The Squares of the City (27 page)

“Couldn’t Caldwell give you an idea?” Angers insisted. “Or someone else from the health department? There are several people on the staff who’ve been down there—”

“I’m tired of ‘being given an idea,’ ” I said wearily. “I was given a wrong idea when I first came here, and there’ve been enough wrong ideas foisted on me since to make me suspicious as hell. I want to form some ideas of my own.”

“Very well,” said Angers stiffly. “I’ll arrange it for you. It’ll have to be this afternoon, I’m afraid, because I have an appointment with Diaz this morning that I can’t put off.”

My rather grudging respect for him rose a notch or two. I said, “You mean you’re coming with me?”

“Of course. Sigueiras’s main quarrel is with me; I wouldn’t want you to think you were collecting something aimed at my head if there is trouble. I’ll ask O’Rourke for a suitable escort—come to think of it, it might not be a bad idea for them to say they’re looking for Brown.”

“Would that hold up? Haven’t they searched the place already? I’d have thought it was an obvious hideout for him.”

Angers shrugged. “I don’t know whether they’ve searched the place or not, and I don’t care. It would be a good excuse.”

“I wonder what’s become of Fats,” I murmured, more to myself than to Angers, but he caught the words.

“Does it matter?” he countered. “The one certain thing is that he hasn’t dared to show his face in Vados again, and I’m sure that’s not a bad thing.”

I didn’t say anything. Whatever else anyone said, though, Fats Brown had left an impression on me: the impression that he was an honest man.

It was roughly what I had come to expect of the Vadeano police that for the afternoon’s sortie they laid on eight armed officers in two cars—after previously having established that Sigueiras himself was going to be out in the city somewhere. They seemed to be good at shows of this kind; less good at the practical side of police work.

It would have suited my purpose much better if I’d been allowed to go with a single policeman as escort, but I was made to understand that, while they couldn’t stop a foolhardy foreigner from committing suicide this way, the lives of their men were too valuable to risk so lightly. Somehow this went with the Spanish-speaking personality—in Spain itself, the
guardias civiles
are a species that hunts invariably in pairs; here in the press and hurry of the New World it seemed that nothing short of four times that number would do.

Moreover, they insisted that we each take a police automatic; Angers, possibly picturing himself as Beau Geste or someone of the kind, accepted enthusiastically, but I did my best to refuse the one given to me—after the way my reputation in Vados had been distorted, I thought carrying a gun was a final straw. When I had to give in, I made sure the holster was well out of sight inside my jacket, and hung the sling of my camera across it.

The cars skidded to a halt on the same graveled patch of ground where the traffic department’s car had halted on the occasion of my first visit. A group of children playing a singing game on the lip of the depression below the station caught sight of us and scattered, crying a warning. The officers piled out of the cars and hurried toward the entry; perhaps they didn’t realize what they were letting themselves in for, because one after the other they lost their footing on the slippery slope and raced in undignified manner toward the bottom.

Angers and I followed more slowly. One could sense the wave of silence spreading through the congested heart of the slum as news of the police’s presence was whispered ahead. It was as though the massed human beings were melting into a single hostile organism, like a carnivorous plant on the approach of a fly.

At the entrance a courageous little dark-skinned woman was trying to bar our way. When the police repeated the ostensible reason for the visit, she shook her head determinedly. Fats Brown was not there, had never been there, and never would be there. Everyone was saying he had fled the country.

“Then you won’t mind us looking through the place if you aren’t hiding him,” said the lieutenant in charge of the squad with heavy irony, and thrust her aside.

We threaded our way one by one into darkness and stink. Two of the police had brought powerful flashlights; they turned them on now, and I saw how this slum had been created. Rough wooden or tin partitions, slatted floors, and rudimentary ladderlike stairs had been attached as best they could be to the original bare steel strutting and concrete buttresses of the monorail station. There was no provision for sanitation, of course, and ventilation was taken care of only by the gaps accidentally left between the ill-fitting sections of board.

Whole families somehow existed here in each of the drawerlike compartments. For furniture they had old boxes, for beds heaps of rags, for cooking stoves sheets of tin with a few glowing sticks heaped in the middle. The smoke mixed with all the other smells and was easier to bear than most.

There were garishly colored prints of the Virgin on most of the walls, along with last year’s pinup calendars from soft drink companies. Occasionally a family ran to a complete home shrine with a crucifix and a couple of wax tapers.

“Don’t they have a lot of trouble with fires here?” I asked Angers, and he snorted.

“Sigueiras is careful about that sort of thing. He knows perfectly well that if this place caught fire, the firemen would just make sure it didn’t spread to the station overhead, and otherwise let it burn itself out. Burning would be a good way of cleaning it out, come to that.”

There were no burros actually in the heart of the slum—but only because if anyone had tried to bring an animal that heavy into the place, its hoofs would have gone straight through the rickety flooring. But there were pigs, and there were chickens, and there were certainly goats somewhere out of sight—their presence was unmistakable.

The police threw back curtains—there was hardly a real door in the place—without ceremony. The word had gone ahead of us; we surprised no one in the kind of situation that Professor Cortés had assured me was commonplace down here. People turned blank faces to us or scowled or half-rose with an ingratiating smile and made meaningless gestures of invitation. Children hesitated between watching the strangers and running to hide; they seemed undernourished and all were dirty, but there were few that were visibly sickly or diseased. I saw cases of eczema, rickets, and something else I could not put a name to—six or eight in all out of perhaps a hundred-odd children.

