The Squares of the City (44 page)

I walked toward the door through which he had just come; he made a half-hearted move to block my way, and I sidestepped, feeling tension gather inside me. Before he could get in the way again, I was in the room.

“
Buenas tardes,
” I said. And took in the scene.

This was an anteroom; beyond it, wide double doors were thrown back to reveal a table laid for dinner. The guests were taking an apéritif before going in. They looked at me.

There was Vados himself, gaping like a stranded fish, his face pale, his hands shaking. There was his wife, looking magnificent in a gown that had probably cost a thousand. Diaz was there, his long-boned face frozen in an expression that might have been comical. There was Garcia, looking more than ever like a schoolmaster, blinking behind his glasses and smiling a greeting to me. There was a woman who might be his wife or Diaz’s. And there were some servants.

A clock on the wall stated that it was five minutes to eight. I looked past the petrified gathering to the dinner table, and I counted. A place for Vados, one for his wife, one for Garcia, one for Diaz, one for the unidentified woman. I felt cold certainty clasp my mind.

Into the long moment before anyone recovered sufficiently to speak to me, I dropped the weightiest sentence I had ever uttered. I said, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not dead.”

Diaz crossed himself with spasmic violence; Garcia, Señora Vados, and the unidentified woman gave a little unison gasp of astonishment. Only Vados remained outwardly calm. A hint of sweat made his forehead shine, but his voice was steady as he said, “Dead, Señor Hakluyt? Has an attempt been made on your life?”

A moment of dominance was upon me now, bringing with it a strange dreamlike calm, as though my mind were running a few moments ahead of the present and watching the inevitable consequences of what I said and did, ensuring that I could only say or do precisely those things which would be most effective.

I said, “Dead.
Señor Presidente,
did you invite me to dine with you tonight?”

“Of course.”

“Did you inform your servants that I was expected?”

“Naturally! I fail to see—”

“You didn’t set a time for my arrival, did you? It seems that eight o’clock is the time you dine. It is now”—I shot a glance at the clock—”four minutes to eight. You had given up expecting me.
You
had. The guards at the gatehouse hadn’t, but you had.”

“Señor Hakluyt, you are obviously overstrained—”

“Or do you tell your servants to lay another place at the dinner table each time another of your guests arrives?”

Garcia, as though realizing for the first time what all the fuss was about, turned and began to count the places at the table, jabbing his forefinger through the air. I looked not at him, though, but at Diaz, whose large, long stone-carving face bore an expression of resigned dismay.

Vados touched his moustache with a shaking finger. He said, “As to my not advising you of the time, señor, that is indeed a fault, and I apologize. But for the rest, you are making a great deal out of nothing at all. We have been told by the police that you were not to be found today, that you were missing from your hotel. There had been—uh—there had been an anonymous telephone call to say you were missing. And we had not been advised of your reappearance.”

“Listen, begetter of concrete and glass,” I said harshly, “and I will tell you of this city you have fathered. You have tried to govern it as one governs a game of chess; you have reduced your citizens to the status of pawns and attempted to direct their actions and even their thinking as though they were pieces of carved wood. You have tried to do this to me also, and here you have made your greatest and last mistake. I have not come here to sit at your table and eat your fine cuisine. I have come to say that a man is not a pawn, and if you try to make a man into a pawn, you must expect him sooner or later to turn on you and spit in your eye.”

And Diaz—that great-bodied horse of a man, huge enough, it seemed, to draw a plough or tear a tree from its roots—Diaz put his wide spatulate hands to his heart, closed his dark eyes, folded at the knees, and sprawled across the immaculate floor in a total faint.

I had intended until that instant to end my tirade there, to spin on my heel and walk out of the room, out of the house, out of Ciudad de Vados. If I had done that, I would never have discovered what my words—my random-chosen, metaphorical words—had done to Vados.

Two servants moved to help Diaz to his feet, to stagger under his weight to a couch. Absolute silence except for their shuffling and grunting. In that silence, my resolve to leave the room forestalled by Diaz’s collapse, I saw Vados’s face go gray and appear to crumble at the edges, like the face of a statue much exposed to weathering.

And yet in the same moment he looked relieved, as though a very heavy burden had been lifted from him.

“So it is over,” he said. “And I am not sorry.”

Half-recovering, Diaz raised his head where he sat on the couch and gazed mutely at the President.

“We were told,” said Vados, looking at him, “that if the knowledge escaped to one of—of
them
, it would all be over. Alejo said that, did he not, Estebán?”

“Many times,” said Diaz in a groaning voice. “Many times.”

“And now it has escaped.” Vados looked back at me, and a ghastly smile sketched itself on his pallid face. “But in a way you do us an injustice, señor. You are no mere pawn—you are a knight.”

XXXII

The words seemed to exist in a vacuum. They bore no relation that I could understand to anything that had gone before. Yet certainly an answer was expected of me. After a long, incredulous pause while I struggled to find a context for what Vados had said, I uttered stupidly, “Am I?”

“
Madre de Dios!
” said Diaz in a choking voice, and Struggled to his feet. He swung menacingly to face Vados and would, I thought, have struck at him but that another spasm seized him and made him clutch dizzily at a chair back for support. “I did not think he knew, and now—but he did
not
know, Juan, stupid one, he did
not
know!”

He bent his head and shook it slowly from side to side. I thought the rhythmic movement would never cease.

