The Squares of the City (38 page)

Caldwell turned up again in Angers’ office on Monday morning, looking bloody but unbowed—not, this time, specifically to talk about Murieta, but on formal health department business. Nonetheless, Angers and I both went for him, and from his reaction I gathered that we weren’t the first by a long way.

“I t-tell you I’ve s-seen all th-this for myself!” Caldwell kept insisting, his voice shaking with rage. The fourth or fifth repetition was too much for me.

“If you have,” I snapped back, “you’re probably Murieta’s only customer yourself!”

I thought for a long instant that he was going to throw himself at me like a wild animal, and I automatically tensed to beat him off. But at that very instant the door was thrust open and one of Angers’ assistants, looking harassed, put his head into the office.

“Señor Angers,” he began,
“por favor—”

He got no further before he was pushed to one side bodily by a huge bull of a man in an open shirt and canvas trousers which stretched so tight across his seat they threatened to split at every step he took. He was very large and very dark, and it seemed for a moment that he filled the entire doorway, shutting out the light beyond.

“Caldwell
aquí
?” he demanded; then his eyes fell on Caldwell who had dropped back into his chair as the door opened, and he gave a grunt of satisfaction. Turning, he signaled to someone behind him.

This was a rather small man, immaculately dressed in a snow-white summer suit and cream Panama hat, smoking a king-size cigarette and holding a silver-knobbed walking cane. He had a thin moustache and brilliantly white teeth.

Caldwell remained frozen to his chair.

The newcomer raised his cane and pointed it as though it had been a gun at Caldwell’s chest. “You will pardon this intrusion, señores,” he said without taking his eyes off Caldwell’s chalk-white face. “But I have business with this cur.”

Angers got to his feet with dignity. “What do you mean by walking uninvited into my office?” he snapped.

“I,” said the intruder calmly, “am Pedro Murieta. I am informed that Señor Caldwell has told lies about me. He has said that I, a citizen of Ciudad de Vados against whom no man has ever breathed a foul word, am a pander. A pimp. A trafficker in immorality of the vilest kind. It is not true, before God it is not true!”

The cane whined across Caldwell’s face, raising a tiny red weal where the very tip touched the skin of his cheek.

“
Say
it is not true, misbegotten son of a mangy mongrel bitch!”

And Caldwell burst into a flood of tears.

Bewildered, Angers glanced from him to Murieta to me, his eyes demanding explanation. While Murieta dropped the end of his cane to the floor and leaned on it, watching Caldwell with considerable satisfaction, I said, “Señor Murieta, do you know why he has been saying—saying this about you?”

“He is sick in the mind,” said Murieta after a long pause. He straightened up and turned away, sighing. “I am not a vindictive man, señor, but this I had to do when I learned what he had published to the world about me. Yes, no doubt he is sick in the mind. We have been to his apartment this morning in search of him—with the police, for he has committed a crime in our law—and we have found certain books and pictures which suggest that he is not normal.”

His sharp black eyes flashed to my face. “Did you not know? Could you or another not have stopped him? Although we shall show what he said was mere lunatic raving, it will nonetheless do me very great harm.”

I said wearily, “Señor, I cannot care any longer what happens in Ciudad de Vados. I live only for the day when I can leave it.”

“Leave it, then!” snapped Murieta, and turned his back on me.

The enormous man who had come in with him had lumbered out again; now he returned, with a policeman and two white-jacketed male nurses. Seeing them, Caldwell began to scream.

The complete disintegration of a human being is not pleasant. When it was over, and Caldwell was in the ambulance, I suggested we go out for a drink, and Angers, shaking like a leaf, agreed instantly.

Over a whiskey in a nearby bar, he said dully, “Who’d have expected it? He’s always been such a steady fellow—hardworking, reliable—and then all of a sudden, this!”

I said after a moment’s thought, “I’ll make a wild guess. I’ll bet you that when they go into the matter they’ll find that Caldwell probably laid some tart or other in one of the shantytowns some while back, and he’s collected a load of guilt in consequence. I imagine that he’s always suffered because of that speech impediment; he’s acquired a string of complexes a mile long.”

“All this is just words,” said Angers impatiently. “What I want to know is—what’s it going to do to the project? We relied on what the health department was saying, and so did the public. When it turns out that it was all the raving of an idiot, what will happen then?”

“They’ll probably laugh like demons,” I said. And I was right.

Having a pretty primitive attitude toward mental illness, most of the Vadeanos did laugh—loudly, long, and often. Not only at Caldwell, but also at everyone else who had swallowed his story, if only for a day.

The worst sufferer, naturally, was Professor Cortés, who had allowed the story currency in
Liberdad.
It was extremely galling for him to have to order the printing of a full-scale retraction. He tried to cover himself and distract attention from the matter by going for Miguel Dominguez again. But the lawyer’s personal position was now virtually unassailable, because of the way he had successfully demolished Andres Lucas and showed up his complicity in the fate of Fats Brown. He laughed the whole thing off.

I had half forgotten my own worries in the atmosphere of tension that followed Caldwell’s breakdown, but I still kept one eye open for any further rash statements by O’Rourke. I preferred not to provoke trouble with him so long as he didn’t repeat what he had apparently said about throwing me out of the country. And at the present moment he seemed to have something else on his mind—more exactly, someone else. Dr. Ruiz, in fact.

I had this from Manuel, as usual—the barman was getting to be quite a pipeline of information for me. He seemed to be dismayed because it was through him I learned about O’Rourke’s attack on me, even though I’d asked for it—literally—and he tried to make up for it by slipping me reassuring snippets of gossip.

According to him, O’Rourke had told Ruiz that if he went on with his accusations, the police would prosecute him for aiding and abetting Caldwell in publishing a libel, and still more than that would start investigating the allegations that he had murdered the first Señora Vados.