The extent of the slum was tremendous once one was inside. After twenty minutes we were a long way from the outside air, and the surrounding, dimly sensed hatred was beginning to prey on my nerves. We were going down a particularly dark passage, the police flashlights cutting stark blades of white through the thick air, rough-cut slats creaking under our weight—when a woman in a peasant’s
rebozo
went past us, head down, carrying a basket. Something about the way she walked struck me as familiar; I paused and looked after her. I never forgave myself for that flash of sudden memory.

For Angers noticed it, and turned to follow my gaze. When he saw the woman, he stiffened.

“By God!” he said softly. “That’s Brown’s wife! What would she be doing here—unless he was here, too?”

XIX

Angers had spoken in English; the policemen nearest us at that moment did not take in the sense of his words. He rounded on them with a sudden burst of incredible, untypical rage—I had not thought his shell of self-possession could break down so completely.

“Don’t just
stand
there!” he exploded. “That’s Brown’s wife! Get her back here!”

It sank in. Two of the officers scrambled into the dimness. There was a cry. In a moment they were coming back, grasping Señora Brown’s arms in strong hands. She struggled, panting, but she was growing old and these police were young and vigorous. Her
rebozo
fell back around her shoulders.

“So it is you,” said Angers softly. He took one of the flashlights and shone it full into her face, dazzling her. She half-turned her head to escape the glare.

“
Dónde está su esposo
?” Angers said fiercely.

She gave him a murderous scowl.
“No sé,
” she said flatly.
“No está
aquí.
”

I think it was in that instant that she recognized me and remembered who I was; at any rate I suddenly caught a flash of hatred from her dark eyes. I turned away, not wanting to be a party to what happened next.

Angers took out his pistol and slowly slid the safety catch off; the tiny noise it made was very loud in the confined space. “All right,” he said, not taking his eyes from Señora Brown’s face. “Go down the way she came and see if you can find him.”

Obediently the policemen released their grip on Señora Brown’s arms. She rubbed the place where their hands had dug into her flesh, but otherwise did not move. Angers leveled the pistol at her chest; her only response was a sneer.

But when the policemen moved purposefully past Angers and off down the passage, she could not control a shudder of terrified anticipation.

“Angers,” I said softly, “you ought to be ashamed of doing this.”

He didn’t look at me as he replied, his voice cold and thin and drained of all human warmth. “Brown is wanted for murder. You know that. If he’s here, we mustn’t let him get away.”

The woman did not understand what he said, of course—she spoke only Spanish. But her gaze followed the armed police officers as they flung back rickety tin doors and swept the squalid cubbyhole rooms with their spears of light.

They came, a short distance away, to a division of the passage. Angers gestured to Señora Brown to go after them; at first she hesitated, but a meaning jerk of Angers’ pistol persuaded her. She yielded and began to walk.

Helpless, I followed.

At the division of the passage the policemen had paused and were hotly disputing which way to go. Snatching his eyes from his captive for an instant, Angers snapped a command at them. “In the left fork there is no floor!” he said. “Go down the right branch, you fools!”

Indeed, the boards laid between the struts and girders gave out a few paces along the left-hand branch, and beyond was a yawning gap that swallowed up the light of the torches. The policemen nodded and went cautiously up the other passage. I think I was the only one who saw that the woman relaxed a little as they went. I didn’t say anything. Maybe if the police drew a blank, they would give up.

They were half out of sight behind a jutting partition, perhaps thirty or forty feet from us, when Angers again indicated to his captive that she should move to follow them. She went readily enough. Angers fell in behind her, and I was on the point of going after him when something moved in the left-hand fork of the passage, where there was only that open pit instead of a slatted floor.

A huge hand came out of the blackness.

It aimed for the nape of Angers’ neck; if it had struck fair, Angers would have dropped like a pole-axed steer. But it didn’t—maybe the reach was too far, maybe a foot slipped, maybe Angers detected its coming and managed to move aside a precious couple of inches. It struck him only behind the left shoulder.

I had time to think, dispassionately, that Brown had doubtless had the floorboards taken up along that branch of the passage in order to prevent people tracking him down; I had time to think that if he hadn’t been stupid-brave to save his wife from a danger that might have passed her by, he would have lived.

In fact, he died.

Angers turned with the blow; possibly the impact spun him around more quickly than he could have managed by himself. The gun in his hand belched sudden flame, and dust shook down about our heads with the explosion. It was chance, it was reflex, it was the hand of fate, and the bullet destroyed the face of Fats Brown like a drawing being wiped from a slate.

The police started to come back; the woman screamed one long terrible cry that echoed in my head for hours—and I ran.

I found my way to the outer air before the news of what had happened. That was all that saved me from having to join Angers and the police in their bloody retreat. For as soon as what had happened was known, the people of the slum turned on the intruders. When they came out, Angers, deathly pale, was bleeding from a cut across his face; one of the policemen was dragging his right leg as if he could not feel it any longer; all of them were smeared and spattered with filth.

I didn’t ask what had happened to Brown’s wife. I assumed she was with her dead.

The police ignored me. One of them went straight to the two-way radio in his car and called headquarters for reinforcements. Angers, dabbing at his face with a handkerchief, said something about fixing Sigueiras for good this time—for harboring a murderer—and I said something insane about a man being innocent until proved guilty.

He turned his eyes on me. I saw they were quite hard.

“No,” he said. “You’re wrong. Our laws are like the
Code Napoléon.
The onus is on the accused.”

Faces full of hate came to the entrance of the slum; eyes stared down at us, and children threw more filth that spattered across the clean shining cars. One of the policemen fired three shots, and the faces vanished.