to have made his deadly opponents.

The waiter took my order and was back almost immediately. I raised the cool glass to my companions, and was taking the first sip when Francis stubbed out the cigarette he had been smoking and spoke angrily to Señora Posador.

“Maria, what the hell you do around here, anyway? Ain’t things bad enough without you waste time ’mong these sonsabitches?” He jerked a large thumb at my glass. “Why not you put that cash to help Juan pay his fine, hey? What’s the reason?”

He had a sweet, thick Caribbean accent that was hard for me to follow at once; Señora Posador was used to it. “The idea is that Señor Hakluyt had a thirst,” she answered. “Didn’t you?” she added, glancing at me.

I realized I’d come in halfway through an argument. “I—was thirsty,” I agreed. “And this was very welcome.”

Señora Posador half-smiled. She took from her handbag a thin gold case containing half a dozen of her black Russian cigarettes, offered me one, which I took, offered another to Francis, which was refused with a gesture of disgust, and took one herself.

“I should explain to you,” she said urbanely. “Sam and I have had a difference of opinion regarding yourself. I’ve been maintaining that as an independent expert called in to solve a problem here in Vados you can be relied on to give a satisfactory answer to it, regardless of personal interests. I remember you saying to me in so many words that you had no interest in affairs here. Whereas Sam—”

Sam Francis made his opinion plain enough without uttering a word.

“So you see it was very gratifying that you arrived when you did,” Señora Posador finished with gravity. “We now have a chance to decide our argument.”

Then they both looked at me, very hard and very closely, in a way that made me feel like a specimen under a microscope.

“I have to admit,” I said slowly, “that when I took the job I didn’t realize there was so much local feeling involved. I was told I just had to straighten out some kinks in a traffic pattern. That’s my job; that’s what I came here to do. If I find myself instructed to solve a social problem, and it’s been made pretty clear to me that’s what I’m really supposed to do, then I tell them: any halfway proposition designed to fit what they want and not what’s really needed will land them in a whole mess more of trouble.”

Francis turned to me, laying one enormous fist on the table before him. “You better mean that, man,” he rumbled. “ ’Cause trouble is something we got too much of right now.”

He sat back glowering; Señora Posador put a calming hand on his arm. “That seems a fair answer to me, Sam,” she said. “Have another drink, Señor Hakluyt—we’ll toast a solution satisfactory to all parties.”

I was about to insist on buying this one when a big car halted at the curb and a man and a woman got out. The woman was plumply attractive, wearing an evening gown and a diamond tiara, with a stole around her bare shoulders; the man was thin and good-looking, and I recognized him at once. It was Mario Guerrero, chairman of the Citizens of Vados.

Sam’s eyes followed them closely as they crossed the sidewalk toward the bar. Guerrero, looking around rather lanquidly, caught sight of him and halted in his tracks. When he spoke, he did so, of course, in Spanish, but my ear had been improving rapidly over the weekend, and I followed the gist of what was said.

“Well, good evening, Señor Francis!” Guerrero exclaimed. “Who would have thought to see you here? Surely it’s not good for your relations with your peasant supporters to be seen indulging your taste for gracious living like this!”

Sam snapped back his answer crisply. “Possibly they will think I deserve it more than you, for I spend my time working on their behalf, and you—you work only for yourself.” His Spanish was better than his English and had as polished a ring to it as Guerrero’s own.

As though by magic, a small group had gathered around us; they included a man with a news camera and flashgun. Guerrero’s eye fell on this man, and he smiled to himself. The woman he was with plucked at his sleeve; he ignored her and continued: “Is there perhaps a photographer here from that rag of your party’s—
Tiempo?”

“Of course not!
Tiempo
has better things to fill its pages than pictures of a bunch of idlers.”

“Really?” said Guerrero smoothly. “Yet I seem to remember seeing pictures of you in it almost every time I ever glanced at it.”

I noticed that the man with the news camera was grinning, and realized suddenly what was being worked out.

“Well, I don’t doubt that those of your supporters who are literate enough to read
Liberdad
occasionally will be very interested to see a picture of you lounging here,” Guerrero said, and as the photographer whipped his camera into position adopted a friendly smile.

A picture of that could have been a very damaging weapon indeed, obviously. For the followers of the National Party to see their leader’s right-hand man apparently chatting in a friendly way with the head of their opponents—and in such surroundings—might be damaging to Sam’s prestige. Guerrero was plainly a very clever man.

But, for this moment, Maria Posador was cleverer. She had obviously reached the same conclusion that I had; she had decided what to do about it. She stood up. That was all. But the glare of the flashbulb shone on her back, and I saw that her shadow would have masked Sam Francis completely. Guerrero’s hastily adopted smile vanished like frost in sunlight.

