John Brunner - The Squares of the City

“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 Senor 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.

“Senor Hakluyt!” he said. “Una senora pregunto por Vd.”

I reflected that I seemed to be pretty much in demand.

“Donde esta?” 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.

“Senor 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. “Senor Hakluyt!” she purred. “I’m so glad we caught you. Do sit down. This is my assistant, Senor Rioco. My name is Isabela Cortes, 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,” Senora Cortes 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. Senor 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 Senora Cortes 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 Senora Cortes 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 Senora Posador and Sam Francis before coming into the hotel, I’d have arrived coincidentally at almost the same moment as Senora Cortes 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.

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.

The evening lights of Ciudad de Vados spread out below us like a carpet of jewels. It was the finest view I had yet had of the city; I said so to Senora Cortes.

“Yes, we have a beautiful city,” she answered, smiling faintly. “It is good to know that you, senor, will help us to keep it so.”

Rioco, sitting in the front beside the driver, gave a short laugh, perhaps not at Senora Cortes’s remark.

Like everything else in Vados, the studio building was spacious and impressive. We pulled up in front of the brilliantly lit main foyer whose high glass doors stood open to the warm night. An attendant—a man, but uniformed in the same shade of green as the girl driving our car—whisked the door open for us to get out.

In the foyer people were coming and going with an air of quiet busyness; several of them greeted Senora Cortes as we entered. There were bored-looking actors, actresses, and commentators whose makeup gave them a slightly inhuman appearance; executives and technicians dashing from office to office: a man leading a trio of carefully clipped French poodles by blue ribbons around their necks; an unshaven man with narrow eyes, carrying a trumpet without a case, who looked lost; several tall, slim girls who from their movements could only be precision dancers—it was the sort of mixture one might see anywhere in the vicinity of a TV studio.