John Brunner - The Squares of the City

I didn’t get a chance to answer, for at that moment Sam Francis came up to us and started to rail at Brown for what had happened. Brown took it calmly, realizing that Francis merely needed someone to listen to him and didn’t care who it was.

After minutes, the flow of Francis’s vituperation was cut short as a group of laughing people came from the interior of the building, I did not have to look around to tell that Guerrero and Lucas were in the middle of them; there was also Guerrero’s girl friend of the previous evening, and others I recognized as supporters of the Citizens of Vados party.

They halted at the top of the steps not far from us, and a man who had been half in the background—the driver of Guerrero’s big black sedan—slipped past us to collect the car. I nudged Brown. “What about him?” I said. “Wasn’t there a charge against the chauffeur, too?”

“Dismissed by Romero,” said Brown thickly. “Said it was only a cover for the real purpose of the case, which was to slander Guerrero.”

“Slander Guerrero!” echoed Sam Francis loudly, in a voice that was meant to carry. “How could you paint the bastard any blacker than he is?”

Guerrero stopped in midsentence and began to approach Francis with even steps. He stopped a pace or two distant, while his companions came up behind him. His eyes locked with Francis’s, and there was a long, cold silence.

“Coming from you,” said Guerrero at long last, “that is a ridiculous remark. You’re the black one here!”

Francis’s face contorted into a snarl, and he closed the gap separating them with a single stride. His thick fingers folded over into his palm with a clapping sound, and he drove his fist like a hammer into Guerrero’s mouth.

Literally, the violence of the blow lifted Guerrero from his feet—literally, because the act of falling carried him back over the lip of the steps beneath us. He seemed to be diving backwards like a ridiculous dummy, and time stopped.

I had a half-conscious memory of a crunching sound that had mingled with the thud of Guerrero’s body striking the foot of the steps. Then we were jostling and stumbling down toward where he lay.

One of Guerrero’s companions—I think it was Lucas— bent down and touched his head. His fingers came away sticky with blood.

“Oh, you fool!” whispered Brown, his eyes on Sam Francis’s heaving chest. “Oh, you double god-damned fool!”

People rushed up from every side. Guerrero’s girl clutched his limp hand as she knelt beside his body. In a moment she was weeping. A policeman shouldered between us, ordered us to stand back, and felt expertly for a pulse. Then he got up and started menacingly to climb the steps toward Sam Francis, who was standing like a man in a nightmare, unable to move hand or foot.

Brown looked at me, with no vestige of humor in his expression. “Sorry, Hakluyt,” he said in a low tone. “When I asked you to come an’ see murder, I didn’t figure it would turn out literally.”

An ambulance; more policemen; court reporters on their way to lunch found a sensation thrown under their noses; there were pictures taken. The crowd milled and eddied, growing as the minutes passed.

Then a black-and-white police car howled across the plaza with its sirens screaming, and el Jefe O’Rourke bounced from it—bounced like a huge rubber doll. He had not made a very favorable impression on me in the office when I saw him the day after my arrival; he had struck me as dour and stolid. Now his affected untidiness seemed to fit him as though he had stripped for action. He barked rapid commands, and the policemen moved quickly and efficiently. The names of witnesses were taken; sightseers were driven back from the body, and a reporter’s camera was commandeered for a record of the way the body lay after falling.

The crowd went on growing; it was perhaps three hundred strong within two minutes of the death. It growled as word of what had happened spread from the front to the back rows; insults were suddenly screamed at Sam Francis, standing—still frozen, like a statue—beside the first policemen who had arrived, high at the top of the court steps.

I saw O’Rourke stiffen and turn his head fractionally each time one of these screamed insults arrowed upward. The temper of the bystanders was growing ugly; I wanted to ask Fats Brown why O’Rourke wasn’t doing anything about it, but he had gone closer to the body and was hovering around with his eyes bright and a taut expression hardening the lines of his fat-creased face.

A silence fell as ambulance attendants lifted the body and carried it into their vehicle. Several of the bystanders crossed themselves. The doors slammed, and as though that had been a signal, a roar went up and something hurtled through the air—a soft fruit. It struck Sam Francis on the arm and splashed colored pulp all over him.

I hadn’t looked at O’Rourke for a few moments. Suddenly he was moving, shouldering his way through the crowd like a charging bull. There were shouts and cries of alarm. I lost sight of him for a second; then his black-sleeved arm went up over the heads of those around him, came down again viciously.

When he emerged again into the cleared circle where Guerrero had lain, he was dragging a man in a cheap white suit, across whose left cheek a huge bruise was already showing. The man kept shaking his head as though dizzy, and stumbled as he was hurried along.

O’Rourke sent him spinning into the arms of a policeman with a final shove, and then turned, breathing hard, to face the onlookers. He didn’t say anything. But gradually the crowd melted; people dispersed, heads down, across the plaza. Two policemen led Francis down the steps and pushed him into O’Rourke’s car; as he went past Andres Lucas, the lawyer, his face contorted with rage, hissed something to the effect that he would never get out of jail alive.

Then Lucas took the arm of Guerrero’s girl and led her away—she was still sobbing—and it was over.

With a final glance around, Fats Brown scuffed some dust over the smear of blood where Guerrero had lain, and came and took my arm.

“Let’s go get a drink,” he said in a flat voice. “You owe me one, remember?”

We had double tequilas in a bar on the other side of the square, where people were already talking in hushed voices about what had happened. We didn’t talk at first—just sat, waiting for the alcohol to help steady the world.

In the end I said, “Do you have a death penalty in Aguazul?”

Brown shook his head. “Not often. I mean they didn’t use it lately. It’s still on the books—choice of hanging or a firing squad. But only a half dozen guys been shot since Vados came to power, an’ the last was five years back.”

There was a pause. Brown shrugged and shifted on his seat.

“Guess you can needle a man just so far—an’ Sam was mad as hell already… That’s about fixed the Nationals for the time being, of course. Vados’ll laugh like a gargoyle when they tell him.”

I pictured Francis’s stunned horror when he saw what he had done. “Had he—had he done anything like that before?” I asked.

“Sam? Not that I know of. But I’ve seen men like him in Harlem—get what I mean? Saw one guy push a broken bottle in a white man’s face for callin’ him a dirty black bastard. An’ Sam’s always had a temper.”

“Fact is,” I said, looking at the chewed lemon in my left hand, “I half thought he might break my neck before he got around to Guerrero’s.”

Fats gave me a sharp glance. “You met Sam personally? Or you just ventilatin’ an impression?”

“I met him. Maria Posador introduced us at my hotel.”

“You’re a friend of Maria’s?” Fats spoke incredulously. “Hakluyt, you begin to bother me. I wouldn’t have said you were the kind of guy Maria would look at twice.”