It was as though the other people in the room did not exist except as shadowy background figures. A fierce spotlight seemed to have selected Vados, Diaz, and myself and left Garcia, the women, and the servants in a twilight from which they could not emerge. In that brilliant glare I could see the very pores of Vados’s face as more sweat gathered and oozed from them, as it was squeezed forth by the terrible tension of the muscles underneath.

“So tomorrow there will perhaps be fighting in the streets,” said Vados glacially. “I can no longer care, Estebán. You say he did not know; I say he did know—sufficient to destroy our work. These past few days the burden has been more than I could bear. I said at first I thought it was the better way, better than to have my beautiful city torn apart in civil war. So I did think at first. And yet those who have died because of us have died in ignorance, without choice; at least those who die in war have a chance to know that there is a war, and why men are dying.”

He was mastering himself bit by bit and now became aware again of the other people in the room. He turned to his wife with a smile that came and went as though it had cost him a tremendous effort to conjure it up.

“Consuela, this is nothing with which to trouble you or Pablo Garcia—or you, madame,” he added with a shadow-bow toward the unidentified woman. “I wish you to begin to dine as planned. Jaime!” he snapped at one of the servants. “Take Señor Diaz to another room and let him rest; bring him restoratives and brandy, and telephone to Dr. Ruiz if there is another attack. And you, Señor Hakluyt—I wish you very much to come with me.”

I thought Diaz would protest; he glanced up, but thought better of it. I saw that he had fumbled open the front of his dress shirt and was touching a small gold cross that hung on a chain against his chest.

Vados did not wait to see if his instructions were followed; he started from the room by the door that had admitted me, and I followed, not yet having understood everything that had been said but beginning to suspect. The suspicion had the quality of nightmare.

Across the hall, into a room identical in shape to the one we had just left; across that room to the double doors at the other end, which were locked. Vados thrust a key into the lock, turned it, threw back the doors, and snapped on the lights.

This was furnished as a lounge, with low chairs, small tables, but there were also many glass-fronted cases of books, and one tall cabinet that almost but not quite disguised its construction of steel plates with a veneer of wood. Breathing heavily, Vados spun the dial of a combination lock that held its doors together.

Not knowing what to expect, I waited tensely, prepared to dodge through the door again if Vados produced a weapon from the cabinet.

Then the front swung aside, to reveal shelved rows of file covers, stacks of paper, documents of a dozen kinds—and a chessboard standing with pieces in play upon it.

For a long moment Vados gazed at the board, leaning on the door of the cabinet. Then in a sudden savage outburst of—not anger, perhaps self-disgust—he picked it up, pieces and all, and flung it against the wall. Pawns and officers bounced with little dull taps all over the room.

“I feel as though I were at confession,” he said half-inaudibly, and wiped his shaking hand over his forehead.

I stood waiting by the door. At length he turned to me, and this time he was smiling as though he meant it.

“Come here, Señor Hakluyt, and I will show you. You are the cause and agent of my salvation. I have been carrying a great guilt. I have been pretending to the powers of God. Here! Look! You will understand completely.”

I went forward uncertainly, only able to think he was insane.

“Look at the documents in this cabinet. There are many of them, too many to read, but you need only look at them to understand.”

Still I was hesitant, and impatiently he snatched down one of the files at random and thrust it into my hands. It was bulky with papers. I looked at the superscription. Typed on a pasted label was a name—Felipe Mendoza—and below had been added by hand two different comments.

The first said: “Black king’s bishop.”

The second said: “Taken.”

“Oh, no!” I said. Then with a sudden burst of energy, “Let me at those files!”

Vados stood back, mechanically rubbing one hand against the other while I shuffled feverishly through the files. I came to one bearing my own name, and likewise two comments.

“White king’s knight.”

“Taken.”

I dropped Mendoza’s file on a table and flung open the one bearing my name. Its contents were divided into two parts. One was a thick wad of handwritten foolscap, which I found too difficult to read with attention—there were many abbreviations, and the writing was crabbed and irregular. The other was a dossier about myself. It included photostats of the letter I had sent when applying for the Ciudad de Vados assignment, of the questionnaire I had completed about myself at the time, of the letter of acceptance and the contract engaging me. I knew about the existence of these documents; they were no surprise to me.

But there were surprising things that followed.

Someone, apparently, had shadowed me for three days in Miami before my arrival. Someone had taken the trouble to go to New York and see my last employer. Someone had interviewed half a dozen of my business colleagues in the States. And a name that I recognized was appended to the last of these reports.

Flores.

The man who had shared my seat in the plane coming here.

It was Flores’s signature, too, that was appended to the most remarkable item of all. That was a typed sheet that ran:

“As directed, I have conducted an exhaustive inquiry into the antecedents of the traffic expert Boyd Daniel HAKLUYT. Owing to the extreme distances involved, I have not been able to investigate his career outside the Americas. It appears that he is indisputably of great skill in his speciality. I have heard him spoken of most highly.

“As to his personal relationships and attitudes, it seems that he deliberately avoids forming close personal relationships while engaged on a particular project. This is in accord with the pattern of his life—viz., that he works for about seven or eight months of the year and takes extended vacations for the rest of the time. The nature of his work would appear to have made him essentially a mercenary, and I have no doubt that his loyalty will be to his employer exclusively.

“As to the information I was particularly asked to obtain, while his Australian origin suggests an inherent intolerance, the fact that he has worked in such countries as the UAR and India may have offset his original reactions. I am unable to state definitely one way or the other on the basis of available data. It is, however, a platitude that childhood conditioning remains throughout life. At least one may expect a disrespectful attitude toward ‘the natives.’ This seems to be in conformity with the desired attributes.”