“I think perhaps we should not keep Señor Guerrero any longer, Sam,” she said quietly, but loudly enough for it to be emphatic. “He doubtless has—pressing business.”

Her eyes brushed over Guerrero’s companion just long enough for her meaning to be unmistakable, and then the two of them pushed away through the bystanders. Guerrero watched them go, eyes narrowed; then he gave me a long, hard stare and finally yielded to the insistence of his companion and entered the bar.

The girl with the guitar shook back her hair and began to sing an old lullaby, very softly; I finished my drink and went into the hotel.

Who the hell was this Posador woman, anyway?

I bypassed the crowded bar, which was slowly beginning to lose its customers as curtaintime at the opera house drew near, and was going through the foyer to collect my key at the registration desk when one of the bellhops trotted toward me.

“Señor Hakluyt!” he said. “
Una señora preguntó por Vd
.”

I reflected that I seemed to be pretty much in demand. “
Donde está?
” I inquired, hoping to hear she had gone home.

She hadn’t; she was waiting for me in the lounge—a slim middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair and green-framed spectacles, idly stirring a long, cool-looking drink with a gold pencil. A young man with a shaven head and a broken nose lounged in the chair next to her, drawing shapeless patterns on a notepad.

“Señor Hakluyt,” the bellhop told the woman, and left me to it.

She hastily took the pencil out of her glass and gave me a beaming smile, extending her hand. “Señor Hakluyt!” she purred. “I’m so glad we caught you. Do sit down. This is my assistant, Señor Rioco. My name is Isabela Cortés, and I’m from the state broadcasting commission.”

I sat down; Rioco shut his notebook with a snap and put away his pencil. “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long for me,” I said.

She waved a carefully manicured hand on which an emerald ring glistened gigantically. “We have been here no more than ten minutes, truly,” she declared. “In any case, that is of no importance whatever, since we have found you. It is a special request we have to make of you.”

I looked expectant and cooperative.

“I am the director of—of what you might in English call current affairs broadcasts on both our radio and television networks,” Señora Cortés expounded. “Each day on the television we produce a program about life in Vados and the interesting people who come here, and we have also the news, of course. Señor Rioco has been preparing for tonight a program about the new developments that are planned for the city. We are desolated that we approach you on such short notice, but—”

She’ glanced expectantly at her companion, who jerked his jacket higher up around his body and leaned forward. When he spoke, he sounded as though he’d learned his English somewhere around Louisiana and then crossed it with Hollywood.

“Ought to have thought of it earlier,” he said in this half-lazy, half-tough accent. “It was Angers in the traffic department who put us on to you—we canned an interview with him this morning, and he said you were the only guy who knew what was in your mind, so we been trying to track you down. We reckoned we’d best try to catch you when you got in here an’ run you straight out to the studio.” He checked his watch. “Program goes out in—uh—hour an’ a quarter, at twenty-oh-five. Mind comin’ along to say a few words?”

“We do hope you’ll agree,” said Señora Cortés sweetly.

“I don’t see why not,” I said. “Just give me time to clean up and change clothes, and I’ll be right with you.”

“That’s great!” said Rioco, and sat back in his chair, composing himself visibly for the short wait.

As I ran my razor over my chin in the hotel bedroom, I reflected there were certain other things I didn’t see, as well as why not. Such as why I was considered important enough for the director of current affairs broadcasting and the producer of the program both to come calling; why, if Angers had suggested enlisting my cooperation for the program, he’d left it as late as today to bring the matter up—presumably it hadn’t just been sprung on him this morning without notice.

And more important than either of these: how Señora Cortés had known I was going to be here, now, when the previous evenings I’d stayed out till the small hours.

Was it a lucky guess? Or information received?

If it hadn’t been for the few minutes’ conversation I’d had with Señora Posador and Sam Francis before coming into the hotel, I’d have arrived coincidentally at almost the same moment as Señora Cortés and this shaven-headed assistant of hers. It looked altogether too much as though someone had worked out my estimated time of arrival; logically, this implied that someone was keeping an eye on me, probably had been since I started work—and further implied that someone didn’t trust me.

Or—another alternative occurred to me as I was going down to the lounge again—or else someone was protecting me. The idea stopped me in my tracks, and a cold shiver threaded beneath my jacket. With the high-running feeling against the project I was supposed to be undertaking, it struck me now for the first time that I
could
become a target.

VII

The slab-sided bulk of the television and radio center was set high up on the hillside across the city from the airport, so as to keep the towering antennae well clear of incoming planes. We whirled up toward it in a luxuriously comfortable car driven by a girl in a dark green uniform.