There was an air of desperation about this, as though Vados were gradually wearing down O’Rourke’s resistance to the eviction of the squatters. Of course, it was unthinkable that Dr. Ruiz should be officially accused of this crime—the mud that would splash on Vados would topple his regime, and
el Jefe
would find himself in one of his own cells before he was allowed to say a word in public. Nonetheless, Manuel assured me he had the story on excellent authority, so I took it for what it was worth.

“Any more news sheets, Manuel?” I asked. “Or have they been closed down again?”

“I do not know whether they have been closed down or not, señor,” Manuel said regretfully. “But I cannot obtain any more of them. Have you not seen today’s
Liberdad?”

He opened a copy of the official paper on the bar before me and jabbed his finger down on a large-headlined story. I read: Bishop Cruz had forbidden all practicing Catholics to buy or read the unofficial news sheets.

“I am a good Catholic,” said Manuel, with regret in his voice. “But I had hoped to collect all of these for the information about the chess championships; the name of my son is in many of them, for he has done very well in the tournament so far.”

“So you won’t have any more unofficial news for me, Manuel?” I suggested.

Manuel smiled. “Señor, behind a bar one has the news anyway.”

It was not a rash boast. A day later he was able to inform me of something else to which Cortés had refused space in
Liberdad
and time on the radio, which was scarcely known to most Vadeanos. General Molinas had pledged his entire support and that of the army for O’Rourke and the police; he had said that if rioting started because the squatters were evicted, he would be unable to keep his forces at the disposal of the Vados government. I found this far more interesting than what Ruiz had been saying, and what was reported at length by the official organs, which was approximately, “No smoke without fire,” in the question of immorality in Sigueiras’s slum. It looked as if Professor Cortés were making a desperate effort to save face over the Caldwell affair.

And that was the situation when Sigueiras exploded his bomb.

I hadn’t given another thought to the threat he had made to Angers on the first occasion when he took me to see the slum; I’d dismissed it as fine words and hot air. I’d realized that the Negro was a determined man, but now, when things were practically all going the Citizens’ way, he capped every desperate move the National Party had ever made with a gesture of spectacular defiance that made people all over the city—myself included—regard him with astonished admiration.

The one person who didn’t, of course, was Angers.

XXVII

A couple of times since he had sent his wife off to California to avoid the disturbances in Vados, Angers had invited me to drop around to his apartment after work and have a drink with him. The first time I’d dodged out of it; the second time I couldn’t—and in any case I was beginning to feel sorry for the guy. Somewhere under that shell he had cultivated there was a human being; I’d even managed bit by bit to recover from his playing cops and robbers at the cost of Fats Brown’s life.

So I finally gave in.

We set off, after sewing up the day’s computer figures, in Angers’ car, and he’d just told me we were only half a block from his home when he slowed down abruptly and pointed ahead.

“Why do you suppose all those people are standing on the pavement?” he said.

I followed his arm. Around the doorway of an apartment building ahead, not less than fifty people were milling. Most of them were shabbily dressed. They seemed to be staring in through the ground-floor windows, gesticulating.

“Whatever it is, they’re enjoying it,” I said. “They seem to be laughing their heads off.”

As we pulled up, we saw that many of them were literally helpless with amusement. More people were dashing up moment by moment, and the janitor of the apartment house was trying frantically to drive them away with vehement curses.

“That’s my place they’re looking into!” Angers snapped, starting to open the car door. “What the hell can be going on? Do you suppose there’s a fire, or something?”

Then one of the windows shivered into sudden fragments, and a bored-looking burro poked its head out, nostrils wide, as though sniffing for fodder.

“God in heaven!” said Angers, and left the car faster than I had ever seen him move before. He crossed the service road at a run; the janitor caught sight of him and called to him pleadingly, but he took no notice. His goal was a new arrival with a large camera, who was down on one knee focusing for a picture of the burro. Now, having found there was nothing to eat outside, the animal was sampling the gauze curtains and not finding them much to its taste.

Angers was the last person I’d have cast as a football player. Nonetheless, the kick he launched at the camera was superbly professional. The camera was snatched from the man’s hands; it soared through the air for twenty feet and exploded into fragments against the wall of the building. The would-be photographer shot to his feet with a yell of dismay, but Angers had already spun around and was thrusting his way into the crowd, a look of savage fury on his face.

I followed more slowly. There was a sound of police sirens coming this way. Once they realized the owner of the apartment was on the scene, the sightseers began to melt rapidly, and I had a clear path to the entrance. I tried to get some sense out of the janitor, but he was distraught with terror—presumably because it was his fault that the burro was in the apartment—so I followed Angers inside.

He was shaking with rage; he could hardly get his key into the lock, and when he succeeded, the door proved to have been barricaded from the inside. He glanced around wildly, spotted a heavy fire extinguisher hanging on a wall bracket across the foyer, seized it, and used it as a battering ram. The door broke from its hinges on the first blow, and we charged into the apartment.

There were people here, too—not just a burro by itself. In the foyer there were four naked children playing delightedly with a doll they had found. The doll was an Inca statuette four centuries old, but that didn’t worry them. The excitement had been too much for them, and they had relieved themselves indiscriminately in odd places on the carpet. A woman so old she seemed not to have energy left to breathe or move her eyes sat wrapped in a
rebozo
on a couch, stroking a fine silk cushion with one hand and telling a rosary with the other.

At the sound of our crashing entrance, a man with a scarred, simple-looking face looked out from one of the bedrooms. He had one hand full of
frijoles,
and their sticky traces were all over his face from chin to nostrils. Behind him, a high-pitched woman’s voice demanded in a peasant accent to know what had happened and what had the children broken this time.